Spee

The future of a bronze eagle which once adorned the Nazi battleship Admiral Graf Spee remains uncertain after plans to melt it down were scrapped.

Treasure hunters raised the eagle in 2006 off the coast of Uruguay, where the Graf Spee had been scuttled in 1939 to stop it falling into enemy hands.

It had been lying on the bottom of the River Plate since 1939, when the captain of the Admiral Graf Spee had scuttled her soon after the first major naval battle of the Second World War.

The Graf Spee had been a great threat to the Allied forces in WWII, having sunk eight merchant ships between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the end of that year.

The eagle — more than six feet tall and with a wingspan of nearly nine feet, its talons holding a wreath-encircled swastika — was affixed to the stern of the Admiral Graf Spee, an approximately 12,000-ton armored heavy cruiser built by Germany in the 1930s.