Paul F. Tompkins and Robert detail Colonia Dignidad, a Chilean cult led by Nazi pedophile Paul Schaefer who murdered Santa Claus out of jealousy. Operating as a state-within-a-state with Pinochet's support, the compound utilized forced confessions called "silasorge," electrocuted victims, and served as a torture camp for the DINA secret police. Despite international allegations involving Joseph Mengele and financial irregularities funneling donations from Germany, Schaefer evaded justice until 2005 when he was extradited to Chile, convicted of child molestation, and sentenced to life imprisonment before dying in 2010. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Eating While Broke Intro00:02:37
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Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
And we know there is a lot of news coming at you these days from the war with Iran to the ongoing Epstein fallout, government shutdowns, high-profile trials, and what the hell is that Blake Lively thing about anyway?
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On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
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So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip, just a little bit bigger hips.
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Well, then you got them.
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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards in our spooky week, the Halloween podcast edition.
This week, in addition to talking about a very spooky episode, we are based in Paul F. Tompkins pill.
Behind The Bastards Spooky Week00:15:44
Paul.
Thanks for taking my pill.
You do offer a lot of pills.
It sucks because there's like, there's two hands.
There's, there's two pills.
And then I come in with my pill and I'm like, can I stick my hand in there?
And hopefully somebody will pick it.
Oh.
I enjoy it.
Paul, I know.
How are you doing?
Well, you know, after our part one, I really had to take an industrial shower and just really think about were humans a mistake?
And so I've gotten, I've just done a lot of thinking, a lot of soul searching, and I think I've come around to feel that people are, you know, basically good.
And I'm ready with that attitude to go into part two.
Wow.
That is brave.
Brave.
Yeah.
Heroic even.
Oh boy.
You know it's a mistake, do you?
Well, he killed Santa.
He did murder Santa Claus.
He got it out of my mind.
He did.
He did kill the living embodiment of childhood wonderment.
Killed Santa because he was jealous that the kids he was molesting would like Santa, were they liked an idea of a person and he couldn't take it.
That is like I think if you were to explain that somehow to Hitler like Pre losing his mind Hitler, Hitler would be like well, that's a bit much.
Yeah, like that's, that's a bit far.
Oh, it can go there.
I didn't even think about that.
Oh boy, maybe i'll.
Maybe i'll try painting again.
Yeah, back to painting.
So by the time Pinochet had solidified his grip on power in the mid 1970s Colonia Dignidad, was almost a state within a state.
They had built a power plant, a television station and two airstrips to transport the timber wheat, corn and bratwurst the community produced, since fucking was more or less verboten.
The workforce Paul Schaefer needed to accomplish all this was built up through a novel method, abducting children who went to his hospital.
So, like he's like okay kids, kids have to come here.
Yeah, they have to.
They need to go to the hospital.
They're kids.
I mean, i'm kind of the king.
So I guess uh, I can make these kids uh do whatever I want.
I can make them disappear.
Um, let's try it and see how it goes.
Let's try it and see how it goes.
I need someone to build my airstrip.
He seemed very willing to say, you know what this is nuts.
But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
But if it doesn't, that is, you've hit upon Paul, one of the common through lines that all of our most dangerous bastards have.
You can draw this to guys like Donald Trump, guys like Hitler.
A big part of their whole mo is just like, I wonder if I can get away with this.
Yeah, i'm gonna give it a shot.
Yeah, i'm gonna give it a shot.
You know uh, if I, I probably can't yeah, probably can't.
And if I, if I can't, then i'll say like hey, I tried it yeah, but if I do, if I do get away with this, I mean oh amazing, the thing is it's living your life that way is incredible advice for like a career like it is like if you, if you're a creative or something like oh, you think you might want to write a novel, give it a shot, do it.
You know um, you think you want to do stand-up, go out there and do some stand-up.
You know um, you know you think you're good enough to be in professional sports.
Well try, you know, see if you can like, um and like in personal lives like oh okay well, you think you're into that person, go up and ask him out.
You know um like, it's not bad life advice, it's just these kind of people take it to the extent of like I bet I could build my own power plant and have a totally self-sufficient torture commune in the middle of Chile that I I keep manned by abducting children at the hospital that I operate.
There's no tryouts for cults, you know what I mean?
You can't go audition to be a cult leader, that's a thing.
There's no internship program exactly, and I feel like.
I feel like once you get the cult formed, then the sky's the limit really yeah yeah, once you get it going, it builds inertia.
You know these people.
If these people are gonna listen to me this far there, let's see what this baby can do.
Yeah let's let's, let's get this thing on the highway.
You know absolutely.
So the colonial hospital was absolutely essential to thousands of people in the working area.
And since it received government funding, the state had no interest in providing people with a second option.
As a result, when young boys were admitted for health problems and caught Schaefer's eye, they were simply taken from their families.
If said families, who were very generally impoverished villagers complained, Schaefer would be like, well, you got other kids, right?
Do you want them to have medical care?
And again, one of the things that's fucked, like, this is fucked up for a thousand reasons.
This is an euriboros of fucked up in this.
I learned about this particular aspect of the cult from a harrowing interview in that Netflix documentary series about the colonia.
And the boy relating this story says, I would have died from the health issue that brought me to the hospital.
They saved my life and then abducted me so I could be molested for years.
Like, damn.
It's fucking something else, Paul.
Wow.
It reminds me of something I once heard someone say in an interview.
You know, I don't remember how they got to this in the conversation, but this person was saying, Yeah, it would have been, I think it would have been okay if I'd never been born, like considering how my life has gone and the pain that's been in it.
Like if I'd never been born at all, that might have been better.
And I, I, that never left my mind.
Like to feel that way is extremely profound.
And to save a child's life for that, like, how does that not?
I don't know how those things happening to you, like, it's bad enough to just be molested, but to have been brought from the brink of death in order to be molested.
Yeah.
The, the, the psycho, the, the, the psychological damage that that does, I don't know how you're not thinking of that every moment of the day for the rest of your life.
Yeah, like just getting up in the morning with that in your background requires a tremendous amount of just like because we all know everybody says like the universe is unfair, but usually you're saying that from like your home with air conditioning and heating and like with fully fed and stuff.
Like that's somebody who knows intimately, yeah, it's real unfair.
Like it is a fucked up roll of some bad dice.
So good for that person for being, I mean, whatever else happened in their life, they were like they had processed it enough to sit down to net with Netflix and like explain what happened to them.
So I got nothing but respect for anybody who survives that.
Absolutely.
Incomprehensible.
Good lord.
So any locals who might feel inclined to complain about the situation at this point are not just running up against the fact that this is their only hospital in the area and whatnot.
These people have money.
But the fact that Paul Schaefer now has the direct support of the unquestioned dictator of the entire country.
He doesn't just have people on the right wing who like him now.
The guy running the country as his personal like possession, Augusto Pinochet, is his homeboy.
For his part, the general allowed the colonial to import and export without paying taxes.
Some of these benefits Schaefer extended to local farmers.
So Pinochet is like, hey, you don't got to worry about taxes.
Import, export, whatever you want.
You got your own airstrips.
You don't have to worry about customs duties.
And one of the ways Schaefer builds local support is he goes to these farmers in the area, kind of like the big local, like the Chileans in the area who have influence.
And he's like, hey, you want to be able to sell your shit without customs duties?
I'll let you use my airport for free.
But if anything happens, you got my back, you know?
Not saying anything's going to happen.
And I'm not going to say what types of things are going to happen.
But if anything happens, I mean, this really, this really does like, you know, it really plays on how grateful are these people to have free free health care.
Where it's like, you may hear that I'm a child molester.
Like, yeah, you may hear that I have been operating a child molestation engine at an unfathomable scale.
But think of your savings.
But yeah, you're not, remember when your daughter broke her leg?
That shit was free.
Yeah, it's wild.
