Nazi Eugenics, Cloning and Dr. Josef Mengele

Whatever happened to Nazi attempts to clone more Nazis? Dr. Josef Mengele had the task of discovering how twins occur in order to increase the number of new Nazi children. The 1978 British-American thriller film, The Boys from Brazil, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, provides a fictional answer to questions about Nazi success in that area. According to the film Mengele escaped to Brazil and there continued his attempts to clone Nazi children for the Master Race and even to clone Adolf Hitler himself.

Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele

The award winning film stars Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier and features James Mason, Lilli Palmer, Uta Hagen and Steve Guttenberg in supporting roles. The screenplay by Heywood Gould is based on the novel The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin. It was produced through Sir Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Young, well-intentioned Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg) stumbles upon a secret organization of Third Reich war criminals holding clandestine meetings in Paraguay and realises that Dr Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz doctor, is among their number. He phones Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), an aging Nazi hunter living in Austria, with this information. A highly skeptical Lieberman tries to brush Kohler's claims aside, telling him that it is a long-established fact that Mengele is still alive. Having learned when and where the next meeting to include Mengele is scheduled to occur, Kohler records part of it using a hidden microphone, but is discovered and killed while making another phone call to Lieberman. 

Aware that something is amiss, Lieberman follows Kohler's leads and begins travelling throughout Europe and North America to investigate the suspicious deaths of a number of middle-aged civil servants. He meets several of their widows and is amazed to find an uncanny resemblance in their adopted, black-haired, blue-eyed sons. It is also made clear throughout the film that, at the time of their deaths, all the civil servants were aged around 65 and had a cold, domineering, and abusive demeanor towards their adopted boys, whereas their wives were aged around 42 and doted on the sons.

So the plot thickens. Have the Nazis, led by Mengele, indeed developed a way to clone new Nazi children? And how will their secret organization be thwarted?

Dr. Mengele, known as the Butcher of Auschwitz, murdered hundreds of children and women during his experiments on twins. The book Children of the Flames, by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Shiela Cohn Dekel, chronicles Mengele's medical experimental activities on approximately 1,500 pairs of twins who passed through the Auschwitz death camp during World War II until its liberation at the end of the war. By the 1980s only 100 sets of these twins could be found.

Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa speculated in his 2008 biography that Dr. Mengele, under the alias Rudolph Weiss, continued his human experimentation in South America. Following is an English translation of part of Amazon's Spanish description of Camarasa's book.

The Angel of Death came to Buenos Aires on June 20, 1949. The political alliances with the governments of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil offered Nazis peaceful opportunities to continue seeking answers to their concerns. Mengele even founded his own laboratory, Fadro Farm. In about 1963 Mengele was seen in Brazil, specifically in Cândido Godói. A welcome sign in that city now reads: Land of Twins. Strangely, during the years of Mengele's residence there, an inexplicable process began, a process that to this day produces some eye-popping statistics: while the birth rate of twins anywhere in the world is 5%, in Cândido Godói, it is 20%. An experiment by Mengele? It's possible. A biological phenomenon that the doctor wanted to see with his own eyes? It is also possible.   

Camarasa's theory was rejected by Brazilian scientists who had studied twins living in the area; they suggested genetic factors within that community as a more likely explanation.

All of the above was part of Nazi Germany's central program of eugenics, the racially-based social policies that sought the improvement of the Aryan race. Humans targeted were identified as life unworthy of life (Leben unwertes Leben). Those included, but were not limited to, criminals, degenerate, dissidents, feeble-minded, homosexual, idle, insane and weak. All were to be eliminated from the chain of heredity. More than 400,000 people were sterilized against their will. 70,000 were killed under Action T4, an "euthanasia" program.

Nazis in Brazil - a Google Search

Nazis in Brazil - 

Here is a timeline developed by Google. Highlights include:

• 1938 - Nazi attempts to win in Brazil
• 1939 - Nazis plan barter deal with Brazil
• 1940 - Nazi agents bring pressure in Brazil
• 1941 - Wendell Willkie warned of serious trouble for this country 
• 1943 - Papacy, says Haaretz, was a center for Nazi espionage
• 1945 - Msgr. Costa assisted Nazis to find refute in Brazil
• 1967 - Franz Paul Strangl, third most wanted Nazi war criminal, arrested in Sao Paulo
• 1985 - Dr. Josef Mengele may have lived for 20 yrs. in Brazil until his death
• 1997 - Banco de Brasil, San Paulo, contained huge Nazi fortune. 

