IBIRUBÁ, Brazil — Looking up at the darkened edifice, the gumshoe thought he was on the cusp of his big break. For years, this house off the town square had fascinated and tormented him. He’d interviewed dozens of residents, pored over old newspaper clippings and spent every spare cent in pursuit of what he believed was a secret, shameful history buried beneath it.
But Clóvis Messerschmidt, had never been inside the house. Not until that night in 2022, the night before it was to be demolished. It was his final chance to bring back definitive proof of a story he had staked his journalistic credibility on — that several prominent inhabitants of this ethnically German town in southern Brazil had been Nazi sympathizers, and that they’d hidden fugitives fleeing from Nazi hunters and the collapse of the Third Reich in a clandestine tunnel system.
Messerschmidt, 45, the publisher, editor and lead reporter of Enfoque, a local magazine with a circulation of 1,000, waited until well past midnight. Then he and two fellow sleuths made their move, the three men recalled in interviews — hopping the wall, climbing the porch and reaching for the front door. It had been left unlocked.
“I was super nervous,” recalled Fábio Loreno Bueno, who shared his friend’s obsession. “A lot of people didn’t want us to discover what was there.”
Messerschmidt led the way, taking a brazen step deeper into a saga that has consumed his life and divided his hometown. Since 2015, when he published his first piece on the alleged Nazi tunnels running beneath the town, Ibirubá has turned itself inside out in search of them. There have been town council motions, official excavations, university research expeditions and national media stories, as well as alleged death threats, conspiracies and cover-ups. Enthusiasts even vandalized the grave of the leading figure in the purported tunnel plot to determine if he’d faked his own death. (And he may have.)
It is a surprisingly common drama in this part of Brazil, where the blank pages of history on South America’s Nazi diaspora have been filled with urban legend. German officials have estimated that about 9,000 Nazis fled to the continent following World War II. About 5,000 went to Argentina; somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 headed to Brazil. Their number famously included Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s “angel of death,” who died in the Brazilian coastal town of Bertioga in 1979.
But from there, historians say, the story of Brazil’s fugitive Nazis and the people who protected them is clouded by uncertainty, false information and ever-multiplying conspiracy theories.
“It’s a collective delirium,” said Ibirubá radio broadcaster Carlos César. “People want to believe.”
Few have believed more fervently than Messerschmidt, a gregarious man with ravenlike features. He’s dedicated years to research and has interviewed more than 100 people who say they either know of, or have entered, the supposed tunnels. But the owners of the historic homes that allegedly lead to them have uniformly declined to participate in his inquiry — because they have something to hide, the truthers contend, or, as many others in the town believe, because they don’t want to involve themselves in Messerschmidt’s elaborate suppositions.
So on that night three years ago, he made his move. The three men scoured the historic Braun family home — which had been sold and vacated — in search of a trapdoor that Messerschmidt’s sources had spoken of.
“At one point, a night guard shined his light inside the house, and we had to get down low,” Loreno Bueno recalled.
After several long, tense minutes, the men said they found what they’d come for. They pulled up the trapdoor and descended the wooden steps, until they found themselves in an underground bunker. This room would branch into separate corridors, they had been told, with each feeding into the larger tunnel system. But, to their profound frustration, Messerschmidt and his companions hit a dead end.
Someone — who? — had lined the bunker with concrete walls, staggered in height, the men said. They appeared to be recently built and, to the enthusiasts, inexplicable.
“No one put them there because they were beautiful,” Loreno Bueno reasoned. “Someone wanted to conceal something.”
The Braun home was soon destroyed, and a high-rise put in its place, erasing the access point to the alleged tunnels. It was “a huge blow to our research,” Messerschmidt mourned.
But if anything, the failure of that night further galvanized him. There were Nazi tunnels down there — Messerschmidt was sure of it.
“This,” he said, “is a search for truth.”
The makings of a mystery
Like most natives of Ibirubá — a prosperous town whose German roots reach back to the late 1800s — Messerschmidt had grown up hearing the stories of underground tunnels. But he had never paid them much attention until 2015, when he started working on a special edition of Enfoque, which he runs out of his house, to celebrate the town’s official 60th anniversary.
One story he wrote delved into the enduring suspicions that one of the town’s central historical figures, Frederico Ernesto Braun, had faked his own death. The doctor’s body had perspired during the funeral in 1964, rumor had it. Other locals had reported hearing noises from inside the coffin.
Members of the Braun family either declined to comment for this article or didn’t respond to questions from The Washington Post.
During his reporting, Messerschmidt realized the elderly people he interviewed were sincere in their convictions — not just that Braun had faked his death, but that there were tunnels underneath his home.
One former domestic employee, Iricema Ana Heiss Grohe, then 75, recalled a “room of secrets” that could be reached through a trapdoor inside the home. Another elderly resident, José Godóy de Souza, who died in June 2021, said he’d built the tunnels himself, beginning in 1946, and that the job “was done in secret.”
