"Nazi Twins" a Myth: Mengele Not Behind Brazil Boom?

In the remote Brazilian town of Candido Godoi, children of multiple births abound-such as these local triplets in an undated photo.

Did Nazi doctor Josef Mengele carry on his sadistic science decades after World War II?

Recent reports have held up a remote Brazilian town-filled with blonde, blue-eyed twins-as evidence of Mengele's postwar attempts to add to the ranks of an Aryan "master race."

But research announced today says Candido Godoi's "Nazi twins" are nothing more than a myth.

The outback town of about 7,000 has a twin rate nearly 1,000 percent higher than the global average.

The twins' fair features are no mystery-Candido Godoi (map) is largely populated by the descendents of German immigrants. But the frequency of twin births is a decades-old mystery.

Earlier this year Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa offered a bombshell of an explanation in his book Mengele: The Angel of Death in South America.

In World War II, Mengele, aka the Angel of Death, was mainly interested in twin research while serving as chief doctor at the Birkenau extermination camp in Poland.

According to Camarasa, Mengele likely continued his twin experiments in the 1960s while on the run in South America.

Mengele disguised himself as a roaming physician and veterinarian and gave pregnant women in Candido Godoi an ahead-of-its-time, twin-inducing mix of drugs or hormones, the historian suggests.

Camarasa cites interviews with locals who say they remember the visits of a traveling German doctor who provided mysterious potions or drugs.

The locals recalled him by different names, Camarasa explained. But each interviewee had the same reaction when shown a picture of Mengele: "That's him."

Mengele was in fact in Brazil during much of his South American exile, which began in 1949 and ended in 1979, when he died of a stroke while living under an assumed name.

During the war, Mengele and colleagues had used Jewish prisoners in often deadly fertility experiments. The ultimate aim: to provide more Aryans to populate Hitler's "Thousand Year Reich."

Twin Boom Predates Nazi's Exile

The twins of Candido Godoi-most of them fraternal, or nonidentical-are eager to shake their supposed Nazi connection.

"Because of these rumors that Mengele was there, the population gets very upset about it," said geneticist Lavinia Schuler-Faccini of Brazil's Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. "So some leaders of the community asked the university to start a project to try and understand why this place has such a high incidence of twin births."

The resulting research, led by Schuler-Faccini and backed by the Brazilian government, is featured in a new documentary: Explorer: Nazi Mystery-Twins From Brazil, which airs Sunday, November 29, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News and part-owns the National Geographic Channel.)