Buenos Aires, Argentina — Argentine police raided a villa in a quiet seaside resort on Tuesday as part of a hunt for a 17th-century Italian portrait believed to have been looted 80 years ago from a Jewish collector by a fugitive Nazi officer who settled in Argentina after World War II.

The probe reopens a shadowy chapter in the history of this South American nation, which sheltered scores of Nazis who fled Europe to avoid prosecution for war crimes after World War II, including high-ranking party members and notorious architects of the Holocaust such as Adolf Eichmann.

Under the government of Argentine General Juan Perón, whose first tenure lasted from 1946 until his overthrow in 1955, fugitive German fascists brought plundered Jewish property with them from the other side of the wo

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