The Dark Secret of Brazil’s Identical Twin Town

I always assumed that everyone must have at least one friend who’s an identical twin. Chances are that you’re likely to have at least two friends who are identical twins because their friendships often come packaged together as a matching set. I’m speaking from personal experience here as I attended a primary school with three different pairs of identical twins, although they were all in different classes. And each pair of twins always used to hang around together in exactly the same social circles.

But after immersing myself in some intense original research – well, a quick post on Twitter – I discovered that my school was perhaps a little unusual, and that not everyone has an identical twin in their lives.

I suppose that the unexpected sight of a pair of identical twins out in the wild still has the capacity to take you by surprise. If you were wandering down the street and randomly bumped into a pair of identical twins, you might do a quick double take before resuming your business. But what if you bumped into another pair of identical twins about five minutes later? And then another pair?

And then another? Unless you’re suffering from double vision after indulging in far too many Babychams, this has got to make you feel like something slightly weird is going on here.

And yet that’s exactly the situation you may well experience if you ever happen to visit the small town of Cândido Godói (pronounced Canjidu Godoy) in Brazil which boasts a quite staggeringly high proportion of twin births in comparison to the rest of the world. Not only is the birth rate of fraternal non-identical twins quizzically high within this modest population, but about half of these are the rarer breed of identical twins which is itself a deeply curious anomaly. And if that wasn’t strange enough, it’s reported that the majority of identical twins in this town have blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, which makes it sound as if the place is a breeding ground for identical batches of identical twins.

So what exactly is going on in Cândido Godói, and what do all these twins want with us? Is there something in the water or something in the yams? Are we witnessing the birth of a new civilisation of super-twins who are destined to take over the world? Or is it all down to the secret and ultimately successful continuation of the horrifying experiments originally conducted in Auschwitz concentration camp which we all foolishly believed had been abandoned at the end of the Second World War?

Let’s take a visit to the self-proclaimed World Twin Capital for this special double-feature episode to see if we can finally put two and two together without the whole thing going pair-shaped…

Back to the Egg

The locals don’t exactly try to hide their thriving twin population. As you wander into the town of Cândido Godói, one of the first things you’ll see is a welcome sign which displays the town’s official crest bearing two identical profiles, accompanied with the words “Garden City and Land of Twins.”

This small remote agricultural town sits in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in the southern region of Brazil, right next to the Argentine border. Only around 6,500 residents live here, the vast majority of whom are German immigrants who were first tempted to make it their home after the first World War on the promise of dead cheap farming land and a stack of financial incentives from the Brazilian government. Most of the residents today still speak in German rather than Portuguese—the official language of Brazil—and many of the quaint shop fronts bear distinctly German names.

Whilst the strange twin phenomena is evident throughout the whole town, it’s particularly notable in the tiny district of Linha São Pedro – home to around 80 families which include over 40 pairs of twins within a radius of just 4km.

Before we start crunching the numbers of the town as a whole, it’s first worth considering the general statistical differences between the global birth rates of identical and non-identical twins. The latter breed – known as Dizygotic or Fraternal twins – take shape when two separate fertilised eggs—or zygotes—stake their place in the womb during the same pregnancy. There’s not really a whole world of difference between fraternal twins and regular siblings – they could be of mixed gender, they all share about 50% of the other’s genes, and they may bear a passing resemblance although that’s not always the case.

The only real difference is that fraternal twins just happen to share living quarters in the womb at the same time, whereas regular siblings get their own private pad in which they can kick back and relax. Or kick forward and relax if the mood takes them.

I didn’t know this until today, but it’s actually possible for fraternal twins to have different fathers if the two separate eggs are fertilised by the sperm from two different blokes during the same menstrual cycle. I’m sure we all have at least one friend who has a different father to their own twin. Or maybe not, as I gather this type of fertilisation—known as heteropaternal superfecundation—is incredibly rare.

Meanwhile, Monozygotic or Identical Twins are formed when a single zygote splits up into two separate embryos to create a couple of clones harvested from the same fertilised egg. And this is an entirely different kettle of afterbirth. Unlike fraternal twins, identical twins share 100% of each other’s genes which goes some way to explaining why they tend to look pretty similar. And it’s a much rarer form of pregnancy.

Although I’m sure we all have at least one friend who has a different mother to their own identical twin.

Whilst the stats can vary from region to region, all types of twin births account for about 1.2% of all pregnancies around the world, or about 12 in every thousand births. But if we split up these stats into separate embryos, we see that identical twins account for just 0.4% of all global births—or about four in every thousand.

