Part Two: The Nazi Pedophile Cult Leader who Murdered Santa (With Paul F. Tompkins)

Robert is joined again by Paul F. Tompkins to continue to discuss Paul Schäfer.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards in our Spooky Week
Halloween podcast edition. Uh. This week, in addition to talking
about a very spooky episode, we are based and Paul F.
Tompkins pilled. Paul, thanks for taking my pill. You do

(00:21):
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? Yeah? Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul,
how are you doing well? You know? I after our

(00:46):
part one, I really had to take uh an industrial shower,
um and just really think about we're humans a mistake? Um.
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 are, you know, basically

(01:09):
good and I'm ready with that attitude to go into
part two. Wow. That is brave, Yeah, heroic even Oh boys,
do you well? He killed Santa? He did murder Santa
Claus got out of my mind. He did. He did

(01:33):
kill the living embodiment of childhood wonderment. He killed Santa
because he was jealous that the kids he was molested with,
like Santa, 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

(01:53):
losing his mind, Hitler hit would be like, well that's
a bit much like that's that's a bit far. Can there.
I didn't even think about that. Oh boy, maybe maybe
I'll try painting again. Yeah, back to painting. So by
the time Pinochet had solidified his grip on power in
the mid nineteen seventies, Colonia Dignidad was almost a state

(02:15):
within a state. They had built a power plant, a
television station, and two air strips to transport the timber, wheat, corn,
and brotworst the community produced. Since fucking was more or
less for boating the workforce, Paul Shaffer 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,

(02:41):
kids have to come here. Yeah, they have to they
need to go to the hospital. Their kids. I mean,
I'm kind of the king, so I guess, uh, I
can make these kids do whatever I want. I can
make it disappear. Um, let's try it and see how
it goes. Let's try and see how it goes. I
need someone to build my airstrip, he seems are you
willing to say, you know what, this is nuts? But

(03:02):
if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But if 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 hit
there A big part of their whole emo is just
like what if I can get away with this? Yeah,
let me give it a shot. Yeah, let me give
it a shot. You know I probably can't. Yeah, probably can't.

(03:24):
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 meaning the thing is,
it's living your life that way is incredible advice for
like a career like it. It is like if you
if you're creative or something like, oh, you think you

(03:45):
might want to write and give it a shot? Do it?
You know, Um, 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 fucking try you know, see if you can,
like um in 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

(04:08):
to the extent of Like, I bet I could build
my own power plan to have a totally self sufficient
torture commune in the middle of Chile that I keep
manned by abducting children at the hospital 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 programs exactly. And I feel like I

(04:28):
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's let's see
what this baby could do. Yeah, let's let's let's get
this thing on the fucking highway, you know. Absolutely so.

(04:51):
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 Shafer's eye, they were simply
taken from their families. If said families who were very
generally impoverished villagers complained safe would be like, well, you

(05:13):
got other kids, right, do you want them to have
medical care? And again, one of the things that's fun
like this is fucked up for a thousand reasons. This
is an oarriborous fund up. Inness. 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

(05:35):
health issue that brought me to the hospital. They saved
my life and then abduct 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, um uh
someone saying in an interview, UM, you know, I don't

(05:58):
remember how they got to this in the conver station,
but this person was saying, yeah, it would have been
I think it would have been okay if I had
never been born. Like, considering how my life has gone
and the pain that's been in it. Like if I've
never been born at all, that might have been better,
and I that never left my mind, Like that way
is extremely profound. And to save a child's life for that, Like,

(06:22):
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, the cycle, 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

(06:44):
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
like fully fat and stuff like that's um somebody who

(07:05):
knows intimately, Yeah, it's real unfair, Like it is a
fucked up roll of some bad dice. Um, 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

(07:27):
respect for anybody who survives that. Um incomprehensible good lord. UM.
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, um, but

(07:48):
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 is his personal like possession.
Augusto Pinochet is his homeboy. For his part, the general
allowed the colonial to import and export without paying taxes.

(08:10):
Some of these benefits Schaefer extended to local farmers, so
Pinochet's 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're gonna be able to sell your
ship for without customs duties. I'll achieuse my airport for free.

(08:33):
But if anything happens, you got my back, you know,
He's I'm not saying anything is going to happen, and
I'm not going to say what types of things are
going to happen, but if anything happens, I mean it's
really this really does, like you know, it really plays
on how grateful are these people to have free, free healthcare,

(08:55):
free healthcare where it's like you may hear that I'm
a child Bill Lester, Like, yeah, you may hear that
I have been operating a child molestation engine at an
unfathomable scale, but but yeah you're not. When your daughter
broker leg that ship was free, um yeah, it's it's wild.

(09:19):
And these these local farmers who he's he gets you
know in bedwidth kind of not literally. Um, some of
these like these guys will defend him when like foreign
journalists will come in to try to investigate what the
fox going on here, and they've got his back, like
it's a very hostile place to be looking into the colonial.
So Schaefer becomes the total like almost god to his followers.

