All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
May 4, 2010 - Skeptoid
16:31
Skeptoid #204: Mengele's Boys from Brazil

A town in Brazil has an unusually high twin rate, but not because Josef Mengele survived and did experiments there. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Mengele's South American Escape 00:06:44
It's a historical fact that the infamous Nazi Dr. Mengele, the angel of death, did eventually make it to South America after World War II.
But what he did while there becomes somewhat foggier.
History paints a fairly complete picture, but persistent conspiracy claims assert that he continued his grotesque human experimentation to the point that some populations, where twins are extremely common, are attributed directly to Mengele's dark work.
Mengele's Boys from Brazil is today on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and we'll replace them with more Skeptoid.
The extended premium show available now.
Come to skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Mengele's Boys from Brazil Some may remember Franklin J. Schaffner's 1978 movie, The Boys from Brazil, featuring the infamous Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death.
In the film, Mengele, played by Gregory Peck, had been living in Paraguay and spent 20 years producing clones of Adolf Hitler.
These black-haired, blue-eyed boys from Brazil were seeded throughout the world in the hope that one may grow to take Hitler's place.
Lawrence Olivier played a Nazi hunter who tracked down Mengele to a farm in Pennsylvania, where they engaged in the film's climactic duel to the death.
The movie was nominated for three Academy Awards, and while many realized it was fiction, some no doubt assumed it was based on a reasonable account of actual events.
Well, how much truth is there to the story?
Complicating this question is the fact that enough building blocks from Mengele's true life story can be arranged to create a reasonable foundation for this.
Jorge Camarasa is an Argentinian historian who has specialized in the exodus of Germans and other Europeans to South America, before, during, and after the Second World War.
In 2008, he wrote a book called Mengele, the Angel of Death in South America, in which he noted that a town in Brazil, Candido Godoy, has a rate of twin births that is 10 times higher than normal, and he attributes this to a series of visits made there by Mengele under an assumed name during the 1960s.
Did Josef Mengele continue his human experimentation in Brazil after the war?
Mengele arrived in Auschwitz as a capable young medical doctor and researcher, only 32 years old.
Before joining the military, he'd worked at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene and developed a particular interest in multiplying the Aryan race through multiple births.
Auschwitz provided him the perfect opportunity.
a large experimental population over which he had complete control.
His first duty was to find all the twins, and he earned his nickname the Angel of Death as one of the selectors who decided the fate of each new arrival to the camp.
He instructed his assistants to especially look for twins, dwarves, or anyone with any kind of physical irregularity.
Mengela wanted to know what caused Aryan traits, and identical twins afforded him the opportunity to experiment on one while keeping the other as a control.
He tested hypotheses about the causes of eye color and other racial traits.
Dissections and comparative autopsies are believed to have been a large part of this.
Much of what actually happened will never be known since the Nazis destroyed all of Mengele's records, leaving us with only survivor testimony to go on.
The stories they tell are an appalling patchwork of surgeries and butchery, often with depraved sexual overtones, almost always without anesthesia, and arguably constitute the darkest moment in all of human history.
Contrary to popular retellings, Mengele was not doing any kind of research having to do with genetics, and the reason we know this for a certainty is that the science of genetics had not yet been invented.
DNA was not yet known until the 1950s.
So while Mengele may have had an interest in heredity, there's no way he could have experimented with genes or manipulated twin heredity other than the trial and error method of selective breeding.
I've not found any record that he attempted this, and it wouldn't have made much sense anyway because World War II didn't last long enough.
In fact, from a study of Mengele's actual experiments at Auschwitz, I didn't find a strong reason to even suggest Mengele as a possible factor in South American twin populations.
At the war's end, Mengele did like most German soldiers and escaped west in hopes of surrendering to Americans rather than to Russians.
He was successful and, giving a fake name, was released and lived peacefully in Bavaria for several years, working as a farmhand, careful not to divulge that he was a doctor.
Mengele knew that he was a wanted war criminal, and in 1949 he made his way to Buenos Aires, Argentina via the German underground, and joined other former Nazis in relative safety.
At first he continued working as a laborer, but after a few years felt safe enough to resume medical practice and worked as an abortionist.
After more than a decade, Israeli agents began stepping up their game, and Mengele's friend Adolf Eichmann, known as the architect of the Holocaust, was captured.
The Twin Rate Mystery Solved 00:07:45
Mengele again faded into the woodwork.
He spent a few years in Paraguay, then later moved to Brazil, relocating from town to town until he finally died in 1979.
