Dan Clore
2005-03-19 08:49:20 UTC
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[Peter Levenda's book _Unholy Alliance_ (1995), on Nazi
involvement with the occult, includes a chapter on Colonia
Dignidad.--DC]
*****
Fugitive Nazi cult leader arrested
Luke Harding in Berlin
Saturday March 12, 2005
The Guardian
A former Nazi who founded a secretive German colony in South
America where opponents of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship
were tortured has been arrested after more than a decade on
the run.
Detectives in Argentina captured Paul Schäfer, an
84-year-old German, on Thursday on the outskirts of the
capital, Buenos Aires. Schäfer has been wanted in Chile in
connection with child abuse charges since 1996, when he
disappeared. Last year a Chilean court convicted him in his
absence of child abuse, together with 26 other cult members.
Smiling and handcuffed, he refused to comment as police
officers took him to a cell in a wheelchair.
Schäfer, one of South America's most enigmatic fugitives,
was the leader of a notorious German cult in southern Chile
known as Colonia Dignidad.
A former corporal and medic in the German army during the
second world war, he moved to Chile in the early 1960s. He
established a self-sufficient colony in the mountains near
the city of Parral, 218 miles south of Santiago. Surrounded
by barbed wire and electric fences, and largely populated by
Germans, the cult remained cut off from the rest of Chile.
In 1996, a number of former residents testified that Schäfer
had systematically abused the colony's young children, some
of whom were taken from their parents at birth. Others
alleged that cult members had been mistreated and forced to
stay in the colony against their will. Chilean officials
also believe the colony was used as a centre for torture
between 1973 and 1990, during the Pinochet era, with former
Gestapo and Nazi officers giving torture lessons.
Investigators say that political prisoners, including the
former leftwing leader Alvaro Vallejos Villagran, arrested
by Pinochet's agents in May 1974, vanished after being sent
to Colonia Dignidad.
Police also want to question Schäfer about the mysterious
disappearance in 1985 of Boris Weisfeiler, an American
Jewish maths professor, who was last seen there.
Yesterday Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, took
the unusual step of welcoming Schäfer's arrest. "It's good
news. His arrest will allow a comprehensive investigation
into all the criminal activities in the former Colonia
Dignidad to be carried out," Mr Fischer said.
Schäfer and the colony had enjoyed Pinochet's protection
right until the end of his dictatorship in 1990.
Chile's deputy interior minister, Jorge Correa, said he
wanted Argentina to expel Schäfer to Chile rather than begin
an extradition process that could take months.
About 300 people, most of them Germans, still live in the
colony. Yesterday a spokesman for the group, Michael Muller,
said he was pleased by the arrest. He added: "Our colony has
reorganised itself as an open free colony, fully integrated
into Chilean society."
*****
The Independent
Nazi fugitive who ran secret German colony is arrested
By Phil Davison
12 March 2005
A former Nazi medic has been arrested in Argentina, after 40
years on the run from multiple child abuse charges in
Germany and Chile.
Paul Schaefer, 83, known as "the doctor" for his service as
a nurse in the Waffen SS, who is also suspected of aiding in
the torture of leftists under the Pinochet regime, was
finally captured near Buenos Aires on Thursday.
He is expected to be extradited to neighbouring Chile, where
he was convicted in absentia last November of sexually
abusing 26 children. His capture is a major coup for
Argentinian and Chilean police and secret services, who
worked together to track him.
Schaefer was also head of a secretive German "colony", the
Colonia Dignidad, from 1961 until his disappearance nine
years ago. Run as his personal fiefdom, the 70 square miles
of agricultural land was worked by Germans who lived behind
barbed wire, doing 100-hour weeks and apparently afraid to flee.
The few workers who did escape have described him as a
mixture of Jim Jones, the leader of the People's Temple cult
in Jonestown, Guyana, where 913 people died in a mass
suicide in 1978; and David Koresh, who died along with 73
other Branch Davidians in the fire and massacre at Waco,
Texas, in 1993.
Schaefer remained in Germany after the Second World War,
became a Protestant preacher and, in 1961, was charged with
sexually abusing children at a Lutheran orphanage he was
running near Bonn. While on bail, he fled to Chile with some
of the orphans, Lutheran supporters and Nazi sympathisers,
bought the land more than 200 miles south of Santiago and
began developing the colony, casting himself as "supreme
leader".