(09:44):
They called him our eternal uncle, which make a creepy
uncle joke here, but we shan't um I mean, is
this where they started re turnal uncle? I might have
some notes. They also called him the Supreme Lead, which
is a little more traditional um. Daily prayer meetings served
as a way for Shaeffer to institute strict groupthink and

(10:07):
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

(10:28):
um uh Christianity aspect to this. Yeah, there always is.
There always is. 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 has filtered through this pedophile.
He's the instrument of God for them, but essentially he

(10:48):
is their God. Yeah, it's like somebody distilled the Catholic
Church into a into a hard liquor. So the process
of having his followers confess their sins was formalized in
a practice he called sealless sourgs, I'm not I don't

(11:09):
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 Shaffer 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 and mass were held at lunch and dinner.
Members of the community would be expected to write the

(11:30):
names of sinners themselves and people they'd seen sin on
a blackboard near the entrance to the cafeteria. When everyone
sat down, Schaeffer 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 funk they're talking about, you have

(11:51):
to come up with something like you have to like
you have to. Yeah. That reminds me of confession when
I was a kid, and like what had I done? Yeah?
And so you know, going in, but you had to
go every week, and so sometimes you just make stuff up, um,
like mild things like I took the lord's name in vain,
or I disrespected my father or whatever, because you can't

(12:13):
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 a hundred this week. You
had to. You had to come up with something you
can't walk into confessionally like you know what, I NA
I'm nailing it right now, bro. Great. No, it's just

(12:34):
so it's also so weird because it is like, I mean,
as a kid, I remember being terrified of like minor
sins that was going to go to hell. Course, yeah,
like some some stupid bullshit like um. But as an adult,
it's like, dude's god, he's got other ship going, Like
there's a lot happening right now. Like it's like walking
in on a guy as he's like watching a genocide

(12:55):
occur and being like, you know what, man, I was
lusting a little of it 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?

(13:16):
Did you have time for that? Right now? Yeah? You
know what I was? I was paying attention to some
stuff in Bosnia. But let me just drop all that
right now, focus on this and I'll tell you what
I'm going to do, the same thing for both. Yeah,
what an easy gig. Rwanda Genet's side and cheated on

(13:40):
a math test. Same, it requires the same thing from me.
Consider them taken care of. I made a note of it.
It's very funny. So what's not funny is all of this.
So yeah, every but he's got to like come up

(14:01):
with something to confess. And on Sundays, everybody's got to
go next to a Schaeffer's house to confess yet again
and pray for forgiveness. And 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 Shaffer is 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

(14:23):
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 Schaffer to inform him of the unreported
sins of other residents were rewarded by having their own
sins forgiven without punishment. So if you tell a Shaffer

(14:44):
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 really to
depends on nobody talking to each other. Yes, well, if
two people talk, that's the devil exactly. Punishments for sins

(15:10):
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

(15:32):
of cars, but you shouldn't be on pills when you operate.
A lot of people say that, um, 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

(15:53):
lot of people do have the idea that like folks
who wind up stuck in this situation or have some
sort of like they're they're dumb or they're week, 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 blaming, But second I think it
misses number one. These aren't dumb people. They have their
own power plant, like that if they built and operate themselves.

(16:15):
They have their own airstrips and like manage air travel
and like yeah, like they know what they're there's 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 eats a really good job of
laying this out. In Santiago in early two thousand and six,

(16:37):
I spoke with Dr Neils Biderman, 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 Shaffer 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 Pulse Schaeffer,

(17:00):
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

(17:22):
under orders from Schaefer. Piederman 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

(17:44):
of this torture is frontloaded. 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 I'm as guilty as

(18:06):
anyone of 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 bla blah, I wouldn't do this. Yeah.
But it's like the the 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

(18:29):
like they just know that it's if I just reinforce
this thing over and over again that will wear people
down and gets into their brains. But sometimes a guy
like this comes along where it's like the the the
way he has he has foreseen and forestalled every opposition
to to uh to the programming is terrifying. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(18:52):
And he's very um, he's he's just good at it.
And and that's the thing. 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 they're being separated
from like their kids. They're not thinking of it as
a as a punishment. They're not thinking of it as
this is what Shaffer is doing to me. They're thinking

(19:13):
about this is what I am doing for the community.
And people will by and large do pretty much anything
for their community, um, if they have one. If they don't, um,
I don't know. See the United States of America. So
Schaffer came to consider sexual intercourse a tool of the devil.

(19:35):
As we have already discussed, the problem with this is
that people fuck. I don't know if you're aware of this, Paul,
but they share? Do they share? Do? I'm not ashamed
to admit it myself. Wow. Wow, that's podcast history here.
Tmzs front page isolate that use it as a drop. Yeah. Um,

(19:58):
so 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. Uh, they're they're
gonna find a way, like life finds a way, you know,
as as as a mathematician once said, Obviously, Paul Shaffer

(20:18):
tried to stop this. He punished men and women who
are caught together viciously. Entire an entire family would be
shunned if their daughter had like a kiss with a boy,
like your whole family is in is in trouble if
that kind of stuff happens. Um 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.

(20:40):
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 m d. You can leave

(21:02):
and find something else to do, you know, like you
don't you don't have to do this ship. Um, you
have a lot more leverage than other people. UM. And
so in order to stop there for 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

(21:24):
a normal life broadly, Like he's at the top of
this colt too. He's not molesting kids, I don't think,
but he he's kind of co leading things. He has
a lot of autonomy. Um. Other people generally had less.
But of these people who are kind of more privileged,
they could go to Shaffer. You couldn't say I'm in
love with this person and I want to marry them,
but you could say I I think God wants me

(21:45):
to marry right, um, and they would go to Shaffer.
They would say this, and it would Shaffer's job. Then,
if this was some of that, he was decided to
let Mary to pick the person that they were going
to marry. UM. Now, maybe some times people he picked
people that they wanted to marry as a general rule,
though he used this as a situation to exert more control.

