The Boy from Brazil

Posted on January 23, 2009
Filed Under Adolf Eichman, Adolf Hitler, Angel of Death, Antisemitism, Argentina, Auschwitz, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Candido Godoy, Colonias Unidas, Dr Josef Mengele, Freedom, Germany, Holocaust, International, Jews, Paraguay, Racism, Religion, Religious intolerance, arrogance, bigot, bigotry, bigots, experiments, hatred, hatred of Jews, medical doctor, medical operations, medicine, prejudice, twins | 1 Comment

Gregory Peck, as the infamous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele, and Sir Lawrence Olivier, as a Nazi hunter, both starred in the 1978 thriller The Boys From Brazil. In that movie Dr. Mengele has hatched a monstrous plot to bring back Adolf Hitler in a younger, more energetic form. The movie was based on a thriller of the same name by Ira Levin.

Yesterday the British daily Telegraph, had the following on its online edition:

Nazi angel of death Josef Mengele ‘created twin town in Brazil’

The Nazi doctor Josef Mengele is responsible for the astonishing number of twins in a small Brazilian town, an Argentine historian has claimed.

One in five pregnancies in the small Brazilian town have resulted in twins - most of them blond haired and blue eyed

The steely hearted “Angel of Death”, whose mission was to create a master race fit for the Third Reich, was the resident medic at Auschwitz from May 1943 until his flight in the face of the Red Army advance in January 1945.

His task was to carry out experiments to discover by what method of genetic quirk twins were produced – and then to artificially increase the Aryan birthrate for his master, Adolf Hitler.

Now, a historian claims, Mengele’s notorious experiments may have borne fruit.

For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.

But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.

Shuttling between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, he managed to evade justice before his death in 1979, but his dreams of a Nazi master race appeared unfulfilled.

In a new book, Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America, the Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa, a specialist in the post-war Nazi flight to South America, has painstakingly pieced together the Nazi doctor’s mysterious later years.

After speaking to the townspeople of Candido Godoi, he is convinced that Mengele continued his genetic experiments with twins – with startling results.

He reveals how, after working with cattle farmers in Argentina to increase their stock, Mengele fled the country after fellow Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, was kidnapped by Israeli agents.

He claims that Mengele found refuge in the German enclave of Colonias Unidas, Paraguay, and from there, in 1963, began to make regular trips to another predominantly German community just over the border in Brazil – the farming community of Candido Godoi.

And, Mr Camaras claims, it was here that soon after the birthrate of twins began to spiral.

“I think Candido Godoi may have been Mengele’s laboratory, where he finally managed to fulfil his dreams of creating a master race of blond haired, blue eyed Aryans,” he said.

“There is testimony that he attended women, followed their pregnancies, treated them with new types of drugs and preparations, that he talked of artificial insemination in human beings, and that he continued working with animals, proclaiming that he was capable of getting cows to produce male twins.”

The urbane German who arrived in Candido Godoi was remembered with fondness by many of the townspeople.

“He told us he was a vet,” said Aloisi Finkler, a local farmer interviewed by Mr Camarasa. “He asked about illnesses we had among our animals, and told us not to worry, he could cure them. He appeared a cultured and dignified man.”

Another farmer, Leonardo Boufler, said: “He went from farm to farm checking the animals. He checked them for TB, and injected those that were infected. He said he could carry out artificial insemination of cows and humans, which we thought impossible as in those days it was unheard of.”

But the Nazi eugenicist did not concentrate on animals alone.

A former mayor and town doctor, Anencia Flores da Silva, set out to try to solve the town’s mystery. He interviewed hundreds of people, and discovered one character who crept on cropping up: an itinerant medic calling himself Rudolph Weiss.

Dr da Silva said: “In the testimonies we collected we came across women who were treated by him, he appeared to be some sort of rural medic who went from house to house. He attended women who had varicose veins and gave them a potion which he carried in a bottle, or tablets which he brought with him. Sometimes he carried out dental work, and everyone remembers he used to take blood.”

The people of Candido Godoi now largely accept that a Nazi war criminal was an inadvertent guest of theirs for several years in the early 1960s. The town’s official crest shows two identical profiles and a road sign welcomes visitors to a “Farming Community and Land of the Twins”. There is also a museum, the House of the Twins.