At its height, during the military regime of his friend
General Augusto Pinochet, it was a state within a state.
Pinochet waived taxes and the 300 German workers produced
wheat and corn, and exported timber, bratwurst, German
pastries and other items via two private airstrips. They
built internal railways and tunnels to shift timber. The
land and business were said to be worth several billion dollars.
Allowing local farmers and their children to use the
compound's 65-bed hospital and its school free, and offering
favourable trading terms, gave Schaefer a strong buffer of
local support and protection against detractors, curious
media visitors and even the Chilean police.
When persistent journalists did reach the remote colony they
were routinely intimidated by Chilean farmers and kept at a
distance by Schaefer's German guards, who patrolled the
perimeter fence with dogs and walkie-talkies.
The secrets of the miniature empire began to emerge after
Pinochet fell. Some of Schaefer's victims and former agents
spoke out and a few of the workers escaped. They said all
babies had been taken from parents at the age of two and
handed to Schaefer and his staff. Children had to call him
"Our Eternal Uncle". Adults had to work 14 hours a day,
seven days a week, without pay.
Then came the sex abuse allegations. "I was just 12 years
old but I had to stay all night in his [Schaefer's] bed,"
said Wolfgang Müller, one of the first to escape. Other
similar statements led to last November's conviction in
absentia for the sexual abuse of 26 minors.
The allegations did not stop there. After the fall of
Pinochet, victims of the regime said they had been
imprisoned and tortured at the colony. Some spoke of "the
German" or "the doctor who spoke German", who drugged them
during interrogation. Pinochet agents confessed they had
served in the colony and had seen torture in underground
chambers while interrogators played loud music by Wagner or
Mozart.
Relatives of the tens of thousands of the disappeared said
they believed the colony may have been used to dump bodies
during the Pinochet era. Some said their loved ones were
last seen in the area near Parral, the town closest to the
colony.
*****
New York Times
Fugitive Leader of Chilean Sect Is Captured in Argentina
By LARRY ROHTER
March 12, 2005
IO DE JANEIRO, March 11 -- After a manhunt that lasted
nearly a decade, the Chilean and Argentine police on Friday
announced the arrest of the fugitive leader of Colonia
Dignidad, a bizarre paramilitary religious sect of German
émigrés established in southern Chile in the early 1960s
that later allied itself with the dictatorship of Gen.
Augusto Pinochet.
The Argentine authorities said Paul Schafer, 83, a former
Luftwaffe medic, was apprehended Thursday afternoon in a
gated community outside Buenos Aires. He was convicted in
absentia by a Chilean court late last year of committing
sodomy and pedophilia with 26 children, and also faces
accusations of human rights abuses and numerous charges of
kidnapping, forced labor, fraud and tax evasion in Chile.
Mr. Schafer, a lay minister who preaches a fiery brand of
apocalyptic fundamentalism that is strongly anti-Communist
and anti-Semitic, was known to the approximately 300
residents of the Colonia Dignidad commune as "the Permanent
Uncle." He controlled every detail of their lives, deciding
whom and when they could marry and often ordering that
babies be taken from their parents at birth and raised
collectively under his charge.
According to human rights groups, Colonia Dignidad served as
a clandestine torture and detention center during the
Pinochet dictatorship. Not only did the group supply Chilean
military intelligence with a house that was used as a
regional headquarters, but political prisoners the
government wanted to stash out of sight were also
transferred to secret cells in Colonia Dignidad, according
to survivors and a Chilean government human rights report.
Among the group's other victims may be Boris Weisfeiler, an
American mathematics professor who disappeared while hiking
near Colonia Dignidad early in 1985. A Chilean military
informant later provided an account, which the American
Embassy deemed "plausible," saying Dr. Weisfeiler, a Russian
Jewish immigrant, had been executed there on Mr. Schafer's
orders.
Because of its ties to the Pinochet dictatorship, Colonia
Dignidad was allowed to function as "a state within a
state," in the words of a Chilean congressional
investigating committee. Barricades, barbed wire, roadblocks
and searchlights were used to keep the outside world at bay.
With the return of democracy to Chile in 1990, Colonia
Dignidad fell into disfavor with the new government and soon
lost its charity status. But powerful allies within the
military and intelligence apparatus continued to protect the
group until 1996, when a student at the sect's boarding
school smuggled out a letter to his mother complaining that
Mr. Schafer was sexually molesting him.