And these, these local farmers who he's he gets, you know, in bed with kind of not literally.
Some of these, like, these guys will defend him when like foreign journalists will come in to try to investigate what the fuck's going on here.
And they've got his back.
Like, it's a very hostile place to be looking into the colonia.
So Schaefer becomes the total, like almost God to his followers.
They called him our eternal uncle, which we can make a not creepy uncle joke here, but we shan't.
I mean, is this where they started?
Yeah.
Our eternal uncle.
I might have some notes.
They also called him the supreme leader, which is a little more traditional.
Daily prayer meetings served as a way for Schaefer to institute strict groupthink and destroy any bonds besides the bond between him and his flock.
He repeatedly forced his followers to repeat a definition of the word family that he said he'd found in the Bible.
He would ask, who are my mother and father?
And his congregation would respond, those that do the work of God.
Okay, so at this point, there is still some sort of Christianity aspect to this.
Yeah, there always is.
There always is.
So they're having services and, you know, doing that sort of thing, but really it's all about him.
It's all about him.
It's Christianity as filtered through this pedophile.
Yeah, he's the instrument of God for them, but essentially he is their God.
Yeah, it's like somebody distilled the Catholic Church into a hard liquor.
So the process of having his followers confess their sins was formalized in a practice he called silasorge.
I'm not, I don't speak German, which apparently means care of the soul.
Confessions were supposed to happen as close to the moment of the sin as possible, but Schaefer would also require his followers to meet with him and each other in small groups repeatedly throughout the day in order to give confession.
Public confessions in mass were held at lunch and dinner.
Members of the community would be expected to write the names of sinners, themselves and people they'd seen sin, on a blackboard near the entrance to the cafeteria.
When everyone sat down, Schaefer would read the names listed on the board while everyone ate.
Every sinner was required to stand up and confess their sins.
You were not allowed to deny sinning.
So if somebody else just writes your name and you don't know what the fuck they're talking about, you have to come up with something.
You have to like, you have to.
Yeah, that reminds me of confession when I was a kid.
And like, what had I done?
You know what I mean?
And so, you know, going in, but you had to go every week.
And so sometimes you just make stuff up, like mild things like I took the Lord's name in vain or I disrespected my father or whatever, because you can't just, it just seemed without being told, you knew I can't just go in there and say, I'm great, you know, that I kept it 100 this week.
You had to, you had to come up with something.
Yeah, you can't walk into confession and be like, you know what?
I'm nailing it right now, bro.
Doing great.
No notes.
It's just so, it's also so weird because it is like, I mean, as a kid, I remember being terrified of like minor sins that I was going to go to hell for.
Of course.
Like some stupid bullshit.
But as an adult, it's like, if there's God, he's got other shit going on.
Like, there's a lot happening right now.
Like, it's like walking in on a guy as he's like watching a genocide occur and being like, you know what, man?
I was lusting a little bit earlier today.
Yeah.
Let me make a note of that.
Oh, sorry.
One second.
They're shooting the children again.
I'm in seventh grade and I saw a bra strap and I got excited.
Is that do you have time for that right now?
Yeah, you know what?
I was paying attention to some stuff in Bosnia, but let me just drop all that right now and focus on this.
And I'll tell you what, I'm going to do the same thing for both.
Yeah.
What an easy gig.
Rwandan genital and cheated on a math test.
Same, it requires the same thing from me.
Consider them taken care of.
Yeah.
I made a note of it.
Oh, it's very funny.
So, what's not funny is all of this.
So, yeah, everybody's got to like come up with something to confess.
And on Sundays, everybody's got to go next to Schaefer's house to confess yet again and pray for forgiveness.
They're spending all of their time that's not working confessing, basically.
Now, again, they're supposed to make a confession in the moment when they sin.
And Schaefer's not always going to be available for everybody.
There's hundreds of people on the compound.
He's a busy man, got a lot of crimes against humanity to commit.
So if a sin occurs outside of one of those regular meetings, followers were expected to confess to the nearest fellow resident who was expected to inform Schaefer of the sin immediately.
This led to a thriving economy in betrayal because people who came to Schaefer to inform him of the unreported sins of other residents were rewarded by having their own sins forgiven without punishment.
So if you tell Schaefer about something bad someone else did that they didn't tell him about, you get a free forgiveness.
You don't have to, because there's punishments, right?
You don't have to take the punishment.
God, I know.
It's pretty bad.
This is like one of those things where it really depends on nobody talking to each other about this stuff.
Well, if two people talk, that's the devil.
Yeah, exactly.
Punishments for sins ran the gamut from restrictions on food, extra hard labor, or simply being berated in front of the group to being electrocuted with cattle prods and forced to take tranquilizers.
Some laborers, including children, were force-fed tranquilizers and then made to work industrial jobs with heavy machinery, like operating wood saws at the mill, which is, I don't know if you know much about saws that are the size of cars, but you shouldn't be on pills when you operate them.
A lot of people say that.
And so people get injured and dismembered all the time.
Now, we talk about this a lot.
And I hope, I think my regular listeners probably don't labor under this misapprehension.
But a lot of people do have the idea that folks who wind up stuck in this situation have some sort of like they're dumb or they're weak.
Flaws That Allowed Domination00:08:53
There's something, some flaw in them that allowed them to become dominated in this way.
And first of all, I think that's kind of victim blamey.
But second, I think it misses, number one, these aren't dumb people.
They have their own power plant that they built and operate themselves.
They have their own airstrips and like manage air travel.
And like, yeah, like they know what they're, these are very intelligent, motivated people who are completely dominated by this guy.
And in order to explain how that can happen, I want to read a quote from Bruce Falconer in The American Scholar.
He does a really good job of laying this out.
In Santiago in early 2006, I spoke with Dr. Niels Beiderman, a Chilean psychiatrist who, in association with the German embassy, had been making monthly trips to Colonia Dignidad to study the psychology of its inhabitants.
This is after Schaefer is gone.
He offered observations from his work.
Everything was done to further the religion, he explained.
Like in any sect, the colonos, that's the members of the colony, the colony, had a spiritual leader in Paul Schaefer, to whom they formed a very strong attachment.
There was a complex network of emotional connections in the colonia.
It was not a concentration camp system in which prisoners tend to think of themselves as individuals.
It was a community, and the children suffered most of all.
The pilgrims may have come to Chile for their religion, but once they were there, they became prey to a brutal and relentless cult of personality.
The older colonos punished the younger ones under orders from Schaefer, Biederman continued.
They were also the ones who were supposed to educate them.
This involved keeping them away from their families, keeping them active all day, and principally keeping them obedient and disciplined.
They did whatever they needed to do, including psychopharmacology and electric shock.
Over time, physical coercion became less necessary as the social system became rooted in the psyche of the individual.
So a lot of this torture is front-loaded.
It's like an attack dose of a drug in order to like you don't have to after a certain point.
Everyone is so inundated by this system that there's not resistance.
There aren't kinks in it.
For most people, it works.
Like again, I mean, this is the thing is that I'm as guilty as anyone of victim blaming people in cults because I think your mind, of course, you go right away to what if it were me?
And well, that wouldn't happen to me and blah, blah, blah.
I wouldn't do this.
But it's like the way these work is because these people are these hideous geniuses who have figured this out.
Sometimes it's simpler than other times.
Sometimes it's like they just know that it's, if I just reinforce this thing over and over again, that'll wear people down.
It gets into their brains.
But sometimes a guy like this comes along where it's like the way he has foreseen and forestalled every opposition to the programming is terrifying.
Yeah.
And he's very good at it.
And that's the thing.
Like it's these people don't think of it when they're asked to do something when they're working these hours, when they're when they're being separated from like their kids, they're not thinking of it as a punishment.
Yeah.
They're not thinking of it as this is what Schaefer's doing to me.