(22:07):
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. Um. But
the way Schaefer usually did it again, unless someone was
high important enough that he couldn't funk with him, 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

(22:28):
people having kids. How he's determined that, well, it's easy
if if the woman's been through menopause, you're not. Because
so if some twenty year old who's got like a
valuable skills, like I want to get married, he's like,
here married this sixty five year old woman, Like that's
your wife now, right like, so it's this um. The
strategy was effective. Only sixty or so children were born

(22:52):
during the entire span Schaefer ran Colonia Dignidad, which was
more than thirty years and again a couple hundreds of
three hundreds something people here between nineteen and nineteen eighty nine,
no children were born there at all. So this is
an extremely successful control regime. He has a lot of
control here, what I mean, like, what if he had

(23:15):
thought about making a car that ran on water. Yeah,
you do have to think about, like, what could this
man have done? How many diseases could have been eradicated? Yeah, yeah, uh,
the the amount of human ingenuity we would be doing
Star trek ship. Now if every one of these guys

(23:37):
and there's we we talk our 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 even just like the head
of the department, you know, yeah, not even like that
as a scientist, just to organize it, yes, and to
motivate people exactly. Yeah. If Don Trump had dedicated every

(24:01):
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 a certain subjective people. Um.
I remember thinking that if he had when when COVID
hit us, and if he had said, you know, we're
gonna John Wayne this and we're gonna do it better
than anybody. This thing faster, like but no, it's not real.

(24:24):
It's gonna be over soon. Yep, No, it's but no,
chug your bleach. Yeah, you know who else wants you
to drink bleach. Paul, know who the products and services
are not? Are we not sponsored by Clorox anymore so?
They we're not. We're not sponsored by Claros anymore over. Well,

(24:45):
you know, Paul, have I told you about my my
my signature cocktail. Paul, I said, you're drinking out of
a very fancy goblet here, and I wanted to I
would love to hear about shore. It's called high ball.
Now here's what you do, Paul. You get a pint
glass and you fill that eight percent of the way
up with pure sparkling four oh nine, and then just

(25:06):
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 high ball. And let me tell you,
at the end of a long day, it's just what
it's just what you need. If I don't, if I
don't have four oh nine, is fantastic and acceptable substitute. Well, Paul,

(25:31):
that's that's You don't know this, but that's actually very
offensive to my to my culture. I'm very sorry. You
apologize now if you want to. I don't know. I
don't know. I don't know what to drink names all right,
well you can tell one of us is a professional improviser.

(25:55):
Oh man, um, let's go to Savad. 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
like if you if you if you go to like
a Mexican market, you get like the big cleaning supplies

(26:17):
in the huge 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 who is rights for Cody Johnson's Outfit and does
his own podcasts then a guest on the show. I
found something called mes colito, which is a horrible It's

(26:37):
like mescal 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. But I'm
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
apologized to his mother for it. Um, but wow, I

(27:03):
miss it, Paul. Ready to get back into this, Yeah, Robert,
let's do it. Let's do it. Let's now. In the
rare occasions where a woman did get pregnant at the Colonia,
Schaeffer would order her isolated from the community, kept in
solitude until she gave birth. The child was taken from

(27:23):
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 the people who love them
and force them to live in a barracks. Who could

(27:48):
have known. Um. It also turns out that it's unfortunately
pretty easy to make people who have already been manipulated
to accept the torture and repeated assault of their loved ones.
It's easy to make those people tortured 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 eighteen seventy ones is Germans beat

(28:10):
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 eighteen hundreds, 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?

(28:30):
At the start of the eighteen hundreds, it's the French, right,
The French are historically like this gets ignored a lot
because of how World War Two 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 ship changes in eighteen seventy one
and all of these Latin American nations that had lusted

(28:50):
after getting like French people to train their armies start
hiring Germans um and that's where the kind of relationship
with um 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 nineteenth century,
and it actually if you want to know, like how
did a fascist take power in Chile? Well, all of

(29:14):
the guys who built the Chilean military, which is responsible
for the coup, we're guys who later were Nazis, and
sometimes some of them were Nazis when they were doing it.
So like, yeah, it did it make sense? Um? During
the Second World War, a new lieutenant general who had
been trained by German officers named Augusto Pinoche sympathized with

(29:35):
the Nazis and expressed his enchantment with Irwin 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 Ramel shade. That's what I'm here for anyway. Um,
we've already discussed the privileges Pinochet gave the colony, but

(29:57):
those privileges did come with a response of ability. As
I introduced in the last episode, Colonia Dignidot's expertise in
torture made them a perfect auxiliary to the d I
n A or dina UM, Pinochet's secret police force. We
don't know how many people they tortured, um, but thousands,
maybe like a lot. They tortured the shipload of people

(30:20):
and one of the people they by the way, this
is actually again some of these people are a lot
of these people are former Nazis. A lot of people
organized and we don't know what all of them did
during the war. Um, 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,

(30:41):
Syria's infamous said Naya prison and it's incredibly Syria has
one of the most like horrific torture programs of any
nation today. Um. It was all organized by a former
member of the s S who like put together their
torture program, and the United States funded it from two
thousand were like two thousand nine or ten, because we

(31:02):
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. You're
talking about the United States of America of America. Yes,
that's right, that's right, I know. Um, it turns out.
I mean, we were also funding Pinochet while he was

(31:23):
using Nazis to torture people. So we 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 nineteen seventies was the last time the United States
did anything questionable in Latin America. It has been nothing

(31:43):
but smooth saying 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. Um,

