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

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

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

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. In our spooky week Halloween podcast, this week, in addition to talking about a very spooky episode, we are Based and Paul F. Tompkins PILB. Paul? Thanks for taking my PILB. You do offer a lot of PILBs.

It sucks, because there's like, there's two hands, there's two PILBs, and then I come in with my PILB and I'm like, can I stick my hand in there and hopefully somebody will pick it? And hopefully somebody will pick it? Oh, I enjoyed that. Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul. I know, I know. How are you doing?

Well, you know, after part one, I really had to take an industrial shower and just really think about, were humans a mistake? And so I've gotten, I've just done a lot of thinking, a lot of soul searching, and I think I've come around to feel that people are, you know, basically good and I'm ready with that attitude to go into part two. Wow, that is brave. Brave, yeah, heroic even. Oh boy.

You're not making a mistake, do you? Well, he killed Santa. He did murder Santa Claus. I just got it out of my mind. He did, he did kill the living embodiment of childhood wonderment. He killed Santa. Because he was jealous that the kids he was molesting would like Santa more than him. They liked an idea of a person and he couldn't take it.

That is like, I think if you were to explain that somehow to Hitler, he would be like, well, that's a bit much. That's a bit far. Oh, it can go there? I didn't think about that. Oh boy. Maybe I'll try painting again. Yeah, back to painting.

So by the time Pinochet had solidified his grip on power in the mid-1970s, Colonia Dignidad was almost a state within a state. They had built a power plant, a television station, and two airstrips to transport the timber, wheat, corn, and bratwurst the community produced. Since fucking was more or less verboten, the workforce Paul Schaefer needed to accomplish all this was built up through a novel method,

abducting children who went to his hospital. So like, he's like, OK, kids have to come here. Yeah, they have to. They need to go to the hospital. They're kids. And I mean, I'm kind of the king. I guess I can make these kids do whatever I want. I can make it disappear.

Yeah. Let's try it and see how it goes. Let's try and see how it goes. I need someone to build my airstrip. He seemed very willing to say, you know what, this is nuts, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But if it does. That is, you've hit upon Paul one of the common through lines

that all of our most dangerous bastards have. You can draw this to guys like Donald Trump, guys like Hitler. A big part of their whole MO is just like, I wonder if I can get away with this. Yeah. I'm going to give it a shot. Yeah. I'm going to give it a shot, you know?

I probably can't. Yeah. I probably can't. And if I can't, then I'll say like, hey, I tried it. Yeah. But if I do, if I do get away with this, I mean, oh. Amazing. The thing is, it's living your life that way

is incredible advice for like a career. Like it is like if you're a creative or something like, what do you think you might want to write it up? Give it a shot. Do it, you know? Yeah. You want to do stand up, go out there and do some stand up, you know?

Yeah. You know, you think you're good enough to be in professional sports? Well, you fucking try. Yeah. You know, see if you can like, in like in personal lives, like, oh, okay. Well, you think you're into that person?

Go up and ask him out, you know? Yeah. Like it's not bad life advice. It's just these kind of people take it to the extent of like, I bet I could build my own power plant and have a totally efficient torture commune in the middle of Chile that I keep manned by abducting children at the hospital that I operate. There's no tryouts for cults, you know what I mean?

Yeah. You can't go audition to be a cult leader. That's a thing you have to do. There's no internship program. Exactly. And I feel like, I feel like once you get the cult formed, then the sky's the limit really. Yeah.

Yeah. Once you get it going, it builds inertia, you know? These people, if these people are going to listen to me this far, let's see what this baby can do. Yeah. Let's get this thing on the fucking highway, you know? Yeah. Let's open her up.

Absolutely. So the Colonial Hospital was absolutely essential to thousands of people in the working area. And since it received government funding, the state had no interest in providing people with a second option. As a result, when young boys were admitted for health problems and caught Shaffer's eye, they were simply taken from their families. If said families who were generally impoverished villagers complained,

Shaffer would be like, well, you got other kids, right? Do you want them to have medical care? And again, one of the things that's like, this is fucked up for a thousand reasons. This is an eriberos of fucked upness. I learned about this particular aspect of the cult from a harrowing interview in that Netflix documentary series about the colonia. And the boy relating this story says, I would have died from the health issue

that brought me to the hospital. They saved my life and then abducted me so I could be molested for years. God damn. It's fucking good. Something else, Paul. Wow. It reminds me of something I once heard someone say in an interview, you know, I don't remember how they got to this in the conversation.