They're thinking about this is what I am doing for the community.
Yeah.
And people will, by and large, do pretty much anything for their community if they have one.
If they don't, I don't know, see the United States of America.
So Schaefer came to consider sexual intercourse a tool of the devil, as we have already discussed.
The problem with this is that people fuck.
I don't know if you're aware of this, Paul.
They sure do.
I'm not ashamed to admit it.
I fuck myself.
Yeah.
Wow.
Wow.
Well, that's podcast history here.
TMZ's front page.
I want you to isolate that.
Use it as a drop.
Yeah.
So no matter what restrictions you try to put on it, people are not going to not fall in love.
Even if you completely separate men from women, they're going to find a way.
Like life finds a way, you know, as a mathematician once said.
Obviously, Paul Schaefer tried to stop this.
He punished men and women who were caught together viciously.
An entire family would be shunned if their daughter had like a kiss with a boy.
Like your whole family is in trouble if that kind of stuff happens.
But still, people found ways to do it.
And there was also a situation, there were also situations in which Paul had to allow it.
This increasingly becomes a thing the longer the colonia gets, he can't stop everybody from doing this because he needs a lot of these people.
There are men and women in the colonia who, though loyal to him, are too valuable to control totally.
There's doctors and nurses.
Everything rides on these people, these skilled professionals.
And they do have, like, if you are an MD.
You can leave and find something else to do, you know?
You don't have to do this shit.
You have a lot more leverage than other people.
And so in order to stop there from being kind of a power struggle with these folks, Schaefer would allow some of these people to marry if they asked.
Now, some of them, like the guy we talked about, Hop, who's like the head doctor, he gets pretty much to live a normal life broadly.
Like he's at the top of this cult too.
He's not molesting kids, I don't think, but he's kind of co-leading things.
He has a lot of autonomy.
Other people generally had less, but of these people who are kind of more privileged, they could go to Schaefer.
You couldn't say, I'm in love with this person and I want to marry them, but you could say, I think God wants me to marry, right?
And they would go to Schaefer, they would say this, and it would Schaefer's job then, if this was someone that he was decided to let marry, to pick the person that they were going to marry.
Now, maybe sometimes people, he picked people that they wanted to marry.
As a general rule, though, he used this as a situation to exert more control.
Bruce Falconer describes it as a kind of sexual roulette where you were just sort of hoping that he would pick someone you actually wanted to be with.
But the way Schaefer usually did it, again, unless someone was high important enough that he couldn't fuck with them, he would pick a woman that you couldn't possibly have a child with, right?
Like that was a big part of it because he doesn't want people having families.
He doesn't want people having kids.
So how would he determine that?
Well, it's easy if the woman's been through menopause.
Right.
So if some 20-year-old who's got like a valuable skill is like, I want to get married, he's like, here, marry this 65-year-old woman.
Like, that's your wife now, right?
Like, so it's this.
The strategy was effective.
Only 60 or so children were born during the entire span Schaefer ran, Colonia Dignidad, which was more than 30 years.
And again, hundreds of, like 300-something people here.
Between 1975 and 1989, no children were born there at all.
So this is an extremely successful control regime.
He has a lot of control here.
Wow.
I mean, like, what if he had thought about making a car that ran on water?
Yeah.
You know what?
You do have to think about like, what could this man have done?
Yeah.
How many diseases could have been eradicated?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The amount of human ingenuity, we would be doing Star Trek shit now if every one of these guys and there's we talk our business is talking about these guys.
Every one of these guys with this level of dedication had instead been like, yeah, fusion seems like a good idea.
Even just to be like the head of the department.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, not even like that as a scientist, just to organize it.
Yes.
And to motivate people.
Exactly.
Yeah.
If Donald Trump had dedicated every aspect of his charisma to feeding the poor, we would have a lot less starving poor people in the world because he's good at motivating certain subjective people.
I remember thinking that if he had, when COVID hit us and if he had said, you know, we're going to John Wayne this and we're going to do it better than anybody.
We're going to get this thing faster.
Like, but no, it's not real.
It's going to be over soon.
Yep.
No.
But no, chug your bleach.
Yeah.
You know who else wants you to drink bleach, Paul?
Oh, God.
No, who?
No.
The products and services that support that.
Are we not sponsored by Clorox anymore, Sophie?
We're not sponsored by Clorox anymore, Robert.
Well, you know, Paul, have I told you about my signature cocktail, Paul?
I said, You're drinking out of a very fancy goblet here, and I wonder if you're not interested.
Financial Literacy Month Kickoff00:05:09
I would love to hear about it.
Sure, it's called a 2021 high ball.
Now, here's what you do, Paul: you get a pint glass and you fill that 80% of the way up with pure sparkling 409, and then just a drop of bleach.
You want to keep a bottle of vermouth nearby, open it up, don't pour it in, just have it nearby, kind of like a good martini.
And then you chug that whole thing as fast as you can.
That's a 2020 high ball.
And let me tell you, at the end of a long day, it's just what you need.
If I don't have 409 is fantastic and an acceptable substitute, well, Paul, you don't know this, but that's actually very offensive to my culture.
I'm very sorry.
I do apologize.
Now, if you want a 2020, I don't know.
I don't know what drink names.
All right.
Well, you can tell one of us is a professional improviser.
Oh, man.
Let's go to Sebastian.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
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It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
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Building A Strong Legacy00:15:41
We're back.
And Paul, you mentioned a specific cleaning product that often comes, you know, the giant jugs that like those, kind of like the, the, like if you, if you, if you go to like a Mexican market, you get like the big cleaning supplies in the huge jugs that are like purple and stuff.
I think Fantastico is one.
When I was in Baja a few years ago, I was living with our friend David Bell, who writes for Cody Johnson's outfit and does his own podcasts.
Been a guest on the show.
I found something called Mezcalito, which is a horrible, it's like mezcal flavoring in sugar and liquor.
And it's this color of yellow that looks radioactive and it's sold in the same bottles they sell cleaning supplies in.
I bought him a jug of it and for like a month, it would just gradually decrease as he would drink it.
And I'm sure it took years off of his life.
I apologize to his mother for it.
But wow.
I miss it.
Paul, ready to get back into this?
Yeah, Robert, let's do it.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
Put this some bitch to bed.
Now, in the rare occasions where a woman did get pregnant at the Colonia, Schaefer would order her isolated from the community, kept in solitude until she gave birth.
The child was taken from her immediately and put with nurses who would care for and raise the child, while the woman went immediately back to work.
As you might expect, people born and forced to live in such circumstances did not always turn out to be the apex of mental health.
Turns out it's bad to separate children from people who love them and force them to live in barracks.
Who could have known?
It also turns out that it's unfortunately pretty easy to make people who've already been manipulated to accept the torture and repeated assault of their loved ones.
It's easy to make those people torture strangers for profit.
And that brings us back to Augusto Pinochet.
Germany and Chile actually had a long military history together prior to the Cold War.
In 1871, the Germans beat the French in a little scuffle called the Franco-Prussian War.
Prior to this, if you were a new country, and again, colonialism is like fading away in a lot of Latin America during the 1800s, right?
All these different countries are getting their independence and stuff, and they're all like figuring out, like thrust into the modern world independent, like, well, we need an army now.
Who's going to train them?
At the start of the 1800s, it's the French, right?
The French are historically, like this gets ignored a lot because of how World War II goes, but like for most of modern history, the French are like the army guys, like the best soldiers in the world.
A lot of people consider them.
That shit changes in 1871, and all of these Latin American nations that had lusted after getting like French people to train their armies start hiring Germans.
And that's where the kind of relationship with between Chile and Germany starts.
So a lot of German military advisors, Prussian officers, are the ones who formed the Chilean armed forces in the late 19th century.
And it actually, if you want to know, like, how did a fascist take power in Chile?
