Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Nazi Pedophile Cult Leader who Murdered Santa (With Paul F. Tompkins)

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

Robert is joined by Paul F. Tompkins to discuss Nazi Cult Leader, Paul Schäfer.FOOTNOTES: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/paul-schafer-nazi-colonel-who-established-anti-semitic-colony-chile-after-war-1981014.html https://www.dw.com/en/ex-nazi-tyrannical-cult-leader-dies-in-chile/a-5503076 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/07/14/chilean-victims-of-ex-nazis-cult-of-horrors-may-finally-get-some-answers/ https://www.dw.com/en/chile-germany-establish-colonia-dignidad-commission/a-39682775 https://theamericanscholar.org/the-torture-colony/# https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/02/11/colonia-dignidad-nobody-comes-nobody-goes-mystery-veils-colony-in-chile/6fbfe01c-9cc2-424e-a225-daf41296cb92/?utm_term=.f630845c431d&itid=lk_inline_manual_30 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-48318295 https://www.ecchr.eu/en/case/colonia-dignidad-remains-a-dark-chapter-of-german-legal-history/ https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/world/americas/at-cults-enclave-in-chile-guns-and-intelligence-files.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/19/chile-former-spy-germans-sentenced-kidnappings-colonia-dignidad https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-a-nazi-pedophiles-horrifying-chilean-child-rape-cult https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/world/hints-of-cruel-fate-for-american-lost-in-chile.html https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-chile-sect/insight-german-sect-victims-seek-escape-from-chilean-nightmare-past-idUSBRE8480MN20120509 https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=67352 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wow, that is quite a story. And the FBI is still looking for you, huh? Yeah, and it's like, I'm easy to find. Yeah, I mean, you are right there. I'm right here right now. Oh, good ton. Oh my goodness, I didn't notice you all come in.

I was just chatting with my friend Paul F. Tompkins. Paul. We get carried away. The audience is here. What? Oh, hi guys. How are you all doing? I hope 2021's treated you well. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history.

And today, Paul, I thought I might have you on, along with all of our friends here, to talk about how do you... Let me start with this simple question, Paul. How do you feel about Nazis? Ooh, I gotta say, and I hope this is not uncool, but not a fan. Not a fan. Not a fan of Nazis. Okay.

Now, ancillary question, Paul. Do you dislike either chocolate or peanut butter, but like Reese's peanut butter cups? I'm gonna say I like them both individually and in the combination. Okay, okay. Interesting. Is there anything that in combination you like, but alone you don't like? Yeah, there are certain tastes like orange or tomato. I like them in different forms, but I don't like them as their own thing.

Okay. And this is kind of like that, maybe, maybe, because we've got a Nazi, right? Don't like Nazis. But he's also a coat leader and a torturer for the Chilean government and a pedophile. I don't actually think you're gonna like all those things in combination. Yeah. Now that I read it out. Let me tell you something.

If a pedophile was turning a corner and ran into a torturer for the Chilean government and they became the same thing, I wouldn't think it was a great taste that went... That tasted better together. It would mash up if it's the pedophile truck hitting the Chilean torturer truck hitting the Nazi truck. That's right. That doesn't make a good mix. I would like to see those trucks hit each other though.

I would be fun to see those trucks hit each other. Yeah, I actually think I would enjoy seeing them collide, but not merge their skills. Anyway, this has been a tortured way of introducing the tale of a guy named Paul Schaefer. Did you ever heard of Paul Schaefer? I mean, I've heard of a Paul Schaefer. Not the Letterman guy. I have to say the Letterman guy, this might be the most unfortunate person other than Hitler to share a name with.

The last game are spelled completely different. It's such an unfortunate thing when that happens. Yeah, it's really not great. Speaking as a Robert Evans. But my Robert Evans just made Godfather. That's right. I mean, probably had a couple of people tortured, right? In Hollywood in like the 70s.

Emotionally for sure. Emotionally for certain. Yeah, I mean, didn't he work with Kubrick, right? Yeah. So, on January 4th, 1985, an American mathematics professor named Boris Weisfeiler was hiking in the Andean foothills in Chile. Boris was the son of a Jewish scientist who'd been forced to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s in order to, you know, not get murdered.

His sister still lived in the Soviet Union. Boris was an American citizen, though, and his disappearance that night would mark him out as the only US citizen who was disappeared by the regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet. So, Boris Weisfeiler. Now, as best we can tell, a local that Weisfeiler met noticed that he was wearing an old backpack that he'd taken with him from Russia that had Cyrillic letters on it, and he was dressed in khaki pants. And under Pinochet, communism, not good, not big fans of communism.

So this local sees he's got Cyrillic writing on his backpack, turns him into the state authorities, who turn him over not to a government agency, but to a group of German nationals who lived in a nearby cult compound and specialized in torture for the Pinochet regime, as well as making bratwurst. Boris was tortured horribly for an unknown period of time before being shot in the head and dumped into a mass grave. I shouldn't have had that right after the bratwurst line. Bratwurst is part of life.

It is, especially for these guys. Exactly. Now, while Boris's father had succeeded in escaping the Nazis, Boris was not so lucky, because the German nationals who carried out his torture and execution were led by a charismatic Nazi apocalypse preacher named Paul Schaefer. It is entirely possible that when the time came, Paul himself pulled the trigger. And that's our little introduction to what we're talking about today. Are you pumped, Paul?

My appetite has been quetted, much like the mention of bratwurst has done. I could go for some bratwurst. One thing that's fun about this week, Paul, is we're talking about a bastard who shares your first name, and the episode I'm writing this week is a bastard who shares my first name. I'm writing an episode about Robert Baden Powell of The Boy Scouts. You know The Boy Scouts have been up to some fucked up shit when in the middle of a discussion of Nazi pedophile torturers, you mention them and go, ooh.

What a monster mash for this Halloween season. Yeah, it is the season, Paul. Paul Schaefer Schneider was born in the town of Siegberg on December 4th, 1921. Or he was born in Bonn. It's also possible he was born in the small town of Troidorf near the Dutch German border. I think all these towns are kind of near each other. As you might guess from the fact that credible sources have all provided me with three different birthplaces for the man, there's some mixed up facts about his early life.

Some stuff happened in Germany about 20 years after he was born that made record keeping less than ideal in parts of the country due to, shall we say, spontaneous fires. So, yeah, he was born somewhere near that Dutch German border area. We don't know a tremendous amount about his early life. He seems to have been a very poor student and quite clumsy. The reason we know this is because we have one clear story from his childhood and it's that while he was a preteen, he was attempting to untie his shoelaces with a fork. He screwed up and he gouged out his own right eye.

I mean, the physics of it. I know, right? You're working through it in your head right now trying to figure out how you do it. I mean, wow. Like if this was a sketch, how do you even fake that? Had he had a rib removed, usually that's for another purpose. I mean, that is, wow, that's a real go-getter. That's an, I'm not a coordinated man, but that is a fascinating act of discoordination.

It's the antithesis of parkour. So when he was 12, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and since Paul was the sort of young man who was dumb enough to gouge out his own eye while untieing his shoe, he really liked the Nazis, big, big Hitler fan from an early age, probably tied to the fact that he was not competent to untie his own shoe without serious injury. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Paul tried to join the elite Schutstaffel or SS. They rejected him because he was missing an eye. Yeah, buddy, you're too dumb for the SS.

You can't, I mean, look, if you're talking about an elite force of the master race, you can't have a one-eyed guy in there. No, no, unless he lost it in a cool way. Exactly, but somebody's gonna ask eventually. Somebody's gonna ask, and you're gonna say, well, so you know how your shoes get really tight? And you know forks? You know forks, those tricky bastards?

Really they're the Jews of the silverware world. Oh, Nazis. So Paul was enthusiastic about Nazism still, and he joined either the army or the air force. I've heard different explanations of this, too. I think it's most likely he joined the Wehrmacht because he, so he worked as a nurse, some sources will say medic, I think they were kind of the same basic gig at that time, in a field hospital in occupied France throughout the war, which is one of the better jobs you could have in the German army, right?