Since then, Mr. Schafer has been on the run, with sightings
of him reported in various parts of Chile and Argentina.
Chilean authorities said Friday that they would like to see
him expelled from Argentina, which would avoid a long,
drawn-out extradition battle, but Germany and France have
also filed charges against him.
*****
Notorious Chile fugitive captured in Argentina
2005-03-12
Associated Press
The former head of a secretive German colony in southern
Chile was captured Thursday near the Argentine capital,
ending nearly a decade as a fugitive from Chilean justice on
child sexual abuse charges.
One of South America's most enigmatic fugitives, 84-year-old
Paul Schaffer, was arrested on the outskirts of Buenos Aires
and moved late Thursday by wheelchair into a downtown
holding cell for his first night in custody.
Smiling and handcuffed, the gray-haired man in brown jacket
and beige pants was deluged by local journalists with
questions as he was rolled past in the wheelchair. But he
silently clasped a soft drink and refused to say anything.
While the sex abuse charges were the most serious ones he
faces, Schaffer was arrested Thursday in connection with the
disappearance of a dissident at the colony in the early
years of 1973-90 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Schaffer and other leaders of the colony were repeatedly
accused here and abroad of a number of human rights abuses,
including holding many of the nearly 350 members of the
enclave against their will and of allowing the colony to be
used as a torture and execution center by Pinochet's
security services.
Colony leaders angrily deny the accusations, calling them a
communist-inspired smear campaign.
In Santiago, the arrest ended years of mystery about the
whereabouts of the elusive Shaffer and prompted an immediate
government response.
Chile's deputy interior minister, Jorge Correa, declared
that his government wanted Argentina to quickly expel
Schaffer to Chile rather than begin a tedious extradition
process that could take months or longer.
President Ricardo Lagos said the arrest "leaves us all happy."
An unexpected reaction came from the colony once led by
Schaffer.
At the entrance to the enclave, a spokesman who identified
himself as Michael Muller, praised the arrest, saying
Schaffer has "fled from justice."
"Our colony has reoriented its life, reorganized itself as
an open, free colony, fully integrated to Chilean society,"
Muller said reading from a prepared statement.
*****
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[Peter Levenda's book _Unholy Alliance_ (1995), on Nazi
involvement with the occult, includes a chapter on Colonia
Dignidad.--DC]
*****
Fugitive Nazi cult leader arrested
Luke Harding in Berlin
Saturday March 12, 2005
The Guardian
A former Nazi who founded a secretive German colony in South
America where opponents of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship
were tortured has been arrested after more than a decade on
the run.
Detectives in Argentina captured Paul Schäfer, an
84-year-old German, on Thursday on the outskirts of the
capital, Buenos Aires. Schäfer has been wanted in Chile in
connection with child abuse charges since 1996, when he
disappeared. Last year a Chilean court convicted him in his
absence of child abuse, together with 26 other cult members.
Smiling and handcuffed, he refused to comment as police
officers took him to a cell in a wheelchair.
Schäfer, one of South America's most enigmatic fugitives,
was the leader of a notorious German cult in southern Chile
known as Colonia Dignidad.
A former corporal and medic in the German army during the
second world war, he moved to Chile in the early 1960s. He
established a self-sufficient colony in the mountains near
the city of Parral, 218 miles south of Santiago. Surrounded
by barbed wire and electric fences, and largely populated by
Germans, the cult remained cut off from the rest of Chile.
In 1996, a number of former residents testified that Schäfer
had systematically abused the colony's young children, some
of whom were taken from their parents at birth. Others
alleged that cult members had been mistreated and forced to
stay in the colony against their will. Chilean officials
also believe the colony was used as a centre for torture
between 1973 and 1990, during the Pinochet era, with former
Gestapo and Nazi officers giving torture lessons.
Investigators say that political prisoners, including the
former leftwing leader Alvaro Vallejos Villagran, arrested
by Pinochet's agents in May 1974, vanished after being sent
to Colonia Dignidad.
Police also want to question Schäfer about the mysterious
disappearance in 1985 of Boris Weisfeiler, an American
Jewish maths professor, who was last seen there.
Yesterday Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, took
the unusual step of welcoming Schäfer's arrest. "It's good
news. His arrest will allow a comprehensive investigation
into all the criminal activities in the former Colonia
Dignidad to be carried out," Mr Fischer said.
Schäfer and the colony had enjoyed Pinochet's protection
right until the end of his dictatorship in 1990.
Chile's deputy interior minister, Jorge Correa, said he
wanted Argentina to expel Schäfer to Chile rather than begin
an extradition process that could take months.
About 300 people, most of them Germans, still live in the
colony. Yesterday a spokesman for the group, Michael Muller,
said he was pleased by the arrest. He added: "Our colony has
reorganised itself as an open free colony, fully integrated
into Chilean society."
*****
The Independent
Nazi fugitive who ran secret German colony is arrested
By Phil Davison
12 March 2005
A former Nazi medic has been arrested in Argentina, after 40
years on the run from multiple child abuse charges in
Germany and Chile.
Paul Schaefer, 83, known as "the doctor" for his service as
a nurse in the Waffen SS, who is also suspected of aiding in
the torture of leftists under the Pinochet regime, was
finally captured near Buenos Aires on Thursday.
He is expected to be extradited to neighbouring Chile, where
he was convicted in absentia last November of sexually
abusing 26 children. His capture is a major coup for
Argentinian and Chilean police and secret services, who
worked together to track him.
Schaefer was also head of a secretive German "colony", the
Colonia Dignidad, from 1961 until his disappearance nine
years ago. Run as his personal fiefdom, the 70 square miles
of agricultural land was worked by Germans who lived behind
barbed wire, doing 100-hour weeks and apparently afraid to flee.
The few workers who did escape have described him as a
mixture of Jim Jones, the leader of the People's Temple cult
in Jonestown, Guyana, where 913 people died in a mass
suicide in 1978; and David Koresh, who died along with 73
other Branch Davidians in the fire and massacre at Waco,
Texas, in 1993.
Schaefer remained in Germany after the Second World War,
became a Protestant preacher and, in 1961, was charged with
sexually abusing children at a Lutheran orphanage he was
running near Bonn. While on bail, he fled to Chile with some
of the orphans, Lutheran supporters and Nazi sympathisers,
bought the land more than 200 miles south of Santiago and
began developing the colony, casting himself as "supreme
leader".
At its height, during the military regime of his friend
General Augusto Pinochet, it was a state within a state.
Pinochet waived taxes and the 300 German workers produced
wheat and corn, and exported timber, bratwurst, German
pastries and other items via two private airstrips. They
built internal railways and tunnels to shift timber. The
land and business were said to be worth several billion dollars.
Allowing local farmers and their children to use the
compound's 65-bed hospital and its school free, and offering
favourable trading terms, gave Schaefer a strong buffer of
local support and protection against detractors, curious
media visitors and even the Chilean police.
When persistent journalists did reach the remote colony they
were routinely intimidated by Chilean farmers and kept at a
distance by Schaefer's German guards, who patrolled the
perimeter fence with dogs and walkie-talkies.
The secrets of the miniature empire began to emerge after
Pinochet fell. Some of Schaefer's victims and former agents
spoke out and a few of the workers escaped. They said all
babies had been taken from parents at the age of two and
handed to Schaefer and his staff. Children had to call him
"Our Eternal Uncle". Adults had to work 14 hours a day,
seven days a week, without pay.
Then came the sex abuse allegations. "I was just 12 years
old but I had to stay all night in his [Schaefer's] bed,"
said Wolfgang Müller, one of the first to escape. Other
similar statements led to last November's conviction in
absentia for the sexual abuse of 26 minors.
The allegations did not stop there. After the fall of
Pinochet, victims of the regime said they had been
imprisoned and tortured at the colony. Some spoke of "the
German" or "the doctor who spoke German", who drugged them
during interrogation. Pinochet agents confessed they had
served in the colony and had seen torture in underground
chambers while interrogators played loud music by Wagner or
Mozart.
Relatives of the tens of thousands of the disappeared said
they believed the colony may have been used to dump bodies
during the Pinochet era. Some said their loved ones were
last seen in the area near Parral, the town closest to the
colony.
*****
New York Times
Fugitive Leader of Chilean Sect Is Captured in Argentina
By LARRY ROHTER
March 12, 2005
IO DE JANEIRO, March 11 -- After a manhunt that lasted
nearly a decade, the Chilean and Argentine police on Friday
announced the arrest of the fugitive leader of Colonia
Dignidad, a bizarre paramilitary religious sect of German
émigrés established in southern Chile in the early 1960s
that later allied itself with the dictatorship of Gen.