Messerschmidt was convinced: “These were serious, honest people,” he said. “They stood to gain nothing from lying.”
In April 2015, he began publishing one story after another. The pieces landed with greater impact than anything Enfoque — until then, mostly preoccupied with town pageants and store openings — had ever published.
Other residents quickly came forward, including former domestic employee Francisca Schöfer, who has since died. She claimed the doctor and other prominent Ibirubá residents had been Nazi sympathizers. She had personally entered the tunnels, she told Messerschmidt, which were built to hide “contraband goods and Nazi fugitives.”
The community was scandalized. Neighbor turned on neighbor. Some thought it was all a lie.
“There’s nothing down there,” Heitor Fredrich, a descendant of one of the figures who allegedly aided in the tunnels’ construction, told The Post in an August interview.
Others saw it as confirmation of the stories they’d heard as children: “There must be something really big hidden there,” resident Maickel Katz wrote on Facebook. Locals called on the owners of the historic homes to open up their doors, but to no avail.
So Messerschmidt pressed on with what he came to call “my mission.”
He scrutinized decades-old newspaper stories and discovered that Ibirubá had, in fact, hosted a cell of Nazi sympathizers. It included some of the community’s most prominent citizens, state police had alleged. According to a 1944 article in Vida Policial, a defunct magazine published by the Rio Grande do Sul state authorities, authorities found that townsfolk had stockpiled pictures of Adolf Hitler, Nazi propaganda and guns.
“They sickly and ardently rooted for the Nazi cause,” the article reported.
Decades later, the community was again roiled by intrigue and speculation, Messerschmidt learned. Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter, reportedly claimed in 1971 that Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann had escaped Germany and been spotted in Ibirubá, where he had undergone plastic surgery to make himself unrecognizable.
Archivist Sandra B. Weiss at the Simon Wiesenthal Archive, which stores 1,800 pages of information on Bormann, told The Post that Wiesenthal had received a tip in 1968 from an actress who had stopped in Ibirubá and asserted that Bormann often stayed in the area.
For Messerschmidt, however, the most startling discoveries were about Braun. In the early 1960s, the physician had been publicly accused by his American wife of leading an international money-laundering syndicate that allegedly brought more than $40 million from the United States into Brazil. The allegations, which Braun denied, caused a frenzy in the Brazilian press. The Última Hora newspaper reported that Interpol was investigating Braun’s “international gang,” which “involved dozens of people.” Another outlet said the findings had been passed along to the FBI.
Interpol spokesperson Rachael Billington said the agency does not launch unilateral investigations and could not confirm the reports. An FBI spokesperson told The Post it had no readily available information to provide.
A theory began to take shape in Messerschmidt’s head: Braun, under investigation by the FBI, had constructed tunnels under the town to hide Nazi fugitives and conceal his other nefarious doings.
Messerschmidt’s subsequent stories in Enfoque led to additional clues. One enthusiast gave him a picture he claimed to have discovered while rummaging through the Braun family’s trash years before. It showed Braun’s father — the cousin of Hitler’s companion Eva Braun, according to one of Messerschmidt’s sources — fraternizing with a man in what Messerschmidt concluded was a Nazi uniform.
In 2016, an unidentified truther and his son descended upon Braun’s sepulchre in the town cemetery. They lifted up the stone covering, extracted a tibia bone and sent a letter to César, the local journalist, explaining where he could find the doctor’s purported tibia.
“I decided to help the press with the history of Ibirubá,” the letter said. “I want the truth.”
The tibia bone was sent by police for forensic analysis. Weeks later came the results, which The Post reviewed: The bone had belonged to a man of African — not European — descent.
“Dr. Braun,” Messerschmidt trumpeted in an interview with The Post, “faked his own death.”
Now began the hunt for the Nazi tunnels.
The skeptics
More than 180 miles away, in the state capital of Porto Alegre, René Gertz, one of the country’s leading historians on Nazism in southern Brazil, was watching the drama in Ibirubá with mounting consternation.
He knew that historians had long since put to rest any doubts over Bormann’s death, which, according to DNA analysis, had occurred on May 2, 1945, in Berlin. He knew that Eva Braun didn’t have any confirmed close relatives in South America. And the photo that allegedly showed Dr. Braun’s father with a Nazi? To Gertz, it was just an anonymous man in black military garb.
As for the tunnels, “this struck me as extremely fantastic,” Gertz said.
It wasn’t just historically improbable. It seemed physically impossible. Ibirubá’s soil is dense, fertile and largely free of rocks and pebbles. That makes it perfect for growing soy. But quite poor, Gertz said, for tunnel construction.
And in 60 years, he mused, “not a single one of these tunnels has collapsed?”