While the twins birthrate varies widely in different countries, it is typically about one in 80 pregnancies – a statistic that has left Mr Camarasa certain in his claim that Mengele was successfully pursuing his dreams of creating a master race, a real-life Boys from Brazil.

“Nobody knows for sure exactly what date Mengele arrived in Candido Godoi, but the first twins were born in 1963, the year in which we first hear reports of his presence,” he said.

Yid With Lid suggested last evening, I write on the above. This brought to mind a book someone once recommended to me: Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz by Lucette Matalon Lagnado, Sheila Cohn Dekel (published by William Morrow – 1991).I looked it up and found the following descriptions:

From School Library Journal
YA– A horrifying yet spellbinding account. Although Mengele was a mediocre doctor, he was encouraged in his pursuit of “genetic research” to create a “master Aryan race” with the concentration camp at Auschwitz providing an ample supply of specimens for his unscientific, poorly documented experiments. Twins were his fixation, and this book interviews some of the estimated 100 survivors from an initial sample of 3000 young people. The fascination of this book is that it follows the lives of both Mengele and the twins in their readjustment to life away from the camps. This gripping tale is extremely readable and well documented, offering another facet to the human tragedy of the Holocaust.
- Pam Spencer, Thomas Jefferson Sci-Tech, Fairfax County, VA

and

From Publishers Weekly
Only 160 of 3000 twins subjected to genetic experimentation by Mengele survived until 1945…

Who was the diabolical Dr.Mengele? A well documented Wikipedia article has this account of his activities during WWII:

In 1943, Mengele replaced another doctor who had fallen ill at the Nazi extermination camp Birkenau. On May 24, 1943, he became medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s “Gypsy camp”. In August 1944, this camp was liquidated and all its inmates gassed. Subsequently Mengele became Chief Medical Officer of the main infirmary camp at Birkenau. He was not, though, the Chief Medical Officer of Auschwitz — superior to him was SS-Standortarzt (garrison physician) Eduard Wirths.

During his 21-month stay at Auschwitz, Mengele earned the soubriquet “Angel of Death” for the cruelty he visited upon prisoners. Mengele was referred to as “der weisse Engel” “the White Angel” by camp inmates, because when he stood on the platform inspecting new arrivals and directing some to the right, some to the left, his white coat and white arms outstretched evoked the image of a white angel. Mengele took turns with the other SS physicians at Auschwitz in meeting incoming prisoners at the ramp, where it was determined who would be retained for work and who would be sent to the gas chambers immediately. In one instance he drew a line on the wall of the children’s block between 150 and 156 centimeters (about 5 feet or 5 feet 2 inches) from the floor, and sent those whose heads could not reach the line to the gas chamber.

“He had a look that said ‘I am the power,’” said one survivor. When it was reported that one block was infested with Typhus, Mengele gassed every single one of the 750 women assigned to it.

Human experimentation

Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly interested in identical twins; they would be selected and placed in special barracks. He also recruited Berthold Epstein, a Jewish pediatrician. As a doctor, Epstein proposed to Mengele a study into treatments of the disease called Noma that was noted for particularly affecting children from the camp.

While the exact cause of Noma remains uncertain, it is now known that it has a higher occurrence in children suffering from malnutrition and a lower immune system response. Many develop the disease shortly after contracting another illness such as measles or tuberculosis. Mengele tried to prove that Noma was caused by racial inferiority.

Mengele took an interest in physical abnormalities discovered among the arrivals at the concentration camp. These included dwarfs, notably the Ovitz family – the children of a Romanian artist, of whom seven of the 10 members were dwarfs. Prior to their deportation they toured in Eastern Europe as the Lilliput Troupe. He often called them “my dwarf family”; to him they seemed to be the perfect expression of “the abnorm”.

“Mengele occupied his time with other numerous acts of the most base cruelty, including the vivisection of infants; the castration of boys and men without the use of an anesthetic; and the administering of high-voltage electric shocks to women inmates under the auspices of testing their endurance. On one occasion Mengele even sterilized a group of Polish nuns with an X-ray machine, leaving the women horribly burned.”