(32:04):
he survived, so we can laugh at the fact that
his name is Louis Peebles. Um. Peebles again, amazing. Was
the former commander of a left wing militia. Um, you
have to really be a frightening man. If you're a
militia leader named Peoples and people take you seriously like you,
that's an extra like boy named Sue level of Like, Yeah,
don't laugh at the name. It is funny that I

(32:26):
never thought twice about the name Van Peebles. But people's
by itself. Yeah it's absurd, Yeah, Louis Peebles, Louis Pee.
So Peoples 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.
Seventy three is when Pinochet is out of power. Most

(32:49):
of the resistance is stomped out in a week or so.
Peoples isn't captured by the government until nineteen seventy five.
February nineteen seventy five. So whoever he is, he's pretty
canny son of a bit. But you know, nobody's that
canny um. He was initially jailed in a military base,
but then early one Sunday morning, soldiers bound him, blindfolded him,
and drove him several hours away to Colonia Dignidad. Next

(33:11):
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 bed frame. 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

(33:31):
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

(33:53):
at least they polished the floor. Yeah, they did polish
the floor. They're Germans, they're clean people. Um. Some times
to do a problematic degree. Um. So the guy who's
doing all this, he hears a German Man talking. And
when all of this becomes public later and Shafers in
the news, he realizes the man torturing him was Paul Schaefer. Um.

(34:14):
He was teaching them how to do their job. People's
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

(34:35):
away from him cause emolested them, the ones who are
like bonded to him, because that happens too, they become
like his torture people. Oh god, damn, it's pretty bad, Paul.
This guy wait, wait, he doesn't know when to quit. Well,
no one has stopped him yet. He has not not
encountered a tremendous number of consequences to his actions so far. U,

(35:00):
everything's coming up shafer um at this point. Um. I'm
very interested now because we've talked about cult people before
and there's always 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.

(35:22):
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 it would it's easy.
I know what it is it that is coming like
you're right, you and you want you know, you're cult guys. Um,
I'm interested if you'll think it's kind of like a deceleration.
And by the way, because at the midpoint of the

(35:44):
story is he murdered Santa Claus Like it's hard. 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 notion to like pulling back
on that throttle a little bit, right. Um, So people's

(36:05):
survived his experience, and again one of the Pinochet kills
a lot of people, but not he's not a he's
not a mass murdering fascist on the scale. If he's
more like um, um, 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

(36:27):
of dictators is not tremendously. I he tortures a shipload
more people than he kills, and he doesn't have people's killed. Um.
In fact, the guys eventually released and he quite wisely
flees to Europe, which I think works out fine for Pinochet. Right. Um,
people's piece together what had happened to him. Over the
next several years, his new stories began to trickle out
about Colonia Dignidad's relationship with Pinochet. He realizes, oh, this

(36:51):
guy who and again their stories filtering back to Europe.
Again we've talked to there's a couple of people who
escape and they go to the media. Though so for
sin the beginning, there have been occasional stories in the
media about allegations that this this German compound in Chile
as host to a pedophile and that. And once pinochets
e power, they start to be stories that come out
that like they might be torturing some people. Um, so

(37:14):
this is it's there. There's a constant kind of background
conversation in Germany and in Europe about what might be
happening here. And when Peoples gets to Europe, he goes
to Amnesty International and in nineteen seventy seven they put
his testimony with a testimony of several other people who
had been tortured there and survived into a sixty page
report with the subtitle a German community in Chile a

(37:36):
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 twenty years and delay
the publication of the report until nineteen seven, So twenty years.
They're able to stop this and from getting out in
mass because he's got money. They've got money of the lawyers,

(37:58):
you know, it's it's the scientology. It there's every so
much of all of these different kind of cults that
are usually aren't involved with each other. Usually like if
you've got the hardcore, got them a less children and
murder people called, they don't really have the resources for
good lawyers and stuff. You know. Scientology never goes that
far with the brutal torture stuff because they the reason
that they have the money is that they keep it on,

(38:19):
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, you know,
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. Um. So like other escapes of

(38:43):
the colonial people settled in Europe, Brussels to be specific.
And because again this goes on for twenty years. So
he he does like live a life which is good.
Um and he continues, he spends years. Anytime anyone's willing
to talk about Paul Schaefer, he will tell his story. Meanwhile,
the torture continued. In fact, as Pinochet his regime went on. Uh,
Pinochet came to rely on Shafer more and more. In

(39:04):
the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, the Dina
started taking dissidence to the colonial for execution. The bodies
were eventually buried in mass grace. We don't know how many.
All of them were dug up and burned at some
point after this. We know they 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

(39:26):
property and whatnot, so we know what was going on.
But the remains themselves were all destroyed. Again their their Germans,
they're very thorough. Um. Yeah. And former d I n
A DINA agents have admitted to taking people there to
be disappeared. We we also do have testimony from people

(39:48):
who were like dropping off dissidents to be murdered, who
were like, yeah, that's what we did there. Um again,
no idea how many people were killed, but a lot,
a mass grave number. You know. I'm these former DINA agents,
I mean, where are they that they're in a position
to say like, oh, yeah, we disappeared all those people
after This is one of those things when you have

(40:13):
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 get 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 in that way. Pinochet's regime ends, but it's
kind of like a negotiated thing and Pinochet gets to

(40:33):
be like a Congressman for life kind of thing like
it's and things get a lot better in Chile. I
no one would disagree with that, but um, they don't.
They have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It's like in
South Africa, right, this system of apartheimes, but they don't like,
they don't like murder all of the people who did
the apartheid um. They have to integrate them into society.

