Inside Brazil’s hunt for the truth behind a town’s alleged Nazi tunnels

Image: The Washington Post

In the quiet southern Brazilian town of Ibirubá, whispers about secret tunnels have persisted for generations. But it took a determined local journalist, Clóvis Messerschmidt, to convert those whispers into a full-blown civic obsession. Armed with notebooks, anonymous tips and an almost missionary zeal, he plunged into a story that would redraw the town’s identity, pit neighbour against neighbour and invite national scrutiny into a place that never asked for it, the Washington Post reported.

A late-night break-in and a tantalizing clue

In 2022, with demolition looming over a historic home long rumoured to sit atop a Nazi escape route, Messerschmidt made his boldest move. Past midnight, he and two allies slipped through the unlocked door and descended into a basement space locals had spoken of for decades. They expected a branching network of passages, a secret route built to hide fleeing Nazis after World War II. What they found instead was an abruptly sealed bunker — its walls newly reinforced with concrete, its original shape obscured. To the believers, it was confirmation. Someone, they insisted, had covered something up.

How an anniversary story spiralled into a years-long investigation

Messerschmidt, publisher of the tiny magazine Enfoque, hadn’t intended to become the town’s chief tunnel hunter. In 2015, while preparing a special edition on Ibirubá’s 60th anniversary, he stumbled onto elderly residents who insisted that one of the town’s most prominent figures — local doctor Frederico Ernesto Braun — had faked his own death. And beneath Braun’s stately home, they said, ran tunnels built to shelter Nazi fugitives and smuggled goods. One domestic worker described a “room of secrets.” Another man claimed he had personally dug the passages beginning in 1946. Messerschmidt believed them. Their accounts began to consume him.

Allegations of Nazi sympathizers — and an old scandal reopened

Digging through archives, the journalist discovered police reports alleging a Nazi cell in Ibirubá during the 1940s, its members stockpiling propaganda and weaponry. He uncovered long-forgotten claims that Braun had once been investigated for laundering millions of dollars. There were even rumours — long dismissed by historians — that high-ranking Nazis, including Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann, once passed through the region. Soon, Messerschmidt’s magazine was chronicling a dramatic tale of tunnels, fugitives and a town entangled in clandestine history.

The town turns on itself

As his reporting intensified, so did division. Some residents accused him of inventing conspiracies. Others demanded the historic homes be opened. A few activists even broke into Braun’s grave, extracting a tibia bone they believed would prove the doctor wasn’t buried there. Forensic tests later revealed the bone belonged to a man of African descent — a twist that only fuelled the believers’ conviction that Braun had staged his own death.

The sceptics push back

René Gertz, Brazil’s leading historian on Nazism in the region, dismissed the tunnel claims as logistically impossible and historically unsound. Brazil’s soil, he argued, would never support

such structures, and no credible account linked fugitive Nazis to Ibirubá. Similar myths had circulated elsewhere in southern Brazil, all debunked. To him, the town was caught in “collective delirium.”

An excavation — and disappointment

Under pressure from residents, the local government brought in researchers using ground-penetrating radar. When scans showed anomalies, the mayor authorized a dig in 2019. Hundreds gathered, expecting revelations. Instead, excavators unearthed an abandoned concrete pipe — likely part of an old plumbing system. Sceptics declared the matter settled. Believers insisted it proved a cover-up. The hole was filled, and the city moved on. Messerschmidt did not.

A quest that consumes everything

The journalist pressed on, filing new stories, interviewing aging residents, contacting researchers and planning fresh digs that, locals later insisted, were never actually approved. His wife hoped he would stop. He could not. “He wants to prove his sources aren’t lying,” she said. Meanwhile, subscriptions fell, advertisers distanced themselves, and Messerschmidt became both admired and mocked — a hero to some, a conspiracist to others.

The tunnels remain unproven — but the belief endures

Years after the investigation began, no tunnels have been officially found. No documents link Braun or others to Nazi fugitives. Yet belief in the underground network — and in the darker past it symbolizes — runs deeper than ever. Messerschmidt still insists the truth is close. “This is a search for truth,” he says. But in Ibirubá, the truth itself has become elusive, a story shaped as much by memory and myth as by evidence buried in the ground.