There are many other indications that neo-Nazism remains a threat in Brazil. In May, 2009 Brazil's federal police thwarted a neo-Nazi plan to bomb two synagogues in Porto Alegre (http://bit.ly/eBeJt6). 

Nazi Twins in Brazil

Here's a quote from the January, 2009 Telegraph.Co.Uk. about Dr. Joseph Mengele:

"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."

However, Ursula Matte of the medical genetics unit at Porto Alegre Hospital in Brazil and her colleagues reject any notion that Mengele was responsible for the phenomenon. She says that other factors may explain the phenomenon, especially since the area was settled by German immigrants and there has been a high level of inbreeding.

That aside, it all makes me wonder how many Nazis made it to Brazil or any other South American country toward the end of WW II. Cecil Adams tells us that the true story has never been told. He suggests that thousands of Nazis may have escaped with the help of members of the Catholic Church, Argentina's president Peron and other high placed people. 

Frederick Forsythe wrote a popular novel about a Nazi organization in Brazil, The Odessa Files. In the book the suicide of an elderly German Jew explodes into revelation after revelation of a Mafia-like organization called Odessa. This secret group (the name is an acronym for Organization der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, "Organization of Former SS Members") supposedly used stashed war booty and connections in high places to spirit Nazi big shots out of reach of the Allies.

All this and more suggests that the Nazis lost WW II, but they and their descendants are still around.

Atlantis, Nazis, Brazil and Other Strange Tales

I finished David Gran's interesting tale about British explorer Percy Fawcett's obsession to find the lost city of Z somewhere along the Amazon River in South America back in the years before and after WW I. The book is The Lost City of Z: a tale of deadly obsession in the Amazon. Most everyone believes that he and his son died in 1925 in the jungles, but not everyone. And that's what interested me, especially as this tale has a connection with the Nazi's Third Reich.

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog the influence Madame Blavatsky had upon early 20th century Europeans. Gran points out that she practiced the arts of a medium, claiming to be a conduit for a brotherhood of reincarnated Tibetan mahatmas. As I also indicated, she claimed that the Tibetans were descendants of the very old Atlanteans and that's where the Nazis come in, especially because they believed themselves to be descended from those wise and very ancient priests, the Aryans, who escaped from Atlantis when it sunk into the sea thousands of years ago.

Percy Fawcett's older brother, Edward, converted to Buddhism and aligned himself with the religious leaders of India and Ceylon to oppose British rule. Edward, who had been a child prodigy, helped Blavatsky to research and write her 1893 magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine.  That work is still read and admired by occultists and new age religionists. And now the plot thickens.

Deep in the Amazon jungles of central Brazil are the Roncador Mountains. There are mystics who believe that Fawcett's lost city of Z was not above, but rather underground. It is a great city built by the Atlanteans even before they escaped into them from the sinking continent off the coast of Brazil. Dr. Raymond Bernard in The Hollow Earth tells us that a resident of Brazil believes there are mysterious tunnels in great number in the Roncador Mountains of northwest Mato Grosso. Colonel Fawcett was last seen heading toward them. And very likely—maybe more than likely—he found the entrance to these tunnels and disappeared into them.

You see an ancient Guatemalan manuscript the Popul Vuh, seems to describe the destruction of Atlantis, that great continent off the eastern coast of Brazil. One of the South American colonies of Atlantis was probably the land called Brazil, a name that land bore thousands of years before the arrival of the Portuguese. In fact, the name Brazil was known to the old Irish Celts as Hy-Brazil. Could this mythical land of Brazil, the Isle of the Living, the land of joy, fair women and apples, be indeed this colony of the sunken continent, as Morris West suggests as he writes about "the blessed stormless isle, where all men are good and all the women pure and where God retreats for a recreation from the rest of us"?

If you follow this line of thinking then the Incas of Peru are the late inheritors of the remains of the civilization of the Atlantean imperial colony of Hy-Brazil. Peru is not a native Peruvian tongue word, it's not found in the Quichua language. The word means the god of the sun. All this speculation comes from books by Lewis Spence, published about the same time that Fawcett disappeared. Read The Problem of Atlantis and the History of Atlantis.

Concluding thoughts: Fawcett found a great subterranean city with Atlanteans still living in it. Some of that great race also escaped to Tibet. Don't go looking for this place yourself, however. It is guarded by fierce, dark-skinned warriors of great physical strength, the Chavantes Indians. But if you do and if you are able to get past them into the ancient city, you just may find Colonel Fawcett and his son Jack, or at least their remains.

I wonder if this might be woven into a novel one day? I wonder . . . Also makes one wonder why so many Nazis ended up in South America and Brazil. We'll have to pursue this another day.