Augusto Pinochet.
The Argentine authorities said Paul Schafer, 83, a former
Luftwaffe medic, was apprehended Thursday afternoon in a
gated community outside Buenos Aires. He was convicted in
absentia by a Chilean court late last year of committing
sodomy and pedophilia with 26 children, and also faces
accusations of human rights abuses and numerous charges of
kidnapping, forced labor, fraud and tax evasion in Chile.
Mr. Schafer, a lay minister who preaches a fiery brand of
apocalyptic fundamentalism that is strongly anti-Communist
and anti-Semitic, was known to the approximately 300
residents of the Colonia Dignidad commune as "the Permanent
Uncle." He controlled every detail of their lives, deciding
whom and when they could marry and often ordering that
babies be taken from their parents at birth and raised
collectively under his charge.
According to human rights groups, Colonia Dignidad served as
a clandestine torture and detention center during the
Pinochet dictatorship. Not only did the group supply Chilean
military intelligence with a house that was used as a
regional headquarters, but political prisoners the
government wanted to stash out of sight were also
transferred to secret cells in Colonia Dignidad, according
to survivors and a Chilean government human rights report.
Among the group's other victims may be Boris Weisfeiler, an
American mathematics professor who disappeared while hiking
near Colonia Dignidad early in 1985. A Chilean military
informant later provided an account, which the American
Embassy deemed "plausible," saying Dr. Weisfeiler, a Russian
Jewish immigrant, had been executed there on Mr. Schafer's
orders.
Because of its ties to the Pinochet dictatorship, Colonia
Dignidad was allowed to function as "a state within a
state," in the words of a Chilean congressional
investigating committee. Barricades, barbed wire, roadblocks
and searchlights were used to keep the outside world at bay.
With the return of democracy to Chile in 1990, Colonia
Dignidad fell into disfavor with the new government and soon
lost its charity status. But powerful allies within the
military and intelligence apparatus continued to protect the
group until 1996, when a student at the sect's boarding
school smuggled out a letter to his mother complaining that
Mr. Schafer was sexually molesting him.
Since then, Mr. Schafer has been on the run, with sightings
of him reported in various parts of Chile and Argentina.
Chilean authorities said Friday that they would like to see
him expelled from Argentina, which would avoid a long,
drawn-out extradition battle, but Germany and France have
also filed charges against him.
*****
Notorious Chile fugitive captured in Argentina
2005-03-12
Associated Press
The former head of a secretive German colony in southern
Chile was captured Thursday near the Argentine capital,
ending nearly a decade as a fugitive from Chilean justice on
child sexual abuse charges.
One of South America's most enigmatic fugitives, 84-year-old
Paul Schaffer, was arrested on the outskirts of Buenos Aires
and moved late Thursday by wheelchair into a downtown
holding cell for his first night in custody.
Smiling and handcuffed, the gray-haired man in brown jacket
and beige pants was deluged by local journalists with
questions as he was rolled past in the wheelchair. But he
silently clasped a soft drink and refused to say anything.
While the sex abuse charges were the most serious ones he
faces, Schaffer was arrested Thursday in connection with the
disappearance of a dissident at the colony in the early
years of 1973-90 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
Schaffer and other leaders of the colony were repeatedly
accused here and abroad of a number of human rights abuses,
including holding many of the nearly 350 members of the
enclave against their will and of allowing the colony to be
used as a torture and execution center by Pinochet's
security services.
Colony leaders angrily deny the accusations, calling them a
communist-inspired smear campaign.
In Santiago, the arrest ended years of mystery about the
whereabouts of the elusive Shaffer and prompted an immediate
government response.
Chile's deputy interior minister, Jorge Correa, declared
that his government wanted Argentina to quickly expel
Schaffer to Chile rather than begin a tedious extradition
process that could take months or longer.
President Ricardo Lagos said the arrest "leaves us all happy."
An unexpected reaction came from the colony once led by
Schaffer.
At the entrance to the enclave, a spokesman who identified
himself as Michael Muller, praised the arrest, saying
Schaffer has "fled from justice."
"Our colony has reoriented its life, reorganized itself as
an open, free colony, fully integrated to Chilean society,"
Muller said reading from a prepared statement.
*****
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"