(40:54):
And so a lot of these guys they say, like, Okay,
we're not gonna There are some people who do get punished,
there are people who go to prison for the stuff
they did in the regime, but a lot of these
people are basically like, we need to know what happened,
but like, we're not going to to kill you over it,
and so, and I think there are people who feel bad. Yeah, yeah,
I don't want to spend a lot of time like

(41:14):
trying to morally whatever these guys. But basically, in exchange
for information, we will yeah we won't execute you, Yeah
we won't, or we won't like whatever, put you in
prison necessary, right because we were trying to figure out
what happened who disappeared. There's a lot of people who
have questions. I don't know if my family members alive
or dead. You know, you're trying to not I'm not
trying to come down one way or the other on
it because it's not my country and not my decision

(41:35):
what should happen afterwards? Um, but yeah, that's what it's not.
The Pinochet's dictatorship doesn't end because the people like murder him,
you know. Um. So. Schaefer's nickname with the Dina was
the Professor, and the eyewitness accounts of people being sent
to the Colonial for execution all point to Schaefer being
the man who received victims and lead them to their execution.

(41:57):
He is a hands on dude, Like he's not delic
eating this ship like Hitler's a delegator. Schaefer is. If
we're gonna be executing people, I'm gonna be there like
I'm gonna be picking them up. I'm gonna be taking
them to the site like. Um. One former member of
the Colony told Bruce Falconer that he had been ordered
by Schaefer directly to drive a bus load of thirty
five political prisoners into the hills of the Colony and
leave them by the side of a dirt road. As

(42:19):
this person drove away, he heard machine gun fire. Nobodies
were ever found, and there's a bunch of stories like that.
That's generally how they go. By nineteen eighty, the Colonial
had expanded from its initial acres to more than fifteen
thousand acres. A sizeable chunk of this was stolen from
locals and the Catholic Church. Again, this comes up like
you've heard of liberation theology. There's this chunk of the

(42:40):
Catholic Church in South America during this period that's fighting
back against all of these like fascist dictators in 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 owned farmland and is like, what are
you gonna do? And so they leave and he gets it. Um, yeah,

(43:03):
and this is probably like the mid nineteen eighties is
kind of win. 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 nineteen eighty makes clear, his
Nazi passed had started to catch up to him on
the international stage. Quote. There have also been charges over

(43:25):
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 experts in performing
plastic surgery. Last December, Nazi hunters Simon of Eisenthal said

(43:45):
that he had evidence that Joseph Mingola, 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
Mingler any other Nazis lived in the colony. We know
Nazis lived there, some of them, like I was in
the idea was in the very pack or whatever. We

(44:05):
we don't have as much as I wants, it would
be good to have on like what extent they were
actually part of the underground Nazi railroad, 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. But

(44:26):
also like everything suggests that that is a thing that
he would do, that he would yea, he would this
is the guy. Yeah, yeah, I don't know if Mingolow
was there, um. Um, nobody does obviously, but um, I
think he helped a lot of hardcore Nazi war criminals side. Um.
That seems completely on brand for the time. I mean,
why not at that point and honestly on the low

(44:50):
end of his crime exactly. Yeah, maybe did that to
feel more respectable to him. Yeah, yeah, just just smuggling
some genocide committers. They already did the genocide. You should
see the ship I'm getting up to. Um. It is
unclear whether or not yet any other famous Nazis hung

(45:12):
out there, but there were definitely Nazis. Schaffer and a
lot of the oldermen were Nazi veterans. They were huge
fans of Pinochet, who was himself a fascist. That nineteen
article from the Washington Post is maybe the first place
to describe the Colonial 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

(45:32):
to fly into the Colonial 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

(45:54):
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. Chilian

(46:14):
peasants from the surrounding area, who hold the colony in
high regard, are given three medical care at its hospital,
but only during certain pre established hours. One Chili and
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

(46:35):
the idea explaining a bug by saying, oh wait, we
just want to know if you want stuff, which wouldn't
be better hosts. Yeah, it's going to be better rather
than you having to ask, like can I make a
sandwich in here? You know, we just make a sandwich,
just like a sandwich. Right now, I'm gonna go ask
for one. We just want this to be the best
damn hospital you've ever been to. It is funny that

(47:01):
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 on, 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. Maybe this might be the most
total control I've ever heard of a cult leader establishing,

(47:21):
Like to be honest, this is yeah, it's it's something else.
He's got the ship locked up, Yeah he does. And
you know who else has their ship locked up? Paul?
Please tell me the products and services that support this
podcast perfect ideological black holes inescapable, that's behind the Bastard's guarantee. Ah,

(47:52):
we're back, Paul. So we just talked about how there's
some weird ship going on with Nazis maybe getting smuggled
through here. 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 Colonial
and shape dudes s really I would have though. That's

(48:14):
the one thing that Paul Shapers insisted was I will
be scrupulous about the books. That nineteen eighty Washington Post
article noted that the Colonial maintained what it called a
mother house in Siegberg, Germany, where it would take care
of single mothers and would raise funds. Uh So they
continue to operate operate an orphanage in Germany, which they

(48:36):
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 were 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 S S.