But this person was saying, yeah, it would have been, I think it would have been okay if I'd never been born, like considering how my life has gone and the pain that's been in it. Like if I'd never been born at all, that might have been better. And I, that never left my mind. Yeah. That way is extremely profound and to save a child's life for that. Like how does that not, I don't know how those things happening to you,

like it's bad enough to just be molested, but to have been brought from the brink of death in order to be molested. Yeah. The psychological damage that that does, I don't know how you're not thinking of that every moment of the day for the rest of your life. Yeah. Like just getting up in the morning with that in your background

requires a tremendous amount of just like, because we all know, everybody says like the universe is unfair, but usually you're saying that from like your home with air conditioning and heating and like with fully fed and stuff. Like that's somebody who knows intimately. Yeah, it's real unfair. Like it is a fucked up role of some bad dice. So good for that person for being, I mean, whatever else happened in their life,

they were like, they had processed it enough to sit down with Netflix and like explain what happened to them. So I got nothing but respect for anybody who survives that. Absolutely. Incomprehensible. Good Lord. So any locals who might feel inclined to complain about the situation at this point are not just running up against the fact that

this is their only hospital in the area and whatnot. These people have money. But the fact that Paul Schaefer now has the direct support of the unquestioned dictator of the entire country. He doesn't just have people on the right wing who like him now. The guy running the country as his personal like possession, Augusto Pinochet, is his homeboy. For his part, the general allowed the colonial to import and export

without paying taxes. Some of these benefits Schaefer extended to local farmers. So Pinochet is like, hey, you don't got to worry about taxes. Import, export, whatever you want. You got your own airstrips. You don't have to worry about customs duties. And one of the ways Schaefer builds local support is he goes to these farmers in the area, kind of like the big, like the Chileans in the area

who have influence. And he's like, hey, you want to be able to sell your shit for without customs duties? I'll let you use my airport for free. But if anything happens, you got my back, you know, he's not saying anything's going to happen. And I'm not going to say what types of things are going to happen. But if anything happens, I mean, this really, this really does like,

you know, it really plays on how grateful are these people to have free free health care, free health care, where it's like, you may hear that I'm a child molester. Like, yeah, you may hear that I have been operating a child molestation engine at an unfathomable scale. But think of your savings. But yeah, you're not when your daughter broke her leg. That shit was free.

Yeah, it's it's wild. And these these local farmers who he's he gets, you know, in bed with kind of not literally some of these like these guys will defend him when like foreign journalists will come in to try to investigate what the fuck's going on here. And they've got his back. Like it's a very hostile place to be looking into the colonia. So Schaefer becomes the total like almost God to his followers.

They called him our eternal uncle, which you can make a not creepy uncle joke here, but we shan't. I mean, is this where they started? Yeah, eternal uncle. I might have some notes. They also called him the supreme leader, which is a little more traditional. Daily prayer meetings served as a way for Schaefer to institute strict group think and destroy any bonds besides the bond between him and his flock.

He repeatedly forced his followers to repeat a definition of the word family that he said he'd found in the Bible. He would ask, who are my mother and father and his congregation would respond? Those that do the work of God. OK, so at this point, there is still some sort of Christianity aspect to this. Yeah, there always is. There always is. So they're having services and, you know, doing that sort of thing,

but really it's all about him. It's all about him. It's Christianity as filtered through this pedophile. Yeah, he's the instrument of God for them, but essentially he is their God. Yeah, it's like somebody distilled the Catholic church into a hard liquor. So the process of having his followers confess their sins was formalized in a practice he called seal the source.

I'm not. I don't speak German, which apparently means care of the soul. Confessions were supposed to happen as close to the moment of the sin as possible, but Schaefer would also require his followers to meet with him and each other in small groups repeatedly throughout the day in order to give confection. Public confessions in mass were held at lunch and dinner. Members of the community would be expected to write the names of sinners themselves and people they'd seen sin on a blackboard near the entrance to the cafeteria.

When everyone sat down, Schaefer would read the names listed on the board while everyone ate. Every sinner was required to stand up and confess their sins. You were not allowed to deny sinning. So if somebody else just writes your name and you don't know what the fuck they're talking about, you have to come up with something. You have to like, you have to... Yeah, that reminds me of confession when I was a kid and like, what had I done? You know what I mean?

Yeah. And so, you know, going in, but you had to go every week. And so sometimes you just make stuff up like mild things like I took the Lord's name in vain or I disrespected my father or whatever because you can't just, it just seemed, without being told, you knew. I can't just go in there and say, I'm great, you know, like I kept it a hundred this week. You had to come up with something.

Yeah, you can't walk into confession and be like, you know what? I'm nailing it right now, bro. Yeah, doing great. No notes. It's also so weird because it is like... I mean, as a kid, I remember being terrified of like minor sins that was going to go to hell for life. Of course, yes. Yeah, like some stupid bullshit. Like, but as an adult, it's like, if there's God, he's got other shit going.

Like there's a lot happening right now. Like it's like walking in on a guy as he's like watching a genocide occur and being like, you know what, man? I was lost in a little bit earlier today. Yeah. Let me make a note of that. Oh, sorry. One second.

They're shooting the children again. I'm in seventh grade and I saw a bra strap and I got excited. Is that... Do you have time for that right now? Yeah, you know what? I was paying attention to some stuff in Bosnia, but let me just drop all that right now. Focus on this. And I'll tell you what, I'm going to do the same thing for both. Yeah.

What an easy gig. Oh. Rwandan genocide and cheated on a math test. Yeah. It requires the same thing from me. Consider them taken care of. Yeah. I made a note of it.

