The Brazilian ranch where Nazis kept slaves
This is an utterly disturbing bit of history, that I didn’t know about. A lot of this isn’t that surprising through, when you consider who the perpetrators were.
On a farm deep in the countryside 100 miles (160km) west from Sao Paulo, a football team has lined up for a commemorative photograph. What makes the image extraordinary is the symbol on the team’s flag - a swastika.
The picture probably dates from some time in the 1930s, after the Nazi Party’s rise to power in Germany - but this was on the other side of the world.
“Nothing explained the presence of a swastika here,” says Jose Ricardo Rosa Maciel, former rancher at the remote Cruzeiro do Sul farm near Campina do Monte Alegre, who stumbled across the photograph one day.
But this was actually his second puzzling discovery. The first occurred in the pigsty.
“One day the pigs broke a wall and escaped into the field,” he says. “I noticed the bricks that had fallen. I thought I was hallucinating.”