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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and I said Dominicana myself. I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to behind the ******** in our spooky Week Halloween podcast edition. 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 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? Ah, I enjoy Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul. Are you doing well? You know, I after our part one, I really had to take an industrial shower and just really think about where humans are 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 are, you know, basically good. And I'm ready with that attitude to go into Part 2. Wow, that is brave. Brave? Yeah. Heroic, even. Uh Hoo. Boy, I don't think it's a mistake, do you? Well. He killed Santa. He did murder Santa Claus got out of my mind. He did. He did kill the living embodiment of childhood wonderment. He killed Santa because he was jealous that the kids he was molesting would like Santa more than him. 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. Like, well, that's a bit much. Yeah, that's, that's a bit far. It can go 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 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 ******* was more or less verboten, 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, OK, 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 I can make these kids do whatever I want. I can make them disappear. Let's try it and see how it goes. Let's try it and see how it goes. I want 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 that is, you've hit upon Paul, one of the common through lines that all of our most. Dangerous ******** have. You can draw this to guys like Donald Trump. Guys like Hitler's a big part of their whole MO is just like, what if I can get away with this? Yeah. Let me give it a shot. Yeah, I'm gonna give it a shot. You know, 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, all amazing. The 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 a creative or something like, oh, you think you might want to write an give it a shot. Do it. You know, you think you want to do stand up, go out there and do some stand up. You know, you know, you think you're good enough to be in professional sports. Well, ******* try. You know, see if you can like in like in personal lives like, oh, OK, well you think you're into that person, go up and ask him out. You know, 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. Their own power plant and have a totally self-sufficient torture commune in the middle of Chile that I keep manned by abducting children at the hospital. Yeah, 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. They're let let's see what this baby can do. Yeah, let's let's let's get this thing on the ******* highway, you know? Yeah, 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 Schafer's eye, they were simply taken from their families. If said families, who were very generally impoverished villagers, complained, shape 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 ****** like this is ******. For 1000 reasons, this is an auriferous of ****** ** edness. I learned about this particular aspect of the cult from a harrowing interview and 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 abduct me so so I could be molested for years. Like, damn, it's ******* something else. Paul. Wow. 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 I think it would have been OK if I had never been born, like, considering how my life has gone. And yeah, the pain that's been in it, like, if I never been born at all, that might have been better. And I I that never left my mind. Like, yeah, 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 cycle, 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 like with fully fat and stuff like, yeah. That's somebody who knows intimately. Yeah, it's real unfair. Like it is a ****** ** 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 Schafer 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. Some of these benefits Schaefer extended to local farmers. So Pinochet is like, hey, you don't have 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 **** for 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 it it really plays on how grateful are these people to have free, free healthcare? Yeah, free healthcare 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 you're. Savings, but but yeah, you're not. You're. When your daughter broke her leg, that **** was free, like. Yeah, it's 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 ****** going on here. And they've got us back like it's a very hostile place to be looking into the colonia. So Shafer becomes the total, like almost God to his followers. They called him our eternal uncle, which you can make a a not creepy uncle joke here, but we shan't. I mean, is this where they started? Turnall 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. OK. So at this point there is still some sort of? 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 as filtered through this pedophile. He's, he's 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 into a hard liquor. So. The process of having his followers confess their sins was formalized in a practiced he called Seal a Sorge. 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 confection public confessions, and 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 **** they're talking about, you have 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? You know? Yeah. 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, like that. I I kept it 100 this week. You had to you had to come up with something. You can't walk into confession. Be like, you know what I need? I'm nailing it right now, bro. Like doing great. No notes. Yeah, it's just so it. It's also so weird because it is like. I mean, as as a kid, I remember being terrified of like minor sins that was gonna go to hell for course. Yeah, like some some stupid ******** like, but as an adult it's like. If there's God, he's got other **** 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 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, I'm in 7th grade, and I saw a bra strap, and I got excited. Is that 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. What an easy gig. Rwandan genocide and cheated on a math test. Same requires the same thing from me. Consider them taken care of. I made a note of it. Uh, 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 a Schafer's house to confess yet again and pray for forgiveness. So 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 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 sense of other residents were rewarded by having their own sins. Given without punishment. So if you tell Schafer 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, it really depends on nobody talking to each other about this stuff. Well, if two people talk, that's the devil. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 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, like folks who wind up stuck in this situation are have some sort of like they're they're dumb or they're weak. 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 #1. These aren't dumb people. They have their own power plant, like, yeah, 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 they're. These are very intelligent and 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 Doctor Niels Biterman, a Chilean psychiatrist who, an 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. Overtime, physical coercion became less necessary as the social system became rooted in the psyche of the individual. So a lot 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 the 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 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 yeah, well that wouldn't happen to me and blah, blah, 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 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 the the way he has, he has foreseen and forestalled every opposition to to, to the programming is terrifying. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and he's very. He's he's just good at it and 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 they're being separated from like their kids. They're not thinking of it as a as a punishment. You're not thinking of it as this is what Schaefer's doing to me. They're thinking about this is what I am doing. Or might 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 ****. I don't know if you're aware of this problem. I'm sure they sure do. They sure do. I'm not ashamed to admit I myself. Yeah. Wow. Wow, that's broke. Podcast history here. TMZ's front page. I want 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 they're going to find a way like life finds a way you know as as as a mathematician once said. Obviously, Paul Schaffer tried to stop this. He punished men and women who were caught together viciously and tight, and 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. 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 the thing the longer the colony 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, like, you don't you don't have to do this ****. 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 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 Schafer. 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 to marry, right and. They would go to Schafer, they would say this, and it would Shaffer's job then, if this was something that he was decided to let Mary to pick the person that they were going to marry. Now, maybe sometimes people he 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 Shafer usually did it, again, unless someone was high important enough that he couldn't **** 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 if the woman's been through menopause, right? You're not. So if some 20 year old who's got like a valuable skills, 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. What? I mean, like, what if he had thought about making a a car that ran on water? Yeah. You know, you you do have to think about, like, what could this man have done? Yeah, how many diseases could have been eradicated? Yeah. Yeah, the the the amount of human ingenuity. We would be doing Star Trek **** now if every one of these guys and there's a we we talk our, 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, yeah? Even even just to be like the head of the department, you know? Yeah, not even doing that as a scientist. Just organize it. Yes, it demotivate 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 subject of people. 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. We're gonna this thing faster, like, but no, it's not real. 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? Oh, God, no. Who? The products and services support that. Are we not? No. Are we not sponsored by Clorox anymore? So they we're not. We're not sponsored by Clorox anymore, Robert. Well, you know, Paul, have I told you about my, my, my signature cocktail? Paul, I see you're drinking out of a very fancy goblet here. And I wonder. Yes, nothing, but might be interested. I would love to hear about it. Sure. It's called a 2021 highball. 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 and 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 highball, 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 409 is fantastic and an acceptable substitute. Well, Paul, that's that's you don't know this, but that's actually very offensive to my to my culture. I'm very sorry. I do apologize now if you want a 2020. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Drink names. Alright, well, we. You can tell one of us is a professional improviser. Uh, man, let's go to Savannah. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. 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Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behindbetter. Com behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart. We're back and Paul, you mentioned a specific cleaning product that often comes, you know, the giant jugs that like those the 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 and the huge. Yeah, they're like purple and stuff. I think Fantastico is 1. When I was in Baja a few years ago, I was living with our friend David Bell, who is a writes for Cody Johnson's outfit and and does his own podcasts. Then a guest on the show I found something called mescalito. Which is a horrible it's like mezcal flavoring and 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. 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 just some ***** to bed. Hmm? 