A small town in southern Brazil has an unusually high proportion of twins living in it - a phenomenon that could be explained by sinister events during World War II.
Candido Godoi lies near the border with Argentina and has a population of around 6,000.
The town is famous for having a 10% twin birth rate, which is just over five times more than the average rate for the state of Rio Grande do Sul it is located in.
One reason given for this mysterious occurrence has its roots in the horrific experiments of Dr Josef Mengele.
The sadistic Nazi, known as the 'Angel of Death', carried out many tests on prisoners in Auschwitz in an attempt to prove the supposed genetic superiority of the Aryan race.
He had a particular interest in performing his experiments on identical twins, including amputations and infecting one twin with diseases.
But with the fall of the Hitler's Third Reich imminent in 1945, Mengele is thought to have fled to South America.
Argentine Historian Jorge Camarasa believes at one point he ended up in Candido Godoi, a Brazilian farming community mostly made up of German and Polish ancestors.
Camarasa claims he continued his sick experiments after arriving there during the 1960s posing as a vet and using the alias Rudolph Weiss.
It thought he then started offering medical assistance to its German female residents.
He asked for blood samples and allegedly offered revolutionary 'twin-inducing' drugs to the women, reports The Daily Mail.
Camarasa described Candido Godoi in his 2008 book The Angel of Death In South America as "Mengele's laboratory " with twin birth rates in the town suddenly increasing after his appearance.
He added: "He attended women, followed their pregnancies, treated them with drugs and talked of artificial insemination."
However, Camarasa's speculations have since been rejected by Brazilian geneticists.
Although no definite explanation could be offered, the team of scientists said that a high amount of interbreeding among the community may have led to an excessive number of twin births.
Mengele died in Brazil in 1979 aged 67 and was never tried for the thousands of deaths he was responsible for during the war.