To Gertz, it was just one more southern Brazilian town in the grip of Nazi conspiracy theories. The residents of Cândido Godói, for instance, believed its abnormally high rate of twins was due to experiments by Mengele, who had purportedly passed through. Nearly 400 miles north, in Marechal Cândido Rondon, locals contended that one of Hitler’s allies had constructed tunnels beneath his mansion.
Academic inquiry had debunked it all.
Gertz soon became one of Messerschmidt’s most public critics. In blog posts, he called the supposed Nazi tunnels both “questionable” and “problematic.” Although, he wrote dryly, he wouldn’t “deny someone their right to conquer a few minutes of fame by spreading theories about exotic things.”
Messerschmidt bristled at the criticism: “The guy never set foot on, much less dug an inch into, Ibirubá land, but he wants to trivialize the work of the press and the testimonies of more than 100 eyewitnesses.”
There was only one way to silence the doubters, the journalist believed. He first persuaded a team of researchers from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul to perform a ground-penetrating radar analysis of the area where sources told him the tunnels were hidden. Then, after they’d discovered several anomalies that were possible “indications of tunnels,” according to a subsequent report, he called on the town to help solve the mystery.
His zeal and persistence soon turned Messerschmidt, who had always seen himself as convivial and friendly, into a polarizing figure. Subscribers canceled their magazine subscriptions. He lost business partnerships. Some openly ridiculed him.
“He ended up being imprisoned by his own story,” said journalist Fábio Schaffner, who covered the saga for the Porto Alegre newspaper Zero Hora.
One morning in May 2019, Messerschmidt claimed, he descended the stairs to Enfoque’s newsroom to find an envelope under his door.
“Don’t go past the limits — fear for those you love and don’t expose yourself; they know where you live and are watching your and your family’s steps,” said the note, which Messerschmidt forwarded to the police and national media. “When the tunnels are opened, much will be found.”
That October, the people of Ibirubá gathered just off the town square to see the truth for themselves. “Let’s finish this story,” intoned then-Mayor Abel Grave.
Municipal excavators dug into the ground where the researchers had identified the anomalies. People peered into the large hole. A firefighter was lowered into the darkness. At the bottom, he found something. But it wasn’t the brick tunnel that Messerschmidt had envisioned. It was a large, hollow concrete tube — an unused plumbing line.
The discovery, as it were, only inflamed local tensions. Skeptics said it confirmed that all the drama was over nothing. Enthusiasts said it was proof that Ibirubá harbored secrets. The town didn’t have any record of the plumbing line. Someone unknown had put it there, they said, for some unknown reason.
But who?
The town decided to investigate no further. The hole was closed. Traffic resumed in downtown Ibirubá.
The true believer
After everything — the failed excavation, the unsuccessful incursion into the Braun house, the menacing letter — Messerschmidt’s wife, Glaciane, believed her husband would finally give up. For years, every time she had brought it up, he would reply that he had just one more person to speak to, one more fact to hunt down. To her, there didn’t seem to be anything left to investigate.
But he couldn’t let go. So she stopped asking about it.
“‘Obsessed’ is the word people use to describe him,” she said. “He wants to prove to the people that his sources aren’t lying, and that’s why he says he has to continue.”
Messerschmidt kept publishing follow-ups and scrounged for additional sources. One was Leonilda Brunheri, 72, who said she’d been befriended by the Braun family as a girl and had frequently entered the tunnels. Inside, she said, was abundant Nazi paraphernalia.
In an interview with The Post in September, she recalled an iron door engraved with a swastika. “There were so many Nazi things,” she said.
For months, in conversations with The Post, and in talks with his sources around town, Messerschmidt had promised he would soon, at long last, expose the network that his sources had described. He said he was partnering with additional researchers from Pampa Federal University. He said the local government was on board.
Maybe the dig would happen in July of this year. Or September, or October.
But when The Post contacted the university researchers and town officials, they all reacted with surprise. Not only was there no imminent dig, they said, there was no dig planned at all.
“It’s not what you’ve been told,” Ibirubá town official Viviane Kanitz said. The community wants clarity, she acknowledged, “but we work with concrete facts.”
When pressed on this and other discrepancies, Messerschmidt didn’t back down. He said he was missing just one last legal authorization to proceed.
It was all true, he insisted: Ibirubá was a Nazi hub, it had attracted some of the Third Reich’s most notorious criminals, and they had hidden in tunnels he would soon uncover. It was the tale he told again in his recent documentary, posted to YouTube in July, which has garnered more than 133,000 views.
“What began as a story to celebrate the town’s 60th anniversary,” Messerschmidt wrote in the opening, “has transformed into a tireless search for answers.”
“Clóvis,” he continued, referring to himself in the third person, “has been able to demystify the myth.”
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