With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Hitler fanatics forced orphans to build new Fatherland in Amazon

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.

Read entire article at Daily Mail (UK)