If we compare those numbers to the twin birth rates in Cândido Godói, we begin to see why this modest farm town has earned its reputation as the twin capital of the world. Here you’ll find that twins account for no less than 10% of all births, whilst approximately half of those of the identical variety. Now, the state of Rio Grande do Sul has a pretty high twinning rate in general—about 1.8% of all pregnancies.

But even taking that into account, the town of Cândido Godói still enjoys twin birth rates which are well over five times the state average, and nearly ten times the global average. There surely is something mighty fishy going on in them there parts.

So the first question we have to ask here is how on Earth can twinning rates vary quite significantly across the globe? This must surely point to certain predisposing factors specific to each region which can be found in abundance in Cândido Godói? Well, the variant in rates only really applies to fraternal twins. Interestingly, the birth rates of fraternal twins witnessed a sharp rise across the board in relatively recent years.

In contrast, the birth rates of identical twins appear to be permanently stuck at 0.4% in most places, and as yet there are no known factors that contribute to the zygote splitting into two embryos. Despite plenty of scientific research into the matter, we’re still pretty clueless today. But let’s see if we can pick up any clues from the fluctuating fraternals by examining the variation in global twinning rates as a whole.

The lowest rates can be found in South America and South Asia where as few as five per thousand births are twins. This complicates the case of Cândido Godói just a little bit, as the town is located in a state which has a higher than average multiple birth rate which is situated in a continent which has one of the lowest multiple birth rates in the world. At the other end of the spectrum, some Central African countries can see as many as twenty twin births per thousand, whilst Western countries tend to hover somewhere in the middle.

There are several theories as to what might actually increase the chances of a multiple birth. One study published in ‘The Journal of Reproductive Medicine’ in 2006 suggests that a lot of it is down to diet. Gary Steinman, MD, PhD claimed in the study that women who consume plenty of milk, cheese, and yoghurt are more likely to have twins, which may be bad news for any vegans who are hoping to squeeze out a bumper bundle of joy. According to Steinman’s figures, vegans are five times less likely to have twins.

Still, if you don’t have any qualms with dairy products and you’re hoping for twins, it might be time to go mad with the squirty cheese in a can. I can only assume that this is exactly what the people of Central Africa are doing.

Incidentally, if we move along a little to West Africa, many people in Nigeria put their particularly high twinning rates down to excessive consumption of yams, a point to which we’ll return later in the video. But I think I’d rather stick with the squirty cheese.

The age of the mother may also have a role to play when increasing the chances of a multiple birth, as it’s been suggested that older mothers—between around 30 to 40—are more likely to give birth to twins. This may also help explain the recent surge in twin births from around the 1970s onwards, as it ties in with a significant increase in maternal age over this period. In fact, the number of twin births in the US alone rose by a staggering 50% between 1980 and 1997.

Another reason for the spike in twins may be down to the rise of fertility treatments that involve the planting of several embryos into the womb. When you’re planting multiple embryos in there, this naturally increases the chances of giving birth to multiple babies. It also apparently helps to be quite tall as one report suggests that mothers of twins are approximately one inch taller than other mothers.

But I’m not sure if we’re just clutching at straws here.

From what we have to work with so far, it seems that African mothers are eating plenty of yoghurt and working hard on increasing their age and height, whilst mothers in South America and South Asia are too short and need to eat much more custard. I don’t think much of this helps to explain exactly what is going on in Cândido Godói unless the residents really go to town with their cheese boards.

Boil and Bubble

Here’s a quick question though…how many prospective parents are actually hoping for twins? And what would be the reason? It’s not something which I’ve ever given much thought to before. I suppose that some parents may be of the opinion that there’s just something incredibly special about raising a pair of twins.

Some might feel that having twins is exactly twice as much fun as having one child at a time, whilst others might just like the idea of dressing them up in cute matching outfits until they hit the age of 18.

Attitudes towards twins have changed dramatically over the course of history, and it wasn’t always entirely safe to be born two of a kind. Nigeria had some seriously conflicting stances on twins in the 19th and 20th centuries, depending on which region and within which ethnic group you happened to be born. The Yoruba people often viewed twins as some kind of sacred gift from God.

They were often believed to have their own supernatural connection with the spirit world and could vastly improve the wealth and fortunes of the blessed parents. When such twins threw a seven, they would be honoured with special memorial statues which would be cared for almost as if they were living children. However, twins born into the Efik group didn’t always have it quite so cushy, as they were often viewed as a bad omen which were destined to bring disaster to the community.

The mother of twins would be considered guilty of a terrible sin—such as sleeping with two different men—whilst the father would be condemned as an evil spirit. New parents would often just abandon their taboo twins in the bushes in order to avoid any consequences for giving birth to inhuman monsters. That seems a bit harsh.

If they’d had their wits about them, they surely would have realised that they only really needed to abandon one of the twins to avoid suspicion.

On a very disturbing note, we can’t even say that this kind of thing has been entirely consigned to the history books. A report from ‘The Guardian’ in 2018 suggests that the vast majority of Nigerians are completely unaware that in remote parts of the country, twin babies are still offered up to the gods as a sacrifice to ensure a bumper harvest.

However, unless you’re incredibly unfortunate to be born in such a place, the chances are that twins today aren’t facing quite such a gloomy prospect from day one. But that’s not to say that being a twin doesn’t come packaged with its own peculiar set of challenges. Life as a twin can be very much a double-edged sword.

I mentioned at the beginning that I grew up enjoying friendships with three different pairs of identical twins who all attended the same small primary school. Now that I think about it, I wonder if they were putting something funny in the ginger beer in my village. One of my teachers at the same school made the front page of the local ‘Rotherham Witchfinder’ paper after she gave birth to quintuplets. Funnily enough, I don’t think she ever returned to school, but I imagine she was being kept pretty busy.

The twins from my youth didn’t always get along with their identical siblings. I can vividly remember one pair of twins having a particularly nasty argument on the school bus which culminated in one of them screaming into the face of the other: “You ugly wanker!” I don’t think he’d really thought that one through.

I sadly drifted apart from all the twins in later life, but I did very occasionally bump into them during my later pilgrimages to the North of England. The slight problem here is that you kind of forget which is which. When you’re regularly hanging out with identical twins, it’s very easy to tell the differences between the two, but this becomes harder when you haven’t seen them for years and their facial features have changed over the cruel passage of time.

I can remember bumping into one of the twins in the Gents toilet of a pub a couple of years back, and he seemed incredibly happy to see me—but straight away I was battling to work out whether he was Romulus or Remus. (Names may have been changed to protect their identity.) I decided to take a massive punt by confidently declaring his name very early on, along with the reassurance that I’d recognise that cheeky face anywhere.

And of course I got it wrong. And he looked crestfallen.

But that’s not quite as bad as a very strange encounter with one of the other pairs of identical twins which left me scratching my head for days. I’d found myself working very briefly in a radiator production factory. On the very first day, I was surprised to cross paths with one of the twins in the canteen area, but again I was unsure at first whether this one was Pinky or Perky as I hadn’t seen either for years. (I might be using fake names again here but the incident is completely true.)

I played it differently on this occasion. Rather than blurt out a name in blind hope, I bided my time to see if he would give me any clues. He didn’t. But never mind, we still had a really pleasant conversation and I hoped to bump into him again later in the week so that I might finally figure out his identity.

When I did see him again in the canteen a few days later, I waved hello but this time he just glared at me before wandering off without saying a word. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to upset him since our last cordial meeting. When I met him for the third time, he was all nice and chatty again, so I put the previous encounter down to him just having an off day or something. But then on the fourth occasion, I just got the silent hostile stare again. This was getting weird.

By the second week, I’d finally worked out what was going on. I’d kind of forgotten that whilst I’d parted with Perky on good terms back when I was a kid, I’d had a bit of a minor fall-out with the other twin Pinky, and he clearly still held a grudge after all these years. It turns out that both of the twins were working in this radiator production factory. And whilst Perky was always happy to see me, Pinky felt quite the opposite.

At least I managed to figure out which one was which, albeit largely by the scowling.

And of course, this is one of the many problems of being a twin. There must be so many times when you get mistaken for the other, and I suspect that half the time you’re wondering if the person you’re talking to even knows exactly who you are. I’m sure there are plenty of advantages too, such as that deep connecting bond which must feel like no other relationship you can imagine. I suspect that there are loads of twins out there who wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

You might well be one of them. If not, you might be the other one of them.

But there’s also the risk of having an identity crisis when people continually get your name wrong, and they don’t even seem to care when you correct them, almost as if the two of you are just completely interchangeable human beings. You’re quite likely to be packaged together as ‘The Twins’ rather than two separate people, and there are times when the best you can hope for is some kind of distinguishing label such as “The Nice One” or “The Sulky One Who’s Still Got The Face On After All These Years.” You may find that people regularly bring up memories or conversations which are only actually relevant to the other twin.

You’ll never even get to celebrate your own special birthday party as you’ll always have to share it with the other. And you’ll often have to put up with some very silly questions which run along the lines of “If I stab you in the eye with a fork, would your twin feel the pain?” Life in general may generally just get a little odd for twins of all breeds.

I was talking about this to fellow writer and basement dweller Emma Freylink whilst waiting in the queue at the Hot Dog Stand. Emma revealed that two of her cousins are fraternal twins who are now pushing forty. One of them got married, and now the three of them all live together in the same house. It’s not some kind of kinky arrangement, but they do share the same house, car, kitchen, and everything else.

I couldn’t help feeling that life must feel a bit strange for the non-married twin. They get to share everything except the bedroom juice. They must sometimes feel as if they came runner-up.

Still, the residents of Cândido Godói don’t appear to have too many hang-ups about living in Twin Town. In fact, they seem to quite like the attention. They hold a biennial party centred around a large fertility statue of a woman holding two babies. They rush indoors to grab the twins and pose for photographs whenever yet another news crew rolls into town to try and get to the bottom of the mystery.

They flog bottles of local fertility water to tourists who are hoping for twins. And they’ve even recently opened a museum called ‘The House of the Twins’ although I suspect that this might get repetitive very quickly.

The locals have their own theories about why the town produces so many twins within such a small space. Some of them reckon that it’s a message from God. Others reckon that it’s got something to do with aliens. One local farmer pointed out to journalists that everything here is twinned—including the pieces of sugar cane, the corn, and the cows.

In fact, the twin bug may have been caught by the cows long before it started spreading to humans. One popular theory is that it’s all down to special minerals that can be found exclusively in the local water supply. This is extracted from The Roosevelt River, formerly known as Rio da Dúvida which translates as ‘River of Doubt.’ Despite the strong element of doubt in this theory, it might still be the best we have to work with so far.

After all, there’s something seriously kooky happening here. It’s perhaps understandable that there might be some broad differences in twinning rates from continent to continent which could potentially be put down to diet or environmental or cultural factors. But here we have a single small town in which the figures are dramatically higher than anywhere else in the same state. Yet, much like a twin, this situation is not entirely unique.

Twin Peaks Around the World

Whilst the town of Cândido Godói probably has a higher twin birth rate than anywhere else in the world, there are a couple of other places on the global map which are seeing double without attracting quite so much publicity.

The village of Kodinhi in the Malappuram district of Kerala in India has a small population of around 2,000, with no less than 408 of those residents originating from multiple births. Or to put it another way, the village contains over 200 sets of twins if we’re lumping them together as packages—which of course is a very insensitive thing to do, so let’s stick with the idea of 408 well-rounded individuals. This was apparently first noted back in the 1940s, and as yet scientists have been unable to reach a definitive cause for the high proportion of twins, ruling out pollutants and dietary or chemical factors. It’s particularly odd that the village is located in India which has one of the lowest twinning rates in the world.

Another curious example takes us back to Nigeria—but in this case, many of the locals feel fairly confident that they understand the very specific reason behind the surprising stats. As we mentioned earlier, Nigeria has one of the highest twinning rates in the world, which is perhaps a little unfortunate considering how some of them have been treated over the course of history. The twin capital of Nigeria is probably the city of Igbo-Ora in the southwest which boasts a population of around 280,000—and although exact figures are hard to come by, it’s blatantly obvious to anyone wandering through the city that twins make up a significant portion of the locals. But it’s believed by many that this is all simply down to the heavy consumption of yams.

The Yoruba people seem to be particularly fond of the bountiful yams found in the region—and bearing in mind that the Yoruba treat twins as a blessed gift from god with supernatural powers, it’s understandable why so many women purposefully binge on yams in the hope of conceiving twins. Research carried out at Lagos University Teaching Hospital concluded that it was the actual peels of the yams which contain chemical substances that seem to encourage the release of more than one egg during a single pregnancy. The study also suggested that there may be some kind of environmental factor which promotes the high level of these chemicals found in the Nigerian yam peels.

However, not everyone is convinced by these findings. Robert Asiedu is a yam specialist—not many of those about—who explained to ‘Science in Africa’ magazine: “Nobody has provided any scientific explanation or evidence that could prove that yam consumption can cause multiple births.”

And it has to be said that although we keep hearing theories about yams and dairy products and, I dunno, pickled pork pies, we still haven’t seen any definitive proof that multiple births are linked in any way to dietary intake. That even applies to the consumption of magic water.

Heading back in the direction of Cândido Godói, a team of researchers analysed the water supply of Cândido Godói in the 1990s and found no abnormalities of any kind. So there definitely isn’t something in the water—but that doesn’t stop some of the locals from trying to shift their special local fertility water onto tourists anyway.

So, it would seem that the parents of Cândido Godói aren’t doing anything significantly different to anyone else in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. They aren’t gorging themselves on dairy products or yams which are unlikely to make a real difference anyway. They aren’t having babies much later in life than other parents in the state. They’re not taking any kind of exclusive local treatment.

And they don’t tend to be about an inch taller than anyone else in the vicinity. So perhaps all this moves us away from theories involving human habits, and points us instead to a very specific event which took place in Cândido Godói many years ago.

The most popular theory of all involves dark secrets and human experimentation which began when an eccentric new doctor arrived in town in the 1960s, after which life would never be quite the same again…

The Return of Doctor Mysterio

The German doctor’s name was Rudolph Weiss, and by all accounts, he was a likeable gentle soul who earned the respect of the locals. Aged around 50, Rudolph wasn’t just a doctor—he was also a vet who was happy to travel around the town making house-to-house calls to help heal every breed of creature in one handy visit, regardless of whether the patient was human or horse. He seemed to take a particular interest in pregnant women, pulling out all kinds of new weird and wonderful treatments and drugs from his medical bag to help expectant mothers through their pregnancies.

It was said that the surge in twin births only began to gather momentum about a year after Dr Rudolph Weiss had arrived on the scene. But then one day, he just seemed to vanish into thin air and was never heard of ever again, leaving behind a town now bustling with twins.

It wasn’t until over forty years later that Argentinean historian Jorge Camarasa began to put the pieces together and came to a shocking conclusion: Rudolph Weiss never existed. The name was just an alias to protect the German physician’s true identity. His real name was Josef Mengele. You might know him better as The Angel of Death.

During the Second World War, the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele had taken on the position of resident physician at Auschwitz concentration camp—a diverse role which involved a wide range of challenging duties including selecting which victims were to be sent to the gas chambers and administering the gas, selecting which victims were to be the guinea pigs for his horrifying experiments, drawing up a weekly rota, and developing a new master Aryan race of blonde-haired and blue-eyed citizens for the Third Reich. We’ll never know for certain just how many victims died directly at the hands of Josef Mengele as he wasn’t great at paperwork, but grim estimates stretch as high as 400,000. And he was destined to evade any justice for his barbaric role in the concentration camp, as he somehow managed to remain hidden in the shadows for the rest of his life until his eventual death from natural causes in 1979.

Mengele was particularly interested in sourcing twins for his abhorrent eugenical experiments, and they were often diverted from the gas chambers or even just plucked from the streets. It was said that he was interested in quickly increasing the population of the Aryan race by unlocking the secret to breeding twins which could potentially compensate for all the millions of German soldiers who were going out and getting killed in the war. He wanted to speed up the process of Aryan replenishments.

There was another practical point to his twin hunts, and a reason why he favoured the sourcing of identical twins in particular. If he was working with—or rather working on—a pair of subjects who were almost identical in every biological respect, he could use one as the “control” and one as the “test”. Even if one of the twins became sick after his twisted experiments, he still had a perfectly healthy specimen which could be used to observe and compare.

And becoming sick was a tragically likely outcome for the subjects as very few are believed to have survived the experiments which included purposefully infecting a lethal disease into the body and amputating healthy limbs. Miklós Nyiszli—a Hungarian prisoner of Jewish heritage who was forced against his will to work with Mengele in the laboratory—later recalled one particular session in which the Nazi doctor killed fourteen twins on the same day by injecting all their hearts with chloroform. Even the twins who were fortunate enough to survive the actual procedures were only likely to be sent back to the gas chambers.

The experiments finally came to an end when Soviet forces advanced on Auschwitz in 1945, and Mengele fled the country having failed in his monstrous mission to create a new master race. Or had he?

According to the 2010 book ‘Mengele: The Angel of Death in South America’, the physician hadn’t quite been ready to give up on his work just yet. He eventually resumed his experiments in secret in the little town of Cândido Godói under the alias of Dr Rudolph Weiss. And considering the reported huge spike in twin births after his prolonged stay in the 1960s, it might even be suggested that The Angel of Death quietly triumphed in his assignment of creating a master race of blonde-haired blue-eyed citizens who were destined to duplicate at double the usual rate.

The Argentinian historian Jorge Camarasa claims in his book that after spending the best part of two decades in hiding around Europe and South America, Mengele eventually settled down in the German settlement of Colonias Unidas in Paraguay in 1963. It was whilst he was living here that he first began to make regular trips across the Brazilian border to another German settlement—Cândido Godói—where he secretly set up his new laboratory to continue the work that had been temporarily interrupted by the unconditional surrender of Germany.

A recent mayor and town doctor of Cândido Godói—Dr Anencia Flores da Silva—claims to have interviewed hundreds of older residents in a bid to get the full story. Apparently, many of them do indeed remember a slightly odd German doctor and vet called Rudolph Weiss who used to roam around the town in the 1960s, taking a particular interest in pregnant women. Apparently he was a cultured and dignified man with excellent bedside manners, and he always seemed to have strange new drugs and potions on hand to treat his pregnant patients, with some witnesses insisting that he regularly collected samples from the women after performing unusual tests.

One witness even claimed that in his veterinary role, he seemed strangely obsessed with the concept of getting the cows to produce twins. Maybe this did all start with twin cows after all.

The former mayor also believed that a number of people he tried to speak with were holding back information on the mysterious Doctor Weiss. He said: “In a region full of Nazis, there are some that remain silent, who are scared. It is important that we discover the truth.”

And it has to be said that whilst the population of Cândido Godói embrace their association with twins, quite a few of them aren’t quite so happy about the association with Josef Mengele. Paulo Sauthier is the curator of the town’s ‘House of Twins’ museum and he feels strongly that the joyful population of this German community doesn’t deserve to be connected with a murderous criminal. He raged to the press: “There are no Nazi sympathisers in this region. People who are speculating about Mengele are doing so to sell books.

He studied the twins phenomenon in Germany, not here.”

So, who’s right? The Argentinian historian and writer backed up by the former mayor and town doctor? Or the local museum curator?

Well, Josef Mengele made a pretty efficient job of covering his tracks back in the day, although he had a few remarkably close shaves in which his capture was thwarted by careless mistakes and clerical errors. But we’ve since been able to fairly accurately retrace his steps after he fled Germany in fear of facing trial over war crimes. He initially fled to Czechoslovakia in 1945 where he was briefly captured by the Americans and held as a prisoner of war.

The only problem was that the Americans didn’t realise who exactly they were holding—largely because the Allied forces hadn’t yet got round to identifying him as a wanted criminal—so he was swiftly released. He had made his way to South America by 1949, briefly working under a false name as a carpenter in Argentina before moving onto Paraguay in the 1950s. By the very early 1960s, he had settled down on a cattle farm in the municipality of Serra Negra in São Paulo, Brazil.

Mengele had bought half the farm whilst the other half belonged to Geza and Gitta Stammer—a nice Hungarian couple who believed Mengele to be a gentleman by the name of Peter Hochbichler. They initially had no idea that they had just thrown their life savings into a cattle farm collaboration with The Angel of Death. The Stammers eventually figured out the true identity of their business associate after coming across a photograph of Mengele in the newspapers.

Although they were now keen to rid themselves of this wretched creature, they were also worried that they could get in trouble themselves for harbouring a fugitive. It’s reported that Mengele bought their continued loyalty for the next few years for the princely sum of $2000.

During this period, he began work on his autobiography which contained no less than 74 pages dedicated to his own birth, including a page and a half which described his own placenta. I’m really surprised that nobody has bothered to snap up the movie rights to this astonishing piece of work. It’s believed that these memoirs were intended to somehow justify his experiments in the concentration camp whilst passing on his wisdom to his son Rolf. If so, it failed spectacularly on both counts.

Rolf did secretly meet up with the father he never really knew towards the end of Mengele’s life, and was hoping to talk to a man consumed with regret and shame over his actions. Rolf later reported that he was greatly saddened to instead talk with “an unrepentant Nazi” who claimed to have been only following orders and carrying out his duty. The pair never met again.

Mengele eventually fell out with the Stammers for good in 1974, after which he spent his final years living in a small rented bungalow in São Paulo, Brazil. He died in 1979 after suffering a stroke during a swim near Bertioga beach. A passing doctor tried in vain to save his life although it may have been more fitting to just amputate some of his limbs and inject him with chloroform.

Although he was originally buried under the false name of Wolfgang Gerhard, his remains were exhumed in 1985 and officially identified for the first time as Josef Mengele. His family members have since repeatedly refused requests by the Brazilian government to send the remains back to Germany, whilst his skeleton is now quite bizarrely used as an educational tool at the São Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine.

So, whilst the Nazi doctor may have evaded justice for his war crimes, he instead lived out his final thirty years as a frightened, bitter, and lonely fugitive who could never return home. And whilst he certainly spent the latter part of his life in Brazil, there’s no evidence to suggest that he ever got within about 800 miles of the town Cândido Godói. Even if he had made his way to the town, I can’t see how he could possibly have been responsible for a rapid spurt in twin growth as he would have lacked the technology, the facilities, the equipment, and the knowledge. Maybe there really was a Dr Rudolph Weiss knocking around the town who was in no way connected to Mengele aside from a shared fascination with twins.

And let’s just imagine for a moment that his experiments were successful. As most accounts seem to indicate that he just vanished without trace at some point in the 1960s, you would have expected the twin rate to have dropped sharply after his sudden disappearance, but that’s not the case.

I still think that if Rudolph Weiss ever existed, he was only ever interested in twinning the cows. But if you dig even deeper into the stats, you’ll find that the Argentinian writer and historian Jorge Camarasa was clearly talking out of his arse when he made the claim in his book that the twinning rates of Cândido Godói only began to surge when a mysterious doctor rolled into town in the 1960s. It hasn’t been possible for anyone to track down old birth certificates or hospital records relating to the town, but the records relating to baptism registries stretch right back to 1927.

And a recent study of 6,615 of these baptism registries revealed that the town was already bursting with twins when the first German immigrants landed shortly after the first World War, and the rate has gradually risen over the subsequent years with no noticeable surge in the 1960s. So there’s clearly no way this has anything whatsoever to do with a mysterious vanishing doctor or Mengele’s much later arrival in Brazil.

It seems more likely that some people just became fascinated with the concept of so many blonde-haired blue-eyed twins squeezed together in one place, and assumed it must have something to do with Mengele’s infamous experiments with twins during his efforts to create an Aryan master race. Perhaps the museum curator Paulo Sauthier was right all along when he suggested that proponents of the theory were just trying to shift books.

The Genetic Truth

We might be better off listening instead to the conclusions reached by Dr Ursula Matte in the 1990s which noticeably don’t involve Nazi doctors or magic fertility water or stuffing yourself silly on yam skins. A researcher at the medical genetics unit at Porto Alegre Hospital in Brazil, Dr Matte and her colleagues were invited to Cândido Godói in 1994 to conduct their own research into the puzzle. This was the same team who analysed the local water supply and found nothing strange bubbling away down there, and the very same team who dug up all those baptism registries dating back to 1927.

And Dr Matte’s final verdict is based on the concept that having twins can be slightly addictive. Although we’re still not entirely sure why, it’s widely accepted that fraternal twins stand more of a chance in the running in the family, on the mother’s side at least. There appears to be some kind of genetic link which is passed down the generations and increases the chances of a fraternal birth by up to 29%.

So if the family tree on the mother’s side has a history of fraternal twins, the expectant mother may have inherited the genes which increase the chances of releasing more than one egg during the same pregnancy. The chances of a fraternal twin birth increase even more if the mother is a fraternal twin herself, although looking at the bigger picture, the odds are still heavily stacked against it. Oh, and whilst people often talk of twins “skipping a generation” in twin-friendly families, that’s just a complete myth.

None of this has any bearing on identical twin births in which the same zygote is split into two embryos, as we still have no real clue as to what exactly causes the split. And of course, none of this explains in itself why the twinning rates are so extraordinarily high in the small town of Cândido Godói. But it gives us a starting point.

And if we go right back to the real starting point of Cândido Godói, the first small group of German settlers already had seventeen pairs of twins amongst their number. Many of them hailed from the Hunsrück region of Germany which has a pretty high twinning rate in comparison to global figures. And many of them had blonde hair and blue eyes as these are typically Aryan features.

This whole thing about the blonde hair and blue eyes has possibly been greatly exaggerated anyway. It’s often suggested that every twin in the town bears these characteristics, which makes it sound as if every twin looks spookily identical. There’s certainly quite a lot of twins sporting the blonde hair and blue eyes of their forefathers, but this doesn’t apply to all of them by any stretch of the fevered imagination.

Now, this small and pretty isolated community grew in size over the subsequent years. But it’s not like they had many outsiders joining their circle to help increase the population. So what did they do? Oh, I see where this is going now.

