The Forgotten Boys of Brazil

The Forgotten Boys of Brazil follows the research of historian Sidney Aguilar, beginning with the discovery of bricks marked with Nazi swastikas on a farm in the countryside of São Paulo. The documentary reveals something really frightening: during the 1930s, fifty black boys were taken from an orphanage in Rio de Janeiro and led to the farm where the bricks had been found. There, the boys were identified by numbers and subjected to slave labor by a family that was part of the political, military, and economic elite of the country. This family did not hide their affinity for the Nazi ideology.

At the time, Brazil had the largest German population-with 100,000 German-born people and a community of 1 million people of German descent. 2,822 were members of the Nazi Party. Such context helped Brazil become a safe haven for Nazi war criminals after WWII when 20,000 Germans settled there. The most notorious fugitive to settle in Brazil was Dr. Josef Mengele.

Two survivors from this Brazilian tragedy, Aloísio Silva (the “boy 23”) and Argemiro Santos, as well as the family of José Alves de Almeida (known as ‘Two’), reveal their stories for the first time.