(48:59):
Gen Role who's been hiding out in Argentina. We donate
to the Colonia. They take a cut off the top
and they pass the money onto this guy because they're
able to travel without like customs documents, Like all sorts
of shady ship is going on here. The thing the
thing to me when it gets to this point, especially
when there's when there's uh, you know, some kind of

(49:20):
when there's Christianity involved, is that what what level is
the Christianity uh entering Paul Shaffer's brain at this point?
Like is he does he still consider himself a religious person?
Like I say my prayers every night? Um? Or is

(49:40):
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. But then when when when you still are

(50:01):
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

(50:24):
of the Bible when you are smuggling Nazis through Latin
America in 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 peak I would like
into their brains is to yeah, what are they thinking
at that moment? Or like, is there a point where

(50:46):
it's just abandoned and they're just like, I got a
good thing going here, I'm gonna keep it up. Uh,
It's it's a it's a useful means of control. Still,
you know, to say that that there's a there's a
power even greater than me that's guiding everything, and yeah,
and then I'm the like I I don't I have
trouble imagining that Schaefer believes in anything but power and

(51:08):
indulging his his his his wants. I do have trouble
believing that. 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,
um using it for their own ship, right, which to me,
and it's the worst kind of Nazi, cynical Nazi at

(51:29):
least be a believer, you know. Um yeah, yeah, I
don't know. Um, it is hard to like, uh, 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

(51:51):
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. Yet it's
not like these guys ever really lay it out at
the end where they're like, you know it all bullshit,
I ad made it. Yeah, yeah, No, they don't ever
do that. Um, But yeah, I don't know. There were
constant rumors of foreign backers for the colonial rumors that
old Nazi war criminals had funneled money to it. It's

(52:13):
hospital again super good at plastic surgery, which is a
little odd for a rural Chilean medical facility that deals
primarily with obstetrics. Um. They of course ran several successful
businesses torture 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

(52:35):
central organization, which he claimed was located in Siegberg, Germany. Um,
this guy claimed that they'd put millions of dollars into
the colony rather than the funding the colony funding its
own endeavors, which I I just don't know what's going
on here, The observer went on to stay, the religious
and social aims of this group are very uncertain. It
is all very strange, and that is kind of the

(52:55):
untold story. Here'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 um 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, this
guy's got a good thing going, let's pump some money

(53:17):
into it, and like we can we can take advantage,
or if it's from sixty one, from the very start,
there's this shadow week of all of Nazis being like,
we need to build this thing. I really just don't know.
Could just be an innocent dude, could be an innocent
pedophile just working for the Nazis, Just an innocent Nazi pedophile,
just a regular nut upon the forces greater than him, exactly.

(53:40):
We've all felt that way at some point. Yeah, yeah. Um.
Journalists in nineteen eighty noted how suspicious it was that
the Colonia, ostensibly a religious mission, had no church. And
I actually think they're wrong, But that didn't even occur
to me. Yeah, there's not a single church there. Where
do these services happening. They're all in like the cafeteria.
And I actually think it's very funny that this religious

(54:04):
mission has no church. But I think the thing that
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

(54:24):
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. Um. Yeah, that's my suspicion. All the
while this is going on, the abuse continued. In nineteen
seventy one, girl Matilda's sure Gillis wrote to her mother
back in Germany, no one is getting in here and

(54:47):
nobody is getting out, um, which is certainly how she
felt at the time, but is not quite true now.
Werner Schmitko was one of the kids we talked about
in episode one. He sailed to Colonia Dignidad in nineteen
sixty two as a two year old, and a few
years later he began being molested by Paul Schaefer. Schmidka
tried to escape the colonia five times over the years,

(55:07):
and even though he was never caught in doing this,
he was always he was never like he was alway
he got out successfully every time, he was always forced
to return. Um. And this is what's interesting to me.
He'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

(55:29):
the only answer was to run away, so he kept
winding up back at the colt after escaping and getting
punished and stuff. In nineteen eight, um it was it
was ninety eight. So in 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 nineteen eighty eight before an escape happens that
generates enough news in the right media climate for the

(55:52):
international community Germany in particular, to start taking the allegations
of abuse at the colonial seriously. And it happens when
two young George and Lottie pack Moore, managed to escape
to Canada and then get to Bonne where they testify
before the Reichstag that German citizens were being sexually assaulted
and forced to stay against their will. Lottie implicated a

(56:12):
number of high ranking officials in the colonia, including doctor Hopp,
saying that he'd been allowed to marry and own a
car in return for enabling a regime of mass child rape.
Dr Hopp had been the colonials, foreign emissary. He was
the guy who would go overseas whenever there were questions
about the colonial He's the guy who's talking to the
press a lot of the time. Um he had connections
with German diplomats. He brought people back sometimes when they

(56:35):
would flee to foreign countries. When Lottie had first escaped
in nineteen eighty, he had 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, this guy gets to have
a wife in a car, and a family and a
job because he's doing this. Since Paul Schaeffer was still

(56:57):
a wanted man in Germany, he sent Dr Hopp to
represent cult in parliament. According to Reuters, hop 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 we're not subjected to forced labor. Quote. Despite this,
there have always been people, are groups who have slandered
our society or individual members in an incredibly scandalous way

(57:20):
by feeding misinformation to the press. So this is what
he says in his testimony. In nineteen nine, 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.