Well, all of the guys who built the Chilean military, which is responsible for the coup, were guys who later were Nazis.
And some of them were Nazis when they were doing it.
So like, yeah, it makes sense.
During the Second World War, a new lieutenant general who had been trained by German officers named Augusto Pinochet sympathized with the Nazis and expressed his enchantment with Erwin Rommel, easily the fifth or sixth most overrated general officer in that war.
Well, now you don't need to be snarky, Robert.
I bring the Rommel shade.
That's what I'm here for.
Anyway, we've already discussed the privileges Pinochet gave the colony, but those privileges did come with a responsibility.
As I introduced in the last episode, Colonia Dignidat's expertise in torture made them a perfect auxiliary to the DINA or DINA, Pinochet's secret police force.
We don't know how many people they tortured, but thousands, maybe?
Like a lot.
They tortured a shitload of people.
And one of the people they, and by the way, this is actually, again, some of these people are, a lot of these people are former Nazis.
A lot of people organize.
And we don't know what all of them did during the war.
But there's an ugly and a pretty global history of former Nazis specifically being the people who helped train secret police for dictators to torture.
And the U.S. supports a number of these guys.
In fact, Syria's infamous Sednaya prison, and it's incredibly, Syria has one of the most like horrific torture programs of any nation today.
It was all organized by a former member of the SS who like put together their torture program.
And the United States funded it from 2004 to like 2009 or 10 because we would take people we captured in Iraq and we would send them over to Syria because we didn't couldn't torture them the way that the Syrians could torture them.
Robert, wait, wait, wait.
You're talking about the United States of America?
Of America.
Yes, that's right.
That's right.
That's the country where I live.
I know.
It turns out, I mean, we were also funding Pinochet while he was using Nazis to torture people.
So we do this a lot.
Well, I hope we don't do it anymore.
No, this is this, I think it's safe to say that the 1970s was the last time the United States did anything questionable in Latin America for sure.
It has been nothing but smooth sailing.
Exactly.
Well, we got that out of our system.
Yeah.
Look, it's like, you know, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta, I don't know.
I don't know what else it's like.
One of the people tortured at the Colonia Dignidad was a guy named Louis Peebles.
He was, which is tragic story, but very funny name.
He survived, so we can laugh at the fact that his name is Louis Peebles.
Peebles, again, amazing, was the former commander of a left-wing militia.
You have to really be a frightening man if you're a militia leader named Peebles and people take you seriously.
Like that's an extra like boy named Sue level of like, yeah, don't laugh at the name.
It is funny that I never thought twice about the name Van Peebles, but Peebles by itself, it's absurd.
Yeah, and Louis Peebles.
Louis P.
So Peebles runs a left-wing militia.
It turns out running a left-wing militia pretty hard in a country that's been taken over by the fascists.
He lasts a while.
73 is when Pinochet is out of power.
Most of the resistance is stomped out in a week or so.
Peebles isn't captured by the government until 1975, February 1975.
So whoever he's, he's pretty canny son of a bitch, but, you know, nobody's that canny.
He was initially jailed at a military base, but then early one Sunday morning, soldiers bound him, blindfolded him, and drove him several hours away to Colonia Dignidad.
Next, from the American scholar, quote, he was taken to an underground cellar that smelled of linoleum and wood polish, stripped to his underwear and fastened down with leather straps to an iron bedframe.
His blindfold was replaced with a leather cap that came down over his eyes.
It had a chin strap that held his jaw firmly in place and ear flaps equipped with metal wires.
More wires were taped to his ankles, thighs, chest, throat, anus, and genitals, all hooked into a voltage machine.
The first session lasted six hours.
As Peebles was being shocked, they stabbed him with needles that caused his skin to itch.
Then they put out cigarettes on his body and applied a sticky substance to his eyes and mouth.
Sometimes, if he screamed, they shoved it down his throat.
I mean, I guess at least they polished the floor.
Yeah, they did polish the floor.
They're Germans.
They're clean people.
Sometimes to a problematic degree.
So the guy who's doing all this, he hears a German man talking.
And when all of this becomes public later and Schaefer's in the news, he realizes the man torturing him was Paul Schaefer.
He was teaching them how to do their job, Peebles later said.
He was saying, you have to do it slowly.
You have to push here.
Once or twice, he punched me very hard below the belt.
He realized that they weren't doing anything to me down there.
So he said, you should also do it here.
And he started beating me.
And I think this is him training the kids, the young people.
I think they're not children at this point, but when they grow up, the ones who don't pull away from him because he molested them, the ones who are like bonded to him, because that happens too, they become like his tortured people.
God damn.
It's pretty bad, Paul.
This guy, he doesn't know when to quit.
Well, no one has stopped him yet.
He has not encountered a tremendous number of consequences to his actions so far.
Everything's coming up, Schaefer at this point.
I'm very interested now because we've talked about cult people before, and there's always the moment where they go, they do a thing that they like, it builds and builds and builds.
And there's a thing like, what if I tried this?
And then that's when it all falls apart.
I cannot even imagine what it's going to be for this guy, given what he's already done.
I'm interested to see if you'll consider it like, because it's easy.
I know what it is.
That is coming.
Like, you're right.
You know your cult, guys.
I'm interested if you'll think it's kind of like a deceleration.
And by the way, because the midpoint of the story is he murdered Santa Claus.
Like it's hard for there's not a lot of pressing the gas from there.
I tell you what, if it is a deceleration, that's fine by me.
I wouldn't say no to its deceleration.
Yeah, to like pulling back on that throttle a little bit.
Right.
So Peebles survived his experience.
And again, Pinochet kills a lot of people, but not, he's not a, he's not a mass murdering fascist on the scale of, he's more like, he's more like Francisco Franco.
He's not like a Hitler kind of guy.
Like his whole thing is, I'm not going to kill them all.
If I torture them until they're too scared to do anything, that's fine.
Like Pinochet's body count in the grand scale of dictators is not tremendously high.
He tortures a shitload more people than he kills, and he doesn't have Peebles killed.
In fact, the guy's eventually released, and he quite wisely flees to Europe, which I think works out fine for Pinochet, right?
Peebles pieced together what had happened to him over the next several years as new stories began to trickle out about Colonia Dignadad's relationship with Pinochet.
He realizes, oh, this guy who, and again, there's stories filtering back to Europe.
There's a couple of people who escape and they go to the media.
So since the beginning, there have been occasional stories in the media about allegations that this German compound in Chile is host to a pedophile and that once Pinochet is in power, there start to be stories that come out that like they might be torturing some people.
So this is it's there's a constant kind of background conversation in Germany and in Europe about what might be happening here.
And when Peebles gets to Europe, he goes to Amnesty International.
And in 1977, they put his testimony with the testimony of several other people who had been tortured there and survived into a 60-page report with the subtitle, A German Community in Chile, a torture camp for the DINA.
Schaefer's lawyers filed libel charges against Amnesty International in a German court.
This started a legal battle that would last almost 20 years and delayed the publication of the report until 1997.
So 20 years, they're able to stop this thing from getting out en masse because he's got money.
They've got money for lawyers.
It's the Scientology shit.
There's every so much of all of these different kind of cults that usually aren't involved with each other.
Usually like if you've got the hardcore got to molest children and murder people cult, they don't really have the resources for good lawyers and stuff.
Scientology never goes that far with the brutal torture stuff because the reason that they have the money is that they keep it on, you know, on the edge of that.
Schaefer does every all of this stuff.
He does all of the quasi-respectable making money, interacting with the real world, having a legal team and also the and we're balls out like unspeakable evil kind of stuff.
Like it's really a pretty remarkable story.
So like other SKPs of the Colonia, Peebles settled in Europe, Brussels, to be specific.
Because again, this goes on for 20 years.
So he does like live a life, which is good.
And he continues.
He spends years.
Anytime anyone's willing to talk about Paul Schaefer, he will like tell his story.