The nightmare is being sent east, being stationed in France is like, that's really where you want to be. He ended World War II as a corporal without a particularly exciting war experience. Corporal's also the same rank Adolf Hitler attained in World War I, which may have brought Paul some comfort as he prepared to endure several horrible years if everyone around him pretending they had not been Nazis for a while. Awkward parties. That must be tough.

So what did you get up to? Yeah, people are trying to pin down times and dates, locations. Yeah. I was at school, I think. Yeah, yeah, I was working on my degree. I've been rebuilding a classic car. I've used a hot air balloon trying to break a record. Around Seveld in 17 years or so.

So Paul had not, again, when the war ends, we tried to punish some of the Nazis. Paul's a corporal who worked in a field hospital. Nobody's after this guy, right? You'll hear people be like, he was hiding from the Allies. I don't think the Allies were looking for corporals who worked in field hospitals. And I've never heard any allegations. He was involved in any war crimes, which I'm not saying, obviously, to defend him. He would have absolutely done a war crime if he could have.

I don't think the Nazis thought he was competent enough to do war crimes. We got to keep this guy away from the war crimes. Look, we got it working just so. Whatever you do, don't let paper in here. This shit is a well-willed machine. Don't let the port guy into it. It's a Gomer pile of the Third Reich. So yeah, he becomes a Lutheran pastor after the war, and he's hired to be a young people's

leader at the Evangelical Free Church, where he preached the gospel and told boys how good it was to be abstinent. Now, that's a red flag to me. Some people are fine with that. I think if you're an adult and you decide to make it your job to tell teenage boys how bad sex is, there might be something questionable about you. Yeah. I mean, it's like having grown up in religion, that's just par for the course.

It's like it's always a part of everything. But if you say, I want to focus on that, I think that you have to be a little concerned. Yeah, there's probably something up there. And there was with Paul, because not long into his gig, people at the church started to suspect that he had mistreated some of the boys in his care, and you don't get more details on than that in this instance. We can guess what he was doing because of the stuff that came out later, although just knowing the way, again, this guy's a pedophile on an industrial scale.

I don't actually know if he'd started fully molesting them. It may have been because people often take time to build up. He may have just been kind of a little bit inappropriate touching and stuff. He may have not built up to that at this point. We really don't know. The rumors are... Although mistreat, I mean, usually they'll say something specific if they can say a specific thing, but when it gets too grim, that's when the euphemisms come out.

Yeah, exactly. So we don't know how bad it was at this stage, but the rumors about him were vague enough that there were no criminal charges filed, although he was forced out of the free church. Now he had a lot of fans even at this point. He's a very charismatic guy, and so there were a lot of adults at the free church who were really surprised that he gets fired and still really liked him. One woman who knew him at the time later told a documentarian, quote, after Schaefer was fired, he lived for a while in the forest.

He said he had a direct encounter with Jesus there and that Jesus had chosen him for a mission, founding something like a community of true Christians. So already, I mean, we've had a few red flags. Being a Nazi, red flag number one. No, I feel like, let's say I'm out in the forest and Jesus appears to me and says he's got a mission for me. Yeah. Let's say that, Paul.

I have to think back on all the people who've said similar things and how successful were those missions. Yeah. How often do those missions not end as nightmares? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, Jesus had his mission accomplished, and then he was like, I'll come back when

I'm ready. When I'm done. Yeah. He never said anything about, and here in the here, I'm going to give you guys assignments. I mean, to be honest, what I respect about Jesus is the same thing that I respect about the Zemeckis brothers, where you do one great thing and you're like, you know what? I don't need to do any more of these. I don't need to come back.

We don't need to reboot back to the future. We're good. We're good. We don't need a second coming. I got it right. That's why we call Jesus the Marty McFly of religion. Yes. If people were wondering.

If people were wondering. So he goes into the woods, God tells him to create a community of true Christian believers, and so he becomes a roving Lutheran pastor, and he spends the next several years traveling the countryside dressed in leaderhosen playing acoustic guitar and singing songs to kids about how awesome abstinence is a couple of legs there. I mean, even back then, when a priest brings out the guitar, this is such a drag. I don't know. I was a kid.

I didn't like the guitar mass. I liked the really old stuff. I like the old hams. I like the old stuff. There's gravity to it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

But the guitar mass is like, I can get this somewhere else. Yeah. What are you here doing this for? Yeah. I don't need it. The only guitar based religious music I want is that one Peter, Paul and Mary Christmas concert. Great album.

Exactly. Although speaking of people with troubling histories involving children. I was not aware. Oh, it was either Peter or Paul. I think. Yeah. Anyway, whatever. We're really racking them up today.

Yeah. So, I mean, you've got a Nazi who gets kicked out of his first church job for mistreating boys and then decides to form a community of true believers by wandering the woods and playing acoustic guitar for children about how good it is not to have sex. Already, also wearing tight leather pants the whole time. More red flags than a Communist Party rally at this point. Like just a lot of them. That said, this is also the 40s and 50s.

People are not as suspicious about such things. Like there's I think probably most people don't even really understand that that's possible that like a man could do that to a child, which is why a lot of this is, you know, able to happen. Paul develops a following and at prayer meetings, he would encourage his listeners to come up and confess their sins. Over years on the road, he honed his craft and he became an exceptional public speaker. Skill augmented his natural charisma and as hard to imagine as it is to imagine, he must

have had natural charisma. There's a good documentary. It's a German language documentary, but it's on Netflix called Colonia. That's about Paul Schaefer and everything we're talking about today. There's some audio of him from this period. He sounds like Hitler and I'm not saying that because like all German men sound like it. No, he, I don't speak German.

I have listened to a lot of Hitler speeches with the subtitles on. The cadence of his voice is Hitlerian and other Germans will say he spoke and I don't even know if it was conscious. This is a kid who grows up during Hitler's rise to power. That may just have been how he internalized, this is how you speak to a crowd. But he has that kind of speaking skill and it has an effect on people. He draws together hundreds of very dedicated followers over the course of a couple of years. One follower who first met him at a prayer meeting in 1952 said that he was so charming

that charisma radiated out of his body like beams of light. But it's the same thing with like any time I hear this about somebody who's a leader of some kind of cult, whether it's a religious cult or Hitler or whatever, there's always this thing where people say like he just transfixed people, he just couldn't look away. And then you see this person, you're like this dude, this guy, this motherfucker. Whenever I see, like I can understand I guess on some level that like Hitler got people all worked up. He tapped into the defeated aspect of the German people and it was like guess what, you're

not defeated, we're the greatest in the world. And I can see how he could cast a spell on someone. But it's the charisma thing that always throws me. They never seem charismatic when I see them. I think part of it is because charisma is so dependent upon the audience, right? There are, it's like with, there's people who absolutely love Beyonce. Obviously, she's huge, a massive, massive, massive star, millions of people are drawn to her.

I don't care one way or the other about her, like that's not an insult, I just like whatever charisma she has, it doesn't like do the thing for me. I am magnetically attracted to Pedro Pascal and I assume there are people in the world who are not, although I can't get inside of that head. Who would dare? Who would dare? The funniest thing about, about his charisma, Paul, the absolute funniest thing about his charisma is that if you look at, again, Colonia Dignidad, this, this documentary on, on Netflix,

if you look at the early footage of him from like the 50s when he's still a youngish guy, did you ever watch Star Trek the next generation? Of course you watched Star Trek. He looks like Barkley, like he's, he looks like Reginald Barkley, it's, it's very weird because again, hundreds of people followed this man into an unthinkable situation and he looks like Barkley, what a world. It just goes to show, it's just like, it's in F, it's like Trump, there are people who find that man irresistible and he looks like Donald Trump.

Yeah, the pictures of him, it's like, yeah, as this, as this like great Superman are always so, it's, it's chilling in a way because it's like you, are we looking at the same dude? Yeah, what is happening here and it's that they have a whole, however many years they've been alive of life that has built them into a person who finds this person charismatic. That's the way it, you know, that it's like I say, I think there is a cult who couldn't snare everyone. I don't think anybody is impossible to be brought in by a cult. I don't think it's, unless maybe you've already been in a cult and like you get that kind

of like PTSD, but I think everybody could at some point in their life be reached by some cult out there. It just depends. It's like a drug. Anybody could become an addict to something, you know? Well, I accept your cult challenge and we'll see about that. All right, Paul, are we having a cult off? Yeah, I'm just starting making calls.

Okay. You know, this is, this is what Elron Hubbard and Frank, or Robert Heinlein did. And we got both the Church of Scientology and the Libertarian Party out of it. So I think this could go really well. We'll do it good though. We'll do it good though. We'll do it good. We'll do it good.

Yeah. We'll do, we'll be nice cults. I'm still gonna, I'm still gonna have 20 year olds build a navy for me and search for gold in the Caribbean. Oh no, that is non-negotiable. That is non-negotiable. Yes, absolutely. A lot of teenagers searching for gold for me.

So after several years in the proverbial and also sometimes literal wilderness, because I think he did live in the woods sometimes, Paul Schaefer had gathered enough followers and money because, you know, again, part of the whole cult thing is you get a bunch of people together, you have them pool their money so you can buy things. They buy a compound, which they intend to turn into an orphanage outside of a town called Troidorf for war widows and orphaned children. Now again, this is the early fifties, mid fifties in Germany, a lot of desperate ass people. So like as a, my family, my grandpa was stationed in Germany immediately after the war along

with a bunch of his brothers. Our family heirlooms are like, we have a bunch of 150 year old antique precious grandfather clocks that he bought for like pennies because everybody was starving in Germany. And it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, you know, that was the situation. There was nothing. So Paul is opening the center is like, okay, there's all these women whose entire families are gone. It's just them and kids, sometimes not even their kids, just children they took from their

destroyed town or from this apartment building that collapsed. They need a place to stay. And that's on the surface a very good thing to do, right? And a lot of these people are also refugees from the East people who, when the Soviets occupy, there's this, again, never to equate Soviet with Nazi war crimes because there's no equating, but a couple of million German women get raped during the occupation of Germany. It's a fucking nightmare. So a lot of these women who like have kids as a result of this and have no resources.

And again, on the surface, creating a place to take care of these people, to educate their kids, to give them food, a leg up, one of the best things you could possibly do. But also, if you're a predator, anyone who's going to need that facility is going to be someone with almost no recourse to deal with the fact that you're preying on their children. Like it's both, you could say one of the best things you could do and also as a pedophile, the best kind of situation you could create for yourself. And that's what Paul is doing. It's pretty bad, Paul.

It's pretty bad. And also, this has never really talked about any of the coverage I've seen, but it has to have affected it. When you think about the women in that situation and what they had lived through during the war, I'm going to guess they're able to tolerate a lot more fucked up shit from Paul, just because it's like, well, I lived through World War II. Your barometer for what is an unacceptable situation is just completely off forever. I think that's a big factor in this whole story.

So Paul offers these women and their families food security and stability and the people who are not. So there's a mix of, he's got these people who are living in the orphanage because they have nothing and all of these people who live in the area around who are like middle class and they're funding all of this because they tithe 10% of their income to Paul. That's one of the requirements for being in his cult. The other is that you have to confess your sins daily, ideally to him. I think it's always to him at this stage, yeah, they have these big meetings where everybody

talks about all the bad stuff they've done, which we talked about Synanon last time, Paul. This is happening at the same time, late 50s, early 60s, all of these different cults are doing Scientology happening at the same time. Huge emphasis in science is kind of, they don't call it confessing your sins, but that's the idea. It's fascinating to me. It's the nexium. It's the collateral thing.

I mean, it makes sense, I get why having a bunch of shit on people that they have admitted to you of their own free will could be very handy later on. There's that. Here's the other thing I find interesting, Paul. All of the cults that do this all start late 50s, early 60s, and all of the people who become cult members are like the children and the people who came out the other side of World War II. For whatever reason, this idea of the center of our cult is going to be the confessing

of sins is huge, maybe because there's no therapy, but a lot of people in need of therapy because they have what? I think there's something there. I've never really seen it dealt with enough, but it's such a common through line in all of these cults, like the confession of sins that start up in this period of time, like the group confession of things you've done that's bad. I don't know. I think there might be, there's something.

There got to be something there. In Germans in 1959, a lot of sins to confess as a population. Speaking of sins to confess, it's time for an ad-break. You know who never confesses their sins, Paul? Who? Advertisers? That is for sure. That's what I was going for.

Or just capitalism and broad. Actually capitalism makes it very profitable to confess and discuss the sins of capitalism, which is one of the great geniuses of the system. Anyway, think about that while you listen to the ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

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So, for a while, things are good, at least on the surface. He's taken all these women, these families in, he's got his flock, people are tithing, confessing their sins. Obviously, the reality is that Paul is a pedophile and again, a grand scale, which is why he established an orphanage in the first place. So he is molesting an unknown number but not certainly not an insignificant number of these kids. In 1959, one of the widows at his orphanage came forward to the police and reported Paul

for molesting her kids. A warrant was issued for his arrest and Schaefer fled to the Middle East with two trusted assistants. So he is now a wanted man in Germany and will be for the rest of his life, so he gets the fuck out of Germany, never comes back. It is important to note that a lot of, I don't have any, I don't know what percentage of his flock stays with him, but hundreds of them do. A couple of hundred people, maybe three, four hundred people continue to believe that he's a legitimate holy man and that the allegations against him were, I think part of a communist

conspiracy is kind of the way it was generally justified. We don't know exactly how Schaefer talked to his flock about all this stuff, but we have some hints in how he explained this to them and the fact that by the late 1950s, Paul had become a follower of an American evangelical preacher named William Branham. Now this is going to be a digression, Paul, but it's a necessary one. That's fine, I'll allow a digression. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You said only one digression per episode and threatened me with your cattle prod, but I

appreciate your openness. I'm feeling generous, two digressions today. Thank you. So, in the US in the late 40s and 50s, there's this huge resurgence of evangelical Christianity, again, right after World War II. This is all tied to the Synodon and the Confession when all of this is tied together. Specifically what has a big surge is the kind of charismatic evangelism that would eventually evolve into the moral majority and the religious right.

This is known historically as the post-World War II healing revival. Since it occurred right at the same time the Cold War kicked off, you won't be surprised to hear that it was profoundly anti-communist. And again, it's not until the 70s, like 73, 74, something like that, that it starts to become political in the traditional sense, like a right-wing movement and anti-abortion gets tacked on and it becomes eventually like a part of the Republican Party. That hasn't happened yet, but that evolves from this. Jerry Falwell and stuff all comes out of this post-World War II healing revival, which

is from the beginning rooted in anti-communism because of the Cold War. So all of this is, a lot of stuff going on is what I'm saying. Now Branham, this preacher who Paul Schaefer comes to follow, is a preacher in Indiana. He's an evangelical preacher in Indiana and Indiana in the late 1940s was still reeling from the second Ku Klux Klan. The KKK National Office had been located there and even though the Klan had faded in size and influence by the 50s, Indiana still had a lot of Klansmen. William Branham had been brought into the Pentecostal faith by an official Klan spokesman

named Roy Davis. The guy who brings Branham in is a Klansman and as you might expect, Branham is rather hard right in his own beliefs, telling his tens of thousands of followers that they must strictly follow the Bible, reject communism, and ensure that women obey their husbands no matter what. Not great stuff coming in here. Branham later inducted a charismatic young preacher, so Branham gets brought in by this Klansman and he brings in a charismatic young preacher to the evangelical faith, a guy you

might have heard of named Jim Jones. Oh boy, what is going on? We got our real best stuff coming for you today. This is like the Avengers of Evil. Yeah, the Avengers of weird 60s cult leaders. God. And you know the guy who played, what's the name of the dude in the Avengers, the suit guy who gets killed in the first movie and then gets his own TV show?

Clark Gregg? Yeah, Clark Gregg. Honestly, wouldn't make a bad Paul Schaefer. Good actor. He doesn't look wildly different from him. If you're doing an Avengers of evangelical cult leaders, which is a terrible idea. I mean, it's a terrible idea to do in life, but for a movie, I mean, I would, I'd go to a matinee, you know what I mean?

It would be fun if that movie was just like Paul Schaefer, Jim Jones, and Ant-Man, played by Paul Rudd. Ant-Man, what are you doing here? Why do you have hundreds of people in the jungle? So Paul Rudd could absolutely pull that off by the very charismatic. So Brannum later, so Brannum brings Jim Jones into the faith and Brannum and Jim Jones do preaching revival meetings together in the late 1950s and early 60s. And I'm going to quote from a write up by John Collins from San Diego University here.

And this is, he's, Collins is writing about how this healing revival in the United States, Brannum and Jones, how this influences Paul Schaefer. The healing revival itself coincided with the second Red Scare of 1947 to 1957. And some revivalists of that era claimed to have prophetic insight into what they considered to be the impending destruction of the United States. The state of Indiana, heavily impacted by the propaganda of the Ku Klux Klan and its anti-communist speeches and literature, held crowds of people eager to hear any extraordinary insight into the turmoil ahead.

Two years prior to the Jones-Brannum revival at the Cattle Tabernacle, William Brannum began proclaiming the first of several of his Doomsday predictions, claiming that 1954 was the year of destruction. Only two months prior to their revival, Brannum updated his prediction to 1956 as the final year for America to accept his vision of the gospel. This prediction came with emphasis on his claim of a prophetic vision describing communist Russia's bombing northern Kentucky and southern Indiana. His Doomsday predictions appear to have finally made an influence on Jim Jones by 1961.

Jones himself began claiming prophetic vision of the same bombing. In November of 1961, Brannum claimed that great men around the world were predicting that the first bomb from Russia would drop in Louisville, Kentucky, a mile from the Indiana border. Around the same time in the fall of 1961, Jim Jones began claiming to have had a prophetic vision of Indianapolis being consumed in nuclear holocaust. So this is fascinating, this Jim Jones connection is fascinating, because he and Paul Schaefer, both huge fans of Brannum, and both do the same basic thing, which is take a group of

people from their home country to a foreign country to create a cult that then does a tremendous amount of violence. I'm sorry, what year are we talking about where Jim Jones gets involved? 61, 59 Paul Schaefer flees, 61 is when Jim Jones, I think when he leaves actually. So he, Jim Jones hits the ground running in terms of like, I figured out why I wanted to know. Well, though, Jones starts preaching with Brannum in the 50s. Okay, okay.

So Jim Jones, we'll do a whole Jim Jones episode, it's fascinating, but one of the things that's interesting to me is that he and Paul Schaefer have the same kind of mentor guy, the same basic journey, absolutely opposite politics. Paul Schaefer is a fucking Nazi, right? Right. Like literally a Nazi. Jim Jones is a lifelong anti-racist activist, he spoke regularly about the need for socialism. Most of his followers were black, and a huge part of what he was doing, why he took people

out of the United States was this nation is so lost to fascism and racism that we can't survive here. We have to flee to somewhere where we can create an ethical, multi-racial society, whereas Paul Schaefer is a Nazi, and it's fascinating that they have the same religious inspiration behind what they're doing, and they do the same things for exactly opposite politics, and they do it at the same fucking time. Because 1961 is when both guys leave to start their cults in foreign countries. Yeah, it's amazing.

So it looks like the common denominator could be the problem. Could be what? Could be the problem? Could be the problem. Yeah, maybe we should look at what the common denominator is, maybe the Pentecostal faith is... I mean, I just thrown it out there. Yeah, I've just thrown it out there.

Yeah, yeah. I don't want that. I don't want to be canceling the snake handlers. Well, let me just take a little sip of strict nine here. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's smooth. Do some psychic surgery.

We'll talk more. Again, Jim Jones deserves a couple of episodes on his own. Fascinating story. But so it's hard for me to say whether or not Paul Schaefer was a real believer in Branham's message of a looming apocalypse or if he was an opportunist who was like, oh, this guy's preaching because Schaefer's not just preaching that the U.S. is going to get nuked. In 1961, actually, the same year that Branham and Jim Jones preach in Indianapolis, later that year Branham goes to Germany and he preaches that Germany is going to get nuked, too.

And Paul Schaefer is a follower of this guy, goes to his followers and says, hey, Germany's not safe anymore. And it just is coincidental that also he can't be in Germany anymore because he's wanted for the police for molesting kids. It works out for him. I will give people of that era this. It was very easy to believe that anywhere was going to be nuked. Yeah.

That is not unreasonable. That's exactly me. It barely didn't happen. We were right on the edge for a while there. Thankfully, we solved that problem and nuclear apocalypse is no longer a looming threat entirely in the hands of a single person at any given point in time. What a relief. What a relief.

So in 1961, Paul Schaefer takes the first 10 of his followers overseas to Chile. He had apparently decided that Chile in particular was a good place to move after a chance meeting with the Chilean ambassador when he's in the Middle East. The ambassador didn't know this guy's an accused pedophile. He was like, you're looking for a place to move your flock of religious followers? We got a shitload of Chile. I mean, so much Chile to be handing out. Come and get your Chile.

The very best information in English about Schaefer's cult comes from an article in The American Scholar by Bruce Falconer, which is an incredible name for a journalist. He writes, quote, a fated- Do you think there's a Falconer named Bruce Journalist? Bruce Journalist? Yeah. No, no. I'm into falconry.

I'm a journalist. Quote, a fated black and white photograph shows Schaefer stepping off the plane in Santiago in January 1961 in a long black winter coat and matching fedora smiling faintly. Within a year, using funds collected from his congregation back in Germany, Schaefer bought an abandoned 4,400-acre ranch several hundred miles south of Santiago, which he and some 10 original settlers from Germany began to rebuild. By the end of 1963, an initial group of approximately 230 Germans, the bulk of Schaefer's congregation, had immigrated from Europe to the newly named Colonia Dignidad Dignity Colony.

Two more waves of German pilgrims followed in 1966 and 73, most belonging to the 15 families that formed the core of Schaefer's following. So this is the way this works, and there's footage of that documentary. It's a lot of like wild, wild country stuff where you've got these groups of white people in the middle of the wilderness who are like putting together, building, you know, these massive barracks and barns and whatnot from kind of unhewn, wild land. And one of the things about this is that there's not enough space to host everybody at first. So he says at first, hey, we're just going to build one big barracks to host everybody

and everyone's going to live communally instead of in family groups and houses. But that's temporary. Don't worry. Eventually, every family is going to get their own house. It's just right now that's not practical. So keep that in mind. That's all that Chile. There's a lot, but you can't make a house in the night, Paul.

Fair enough. I mean, you can if you're Jimmy Carter and you're motivated by the ghosts of all the war crimes you had to do as president. So but Jimmy Carter's president, well, not quite president, but not far from it at this point. So Schaefer's passage into Chile was eased by the fact that the elected government at the time was led by President George Alessandri, a conservative who gave him personal permission to create his dignity colony.

The land he bought was a former farm outside of a town called Peral, dead in the middle of Chile, nestled amongst the Indian foothills. It was a fairly isolated place. And this allowed Paul to exert something like total control over his followers. In Germany, most of his congregation had not lived with him. He did have his orphanage and a core of single mothers and children who had no choice but to stay with him. But much of his congregation had lived in their own private homes.

People giving him money all had houses and stuff nearby. Now that they were all in Chile, though, everybody effectively lived with Schaefer and thus under his rule at all times. And he quickly took total control. Step one was to forbid anyone from engaging in private conversations. So you cannot talk if there's just two of you. As he tells his flock, quote, if two are gathered, they are under the devil. If three are gathered, they are under Jesus.

So because of Sophie, we're under the devil right now, Paul. Thanks a lot, Sophie. Wait, no. We're under Jesus because of Sophie. Never mind. If it was just you and I, we'd be under the devil. This is hard to keep straight. There's a lot going on here.

I thought it would be simpler to keep track of, but it's actually, I'm a little messed up. Yeah. No, there's a lot going on here. A lot going on here, Paul. It's okay. A lot of people accuse Jesus of being the devil, too, Robert. That's right.

That's right. And you know what? Maybe he was. We don't know. We don't know. Now that's another episode. Yeah. Behind the Jesus.

So, back in Germany, Schaefer's followers had been ordered to confess their sins on a regular basis, as often as possible, in group. This was ratcheted up, though. Sins now had to be confessed immediately, whether the sins were physical actions or just thoughts. Now, another key aspect of life at the dignity colony was that children and their parents had to be separated forever, like, that seems bad to you, huh? It's like, man, I don't know, what's so, what's amazing to me about, because this, this was

sent in on two, right, where they separated the kids. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. You're right. And right around the same time. Yeah.

That doesn't, that's not an immediate red flag is always like, that's, that's how sad cults are, is that you're so sucked into this thing that there must be something inside of you and I, is this right that they're gonna take my kids away from me? I feel like it's natural for children to be important to parents. It's almost like I'm having an instinct right now, and I'm having to fight against. Yeah. This feels maybe unnatural, maybe abandoning your children and having no contact with them through force is like, not human.

But what do I know? I mean, he's, he's holy, I'm not. He's the, yeah, he's the holy man who can't live in Germany for unspecified reasons. Also, I did tell him that I thought about a boob recently. Yeah. Oh man. I don't want that tit thing getting out. Yeah.

He could tell my parents who were Nazis. So another, yeah, so parents and children had to be separated. Now, Paul, to go into this little detail, I need to note, the source here is Wikipedia and as a rule, I don't like to use Wikipedia as a source for my episodes, not because it's not a useful, it's very useful, but because you can always trace the claims back and that's always ideal. Yeah. But some of the claims for this episode are based on recorded conversations that Schaefer

had with people and those were translated by somebody who was doing the Wiki and that's where I found the translation. So I, we're trusting them a little bit on this. I don't see a reason not to particularly. But you know, caveat emptor. Yeah. So this translation from Wikipedia claims that Schaefer justified his child-parent separation policy by claiming, the problems in child education aren't the children, they are always

the parents because the parents are responsible for the sins of the children. True. I mean, yeah, that's, that's, that's not, again, that's, that's good cold shit though because that's a thing where it's like, okay, well, you can argue that point, but it's also, it's irrelevant to the idea of separating children permanently from their parents. Like, exactly. Well, yeah, generally if a kid is doing something fucked up, it's the parents, something the parent did is involved because they're kids, you know, they're essentially the reasoning

is if you're going to do something, do it right. So if the parents are responsible for the sins and intrudes on the teaching, just gotta get those kids out of there. Gotta get those kids out of there, gotta un-parent them. That's the problem. Now the reality, of course, is that again, Paul Schaefer was a pedophile on an industrial scale and as a pedophile, your best situation, I mean, the situation he had in the orphanage was pretty good, but obviously one of those moms was able to go to the cops because they

were still living in society. The best situation is to drop out of society, have your own weird self-sufficient cult where parents and their children are forced to live separately, but you have total run over all of the facilities and couldn't go anywhere. That's your best case scenario as a pedophile, yeah, and he's orchestrated this. And I have to think, it's always the question like what do they believe, how much of it did they buy into with any cult leader you have that question? With Schaefer, maybe he believed something, but I can't help but see everything he's

doing is this extremely calculated years-long plan to develop the best case scenario for a child molester. That really feels like at least a big part of what's going on here. Yeah, I mean, because I have not studied pedophilia, I don't know, but from what I kind of just know from osmosis is the thing that makes pedophiles so horrible is that they have convinced themselves that this is okay to do and that people don't understand it. And that's why I have to keep it hidden is because nobody would understand what a pure love this is or whatever, so it makes sense that you would want to create a world, literally

a world where you can just do whatever you want and you don't have to worry about people understanding it or not. Yeah, you make the moral rules here, so you don't have to care about what other people might say. And you have convinced yourself that you're right. Yeah. Yeah. You just have to explain it in a way that people will understand because they're not

going to understand the purity of what you are doing. So put it in terms of these sort of less evolved people. I don't know what they... Yeah, I mean, I think that's how Schaefer sees it, yeah, because he also sees, we'll talk about this more, but like traditional sex between adults as horrible and to be avoided at all costs. Oh my God. I know, there's a lot going on with Mr. Paul.

So if you're curious about the experience of little kids taken from a relatively normal home life in Germany to this whole world, I want to read you the story of a kid named Werner Schmitka. This is from a write-up in Reuters, quote, he sailed to Chile in 1962 as a two-year-old along with his mother and nine brothers and sisters, one of whom died as a child in Colonia Dignidad. His parents were convinced to sell the family home and follow Schaefer to South America by his powerful preaching and promise of a more godly life.

Schmitka's father stayed in Germany to look after the sect's business interests and join them in Chile eight years later. On board the ship, the children were separated from their mother, whom Schmitka remembers as a good-hearted woman and then were kept apart like the other families in the enclave. In their new home, Schmitka lived in the Timber Kinderhaus, or children's house, where Schaefer had his private apartment. It was there that he first encountered the charismatic leader. One or two boys would be taken to his room every day, and one day I was called, Schmitka

told Reuters. He sat me down on his bed and started to stroke me and ask me questions, to talk the way a father talks to his child, and I had no parents anymore. I have never forgotten my first dealings with Schaefer, he said. I was about seven or eight. That is when the abuse and rape started. So there's a lot going on here. One of the things he's doing is he's, in order to make these kids, I think, more compliant,

you take away their parents and then you're like, I'm the father figure for all of the kids here. And not only does that mean the parents aren't around to complain, but kids need parents. And their understanding of the moral universe is heavily influenced by parents. And so if this guy, who's the only father figure they're allowed, is saying, this is just what you do, it's just what you do. You're eight. You know?

Yeah. It's pretty fucked up. Yeah. It's real bad. Like, I don't know, it's already monstrous enough, and then when you get into what feels like the deviousness of it all, it's heartbreaking that somebody can be this evil. Yeah. This is evil on like an almost incomprehensible scale, because he spent like a decade orchestrating

this. Yeah. Yeah. The work that was put into it. Yeah. It's, honestly, so far a pretty unique story that I've come across. This is a... Thank God.

Like, yeah. Jesus. But you know what's not a unique story, Paul? Oh, wow. There it is. What? Advertisements? The story of the success of all of our fantastic advertisers.

That's not unique at all, because there's so many wonderful products and services that support this podcast. Oh, that's true. Mm-hmm. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

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And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

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world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

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podcasts. So we're back and yet we're talking about the fact that there's elements of this in a number of cults, taking kids away from parents, even like L. Ron Hubbard did this to some of his followers and stuff. And it wasn't like I've never come across any evidence that he was a child molester. It's also just like as a cult leader, the concept of a family is one of your chief enemies, right? Absolutely, yeah.

But yeah. So we have no way of knowing how many children Schaefer abused. It's not even entirely clear to me. I think it was boys, just boys, but I can't say that to a point of certainty. All of the direct claims I've heard from victims were male. But again, I'm sort of locked out from a lot of the survivor accounts of this guy because I don't read German and a decent number of those accounts are in German language print books that have not been digitized in any way or translated.

One thing that's clear is that Paul Schaefer absolutely hated the concept of people having sex in a way that did not involve him molesting children. There's a story that's told in that Netflix documentary of two of his victims, well, two people who were in the cult, one of whom as a young boy was one of his victims. And they're married now. And they talk about there was one time early on in the cult's history where they did a big dance with all the men and women. And Schaefer saw the way they tell the story.

He saw a couple of young couples, like little kids, who were clearly into each other, including this couple, who again later get married, dancing together, and it enraged him because he was jealous of the boys, that the girls were like, that's why he starts to separate the sex because he's insanely jealous that there will be rivals for the attention of these little boys. And that's why he separates the genders. That's what they claim. I don't know, like, you know, they're coming at this from one perspective.

I don't know how much that it was planned ahead of time. But one of the things that's interesting in that documentary, while the husband relates the stories of the time Schaefer abused him, his wife is sitting there next to him. It was also in the cult. And I think if you want to look at the purist expression of hatred I've ever seen on a human face, her face in that scene is, it's chilling, obviously completely justified, but it is quite a thing to see. So back in Germany, Schaefer had obviously preached about abstinence constantly.

And now that he was in Chile, he insisted that everybody be abstinent, even married couples. Schaefer preached that women were temptresses who would uncontrollably drive men to sexual sin and pull them away from God, channeling his spiritual mentor, Branham. He argued that this was why women needed to be tightly controlled by men. But unlike Branham, he didn't believe that husbands could be trusted with this job. Maybe he could keep sexual anarchy at bay. So he's taken this, this, this traditional Christian cult leader is like, women have to be controlled because of their uncontrollable sexualities.

So you have to make sure people, women are tightly on a leash until they're married and then it's the husband's responsibility. Schaefer's like, even if they've got a husband, they'll be fucking and God doesn't want people fucking. You know what? Let me take care of this. I got a better idea. I'll be in charge of it.

So you don't have to worry about it. Isn't that great? Mm-hmm. Let's work for you. Yeah. Let's work for you because you just can't. As time went on, women and men were entirely isolated from each other at the colonia. Women were dressed at all time in baggy, sackcloth dresses that were meant to hide every hint

of breasts or hips. They wore their hair in tight buns. Both men and women engaged in constant hard labor, sometimes for 12 hours a day, to ensure they were too tired to bone. The side effect of this is that they made a lot of money for Paul Schaefer. These are Germans. You know, they're good at working. Industrious people.

So after he'd arrived in Chile, his agents back in Germany have succeeded in selling his old orphanage, which he used to buy a German stone crushing machine in order to operate a profitable quarry. His followers began to farm too, and in a few years, they were selling both wheat and quarried stone. Gradually, they build up a financial base, they do start selling like bratwurst and stuff. They start making and selling like raising animals, making German food products to sell to Chile like Argentina has a sizable German expat community for reasons that are not great.

All of this allows them to build a financial base, and they were able to build a lot of infrastructure on this compound, including several barracks for the faithful to live in. Again, it starts as like we all have to live in the same barracks, and then all men have to live in one, and women have to live in the other, because we haven't been here long, we don't have time to make everyone a house. And then gradually, Shaver's like, you know what, nobody's getting houses. You're all living communally.

Except for me, I have a bedroom in the children's house. I just feel like the gymnastics, the mental gymnastics that people in a cult have to go through with all of the plans changing all the time. Like it's the same story every time where it's like, I promised you this, but now there's a different thing. I told you I was immortal, but guess what, now I'm this. And these poor people have to keep, the number must do on your brain to just be in that kind of denial and say, well, I mean, he is the sort of God on earth to me, and I just have

to trust that he knows what's best, even though he's changed this plan every single time. You know what, there's an element of it that this is like, if you've ever been in a relationship that gets really bad and you're living together and it becomes intolerable, but you're like, oh, shit, we got to like figure out what to do about the lease. Like I have to separate our stuff, all this stuff we bought together, we have to figure out who, and you just continue to stay in an intolerable situation because you think about like the logistics of getting out of it. These people don't come to Germany being like, yeah, everyone will be separated.

You'll have no family. You'll live in a barracks with everyone of the same gender and age as you. They're told like, well, you know, come over here, we're going to build this godly community. You know, everyone will have their houses eventually, but we got to do this first and this first and this first. And then it becomes clear that like, oh, no, this has changed and this is never going to happen. Yeah.

But you're there and you don't have a passport. I have no money. I can't get out. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's difficult and people just accept things, you know, and also like everybody you know is there. Yeah.

What are you going back to? You know? Yeah. And while most people go along with this, there were folks who rebelled from the beginning and Bruce Falconer writes about these rebels, quote, a rebel named Wolfgang Muller tried to escape on three separate occasions. Twice, one then once in 1962 and again in 1964, he fled to the home of a Chilean family in a nearby town and twice members of the Colonial Security Force found him there and

brought him back. Both times, Muller was beaten and forcibly sedated on his third and final escape attempt in 1966, he made it as far as Santiago, where he received police protection and sought refuge in a German embassy safe house. On orders from Schaefer, 15 members of the colony stormed the house in an attempt to recapture him. After a fistfight with police, they fled. Soon after, Muller left Chile and found safety in Germany, where despite his repeated accusations

against Schaefer, government officials took no action. And there's this mix with the German government of on the on the grand scale, shameful failure to do anything about this, on an individual scale, there's some very heroic members of the German government. When this kid finally escapes to Santiago, he goes to like the German ambassador basically in Santiago and tells him what's happened and this guy hides him in a safe house and like it's a significant danger and eventually helps him smuggle out to the country. So there's this mix of like the German government, total failure, individuals in the German government

do a lot of laudable work to try to help this guy and other people escape when they're able to get out. It was actually the Chilean government, which is not going to get a lot of praise in this article that first attempted to investigate Muller's allegations against Schaefer. In 1968, they sent a parliamentary delegation to look into the claims of torture. Schaefer had his children sing for the delegation and then plied them with a meal of excellent food. They determined that no abuse had occurred and that Muller was lying.

And there was like a period where they had like a warrant out to try to question him and stuff. So Schaefer organized protests that never actually got him and it's like he has friends in the government, right wing friends in the government because he's got a lot of money and stuff to throw around. And so does the Nazi community in Chile, which is a part of this. We'll talk about that more later. So the first attempt to shed light on the crimes of Paul Schaefer and the colonia dignidad

failed, not for lack of trying. Muller still lived in Germany as of 2008 and now he operates a nonprofit that works to fight the abuse of children by religious sects. So he seems to have gotten out of that as well as you possibly could. Now there were several attempts by children to flee the abuse of the colonia during the 1960s. One of the first was Helmut Hopp. He was caught and punished, but he had a chance to redeem himself in Paul Schaefer's

eyes in 1966 when another teenager succeeded in escaping. Wolfgang Knieß fled and managed to reach the German embassy again. He made allegations that he'd been tortured and sexually assaulted, and he made these directly to the press. To deal with this, Schaefer convinced Helmut Hopp, who had just been trying to escape himself a few years earlier, to go to Santiago and accuse Knieß of lying and having sexually assaulted him. So he's like, hey, you want to get back in my good graces?

Like I'll make you my number one boy, but you got to go say, number one, this guy's lying. And number two, he's the one who's doing the sexual assaults. Knieß successfully muddies the waters, enough that Knieß's allegations don't do any permanent damage to the cult. Knieß is allowed to return to Germany, thankfully, and Schaefer rewards Hopp for his service by allowing him to leave the colonia temporarily and go to medical school. So this is like, you play a ball with Schaefer, you get special privileges other people don't get.

And he needs Hopp to be a doctor, right? Because he has a scheme that heavily involves having a doctor. So over the mid 1960s, Schaefer had been funneling the money made by his flocks labor into the construction of a 65 bed hospital. It was reportedly state of the art. And by the time Hopp came back from medical school, a newly minted doctor, it was ready to go. Paul Schaefer was not a dumb man, and he understood that bringing a bunch of Germans

into the middle of Chile and then doing weird cult shit was something that could go really bad, especially if the right wing president who liked him got replaced. The Colonia Dignidad Hospital, though, once they get this running, they start providing free health care to local Chileans who have no closer options for medical care of this quality. The hospital had sterile operating rooms, a high quality maternity ward where for generations, most of the local women in the area give birth to their children. About 26,000 people relied on this hospital, which is subsidized by government funds, so

the government has a vested interest in this continuing to function. It's smart. Wow. Mm hmm. The deviousness, it's off the charts, this guy, my God, like, I don't know. I guess it's like, for me, if I try to do something like this, there are so many things I would not have thought about. Yeah, hospital none of this.

I wouldn't be nearly this good at a Chilean cult. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's something else. It's amazing how smart he is for a man who once gouged his own eye out trying to untie a shoe. But you know what? Here's the thing, you must learn from mistakes.

That's right. That's right. It's like, okay, this didn't go the way it should have. What could I have done differently and then apply that lesson as you go along in life? Gouged my own eye out once, shame on you. Yeah. So the Colonia Dignita Hospital also pays for a network of buses that drive to and from isolated villages in the area, collect locals who need to see a doctor on a regular basis.

The Colonia also supplies local women with four and a half pounds of powdered milk a month for the first six months of their child's life. So this becomes very quickly an integral part of the healthcare infrastructure of this area. This is particularly a big deal because Chile spends a lot of the 60s and 70s in a state of political and economic turmoil, which we'll talk about a bit more later. The thrust of the matter is that few of the powers that be in the area and even the regular people who live nearby had any interest in looking critically at what was going on in the Colonia because it's a lifeline to the people there.

But while the hospital undoubtedly saved a lot of lives, it was, by all accounts, a quality hospital, although quality is... Let me explain to you what this hospital is doing. It's doing a lot of births. It's doing a lot of surgeries. A lot of people's lives are saved by this hospital. That is not all that it's doing. It is an integral part of Paul Schafer's architecture of torture. See, as the Colonia aged, Paul developed tactics for more clearly delineating and punishing

the rebels in his midst. He forced the men to wear... Rebel like men who had basically committed crimes against the colony to wear red shirts and white pants. He forced the women to wear potato sacks over their dresses, and he ordered the other followers to treat them with hatred. One rebel was a young Chilean boy, and in order to deal with the fact that his... In the late 60s, he starts taking local Chilean boys in, and this is to deal with the fact that he's not letting his followers breed.

Obviously, this guy's a pedophile. He's not letting his followers breed, so there's, at some point, not going to be any more young boys for him than the rest. They start adopting local kids to provide him with a steady stream of victims. This boy, Franz Barr, was adopted by the German Colt when he was 10. He did not like being forced to live in a weird Nazi sex cult, and by the time he was a teenager, Paul had singled him out as a rebel. I'm going to quote from Bruce Falconer's article in The American Scholar here.

As Barr now remembers it, a group of men approached him one day while he was working in the carpentry shop and accused him of stealing the keys to one of the dormitories. When Barr denied it, he was beaten unconscious with electric cables, his skull broken, and loaded into an ambulance. He awoke sometime later in the hospital, where he would remain as a prisoner for the next 31 years. Barr was kept in an upstairs section of the hospital, never seen by the local Chileans who sought treatment there.

As he later described to me, his days began with a series of intravenous injections, after which the nurses brought him bread and a plate with 12 to 15 different pills. Once satisfied that he was properly medicated, nurses delivered his clothes and shoes, hidden from him to reduce the likelihood of escape. After he dressed, a security escorted him to his job at the carpentry shop. Barr worked on heavy machines in a cramped space. The injections and pills slowed his movements and made him clumsy. Today, scar tissue on his forearms maps the places where the electric saws bit into his

flesh. Barr was forced to work late into the night, sometimes until 3 a.m. He was not permitted to eat with the rest of the community. Instead, his meals were delivered to him at the carpentry shop, where he devoured them in isolation. A still worse punishment awaited in rooms 9 and 14 of the hospital, where Barr and other members, unfortunate enough to draw the full measure of Shafer's fury, were subjected to shock treatments.

A female physician worked the machines. Her mannered attached in clinical. Patients were strapped down and fitted with crowns attached by wires to a voltage machine. Barr told me how the doctor seemed to enjoy watching him suffer. She kept asking me questions, he said. I heard what she was saying and wanted to respond, but I couldn't. She was playing with the machine and asking, what do you feel? Are you feeling something?

She wanted to know what was happening to me as she adjusted the voltage. I mean, a female physician, was this an actual doctor that is agreed to, yeah, I'll torture these guys for you. I think these are people, special preferred people, who he lets get medical degrees and whatnot because he needs doctors and because he needs people to do this torturing, to help him with it. He's also doing a lot of the torturing. A lot of sources will note that when they were tortured, Shafer was there.

So he's often there, particularly when children are tortured. But he really likes to be the one who does the torturing of the children. There were not always reasons given for punishment. Barr's case was one of the more elaborate ones, but it was not uncommon for kids to get punished without being told why and just beaten with rods for 30 minutes at a time. It seems likely that this was just a kink of Shafer's. This is something that gave him sexual pleasure and that's why he was doing it. It's messed up, Paul.

Yeah. One of the people who helped him with the torturing and punishment was a guy named Heinrich Himpel. Now, Himpel survived Paul Shafer. He still lived, or at least when he did this interview, he still lived in the colonia because it's still around today. It exists after Shafer. No.

Yeah. Yeah. What? Wait till you hear what they're doing with it now, Paul. All right. You know what? I'll tell you, Robert, I did not see that one coming. Yeah.

What a surprise is in this one. Wow. Wow. This is a guy, Heinrich Himpel, who's one of the, I don't think he's doing the hard core torture, but he's one of the guys who's like beating kids with a stick when they're punished and whatnot, and I think probably adults too. He gives an interview with Bruce Falconer of the American Scholar and Falconer writes, quote,

Himpel confides that during World War II, as the Soviets were pushing through Eastern Europe, his family had been forced out of East Prussia and thrown into a Soviet labor camp in Poland. They spent five years there under terrible conditions. His brother and sister froze to death in the snow. He describes the high fences that had surrounded the camp in Poland and draws them in my notebook with coils of razor wire at their base. He tells me that after his release, he had gone to Germany and joined Schaefer's congregation.

I asked him why he had moved to Chile. He thinks for a minute, smiles and says, I came here to do five years of charity work, but then I forgot how to leave. And that's a key and why people are willing to accept this brutality and why some of these people are willing to do this brutality. You have to think about what was their fucking childhood like. They were Germans in the early 40s, you know, like everything that's happening seems a little bit less fucked up if your childhood was my family starved to death in a prison camp

after the war when I was a child, like, yeah, you know, it's, it's, yeah, a real man hands down misery to man situation. Now depending on how you measure such things, the rebels, the people like Barr who were punished were in some ways the lucky ones because on the other end of things were the young boys who Schaefer considered the, his golden boys, the ideal representatives of proper behavior. He called these his sprinters and this is because of the job that he gave them. If he wanted to speak to a follower who was laboring in a distant end of the colonia, he would send a sprinter to run off and go get them.

L. Ron Hubbard actually did a very similar thing. He had this network of little kids who would be his voice to his followers. In time, these sprinters- Like Sherlock Holmes or Fagan, like having your little army of kids. Yeah. Now, with this exception that this is the problem here, he's molesting all of them. Well, I mean, yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Which Holmes rarely did. Only when he was under the influence of the solution. Yeah. So, in time, like these kids are doing, they're not just like running and getting people. They're doing stuff like he gets so lazy that they're like holding a phone up to his ear and shit, like real decadent cult leader shit. Sprinters were rewarded with better treatment, with respect and with an ability to whisper

into the prophet's ear about those on the colonia they disliked. But this came at a terrible cost because of course Schaefer was molesting all of them. He kept them around him at all times. They followed him when he took his daily tour of the grounds, wearing a uniform he had picked out for them. Loose athletic shorts with an elastic waistband. Obviously, this is their uniform for reasons that should be unfortunately obvious. For his very best sprinters, there was a special reward.

His room included a child-sized bed set up right next to his own bed. Sometimes more than one sprinter would sleep there. Sometimes he would drug them with sedatives, wash them with a sponge and sexually assault them. It's not getting better. It's not getting better. Yeah. I don't know what I expected.

It's a bleak one, Paul. Yeah, it's a bleak one. It's one of the rougher ones we've had to talk about. Left-wing candidate Salvador Allende was elected to be the president of Chile in 1970 and he brought with him promises of socialism and a number of different reforms. This terrified Paul Schaefer, who considered Allende to be nothing more than the physical reincarnation of Joseph Stalin mixed with, one presumes, the literal Christian devil. He started marshalling his followers to prepare for an apocalyptic assault.

They smuggled weapons in from Germany. Since the colonia was a charitable organization, its shipments were not stopped by customs. In this way, they smuggled in dozens of submachine guns, which they used as models so they could turn their machine shop to the task of reproducing dozens of nearly identical assault rifles. Over the years of Allende's short time in power, they acquired thousands of grenades, mortars, and even a handful of surface-to-air missile launchers. So now they have an army. Fantastic.

Great. That's what this pedophile cult really needed to get cooking. Should have seen it coming. Surface-to-air missile launchers. When I heard about the hospital, I should have said, what's keeping that army? Yeah, what's keeping them. So given what comes later, it's very likely that Colonia Dignidad was not just able to acquire this arsenal because the authorities didn't check the shipping of a charitable

organization. The police and military hated Allende because he was left-wing and likely had an arrangement with Schaefer. He may have been giving guns to right-wing militant groups we don't entirely know. In the early 1970s, though, Schaefer starts planning a coup against Allende. He brings in another Nazi to help him with the planning. And it's unclear to me if this coup attempt fed into the coup against Allende or was just a separate plan for a coup attempt.

But as we've talked about a couple of times on this show, the CIA comes in. They give a right-wing general like backing, and Augusto Pinochet, that right-wing general in September 11, 1973, takes power by extreme violence. Allende dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And for a week or so, the scattered forces of the left fought in the street, but in very short order, the country was under the military's control. Pinochet immediately declared a state of emergency. He suspended the Constitution, he disbanded Congress, he banned political parties, and

he censored the press. Socialism was annihilated in Chile, which Paul Schaefer hailed as a victory against international communism. In the months that followed, Pinochet ordered at least 45,000 people arrested and taken to detention centers to be interrogated and, often, tortured. More than 1,500 people were killed this way in the first year of his reign. To facilitate all this, the general ordered the creation of the National Intelligence Directorate, or DINA, to act as a secret police force dedicated to maintaining his grip

on power. But it's actually kind of hard to do that. I don't know if you've ever tried to build a brutal intelligence apparatus from scratch, Paul. Not an easy task. It's really, we're trying to do it now. It cools on media, and Garrison and Chris barely understand how to attach a nipple to a car battery.

I mean, terrible at it. Are you saying I shouldn't bother? No, no. I mean, you got to try, Paul. Look, a journey of 1,000 steps starts with one step, right? That's true. That's true. A journey of 1,000, 45,000 dissidents tortured.

You got to start torturing. You know? All right. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You know what? I needed that talk, and thank you.

Thank you. Just trying to encourage you. I give up too easy. That's my problem. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's why most people never get the kind of secret police force they deserve. So the good news for the fascists, the bad news is that, you know, the bad news for the

fascists is that it's actually hard to find a lot of people who are willing to like torture folks to death. Most folks, even most folks who are shitty, aren't up for that, you know? Like, even among the people who are assholes. But the people that want to do it? Yeah. They really want to do it. They really want to do it.

And the great news for Pinochet is that there's this heavily armed Nazi commune full of psychopaths who have been torturing their own children. So if they're psyched to torture people for the dictator, right, like they got no issue with that at all. And in very short order, Colonia Dignidad becomes one of Pinochet's most well-used torture and execution sites. We're going to talk more about that in part, too, Paul, but that's kind of a bummer note to end the episode on.

And so in the interest of closing things out on a more upbeat note, I got a little story Paul, a little story about Santa Claus. This comes from that article in The American Scholar and boy, howdy, Paul, I'm excited to read this one to you. Okay. Now, this is we're ending on an up note. I would call it a high note because it's one of the craziest things I've heard about in my entire fucking life.

No one inspired greater love and admiration among the children of the Colonia than Santa Claus. It is said that in the days shortly before Christmas one year in the mid-1970s, Schaefer gathered the Colonia's children, loaded them onto a bus, and drove them out to a nearby river where, he told them, Santa was coming to visit. The boys and girls stood excitedly along the riverbank while an older man in a fake beard in a red white suit floated towards them on a raft. Schaefer pulled a pistol from his belt and fired, seeming to wound Santa, who tumbled

into the water where he thrashed about before disappearing below the waves. It was a charade, but Schaefer turned to the children assembled before him and said that Santa was dead. From that day forward, Schaefer's birthday was the only holiday celebrated inside Colonia Dignitat. He's so jealous of these kids' attention that he literally murders Santa Claus in the river. Sorry.

That is, that is extra. I, I, I can't, just, I mean, to, to, to have a brain, yeah, that came up with that. That comes up with that fucking idea. I, I, in a weird way, I have to respect it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like when you hear about like some of the, like, Elrond Hubbard infiltrating the

federal government more than the USSR ever did. It's like, God damn. It's not only not letting kids have Santa. Yeah. They need to know he's dead. I got to take this motherfucker out. I can't, I can't have him around. Drop this son of a bitch.

This guy who doesn't exist and I, it has to be the whole story that he told them has to be that like, well, he flew over the Colonia. So we shot him down with one of our Sam's that I executed him in the river. Jesus. Exactly. Yeah. They have to, they have to see it. Yeah.

For, Santa's a thing that's just told to kids. They believe it. I have to, I can't trust that. I have to kill him. That is, we are at behind the bastards, kind of connoisseurs of like the extremes of the human condition. That's one of the wildest things I've ever heard of a human being doing. 100%.

100%. That is beyond rattlesnake assassination levels of like wild. So miles beyond, miles real A level shit here, Shafer's playing in the big leagues. Damn. Oh man. I'm going to say it. That's the one to beat. That's the one to beat.

That's the one to beat. That's the one to beat. Yeah. Anybody can torture anyone can assassinate. This is the one. This is like gold standard. Yeah. This is our new gold standard.

Good luck other criminally insane bad men. Yeah. You've got, you've got quite a thing to top here. If you're not arranging Santa's assassination in front of children, turn around and walk out that door. Yeah. I got no time for you. I don't want to hear your story.

Yeah. Wow. Oh, Paul, that is going to close us out for part one. That was a journey, man. That was a real journey. You weren't lying. Okay. Okay.

From gouging his own eye out, untying a shoe to murdering Santa Claus in front of an audience of children. What a fucking tale. We covered some ground, my man. Yes, we did. Well, Paul, you got anything to plug? I will say I did a show this past Saturday called the Uncanny Hollow. I did a live show here in LA, but it's available online.

We archived it. We filmed it and archived it. If you'd like to see that, you can go to dynastetypewriter.com. It is a sort of Twilight Zone-ish sketch show that I did with an awesome cast, and it was a blast. Yeah. Go check that out online. That sounds great.

We love Dynasty Carburger. Check that out. Yeah. Those guys are the best. They're the best. They're fucking rad. Check Paul out, and don't move to Chile with a Nazi cult leader. Please.

I thought you were going to say, don't murder Santa Claus. That? I mean, look, look, look. I'm a Texan, so somebody comes into my home without asking. You got to do what you got to do. And on that note, that's part one. Yeah. Oh, boy.

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