http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/11/twins-brazil-mengele-theoryNature or sinister design: what's going on in town with highest rate of twins?In Candido Godoi rumours about tests on villagers by Nazi geneticist Mengele vie with theories about water supply
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Tom Phillips in Candido Godoi guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 December 2009 17.17 GMT Article history
Staring out over the rolling pastures of Brazil's deep south, 65-year-old twin Cecilia Kunkel placed the blame squarely with her parents. "It's hereditary, isn't it," she said. "It's like an illness."
Across the valley, on the porch of his wooden farmhouse, Jose Ignacio Lunkes, 63, the father of identical twins, said it was all about nature.
"It's the water," he beamed, before adding: "Or perhaps it is a message from God."
Facts are as scarce as twins are common in Candido Godoi, a tiny agricultural town in southern Brazil that is said to boast the highest rates of twin births on earth. According to one Brazilian university study, 10% of births in one region of Candido Godoi between 1990 and 1994 were of twins, more than five times the state average. The same study showed nearly 50% of these twins were identical, far higher that normal rates.
And in the absence of any concrete scientific explanation, myth and rumour abound in this town of 6,400 inhabitants.
Many, like Lunkes, who is also the grandfather of twins, believe the town's twin boom is down to the water supply, extracted from the appropriately named rio Duvida, or Doubt river, that runs past his home. Others say minerals in the earth must be responsible. Recent years, however, have seen a more sinister explanation in this remote farming town where nearly 80% of residents are of German descent, shopfronts bear names like Danzer or Finkler and where an antiquated German dialect is still largely preferred to Brazil's official language, Portuguese.
According to these rumours Josef Mengele – a Nazi scientist often referred to as the "Angel of Death" – is the man behind what locals call the "twin revolution".
Mengele, thought to have died near Sao Paulo in 1979, is said to have visited the region in the 1960s, performing a number of obscure tests on local women who subsequently gave birth to twins, often with blonde hair and blue eyes. One of the town's former mayors has claimed that Mengele went about his work under the alias Rudolf Weiss.
Mengele, who fled to South America, was notorious for his obsession with creating an Aryan master race through genetic experimentation and his tests on twins in Auschwitz. Holocaust survivors say that the Nazi doctor routinely used twins – dubbed "Mengele's children" – as human guinea pigs. He is said to have diverted thousands of young children from the gas chambers to his operating tables, convinced that twins held the key to this master race.
Long-held suspicions about Mengele's activities in the region around Candido Godoi gained strength last year after the launch of a book by Argentine journalist, Jorge Camarasa, called Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America.
The book reiterated claims that Mengele had spent time clattering around Candido Godoi's dirt tracks in a mobile laboratory conducting genetic experiments on women.
Brazilian scientists and historians have dismissed such theories as spurious and scientifically impossible but with geneticists struggling to explain the "twin revolution", the Mengele theory still carries some weight.
Until the theory reappeared in Candido Godoi, locals saw the twin phenomenon as a major selling point. They built a fertility statue for tourists to visit, sold bottles of fertility water to women who hoped to bear twins. They continue to hold annual "twin parties" at which twins gather for a banquet.
Today many of Candido Godoi's residents still get a visible kick out of the outside attention from visiting academics and film crews ‑ but the Mengele theories have angered many.
One local historian was visibly upset and refused to talk to the Guardian this week, claiming he did not have enough time to discuss the situation.
"It's genetic," one local woman yelled one morning at the bus station. "Tell the world it wasn't the Nazi."
Osmar Mallmann, headmaster of the local school, agreed. "It's a myth, just like those old indigenous myths."
Lunkes, who says that Menegle was in the region but not performing genetic experiments, added that government persecution of Brazil's German communities following the South American country's allegiance with the allied forces during the second world war had left many locals reluctant to revisit the past. "It was a very complicated period. Nobody wants to relive that time," he said. "[Back then] anybody caught with any German symbol was punished. Everything was forbidden."
Alice Szinwelshi, Candido Godoi's education secretary, said: "I believe that Mengele really did pass through these parts. That is not being ruled out.
"But that he carried out experiments that resulted in the big rise in the number of twins – that is not true."
Others are not so certain. Ms Kunkel said her uncle had told her that Mengele, supposedly a visiting vet, had come to the region in the 1960s and did experiments on animals with what they later discovered were placebos.
Kunkel said she believed that Mengele's reputed ability to breed twin animals had caught the imagination of local families who, obsessed with the idea, became more likely to have twins. "It's about what is in the mind, not what is in the water," she claimed.
Lunkes, a retired teacher who lives in the Linha Sao Pedro community, a particular twin hotspot where 43 pairs have been born into little more than 80 families all living within a 4km radius, said he hoped a scientific explanation would be found, with one local university now preparing a study into the phenomenon.
"We want to be recognised around the world but not because of the Nazis," he said. "Nobody can really say what it is but it must be something to do with nature – the earth or the water. We just don't have any scientific proof."
Lunkes, a farmer, said the area around the Doubt river produced "twin manioc roots, twinned pieces of sugar cane, twinned corn. It makes me think that there is something in the earth."
Such theories fail to convince the area's younger generations, people such as Daiane, Daniele and Denise Spies, (left), aged 12, the first triplets to grace Candido Godoi's dusty streets.
"My parents say they don't really believe that it was the water," admitted Daiane. But why were there so many twins in Candido Godoi? The three girls shrugged, simultaneously.
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