Meanwhile, the torture continued.
In fact, as Pinochet's regime went on, Pinochet came to rely on Schaefer more and more.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the DINA started taking dissidents to the Colonia for execution.
The bodies were eventually buried in mass graves.
We don't know how many.
All of them were dug up and burned at some point after this.
We know there were mass graves because number one, you can tell that like there was a grave.
There's little bits and pieces, you know, of clothing and stuff.
The cars of missing persons were found buried on the property and whatnot.
So we know what was going on, but the remains themselves were all destroyed.
Again, they're Germans.
They're very thorough.
Yeah, and former DINA DINA agents have admitted to taking people there to be disappeared.
We also do have testimony from people who were like dropping off dissidents to be murdered, who were like, yeah, that's what we did there.
Again, no idea how many people were killed, but a lot.
A mass grave number, you know?
I mean, these former DINA agents, I mean, where are they that they're in a position to say like, oh yeah, we disappeared all these people.
After, this is one of those things.
When you have a dictatorship like this that ends and it doesn't end in a massive civil war, when it ends in a massive civil war, yeah, those guys when they tend to get murdered if they get caught, right?
Like, that's what you do if it's a civil war to the old secret police.
You fucking kill a lot of them.
This doesn't end that way.
Pinochet's regime ends, but it's kind of like a negotiated thing, and Pinochet gets to be like a congressman for life kind of thing.
Like, it's, and things get a lot better in Chile.
No one would disagree with that.
But they don't, they have a truth and reconciliation commission.
It's like in South Africa, right?
This system of apartheid ids, but they don't like, they don't like murder all of the people who did the apartheid.
They have to integrate them into society.
And so a lot of these guys, they say, like, okay, we're not going to, there are some people who do get punished.
There are people who go to prison for the stuff they did under Pinochet's regime.
But a lot of these people are basically like, we need to know what happened, but like, we're not going to kill you over it.
And so, and I think there are people who feel bad, yada, yada.
I don't want to spend a lot of time like trying to morally whatever these guys are.
But basically, in exchange for information, we will, we won't execute you.
Yeah, we won't, or we won't like whatever, put you in prison necessarily because we're trying to figure out what happened, who disappeared.
There's a lot of people who have questions.
I don't know if my family member is alive or dead.
You know, you're trying to, I'm not trying to come down one way or the other on it because it's not my country and not my decision what should happen afterwards.
But yeah, that's what it's not.
Pinochet's dictatorship doesn't end because the people like murder him, you know?
Smuggling Genocide Committers00:04:56
So Schaefer's nickname with the Dina was the professor.
And the eyewitness accounts of people being sent to the colonia for execution all point to Schaefer being the man who received victims and led them to their execution.
He is a hands-on dude.
Like he's not delegating this shit.
Like Hitler's a delegator.
Schaefer is, if we're going to be executing people, I'm going to be there.
Like, I'm going to be picking them up.
I'm going to be taking them to the site.
Like, one former member of the colony told Bruce Falconer that he had been ordered by Schaefer directly to drive a busload of 35 political prisoners into the hills of the colony and leave them by the side of a dirt road.
As this person drove away, he heard machine gun fire.
No bodies were ever found.
And there's a bunch of stories like that.
That's generally how they go.
By 1980, the colonia had expanded from its initial 4,400 acres to more than 15,000 acres.
A sizable chunk of this was stolen from locals and the Catholic Church.
Again, this comes like you've heard of liberation theology.
There's this chunk of the Catholic Church in South America during this period that's fighting back against all of these like fascist dictators and militias and stuff.
So they don't have a lot of resistance from the Pinochet regime.
When they just like show up one day, Schaefer has his people like surround this group of nuns who own farmland and is like, what are you going to do?
And so they leave and he gets it.
Yeah, and this is probably like the mid-1980s is kind of when his control is at its peak.
But while his personal control of his cult is at its peak, he's now lost control of the international narrative.
And as this Washington Post report from 1980 makes clear, his Nazi past had started to catch up to him on the international stage.
Quote: There have also been charges over the years that the colony is a way station in the South American Nazi underground where war criminals wanted by German, Israeli, or other authorities are allowed to hide.
A Chilean who visited the colony several years ago said that he was told by Ursula, a nurse in the colony's ultra-modern hospital, that the doctors there were expert in performing plastic surgery.
Last December, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal said that he had evidence that Joseph Mingle, the Third Reich's infamous angel of death, had lived in the colony for a time last year.
The FBI had similar information.
And the colony, they have a spokesman.
The colony denies that Mingle or any other Nazis lived in the colony.
We know Nazis lived there.
Some of them had, like, I was in the, I was in the Wehrmacht, whatever.
Right.
We don't have as much as I want as it would be good to have on like what extent they were actually part of the underground Nazi railroad.
Yeah.
But it kind of seems like they were a key aspect of helping like hardcore war criminal Nazis move around and change their appearance and stay in the underground and avoid prosecution.
And it also, like, everything suggests that that is a thing that he would do.
That he would make it.
This is the guy.
Yeah.
I don't know if Mingelo was there.
Nobody does, obviously.
But I think he helped a lot of hardcore Nazi war criminals.
That seems completely on brand for the day.
I mean, why not at that point?
Yeah.
And honestly, on the low end of his crime.
Yeah, exactly.
Maybe he did that to feel more respectable to himself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just smuggling some genocide committers.
They already did the genocide.
You should see the shit I'm getting up to.
It is unclear whether or not, yeah, any other famous Nazis hung out there, but there were definitely Nazis.
Schaefer and a lot of the oldermen were Nazi veterans.
They were huge fans of Pinochet, who was himself a fascist.
That 1980 article from the Washington Post is maybe the first place to describe the colonia as a state within a state, which it was.
And they note that the private airstrips and private communication system would make it simple for someone to fly into the colonia from outside of the country without going through customs or being registered in any way.
So they're in the ideal situation to help Nazis stay underground.
The reporter on that article noted that he attempted to visit the colonia, but was threatened with arrest by local police, who swarmed him before he could get close and destroyed his film role, just to be sure.
They claimed to be acting on orders from the capital.
Quote, The Chilean government takes the attitude that the colony is located on private property, which, unless there is a problem, should not be entered by the police.
Neither the police captain, who almost arrested me in December, nor the government officials in Santiago could explain how the police would know if there were a problem without regularly entering the vast commune.
Chilean peasants from the surrounding area who hold the colony in high regard are given free medical care at its hospital, but only during certain pre-established hours.
One Chilean who spent three nights there said he had uncovered microphones hidden in his room, which his hosts then explained were there to anticipate his needs.
He also said that he was followed wherever he went and was not allowed to have spontaneous contact with members of the sect.
I love the idea explaining a bug by saying, oh, wait, we just want to know if you want stuff.
We just want to be better hosts.
Yeah.
Chilean Colony Microphones00:04:17
It's like, wouldn't it be better rather than you having to ask, like, can I make a sandwich in here?
You know, we just make a sandwich.
We just make a sandwich.
I want a sandwich right now.
I'm going to go ask for one.
We just want this to be the best damn hospital you've ever been to.
It is funny that you would even like, yeah, try to justify it.
But yeah, that is, and you also see in that quote, everything he's spent years doing coming home.
Like he's got all of this local support, not just from the government, but from the people.
Like, there is no getting in there.
There's no, he has, this might be the most total control I've ever heard of a cult leader establishing.
Yeah.
Like, to be honest, this is wild.
Yeah, it's something else.
He's got this shit locked up.
Yeah, he does.
And you know who else has their shit locked up, Paul?
Please tell me.
The products and services that support this podcast.
Ah, you're right.
Perfect ideological black holes.
Inescapable.
That's the behind the bastards guarantee.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
You're this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
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Untold Story Of Schaefer00:16:03
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Oh, we're back.