(57:42):
Attention was paid quite naturally to Colonia Dignidad, and an
investigation into missing persons there, including Boris wise Feiler, who
we opened the episode with, started back up. It would
be a gross misuse of the words slow to say
that justice was slow in this case. For more than
half a decade, the coloe and he has stayed closed
to the world, duing large part to the fact that

(58:03):
the police were still very sympathetic to the old regime
and thus to Schaffer. In nine six, Schaefer launched a
new so Shaefer still in control, doing his thing after
Pinochet leaves, and they're being investigated their kind of stonewalling,
forcing police out fighting it in court um and he
kind of continues business as usual, and in nineteen he

(58:24):
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 eighteen.
Now this is bad, Yeah, it's not great. Like everything

(58:46):
else Shaefer did, the Intensive Boarding School was away 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
sent their kids to the colonia, and Paul Shafer molests
and a lot of these kids. This situation goes on
until the winter of nineteen six, when a twelve year

(59:09):
old named Christo Ball smuggles a note out to his mother.
The note read take me out of here. He raped
me so yeah yeah, um, and this is the bridge
too far for whatever reason, this is the thing that
is the step too far. So she rescues him um,
which was a dicey proposition, very dangerous thing to do.

(59:29):
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 was claiming that it's done by Paul Shaper.
She did not believe local police would help her, obviously,

(59:50):
so she flees to the capital of Santiago, and she
finds the chief of Chile's National Detective Force, Louis Henriquez.
We don't often have cop heroes on a show, but
I will give Enriquez a lot of credit here. He
is um 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 are were fundamentally

(01:00:13):
sympathetic to Pinochet. That's why they're willing to protect this
massive child rape operation. But Louis Henriquez had been one
of Salvador Allende's bodyguards. He had been there in the
presidential palace when Ende committed suicide, so he was not
a Pinochete loyalist um, and he gets he hears about
what's going on, and he sticks to this case like glue.

(01:00:33):
In mid August of nineteen six 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 quote. A meeting
was called on August nine to discuss what should be done.

(01:00:56):
Schaefer seemed badly shaken as the Colonis 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 thirtieth, nineteen ninety six, Henriquez
muscled his way into Schaefer's utopia for the first time.
Enriquez had hoped to capture Schaeffer by surprise. He went

(01:01:19):
in with thirty 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 colonials were

(01:01:41):
like zombies, or maybe like robots. Henriquez would later recall
there 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
feuse cases they physically assaulted the police. Henriquez assumed these
outburst signal that they were getting close to Schaefer, but
in the in Henriquez and his police went home empty handed.

(01:02:04):
Gotta be Yeah, what a thing to see breaking into
this cult for the first time, seeing the way the
people react to the outside world coming in. It's really chilling.
Like the description of helly behaved and uh so, the
obvious question is where where was he? Like? How did
they was it? Was it that he wasn't there, that

(01:02:25):
they couldn't they couldn't get to where he was, or
we don't entirely know. The leading theory and Henriquez this
theory is that he was there, he was very close by,
but they had they had spent years building a system
of underground bunkers, and he's underground, of course, right, Yeah,
of course, this guy's got underground bunkers, underground bunkers and tunnels.

(01:02:49):
God damn yeah. I mean, he's not an unprepared man
to draw another boy Scouts comparison Paul uh So. To
his immense credit, Henriquez sticks with the case for years.
He executes more than thirty raids on the Colonia. They

(01:03:10):
don't capture Schaffer. None of these capture Schaeffer, 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 um. 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 nineties he did finally leave the country. I guess

(01:03:31):
I think Enriquez, I suspect a few of these raids happen,
and he gets closer and closer, and eventually Schaefer's like,
they're gonna get me. Eventually I have to leave, and
he gets smuggled out. Life in the colonial changed little
at first. One of his senior officers became the new
leader um, and they try to keep up a lot
of the old rules. But gradually things start to shift

(01:03:52):
and change. Right, the molestation certainly seems to have ended
when Schaefer left and things thaw a bit of Actually,
the colonial 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 close society cracks open and
like normalcy starts to creep in. In time, some cult

(01:04:14):
members started to break free of their mental programming. The
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, whatever is going on. Some of these
people realize, like, you know what this was, This was bad,
you know, UM. Some of them are probably people who
defended him because they've been five or six when they

(01:04:35):
came to the colony, or even born into the colony,
and it it's not easy to overcome all that kind
of programming. 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

(01:04:56):
were kept. They hand over information that led to the
larg just private arms cash in a Chilean history, thousands
of grenades, dozens and dozens of rifles surface to air
missile launchers like he's got a quite an arsenal um.
And they also showed Henriquez the sight of the mass
graves um, which again are empty, but there's stuff there

(01:05:17):
that ties back to people who have gone missing. Now,
one of the tips that Henriquez gets over the years
leads to investigators moving Shafer'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
leaders private like weapons. Cash Um. He had three pencils

(01:05:39):
rigged to fire twenty two 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 um, a camera that could fire darts,
and several walking canes with guns built into them. Because
Schafer was a very old man at this point, they

(01:06:01):
found a walker that he had an electrocuting machine built
into that could deliver shock. Weaponized walker. That's that's I know,
that's pretty cool, right, can give it up for I'll
give it up for that, and only that, for that,
and only that. But the weaponized walker. All right, Look,

(01:06:22):
we're fair here every now. It's incredible. Life in the
Colonial 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 don't rape kids and torture people.
Do one thing, Yeah, if you do one thing for me,

(01:06:44):
don't be a pedophile, nazi torture rap 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,
by a Chilean t V journalist Corolla Fuintez, who spent
more than a year tracking down leads. She eventually found

(01:07:05):
him in Buenos Aires, in an expensive gated community. On
March two, five, twenty four member swat team busted down
the gate and entered his house. Fuintes 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.

(01:07:27):
Shaffer did not resist arrest. As he was being hauled
away in handcuffs. Shaefer 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,

(01:07:50):
and I oh, I was gonna say, is Dwight Schultz
still alive? Because maybe he could play the the older
um uh Paul Schaefer m yeah yeah yeaph and and yeah,
maybe a Walton Goggins could play him as a man. Yeah, yeah,
Goggins is what this story needs to really really pop Netflix.