Mengele’s experiments also included attempts to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes, various amputations of limbs and other brutal surgeries. Rena Gelissen’s account of her time in Auschwitz details certain experiments performed on female prisoners around October 1943. Mengele would experiment on the chosen girls, performing sterilization and shock treatments. Most of the victims died, either due to the experiments or later infections. Once, Mengele’s assistant rounded up 14 pairs of Roma twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then proceeded to inject chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantly. Mengele then began dissecting and meticulously noting each and every piece of the twins’ bodies.

At Auschwitz, Mengele did a number of twin studies. After the experiment was over, these twins were usually murdered and their bodies dissected. He supervised an operation by which two Gypsy children were sewn together to create conjoined twins; the hands of the children became badly infected where the veins had been resected, this also caused Gangrene.

The subjects of Mengele’s research were better fed and housed than ordinary prisoners and were, for the time being, safe from the gas chambers. When visiting his child subjects, he introduced himself as “Uncle Mengele” and offered them sweets. Some survivors remember that despite his grim acts, he was also called “Mengele the protector”. On several occasions he killed subjects simply to be able to dissect them afterwards. Mengele was almost fanatical about drawing blood from twins, mostly identical twins. He is reported to have bled some to death this way.

The book Children of the Flames, by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Shiela Cohn Dekel, chronicles Mengele’s medical experimental activities on approximately 3,000 twins who passed through the Auschwitz death camp during World War II until its liberation at the end of the war. Only a few of the twins survived; 60 years later, they came forward about the special privileges they were given in Auschwitz owing to Mengele’s interest in twins, and how as a result they have suffered, as the children who survived his medical experiments and injections.

Auschwitz prisoner Alex Dekel has said: “I have never accepted the fact that Mengele himself believed he was doing serious work — not from the slipshod way he went about it. He was only exercising his power. Mengele ran a butcher shop — major surgeries were performed without anesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation — Mengele was removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anesthetic. Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again, without anesthesia. It was horrifying. Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was given. Nobody ever questioned him — why did this one die? Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part”.

It has been recently reported that it was as a result of his experiments that a town in Brazil, Candido Godoi, has an unnatural rate of birth of twin children:one in five pregnancies.

After Auschwitz

When the SS abandoned the Auschwitz Camp on January 17, 1945, Mengele transferred to Groß Rosen camp in lower Silesia, again working as camp physician. Groß Rosen was dissolved at the end of February when the Red Army was close to taking the camp. Mengele worked in other camps for a short time and on May 2, joined a Wehrmacht medical unit led by his former colleague at the Institute of Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene, Hans Otto Kahler, in Bohemia. The unit hurried west to avoid being captured by the Soviets and were taken as POWs by the Americans. Mengele, initially registered under his own name, was released in June 1945 with papers giving his name as “Fritz Hollmann”. From July 1945 until May 1949, he worked as a farmhand in a small village near Rosenheim, Bavaria, staying in contact with his wife and his old friend Hans Sedlmeier, who arranged Mengele’s escape to Argentina via Innsbruck, Sterzing, Merano, and Genova. Mengele may have been assisted by the ODESSA network.

It is interesting this infernal doctor introduced himself to the farming families of Candido Godoy as “Dr. Rudolph Weiss,” obviously the Angel of Death must enjoyed being referred to “der weisse Engel, the White Angel” by the inmates… What a way to display his contempt for the inferior Jews, gypsies and other subjects of his “experiments.”

There is an elderly woman in my neighborhood who recalls Mengele’s visit to her block, in Auschwitz, when she was 16 years old. He came with some musician’s and he danced with some of the younger women, including her. He put a handkerchief on her shoulder where he touched her so as not be contaminated by touching a Jewess. Upon leaving he took various women, of all age groups, who were never seen again. She describes Mengele’s steel look as frightening, oppressing her heart, even as he tried to seem amiable and charming. She dared not refuse the dance, though her heart was not in the mood…

I suppose that even while being on the run the man had to earn a living, but his madness, his blood thirst, lead me to believe that the central premise of Mengele’s plot in Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil was closer to reality than even the author dared think. Few monsters in the 20th century or before ever managed to be so revered in a small village in Brazil or anywhere else in the world, for that matter… This world, this age we live in, has turned all traditional values on their head… Pity!

Chaim

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