Paul.
So we just talked about how there's some weird shit going on with Nazis maybe getting smuggled through here.
Yeah.
To add to that, there's a bunch of stuff we just don't know enough about as I would like.
There's a lot of unexplained financial irregularities behind the Colonia and Shaw.
Huge funding.
Dude, say, really?
I would have thought that's the one thing that Paul Schaefer insisted upon was: I will be scrupulous about the books.
That 1980 Washington Post article noted that the Colonia maintained what it called a motherhouse in Siegberg, Germany, where it would take care of single mothers and would raise funds.
So they continue to operate an orphanage in Germany, which they use.
The establishment of this orphanage means there's a charity in Germany, which means anonymous people only described as partners can donate money to that orphanage.
And all that money goes to the commune in Chile.
And those partners are maybe former members of the Nazi Party who are trying to help smuggle people or get funds to them.
A lot of this might have been a money laundering operation where we need to get money to this fucking SS general who's been hiding out in Argentina.
We donate to the Colonia.
They take a cut off the top and they pass the money on to this guy because they're able to travel without like customs documents.
Like all sorts of shady shit is going on here.
The thing, the thing to me, when it gets to this point, especially when there's, when there's, you know, some kind of when there's Christianity involved, is that what level is the Christianity entering Paul Schaefer's brain at this point?
Like, is he, does he still consider himself a religious person?
Like, I say my prayers every night.
Or is it just like at this point, it's just like, I am fully, I'm fully embracing my own godhood and the sham.
Like, it's always to me the balancing, like we talked about before, the balancing of how much do I believe in myself to be this thing and how much of it is just a con and I know it's a con, you know, but then when you, when, when you still are considering yourself a Christian or you're, you're having some sort of Christian aspect to your scam, like how much do you believe like in our Lord Jesus Christ on high is smiling down upon me and the things that I'm doing?
It is, um, I don't know.
I really have no idea because like you're pretty far from the teachings of the Bible when you are smuggling Nazis through Latin America and while raping hundreds of children and torturing people for Pinochet and laundering money and like not very Christian, I would say.
That's the only peek I would like into their brains is to know what are they thinking at that moment.
Or like, is there a point where it's just abandoned and they're just like, I got a good thing going here.
I'm going to keep it up.
It's a useful means of control still, you know, to say that there's a there's a power even greater than me that's guiding everything.
And yeah, and that I'm the like, I don't, I have trouble imagining that Schaefer believes in anything but power and indulging his his his wants.
Yeah.
I do have trouble believing that.
Me too.
Yeah.
Um I don't know, though.
Obviously, there's a lot of belief in this organization and a lot of skills.
I think there's also just a lot of very cynical Nazis using it for their own shit, right?
Which to me is the worst kind of Nazi.
Yeah, cynical Nazi, at least be a believer, you know?
Yeah, I don't know.
It is hard to like, it's hard to really wrap your head around what is going on in Paul's head if it's anything but just cold.
And it might, because he's, he's got to be a calculator, right?
Like I could see it just being sort of like a dial tone in there, just like, I get what I want.
These are the things that I'm doing in order to get the things that I want.
And it's not like these guys ever really lay it out at the end where they're like, you know, it was all bullshit.
I admit it.
Yeah.
No, they don't ever do that.
But yeah, I don't know.
There were constant rumors of foreign backers for the colonia, rumors that old Nazi war criminals had funneled money into it.
Its hospital, again, super good at plastic surgery, which is a little odd for a rural Chilean medical facility that deals primarily with obstetrics.
They, of course, ran several successful businesses, tortured people for the Chilean state.
So a lot of the money may have come from that.
It's hard to say.
One diplomatic observer cited by the Washington Post noted that, quote, no one knows who was behind the central organization, which he claimed was located in Siegberg, Germany.
This guy claimed that they'd put millions of dollars into the colony rather than the colony funding its own endeavors, which I just don't know what's going on here.
The observer went on to say the religious and social aims of this group are very uncertain.
It is all very strange.
And that is kind of the untold story here.
It's like, how much of this, how much of this, how much of Paul was, if you keep this operation going for these underground Nazis, you can do whatever you want.
Like, how much was he an instrument of other people who helped him get established and helped him do all this?
I don't know.
I don't know how much of that is underpinning this.
I don't know if they come in later and are like, shit, this guy's got a good thing going.
Let's pump some money into it and like we can take advantage.
Or if it's from 61, from the very start, there's this shadowy cabal of Nazis being like, we need to build this thing.
I really just don't know.
So Paul could just be an innocent dude.
Could be an innocent pedophile.
Just working for the Nazis.
Just an innocent Nazi pedophile.
He's just a regular Nazi upon a forces greater than him.
Exactly.
We've all felt that way at some point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Journalists in 1980 noted how suspicious it was that the Colonia, ostensibly a religious mission, had no church.
And I actually think the wrong.
That didn't even occur to me.
Yeah, there's not a single church there.
Where are these services happening?
They're all in like the cafeteria.
And I actually think it's very funny that this religious mission has no church.
But I think the reason these journalists think that it's weird and suspicious is because they don't actually understand what these people believe.
There was no physical church because Schaefer was the church.
Wherever he is, is the church.
And he could not abide the thought of worship that was not centered around and directed by him.
I think he hated the idea that there would be a church because then people could go there when he was not there and worship.
Like, I am the worship.
I am the vector of this faith.
Yeah, that's my suspicion.
All the while this is going on, the abuse continued.
In 1970, one girl, Matilda Schergalis, wrote to her mother back in Germany, No one is getting in here and nobody is getting out.
Which is certainly how she felt at the time, but is not quite true.
Now, Werner Schmitka was one of the kids we talked about in episode one.
He sailed to Colonia Dignidad in 1962 as a two-year-old.
And a few years later, he began being molested by Paul Schaefer.
Schmitka tried to escape the colonia five times over the years.
And even though he was never caught in doing this, he was always like he was always, he got out successfully every time.
He was always forced to return.
And this is what's interesting to me.
It's like he would get out, he would be free and clear, and then he would have to go back because, as he explained, I had nobody to go to.
As a child, you need your parents to go to, to cry to and say, I can't take it anymore.
But the only answer was to run away.
So he kept winding up back at the cult after escaping and getting punished and stuff.
In 1988, it was 1988.
So Werner is escaping a bunch of times.
A number of kids get out.
A lot of them get brought back.
Some of them flee to Europe.
But it's 1988 before an escape happens that generates enough news in the right media climate for the international community, Germany in particular, to start taking the allegations of abuse at the colonia seriously.
And it happens when two young people, George and Lottie Packmore, manage to escape to Canada and then get to Bonn, where they testify before the Reichstag that German citizens were being sexually assaulted and forced to stay against their will.
Lott implicated a number of high-ranking officials in the colonia, including Dr. Hop, saying that he'd been allowed to marry and own a car in return for enabling a regime of mass child rape.
Dr. Hop had been the colonia's foreign emissary.
He was the guy who would go overseas whenever there were questions about the colonia.
He's the guy who's talking to the press a lot of the time.
He had connections with German diplomats.
He brought people back sometimes when they would flee to foreign countries.
When Lottie had first escaped in 1980, he'd convinced foreign officials to send her back because she was a child.
And she claims that when she protested, he threatened her: Another peep out of you, and you'll get an injection to keep you quiet.
So, this is like this guy gets to have a wife and a car and a family and a job because he's doing this.
Since Paul Schaefer was still a wanted man in Germany, he sent Dr. Hop to represent the cult in parliament.
According to Reuters, Hopp testified that, quote, the group was one big family, which in a quarter of a century had not a single divorce or suicide, and whose members were free to leave at any time and were not subjected to forced labor.
Quote, despite this, there have always been people or groups who have slandered our society or individual members in an incredibly scandalous way by feeding misinformation to the press.