Though reports often say Mengele was, quote, posing as a veterinarian in Brazil, he was in fact earning a living as a veterinarian.
Farm animals were an important commodity, and Mengele had the means and knowledge to treat them, which included artificial insemination.
He also worked as a farm manager for a time.
I found no records that he ever worked as a doctor in Brazil, and certainly no reports that he did any further human experiments.
His life in Brazil is fairly well documented, and at no time were his circumstances such that he could have been continuing his Auschwitz work in secret.
Histories of some of the South American Nazis and those pursuing them read like modern spy novels, and there were only a few times when Mengele had any chance to settle down for as much as a year or two.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy.
It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding together.
Get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is.
According to Camarasa, it was during one of these periods when Mengele lived in Colonias Unidas, Paraguay.
Camarasa cites the testimony of several witnesses who recall that in the 1960s, Mengele made several short trips across the border into Condido-Gadoy, which, like many towns in the region, consisted almost entirely of German expatriates.
Camarasa speculates that these are the times in which he performed his twin experiments.
DNA had been discovered by then, but the science was in its infancy and was being studied largely in the United States and Europe.
Practical gene manipulation was not yet being done.
Mengele had scarce opportunity to learn about it in the backcountry of Brazil.
And by that time, his medical knowledge was almost 20 years outdated.
Corroborating evidence for these alleged visits seems hard to come by.
Even if Mengele did visit Condido-Gadoy, even Camarasa himself offers nothing firmer than speculation that he ever did any experimentation.
Nobody in Candido-Gadoy reports ever having met or been treated by Mengele, and there is no record of a laboratory or victims.
So where does this leave us?
We have no proof that Mengele performed twin experiments in Brazil, and also no proof that he didn't.
When setting out to solve a mysterious event, first find out whether that mysterious event ever actually happened.
Let's look and see if there actually was a five-fold or ten-fold explosion in the twin birth rate in Candido-Gadoy in the 1960s.
When we do this, we quickly learn two things.
One, it turns out that Condido-Gadoy experienced no notable change in the twin birth rate in the 1960s.
According to the town's baptismal records, twins had been unusually common in the town since at least the 1920s, decades before Mengele's arrival.
Twin births are still common in the town today, decades after Mengele's death.
Even if Mengele had developed some ovulation induction drug, it would have affected only that generation.
he had no knowledge or ability to modify genetic code, which would have been necessary to pass the trait to future generations.
2.
Condido Godoy's twin rate is very high, but not extraordinarily high compared to similar towns in the region.
It turns out that many such communities, not only in South America but worldwide, consisting of small isolated populations, often expatriates, have high twin rates.
In particular, isolated villages in Nigeria and Romania have similar histories and similar twin rates.
So it appears that we do have a bit of a mystery to solve, but it's not the one we started with.
Whether Josef Mengele ever visited these twin towns or not, it's known that it had no effect on their twin rate, and thus it would be illogical to introduce him as a possible explanation.
A better explanation for the high twin rate lies in established genetics, where we have something we call the founder effect.
When a community is founded by a small number of individuals, particular genetic traits can become common among their descendants.
This is observed all over the world, the best example being the mitochondrial Eve.
While she was not the only person alive at the time, say 200,000 years ago, her descendants intermarried with enough other people that eventually everyone in the small population was related to her, and their descendants eventually colonized the whole world.
The Amish population in the United States exhibits a founder effect, where polydactyly, extra fingers and toes, was inherited by the community from one of the original founders who had the gene, and that gene is expressed more in the Amish community than in the United States at large.
One island in Micronesia was decimated by a hurricane in 1775, leaving only 20 survivors, one with an extremely rare form of colorblindness.
Today, their rate of that type of colorblindness is 1500 times higher than average.
As it happens, many of the founders of Condido Godoy and the many other German towns in Brazil and Paraguay came from a region of western Germany called Hunsruck, which has a higher than average twin rate.
When Condido Godoy was first settled, the founding families happened to include 17 pairs of twins.
With such a high expression of the twin gene in the founding population and being socially isolated within Brazil, it was a virtual certainty that Condido Godoy would become one of the twin capitals of the world.
Why Sensational Stories Fail 00:01:58
No need to introduce Josef Mengele or other external influences.
Paolo Sothier, the historian at Condido Godoy's small museum, perhaps said it best.
People who are speculating about Mengele are doing so to sell books.
Although the sensational explanation can often be the most compelling, it's usually not the true one.
Dig enough to find the facts, and you'll almost always learn something new and true.
And since it's real, you can apply it elsewhere.
It's the value of knowledge.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double-doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection