Bricks marked with swastikas on a crumbling building in Brazil have helped historians trace an astonishing plan by Adolf Hitler for a Nazi empire in South America.
They have also found some of the young men who were kept as slaves by German settlers and local Nazi supporters.
They were known as ‘ Nummernmenschen’ – the number people – as the dehumanisation practised in the concentration camps was exported.
It had long been known that fleeing Nazis moved into remote regions of South America after the war. But the story of the slaves began years earlier.
From 1933 onwards men and boys, often from orphanages, were taken to vast farms like the hacienda Cruzeiro Do Sul 150 miles west of Sao Paulo.
Aloísio Silva, ‘Number 23’, with two of the bricks carved with Nazi insignias
It was there that pig farmer Jose Maciel found the swastika bricks after buying the land. In one of the buildings, preserved in a metal cyclinder, were documents and photos showing cattle branded with swastikas and a Nazi flag flying.
Now the last three surviving slaves have been back to see the bricks they made by hand – and point out the shallow graves where many of their friends were buried after dying through neglect and maltreatment.
Explorers: Nazi researchers on expeditions of the Brazilian jungles in 1935
AloÌsio Silva, 85, was number 23. ‘Cattle and horses had more of a family tree than I,’ he said. ‘I was a slave and a boy without a name.’
Mr Silva was nine when he was taken from an orphanage by rich landowner Oct·vio Rocha Miranda, a fanatical supporter of Hitler.
‘The great landowners saw ideal workers in us parentless boys,’ he said. ‘We were lied to, told that we would ride around on horses, that the work wasn’t hard.
‘But we were put to backbreaking toil and paid with coins that could be spent only on the farm. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I got my first shoes.
Final resting place: Brazilian natives at a Nazi grave decorated with swastikas
Discovered: Crosses mark the graves deep in the jungle
‘I was tortured, made to kneel on hard grains of corn for hours on end, beaten. Two large dogs guarded our barracks.’
The slave boys were employed until the mid-1940s when the authorities clamped down.
Some 2,000 German settlers moved to Brazil after SS officers posed as naturalists to scout it out, calling the area ‘ripe for exploitation.’

Everything from bricks to animals were carved with the Nazi sign, on the orders of Nazi supporter Octávio Rocha Miranda
There were similar-migrations to Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay.
Now the surviving Brazilian slaves are seeking reparations from the government which allowed their ordeal.
Mr Silva said: ‘I want compensation, I want an apology. But above all, I want to find out who my mother was and put some flowers on her grave.’
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Aguante argentina papà!!! GsZpRo de taringa!
It is clear that nazis had a plan for South America, they appeared in the Southern Cone at the beggining of the 30s. It has been well documented that Condor plan was a spy network in the coasts of Brazil and Argentine. And what better proof are the cloned murderers in the dictatorships of the 70s and 80s? One has to look at who are the elites in South America.
I am pretty sure the swastika was in South America THOUSANDS of years before Hitler’s birth.
do you actually know that the nazi sign is in a diamond form? and not square? and the actual square form is a good fortune sign? so all your picture just failed
except the one with the flag here its clear that the sign is the nazi one, but on the bricks its the square one, so its a good fortune, same for the cross.
It’s only ONE thing is true about this story: that the Nazis from Germany – many high-ranking officials from the Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht and the Government – moved to South America with 6 secretly loaded submarines in the summer of 1944 and settled down in the triangle of Bolivia, Chile, Ecquador to continue the liberization of our suffering Earth from jewish domination.
The ‘slaves’ and other fairy tales remind us the ‘holohoax’ stories. Some jewish dwarves from some ‘american’ jewsmedia created the lies.
NAZISM is alive and well. Thanks God for National Socialism!
Hey Charlie, go back to the jungle where you came from, with your moronic comments. It is a shame that the US missed frying your as s with some napalm