So, this is what he says in his testimony.
In 1990, the people of Chile forced Augusto Pinochet out of office via a plebiscite.
He stepped down to a term as senator for life, and we'll talk about all this more at some point, I promise.
After he leaves office, a truth and reconciliation commission is formed to investigate human rights abuses during the regime.
Attention was paid, quite naturally, to Colonia Dignidad, and an investigation into missing persons there, including Boris Weisfeiler, who we opened the episode with, started back up.
It would be a gross misuse of the word slow to say that justice was slow in this case.
For more than half a decade, the colonia stayed closed to the world, due in large part to the fact that the police were still very sympathetic to the old regime and thus to Schaefer.
In 1996, Schaefer launched a new so Schaefer's still in control doing his thing after Pinochet leaves.
And they're being investigated.
They're kind of stonewalling, forcing police out, fighting it in court.
And he kind of continues business as usual.
And in 1996, he launches a new educational initiative called the Intensive Boarding School.
This was an immersive teaching program for local Chilean kids to study and live in the colonia until they reached 18.
Oh my God.
This is really bad.
Yeah, it's not great.
Like everything else Schaefer did, the intensive boarding school was a way for him to molest a lot more children.
Local parents saw it as an opportunity for their children to get a Western quality education and work experience for free.
So they send their kids to the colonia and Paul Schaefer molests a lot of these kids.
This situation goes on until the winter of 1996, when a 12-year-old named Christobal smuggles a note out to his mother.
The note read, Take me out of here.
He raped me.
So yeah, yeah.
And this is the bridge too far.
For whatever reason, this is the thing that is the step too far.
So she rescues him, which was a dicey proposition, very dangerous thing to do.
There's armed guards at all times, but she gets her kid out of here.
And once they're free, she takes him to a nearby clinic where a doctor verifies that the boy had been raped.
This is the first time there is medical evidence of sexual abuse of one of the kids who is claiming that it's done by Paul Schaefer.
She did not believe local police would help her, obviously.
So she flees to the capital of Santiago and she finds the chief of Chile's national detective force, Luis Henriquez.
We don't often have cop heroes on this show, but I will give Henriquez a lot of credit here.
He is a good guy.
He does the right thing here.
And it's one of those things where not a lot of most of the police in Chile were fundamentally sympathetic to Pinochet.
That's why they're willing to protect this massive child rape operation.
But Luis Henriquez had been one of Salvador Allende's bodyguards.
He had been there in the presidential palace when Allende committed suicide.
So he was not a Pinochet loyalist.
And he gets, he hears about what's going on and he sticks to this case like glue.
In mid-August of 1996, he succeeds in getting a judge to issue a warrant for Schaefer's arrest.
Henriquez takes a team to capture the Nazi pedophile cult leader.
But Schaefer's got a good intel apparatus.
He's got cops inside who are loyal to him, and he gets warned before the raid hits.
Bruce Falconer writes: A meeting was called on August 20th, 1996, to discuss what should be done.
Schaefer seemed badly shaken.
As the Kolonos discussed how to proceed, he kept his head down and never spoke a word.
Shortly thereafter, he disappeared into the Colonia's network of subterranean bunkers and tunnels.
It is widely believed that he was there underground when on November 30th, 1996, Henriquez muscled his way into Schaefer's utopia for the first time.
Henriquez had hoped to capture Schaefer by surprise.
He went in with 30 armed policemen in a caravan, but as his team made its way up the long dirt road, it was spotted by the Colonia's lookouts, who gave warning.
The caravan busted through a sequence of gates and only slowed as it approached the village itself.
Henriquez had given orders to his men, should they come under fire, not to retreat, but to move deeper into the village for cover.
To his surprise, though, resistance was minimal.
The Colonos were like zombies, or maybe like robots, Henriquez would later recall.
They were machines, on off, on off, on off.
They didn't change moods like normal people.
Though Schaefer's followers were generally subdued, at times they became aggressive, and in a few cases, they physically assaulted the police.
Henriquez assumed these outbursts signaled that they were getting close to Schaefer, but in the end, Henriquez and his police went home empty-handed.
Gotta be, yeah, what a thing to see.
Breaking into this cult for the first time, seeing the way these people react to the outside world coming in.
It's really chilling, like the description of how he behaved.
Yeah.
And so the obvious question is: where was he?
Like, how did they was it?
Was it that he wasn't there, that they couldn't get to where he was?
Or we don't entirely know.
The leading theory, Henriquez's theory, is that he was there.
He was very close by, but they had spent years building a system of underground bunkers.
Oh, of course.
And he's hiding underground.
Of course, right?
Yeah, of course this guy's got underground bunkers.
Fucking underground bunkers and tunnels.
God damn.
Yeah, I mean, he's not an unprepared man.
Yeah.
To draw another Boy Scouts comparison, Paul.
Raids On The Colonia Dignidad00:12:05
So, to his immense credit, Henriquez sticks with the case for years.
He executes more than 30 raids on the Colonia.
They don't capture Schaefer.
None of these capture Schaefer, but they all get things.
They all find evidence of what's been going on, evidence of the tortures, of the executions, of the child molestation.
Henriquez believes that Schaefer probably stayed underground for some time, maybe even years.
We don't know when he fled Chile, but at some point in the late 90s, he did finally leave the country.
I guess I think Henriquez, I suspect a few of these raids happen and he gets closer and closer.
And eventually Schaefer's like, they're going to get me eventually.
I have to leave.
And he gets smuggled out.
Life in the Colonia changed little at first.
One of his senior officers became the new leader, and they try to keep up a lot of the old rules, but gradually things start to shift and change, right?
The molestation certainly seems to have ended when Schaefer left, and things thaw a bit.
Eventually, the colonia adopts a democratic council of leaders.
Now, this doesn't work very well, it's dissolved very pretty quickly under intense debate.
But gradually, the closed society cracks open and like normalcy starts to creep in.
In time, some cult members started to break free of their mental programming.
Schaefer's hiding for years, and individuals who had been in the cult and who had been defending him start to cooperate with the investigation.
Just like the, I don't like the term brainwash, but whatever's going on, some of these people realize, like, you know what, this was bad.
You know, um, some of them are probably people who defended him because they'd been five or six when they came to the colony or even born under the colony, and it's not easy to overcome all that kind of programming.
Yeah, um, so they start to give more and more information to Henriquez, who just keeps like really doggedly keeps going after this place, keeps trying to figure out what's happening.
And gradually, these people open up to him.
They show Henriquez where the files from Pinochet's torture operations were kept.
They hand over information that led to the largest private arms cache in Chilean history: thousands of grenades, dozens and dozens of rifles, surface-to-air missile launchers.
Like, he's got quite an arsenal.
And they also showed Henriquez the site of the mass graves, which again are empty, but there's stuff there that ties back to people who have gone missing.
Now, one of the tips that Henriquez gets over the years leads to investigators moving Schaefer's bed and finding a trapdoor hidden underneath it.
In the secret chamber, they found what police described as an arsenal of fantasy weapons, the cult leader's private weapons cache.
He had three pencils rigged to fire .22-caliber rounds, two pencils that could shoot darts.
I think these may have been pins, and it may be a translation error because I don't know how a pencil could fire a bullet without the wood.
Maybe it's a mechanical pencil.
It had to have been if it's a pencil.
A camera that could fire darts, and several walking canes with guns built into them.
Because Schaefer was a very old man at this point, they found a walker that he had an electrocuting machine built into that could deliver a 1200-volt shock.
Fucking weaponized walker.
That's, I know, that's pretty cool, right?
I'll give it up for that and only that.
For that and only that.
The weaponized walker.
All right.
Look, we're fair here.
Every now.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Life in the colonia did not become what many of us are likely to consider normal, but it did stop being a child rape cult/slash torture site, which is all I've ever asked of anyone.
Don't rape kids and torture people.