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 a barracks. Christ, 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, Zingermans 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. Get all these different countries are getting their independence and stuff, and they're all like figuring out that, like, thrust into the modern world, independent. Like, well, we need an army now. Who's gonna 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 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 **** 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 them between Chile and Germany starts. So a lot of German military advisers, 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 fascists 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 sometimes some of them were Nazis when they were doing it. So like, yeah, it did. 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 5th or 6th most overrated general officer in that war. Well now you don't need to be snarky, Robert. I bring the rammel 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 the responsibility. As I introduced in the last episode, Colonia Dignidad's expertise in torture made them a perfect auxiliary to the DIN, a ordena a secret police force. We don't know how many people they tortured, but thousands maybe, like a lot. They torture the **** load 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 Nazi specifically being the people who helped train secret police for dictators to torture. And the US 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 s s. 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. 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. And it turns out, I mean, we were also funding Pinochet while he was using Nazis to torture people. So we we do this a lot. I hope we don't do it anymore. No net. 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 Louie 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 you, you. 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 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. 73 is when Pinochet is out of power. Most of the resistance is stomped out in a week or so. Peoples isn't captured by the government until 1975 February 1975. So whoever he's, he's pretty canny. *** ** * *****. 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 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 taped to his ankles, thighs, chest, throat, **** and genitals, all hooked into a voltage machine. The first session lasted 6 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 Polish the floor. Yeah, they did Polish the floor. They're Germans. They're clean people. Sometimes do a problematic degree. So the guy who's doing all this, he he hears a German man talking. And when all of this becomes public later and shapes in the news, he realizes the man torturing him was Paul Shaffer. He was teaching them how to do their job, peoples 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 that's him training the kids, the young people. I think they're not. Not at this point, but when they grow up, the ones who don't pull away from him, Kazuma molested them. The ones who are like bonded to him? Because that happens too. They become like his torture people. Oh *** **** it's pretty bad. Paul this guy. He doesn't know when to quit. Well, no one has stopped him yet. Yeah, like he has not problem not encountered a tremendous number of consequences to his actions so far. Everything's coming up Schaefer at this point, you know? I'm very interested now because we've talked about cold 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. I cannot even imagine what it's going to be for this guy given what he's already done. I'm 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 is that that is coming. Like you're right. You want, you want you know your cult guys. I'm interested if you'll think it's kind of like a deceleration. And by the way, because of the midpoint of the story, is he murdered Santa Claus like it's hard for? Yeah, 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 celebration yet to like pulling back on that throttle a little bit, right? So peoples 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 him, he's more like Francisco Franco. He's not like a Hitler kind of guy. Like his whole thing is, I'm not gonna 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 **** load, more people than he kills and he doesn't have. Eagles killed. In fact the guys eventually released and he quite wisely flees to Europe, which I think works out fine for Pinochet right peoples piece together what had happened to him. Over the next several years as new stories began to trickle out about Colonia Dignidad's relationship with Pinochet, he realizes oh this 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 those so for since the beginning there have been occasional stories in the media about allegations that this. This German compound in Chile is host to a pedophile and that in in once Pinochet in power, there start to be stories that come out that like they might be torturing some people. So this is it's there. There's a constant kind of background conversation in Germany and in 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 in mass because. He's got money. They've got money for lawyers, you know? Yeah, it's it's the Scientology ****. Yeah. 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 ******** gonna molest children and murder people cult, 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 they keep it on, you know, on the edge of that. Shafer 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 pretty remarkable story. So, like other SKP's of the Colonia, people settled in Europe, Brussels to be specific, because again, this goes on for 20 years. So he he does like, live a life which is good. And he continues, he spends years. Anytime anyone's willing to talk about Paul Shaffer, he will, like, tell his story. Meanwhile, the torture continued. In fact, as Pinochet's regime went on, Uh, 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 they're Germans. They're very thorough. Yeah, and former DNA Dina agents have admitted to taking people there to be disappeared. We 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 DEA 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 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 ******* 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. They have a truth and reconciliation Commission. I think 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, OK, 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 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 I think there are people who feel bad, yada, yada. I don't want to spend a lot of time like trying to morally. No, whatever these guys. But basically, in exchange for information, we will, yeah. We won't execute you. Yeah, we won't let or we won't like, whatever put you in prison necessarily, like 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 members live 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 what should happen afterwards. But yeah, that's what it's not. The Pinochet dictatorship doesn't end because the people like murder him, you know? 