Yup. Without too many other options on the local procreation menu, they just had to make do with what they had. So, in a small community descended from a region with a high twinning rate, the already high proportion of twins began mating with other twins within the same families. That level of inbreeding and genetic isolation has got to help increase the odds of producing yet more twins quite a bit.

It’s an unusual principle known as The Founder Effect in which a small group of migrants effectively begin founding their own distinct population from a strictly limited gene pool.

And Dr Matte even reckons that her team may have identified the specific gene at work in this case. After conducting DNA tests on dozens of mothers of twins in the town, the team found that the gene TP53 appeared to be the common shared factor—or if we’re being specific, the P72 allele of TP53 appeared to be the connection with multiple births. That’s not to say that Dr Matte’s team had discovered the universal twin gene.

As Dr Matte explained to ‘New Scientist’ magazine, the results may have been very different if the study had been conducted on mothers of twins living in different areas of the world. A more recent study on gene variants reported by ‘The American Journal of Human Genetics’ in 2022 has indicated that the genes FSHB and SMAD3 may play specific roles in stimulating the ovaries to produce more eggs, but it may be a while until more definitive answers are hatched.

And we’re still none the wiser as to why the number of identical twin births in Cândido Godói are so disproportionately high. But from what we can gather today, it does seem as if the real answer to the mystery of Cândido Godói can be found lurking somewhere in genetic traits rather than dairy food plates or Hitler’s mates.

Incidentally, getting a bit too intimate with your own family members may also go some way to explaining the twin epidemic in the Indian village of Kodinhi in which marriage between family members is practised.

None of this may be all that surprising to the actual locals of Cândido Godói. You’d think that they might not be so keen on discussing the theory that their famous twin population is all down to in-breeding, although I suppose it’s several steps up from the theory of all it being down to the experiments of a Nazi war criminal. One local 22-year-old twin spotted by ‘The New York Times’ in 2009 took time in-between posing for yet more photographs to give her take on the matter.

Fabiane Grimm—who is part of a family with five different sets of twins—gave a casual shrug and told a reporter: “It’s not too much of a mystery to me. My brother married his third cousin. There are lots of cases like that, people marrying their cousins or other close family members.”

Still, maybe there’s more than one possible answer to this riddle. I’m sure we all have at least one friend who is an identical twin born from incest, Nazi experimentation, and yam addiction. Chances are you have at least two.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the twin birth rate in Cândido Godói?

In Cândido Godói, twins account for no less than 10% of all births, with approximately half of those being identical twins.

What is the global average for twin births?

Globally, twin births account for about 1.2% of all pregnancies, or about 12 in every thousand births.

What are the differences between fraternal and identical twins?

Fraternal twins, or dizygotic twins, are formed from two separate fertilized eggs and share about 50% of each other’s genes. Identical twins, or monozygotic twins, are formed from a single fertilized egg that splits into two embryos and share 100% of each other’s genes.

What are some theories about why twin birth rates vary globally?

Theories include diet (such as consumption of dairy products or yams), maternal age, fertility treatments, and environmental factors. However, these theories are not definitively proven.

What is the history of twin births in Cândido Godói?

The town of Cândido Godói has had a high twin birth rate since the first German immigrants arrived shortly after World War I. The rate has gradually increased over the years.

What is the Founder Effect and how does it relate to Cândido Godói?

The Founder Effect occurs when a small group of migrants found a new population from a limited gene pool. In Cândido Godói, the high twin birth rate is likely due to inbreeding and genetic isolation among the descendants of the original German settlers.

What is the gene TP53 and its connection to twin births in Cândido Godói?

The gene TP53, specifically the P72 allele, was found to be a common factor among mothers of twins in Cândido Godói. This gene may contribute to the high twin birth rate in the town.

What are some local theories about the high twin birth rate in Cândido Godói?

Locals have various theories, including messages from God, aliens, special minerals in the water, and the influence of a mysterious doctor named Rudolph Weiss, who is speculated to be Josef Mengele.

What is the significance of the town’s welcome sign?

The welcome sign of Cândido Godói displays the town’s official crest bearing two identical profiles, accompanied by the words ‘Garden City and Land of Twins,’ highlighting the town’s unique twin population.

What is the historical context of the German immigrants in Cândido Godói?

The German immigrants who settled in Cândido Godói after World War I were attracted by cheap farming land and financial incentives from the Brazilian government. Many still speak German and have German names.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Dark Secret of Brazil’s Identical Twin Town
• Hero image source by Felipe Bandeira Netto / openverse, by-sa.