If you do one thing for me, make it this.
Yeah, if you do one thing for me, don't be a pedophile Nazi torture rape cult.
And that's all I'll ask.
That's all I'll ask.
Yeah.
So, meanwhile, Schaefer continued to be in the wind with a handful of his bodyguards.
He was eventually tracked down, not by the law, but by a Chilean TV journalist, Corolla Fuentes, who spent more than a year tracking down leads.
She eventually found him in Buenos Aires in an expensive gated community.
On March 10th, 2005, a 24-member SWAT team busted down the gate and entered his house.
Fuentes followed them in order to make the arrest.
Quote: I saw this old guy, very lost in space, lying on the bed.
He was absolutely not dangerous.
I remembered what the bars had told me.
He didn't match the image of this bad, evil guy.
Schaefer did not resist arrest.
As he was being hauled away in handcuffs, Schaefer only groaned and mumbled a question over and over: Why?
Why?
Do you need a list?
By the way, we must acknowledge that Corolla Fuentes is an awesome name.
It's incredible.
And apparently, an awesome journalist.
Yeah, and I, oh, I was going to say, is Dwight Schultz still alive?
Because maybe he could play the older Paul Schaefer.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And yeah.
Maybe a Walton Goggins could play him as a young man.
Yeah, Goggins is what this story needs to really pop.
Netflix is already.
There was a movie recently made about the Colonia, but it's like a fiction movie.
Really?
Yeah, and it stars like big names.
Yeah.
2015, a historical thriller starring Emma Watson, Daniel Bruhl, and Michael Nyquist.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, big names.
Directed by Florian Gallenberger.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's who you get for that.
Yeah.
Emma Watson.
There's an Emma Watson movie about this.
If you thought that's what this film needed.
I think a Goggins.
Nothing against Emma Watson, but this cries for a Goggins.
It screams to the heaven.
Goggins.
So Schaefer gets extradited to Chile.
In May of 2006, he is convicted of child molestation and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
He receives further sentences after this for possession of illegal weapons and for torture.
He gets more time than he could possibly live for a number of different bad things.
At one of his first interrogations, he is approached by Louis Peebles, one of the dissidents that he had personally tortured.
Schaefer seemed to recognize the man again.
He's very old at this point.
And he asks Peebles, like, oh, were you a lawyer who worked for us at some point?
And Peebles responds: No, I was once a guest in your home.
You were very unkind.
I never did anything to you or the Colonia.
So why were you so cruel to me?
And at this point, Schaefer stops talking and pretends he can no longer understand Spanish.
He can't actually even like, for all that, can't even fucking confront this guy and admit what he did to him.
In 2010, at age 88, Paul Schaefer died in a prison hospital from heart failure.
Dr. Hop, one of his chief lieutenants, lives in Germany today.
They refuse to extradite him to Chile to stand trial for his crimes.
The German government has a policy of not extraditing citizens for most reasons, pretty much.
So he's that, this guy, big part of it, still doing fine.
I mean, Germany, I feel like this is a good reason to.
Yeah, I feel like this would be a good reason.
If you're going to do it for any reason at all, this is the one.
I feel like Nazi.
Oh, wait, no, no, no.
Oh, wait, no, a Chilean court.
In 2013, yeah, a Chilean court approved an extradition request.
But as of 2018, yeah, that's from 2018.
The Guardian article from 2018 is Germany won't jail doctor from Nazi pedophile sect convicted in Chile.
That's now, there's a headline for you.
There's a headline right there.
Yeah.
If you're Germany, if you're Germany, you might not want there to be headlines that involve the phrase, Germany won't jail doctor from Nazi pedophile sect.
This is classic, are we the baddies situation where it's like, oh, wait, we're Germany?
Look where we are in that area.
You probably ought to get on this one, huh?
Yeah.
Does this look bad?
Yeah.
This might look bad.
Several of Schaefer's lieutenants have been convicted, though, and wrought in a special war criminal prison in Chile to this day.
Colonia Dignidad still stands.
It now goes by a different name, Paul.
It calls itself Via Bavaria.
And it has rebranded.
Yeah, you're going to want a new name after that.
That is like a restaurant in a theme park.
Via Bavaria.
Yeah.
It's kind of like how the town of Auschwitz changed its name to Happy Town.
Oh, the branding of this isn't going to go good.
So they are now a tourist destination for foreigners.
They advertise that it's basically like it's an old German village from the mid-century, frozen in time in the middle of Latin America.
Come here and stay and enjoy the Laterhosen and the Bratwurst and the German dances.
Don't worry.
There's no church.
Yeah, there's no church.
None at all.
Don't ask what there used to be here.
Wow, that's a hard no thanks from me.
Yeah, I don't think I will be going there.
I'm very excited to see Chile one day.
I don't think I'll be visiting Colonia Villa, Bavaria.
In fairness, a lot of the people who run it now were like victims of Schaefers, right?
They were kids he molested and they're like, this is the only life I know.
This is my home.
Like, I'm not going to say they shouldn't like.
Oh, hey, whatever.
Like, yeah, I'm certainly not the person to say, like, what you should be doing is one of the kids who survives this.
Do what you got to do.
I will not be swinging by.
Yeah, I will not be taking a visit there, though.
They have returned some of the land that was stolen from people, including from the Catholic Church.
They gave back a bunch of the land that was taken under Schaefer.
And a little bit of a...
Thank God the Catholic Church got some of their land back.
Yeah, that was, I know you were really worried about those nuns.
That's all I could think about.
Did the Catholic Church over their land?
Yeah, that way we know at least some of the land is still being used to abuse children.
If you're viewing this story a different way and you were afraid there wasn't going to be a happy ending, don't worry.
Don't worry.
The Catholics are still on the ground.
Yeah.
The German state has offered a small stipend to victims of Paul Schaefer.
It's like a few thousand bucks, basically.
Although they are emphatic about this, them giving the stipend does not mean they take any responsibility for his crimes.
Wow.
Wow.
No one's asking that, but you could have taken responsibility for like trying to get him extradited.
Yeah.
That makes it seem a little more like you're claiming responsibility.
Yeah.
That makes it seem like maybe there were some people in the German government who were involved in funneling money through this in order to protect Nazis.
And maybe you don't want anyone looking, that's entirely into it.
I don't know.
Paul?
How you doing?
Hey, hold on.
I mean, this is the worst one I've done with you yet.
Yeah, it's pretty bad.
This is the worst one you've inflicted upon me.
I really forget this.
Yeah, it's really like that is just every aspect of the story is just true, horrific evil.
And it's one of those things where you it's it's hard to fathom that this person is the same species as you, you know, that this is there are people like that that have walked this earth and currently walk this earth.
And maybe we'll find out an even more hideous person exists in our, in our, in our midst, you know, that somebody's walking around right now that's committing crimes like this.
It's, it's just impossible to wrap your mind around the enormity of it.
Bleep With Ana Navarro00:03:51
Yeah, it really is.
But I will say, Paul, I have you on speed dial if I do find a story that's all right.
Well, tell you what, that might go right to voicemail.
I'm going to get a signal put up in the middle of Los Angeles.
It's just a silhouette of Santa Claus with a pistol to his head.
I'll know what it means.
I'll know what it means.
Oh, good.
Robert did more research.
Oh, Paul.
Got any pluggables to plug?
I mean, not right now.
I've got some more live shows coming up in the future, but nothing that's available yet.
But yeah, follow me on Twitter at PFTompkins.
And my live shows are at paulftompkins.com slash live.
And I update that when I got a new thing.
So yeah, I'll be announcing things as they are announceable.
Yeah.
Check out Paul's stuff and.
I don't know, just check out for a while, chill out.
Everybody needs a little bit of time to de-stress from this one.
So go find a cat or a dog somewhere.
Absolutely.
Okay.
Hey there, folks.
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