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 **** like Hitler's a delegator, Schaefer is. If we're going to be executing people, I'm gonna 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. Under the hills of the colony and leave them by the side of a dirt Rd. As this person drove away, he heard machine gunfire. 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 4400 acres to more than 15,000 acres. A sizable 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 Catholic Church in South America during this. That's fighting back against all of these, like fascist dictators and. And malicious 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 gonna 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 weigh station in the South American Nazi underground where war criminals wanted by German, Israeli or other authorities are allowed to hide. The Chilean, who visited the colony several years ago, said that he was told by Ursula, a nurse in the colonies, ultramodern hospital, that the doctors there were expert in performing plastic surgery. Last December, Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal said that he had evidence that Joseph Mingolla, 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 live in the colony. We know Nazis lived there. Some of them had like, I was in the. It was in the Vermont whatever, right. We 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. But it kind of seems like they were a key aspect of helping like ******** war criminal Nazis move around and change their appearance and stay in the underground and avoid prosecution. And also like everything suggests that that is a thing that he would do that he would, he would make. This is the guy, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if Mingolla was there. Nobody does, obviously, but Umm, I think he helped a lot of ******** Nazi war criminal side that seems completely on brand for the. I mean, why not at that point? Yeah, and honestly, on the low end of his crimes? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Maybe he did that to feel more respectable to himself. Yeah, yeah, just just smuggling some genocide committers. They already did the genocide. Like you should see the **** 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 older men were Nazi veterans. They were huge fans of Pinochet, who was himself a fascist. That 1980 article from the Washington Post is maybe the 1st 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. Know if there were a problem without regularly entering the vast commune, Chilean peasants from the surrounding area who hold the colony and high regard are given three medical care at its hospital, but only during certain pre established hours. 1 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. Yeah. Explaining a bug by saying, oh, wait, we just want to know, if you want stuff, we should be better hosts. Yeah. Yeah, 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 huge toy. I would 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 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. Maybe. This might be the most total control I've ever heard of. A cult leader establishing. Yeah, like, to be honest, this is it's wild. Yeah, it's it's something else. He's got this **** locked up. Yeah, he does. And you know who else has their **** locked up? Paul, please tell me the products and services that support this podcast. Yeah, you're right. Mm-hmm. Perfect. Ideological black holes. Inescapable. That's the behind the ******** guarantee. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. 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Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Ohh, we're back, Paul. So we just talked about how there's some weird **** 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 she you funding it. Yay, dude. Say really? Yeah, I would have. That's the one thing that Paul Shavers insisted Obama was. I will be scrupulous about the books. That 1980 Washington Post article noted that the Colonia maintained what it called a mother house in Siegburg, Germany, where it would take care of single mothers and would raise funds. So they continue to operate 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. Couple 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 ******* s s 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 light. Customs documents, like all sorts of shady **** 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. Yeah. Is that what what level is the Christianity entering Paul Shaffer's brain at this point? Like is he is 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 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, 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. I don't know. I 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 ****** 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 you 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 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 Shafer believes in anything but power and indulging his his his his wants. Yeah, I I do have trouble believing that. Me too. Yeah. I don't know, though. Obviously there's a lot of belief in this organization, but a lot of skills. I think there's also just a lot of very cynical Nazis using it for their own **** right? Which to me is the worst kind of Nazi. Yeah, cynical Nazi. At least be a believer, you know? Yeah, yeah. I 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 ********. I had made it. Yeah. Yeah. No, they