(01:08:14):
It's already there was there was a movie recently made
about the colonial But it's like a fiction movie really,
yeah it's and it stars like big names. Yeah. Um,
historical thriller, uh, starring Emma Watson, Daniel Brule, and Michael Nyquist. Wow.
M yeah yeah big names directed by Florian Gallenberger. Um. Yeah, yeah,

(01:08:41):
that's how you get for that. Yeah, Emma Watson, there's
an Emma Watson movie about this. If if you I
thought that's what this film needed. Um, I think a Goggins.
Nothing against Emma Watson, but this cries for a Goggins.
It screams to the heaven Goggin so um. Schaefer gets
extradited into Chile in May of two thousand six. He

(01:09:04):
is convicted of child molestation and sentenced to twenty 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.

(01:09:25):
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 people's response, no, I was once a guest in
your home. You were very unkind. I never did anything
to you or the colonial 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

(01:09:47):
actually even like for all that, can't even confront this
guy and admittedly did to him. Um. In two thousand
and ten, at age eighty eight, Paul Schaeffer died in
a prison hospital from heart failure. Dr Happ, one of
his chief lieutenants, lives in Germany today. They refused to
extradite him to Chile to stand trial for his crimes.
The German government has a policy of not extraditing citizens

(01:10:09):
for most reasons pretty much. Um, 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 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 uh oh wait no, no, no, wait no. Chilean

(01:10:30):
court in two thirteen, yet Chilean court um approved an
extradition request, but as of two eighteen, yeah, that's Germany want.
The Guardian article from two eighteen 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. Um,

(01:10:53):
if you're Germany, if you're Germany, you might not want
there to be headlines that involved the phrase Germany won't
jail doctor from Nazi pedophile sext. This is this is
classic are we the baddies? The situation where it's like,
oh wait where Germany? Look where we are? And that's
probably how to get on this one. Huh does this

(01:11:14):
look bad? Yeah? This might This might look bad. Um.
Several of Shaffer'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 it calls itself via Bavaria Um and it
has rebranded. Yeah, you're gonna want a new name after that.

(01:11:38):
Like that is like a restaurant in a theme park. Yeah,
it's kind of like how the town of Auschwitch changed
his name to Happy Town. The branding of this isn't
gonna go good. Um, so they're now a tourist destination
um for foreigners. They advertised that it's basically like, it's
a it's an old German village from the century, frozen

(01:12:01):
in time in the middle of Latin America. Come here
and stay and enjoy the later hosen in the broadworst
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 that's a hard no,
thanks for me. Yeah, I don't think I will be
going there. I'm very excited to see Chile one day,

(01:12:21):
but I don't think I'll be visiting Colonia Villa bavaria Um.
In fairness, a lot of the people who running now
were like victims of Shavers, 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

(01:12:42):
not the person to say, like what you should be
doing is one of the kids who survives this swinging by. Yeah,
I will not be taking a visit there though. Um.
They have returned some of the land that was stolen
from people, Um, including from the Catholic Church. They gave
like gave back a bunch of the land that was
taken under Shafer. Um and a bit of thank god,
the Catholic Church got some of their land. But yeah,

(01:13:03):
that was I know, you were really worried about those nuns.
That's all I could think about Catholic Church. That way.
We know at least some of the land is still
being used to abuse children. This story a different way,
and you were afraid there wasn't gonna be happy. Yet,
don't worry, don't worry. The Catholics are still on the ground. Um. Yeah.

(01:13:30):
The German state has offered a small stipend to victims
of Paul Shaffer. It's like a few thousand bucks basically. Um.
Although they are emphatic about this them giving the stipend
does not mean they take any responsibility for his crimes. Yeah,
no one's asking that. But you could have taken responsibility
for like trying to get him extradited. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(01:13:54):
that 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 man going timely
into it. Um. I don't know, Paul, how you doing.

(01:14:18):
I mean, this is 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. Um. Yeah,
it's really like that is just every every aspect of
the story is just true, horrific evil, and it's it's
it's one of those things where you it's it's hard

(01:14:41):
to fathom that this person is the same species as you.
You know that that this is there are people like
that that have walked this earth and and and currently
walk this earth and maybe we'll find out um uh
and even more hideous a person exists in our in
our in our midst You know that somebody's walking around
right now that's that's committing crimes like this. It's it's

(01:15:04):
just impossible to wrap your mind around the the enormity
of it. Yeah, it really is. But I will say, Paul,
I have you on speed dial. If I do find
a story that Santa Claus, we'll tell you what that
might go right to voicemail. I'm gonna get a signal
put up in the middle of Los Angeles. It's just

(01:15:28):
a silhouette of Santa Claus with a pistol to his head.
I'll know what it means. Oh good, Robert did more research. Oh,
Paul got any pluggable to plug? I mean not right now. Um,
I'm I've got some more live shows coming up in

(01:15:51):
the future, but nothing that's uh that's available yet. But
but yeah, follow me um on on Twitter at um
p F Tompkins and my live shows are at Paul
thompkins dot com slash live and I update that when
I got a new thing. So um yeah, I'll be
I'll be announcing things as they are announceable. Yeah, check
out Paul's stuff. Um and uh, I don't know, just

(01:16:15):
check out for a while, chill out. Everybody needs a
little bit of a little bit of time to distress
from this one. So we'll find a cat or a
dog somewhere absolutely, Okay, who