don't ever do that. But yeah, I don't know. There were a constant rumors of foreign backers. The colonia rumors that old Nazi war criminals had funneled money into it. It's 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, you know, a lot of the money may have come from that. It's hard to say. 1 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 Siegburg, Germany. This guy claimed that they'd put millions of dollars into the colony rather than the fund the colony funding its own endeavors, which I 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'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, **** this guy's got a good thing going. Let's pump some money into it and, like, we can 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 I really just don't know. It could just be an innocent dude. Could be an innocent pedophile just working for the Nazis. Just an innocent Nazi pedophile. Just a regular Nazi apona 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 they're 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 I actually think it's very funny that this religious 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 the idea that there would be a church because then people could go there when he was not there and were right. Like I am the worship, I am the the the vector of this faith. Yeah, that's my suspicion. All the while this is going on. The abuse continued. In 1971, Girl Matilda, shirtless, 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. Verner Schmidtka was one of the kids we talked about in episode one. He sailed to Colonia Dignidad in the 1962 as a 2 year old, and a few years later he began being molested by Paul Shaffer. Schmidtka tried to escape the colonia. Five times over the years and even though he was never caught in doing this, he was always, he was never like he was all he got out successfully. Every time. He was always forced to return. And this is what's interesting to me, is 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 we kept winding up back at the cult after escaping and getting punished and stuff. In 1988 it was it was 1988. So in in, Verner 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 and 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 Packmoor, managed 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 Lottie implicated a 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. Doctor Haupt had been the Colonial's 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. He had connections with German diplomats. He brought people back sometimes, and 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 is this guy gets to have a wife and a car and a family and a job because he's doing this. Since Paul Schaffer was still a wanted man in Germany, he sent Doctor Hopp to represent the cult in parliament, according to Reuters. Hop testified that quote, the group was one big family, which in 1/4 of a century had not a single divorce. Were 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's attention was paid, quite naturally, to Colonia Dignidad, and an investigation into missing persons there, including Boris Weisweiler, 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. Just launched a new so Shafer 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 now. This is really bad. Yeah, it's not great. Like everything else Shafer 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 Shaffer molests and a lot of these kids. This situation goes on until the winter of 1996 when a 12 year old named. Cristobal smuggles a note out to his mother, the note read. Take Me Out of here. He raped me. Jesus, 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 of sexual abuse of one of the kids who is claiming that it's done by Paul Schaffer. She did not. Believe local police would help her, obviously. So she flees to the capital of Santiago and she finds the chief of Chiles 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 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 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 Schafer's arrest. Henriquez takes a team to capture the Nazi pedophile cult leader. But Schafer'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 20th, 1996 to discuss what should be done. Schaefer seemed badly shaken as the Colonos discussed how to proceed. He kept his head down and never spoke a word. Shortly thereafter he disappeared into the colonial 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 Schafer'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 Rd, it was spotted by the colonias 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, Enriquez would later recall. There were machines on, off, on, off, on, off. They didn't change moods. Like normal people, though, Schafer's followers were generally subdued. At times they became aggressive, and in a few cases, they physically assaulted the police. Henriquez assumed these outbursts signal that they were getting close to Shafer, but in the end, Henriquez and his police went home empty handed. Gotta be a yeah. The first time seeing the way these people react to the outside world coming in, it's really chilling, like the description of of how they behaved. And so the obvious question is where, where was he? Like what, how did they was it? Was it that he wasn't there that they couldn't, they couldn't get to where he was or we don't entirely know. The leading theory and henrique's theory is that he was there. He was very close by, but they had, they had spent years building a system of underground. Bankers. Ohh. And he's hiding underground, of course, right? Yeah, of course. This guy's got underground bunkers. ******* underground bunkers and underground bunkers. ******* underground bunkers and tunnels. *** ****. Yeah. I mean, he's not an unprepared man, yeah. Probably another Boy Scouts comparison fall. Ohh, so two is immense. Credit Henriquez sticks with the case. Four years he executes more than 30 raids on the colonia. They don't capture Shafer. None of these capture Shafer, 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 shafers 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 Shafer left and things. Far 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 cold and who had been defending him start to cooperate with the investigation. Just like the I don't like the term brainwashing. Whatever is going on, some of these people realize, like. You know what this was? This was bad, you know? Some of them are probably people who defended him because they've been five or six when they came to the colony or even born into the colony and it it it's not easy to overcome all that kind of programming. 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 Schafer'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 cache. He had three pencils rigged to fire 22. Caliber rounds. 2 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 like ******* weaponized Walker. That's that's. I know that's pretty. All right, give it up for. I'll give it up for that and only that for that and only that. But the weaponized Walker, alright. Look, we're fair here every now. 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 don't rape kids and torture people. You do one thing for me, make it this yeah. If you do one thing for me, don't be a pedophile. Nazi torture radical. And that's all I'll ask. That's all I'll ask. Yeah. O meanwhile, Schaffer 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. Schaffer 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. Yeah, and apparently an awesome journalist. Yeah, and I I ohh I was gonna say, is Dwight Schultz still alive? Because maybe he could play the the older. Paul Schaefer. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah and and yeah. Maybe a Walton, Goggins could play him as a young man. Yeah, yeah, Goggins is what this story needs to really, really pop. Netflix is already there was there was a movie recently made about the colonia, but it's like a fiction movie. Really. Yeah, it's. And it stars like big names. Yeah, 2015, a historical thriller starring Emma Watson, Daniel Bruhl and Michael Nyquist. Hmm, yeah, yeah. Big names. Directed by Florian Gallenberger. Yeah, yeah, that's how you get for that. Yeah, Emma Watson. There's an Emma Watson movie about this. If 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 Umm 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. 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 colonia. So why were you so cruel to me? And at this point, Schafer stops talking and pretends he can no longer understand Spanish. He can't actually even, like, for all that, can't even ******* 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. Doctor Hopp, 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 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 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. Oh, wait. No, no, no. Oh wait. No. A Chilean court in 2013. Yeah. Chilean court approved an extradition request. But as of 2018, yeah. That's from 2000. Germany. Well, the, the 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 sex. This is this is classic are we the baddies? Are we situation where it's like, oh wait, we're Germany. Look what? Look where we are in that head. Probably ought to get on this one, huh? Look bad? Yeah, this might. 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, to Colonia Dignidad still stands. It now goes by a different name, Paul. It call it calls itself via Bavaria, and it has rebranded. Yeah, you're gonna want a new name after that. Like that is like a restaurant in a theme park via yeah, it's kind of like how the town of Auschwitz changed his name to Happy Town. The branding of this isn't gonna go good. So they are now a tourist destination for foreigners. They advertise that it's basically like it's a 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 later Hosen 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 they're used to be here. Yeah, 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. Don't think I'll be visiting. Yeah. Colonia villa. Bavaria. Given this, in fairness, a lot of the people who run it now, we're 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, yeah, whatever. Like, yeah, I've. I've certainly not the person to say, like, what you should be doing is one of the kids who survives. Do what you gotta 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 like gave back a bunch of the land that was taken under Shafer and a little bit of Fair. Thank God the Catholic Church got some of their land. But yeah, that was. I know you were really worried about those nuns. That's all I could think about. Catholic Church over their land back that way we know at least some of the land is still being used to abuse children. You're viewing this story a different way, and you were afraid there wasn't gonna be happy ending. Don't worry. Don't worry. The Catholics are still on the ground. Yeah, uh. The German state has offered a small stipend to victims of Paul Schafer. It's like a few 1000 bucks, basically. Although they are emphatic about this, them giving the stipend does not mean they take any responsibility for his crimes. Wow. Wow. Was like no one's asking that, but you could have taken responsibility for, like, trying to get him extradited. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that that makes it seem a little more like you're claiming responsibility. Yeah. That light 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, well, entirely into it. I don't know, Paul. How you doing? Hey, hold on. 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 pretty bad. Forget this. 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 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 walked this earth and maybe we'll find out and even more hideous 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 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 will 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, what it means. Oh, good. Robert did more research. Ohh Paul. Got any plegables to plug? I mean, not right now. I'm, I've got some more live shows coming up in the future, but nothing that's that's available yet. But but yeah, follow me on on Twitter at PF Tompkins and my live shows are at paulftompkins.com/live and I update that when I got a new thing. So, yeah, I'll be I'll be announcing things as they are accountable. Yeah, check out Paul's stuff. And. Just check out for a while. Chill out, everybody needs a little bit of. A little bit of time to destress from this one, so sure, go find a cat or a dog somewhere. Absolutely. OK. Whoo. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. 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