Oh, it's very funny. So what's not funny is all of this. So, yeah, everybody's got to like come up with something to confess. And on Sundays, everybody's got to go next to Schaeffer's house to confess yet again and pray for forgiveness. They're spending all of their time that's not working confessing, basically. Now, again, they're supposed to make a confession in the moment when they sin. And Schaeffer's not always going to be available for everybody.

There's hundreds of people on the compound. He's a busy man, got a lot of crimes against humanity to commit. So if a sin occurs outside of one of those regular meetings, followers were expected to confess to the nearest fellow resident who was expected to inform Schaeffer of the sin immediately. This led to a thriving economy in betrayal because people who came to Schaeffer to inform him of the unreported sins of other residents were rewarded by having their own sins forgiven without punishment.

So if you tell Schaeffer about something bad someone else did that they didn't tell him about, you get a free forgiveness. You don't have to because there's punishments, right? You don't have to take the punishment. Oh, my God. I know. It's pretty bad. This is like one of those things where it really, it really depends on

nobody talking to each other about this stuff. Well, if two people talk, that's the devil. Yeah, exactly. Punishments for sins ran the gamut from restrictions on food, extra hard labor, or simply being berated in front of the group to being electrocuted with cattle prods and forced to take tranquilizers. Some laborers, including children, were force-fed tranquilizers and then made to work industrial jobs with heavy machinery

like operating wood saws at the mill, which is, I don't know if you know much about saws that are the size of cars, but you shouldn't be on pills when you operate them. A lot of people say that. And so people get injured and dismembered all the time. Now, we talk about this a lot and I hope, I think my regular listeners probably don't labor under this misapprehension, but a lot of people do have the idea that folks who wind up stuck in this situation

have some sort of like they're dumb or they're weak, there's something, some flaw in them that allowed them to become dominated in this way. And first of all, I think that's kind of victim-blamey, but second, I think it misses. Number one, these aren't dumb people. They have their own power plant that they built and operate themselves. They have their own airstrips and manage air travel. And like, yeah, like they know what they're, these are very intelligent,

motivated people who are completely dominated by this guy. And in order to explain how that can happen, I want to read a quote from Bruce Falconer in The American Scholar. He does a really good job of laying this out. In Santiago in early 2006, I spoke with Dr. Niels Beiderman, a Chilean psychiatrist who, in association with the German embassy, had been making monthly trips to Colonia Dignidad to study the psychology of its inhabitants.

This is after Schaefer is gone. He offered observations from his work. Everything was done to further the religion, he explained. Like in any sect, the colonos, that's the members of the colony, the colony had a spiritual leader in Paul Schaefer, to whom they formed a very strong attachment. There was a complex network of emotional connections in the Colonia. It was not a concentration camp system in which prisoners

tend to think of themselves as individuals. It was a community and the children suffered most of all. The pilgrims may have come to Chile for their religion, but once they were there, they became prey to a brutal and relentless cult of personality. The older colonos punished the younger ones under orders from Schaefer, Beiderman continued. They were also the ones who were supposed to educate them. This involved keeping them away from their families,

keeping them active all day and principally keeping them obedient and disciplined. They did whatever they needed to do, including psychopharmacology and electric shock. Over time, physical coercion became less necessary as the social system became rooted in the psyche of the individual. So a lot of this torture is front-loaded. It's like an attack dose of a drug in order to, like, you don't have to after a certain point. Everyone is so inundated by the system that there's not resistance.

There aren't kinks in it. For most people, it works. I mean, this is the thing. I'm as guilty as anyone of victim-blaming people and cults because I think your mind, of course, you go right away to what if it were me. Well, that wouldn't happen to me and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I wouldn't do this. But it's like the way these work is because these people are,

these hideous geniuses who have figured this out, sometimes it's simpler than other times. Sometimes it's like they just know that it's, if I just reinforce this thing over and over again, that I'll wear people down, it gets into their brains. But sometimes a guy like this comes along where it's like, the way he has foreseen and forestalled every opposition to the programming is terrifying. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and he's just good at it. And that's the thing. These people don't think of it when they're asked to do something, when they're working these hours, when they're being separated from their kids. They're not thinking of it as a punishment. They're not thinking of it as this is what Schaefer is doing to me. They're thinking about this is what I am doing for the community.

And people will, by and large, do pretty much anything for their community. If they have one, if they don't, I don't know, see the United States of America. So Schaefer came to consider sexual intercourse a tool of the devil, as we have already discussed. The problem with this is that people fuck. I don't know if you're aware of this, Paul, but they sure do. They sure do.

They sure do. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I talk myself. Yeah. Wow, wow. Yeah, I said it on the mic. Podcast history here. TMZ's front page.

Isolate that, use it as a drop. Yeah, so no matter what restrictions you try to put on it, people are not going to not fall in love. Even if you completely separate men from women, they're going to find a way. Like life finds a way, you know, as a mathematician once said. Obviously Paul Schaefer tried to stop this. He punished men and women who were caught together viciously.

An entire family would be shunned if their daughter had like a kiss with a boy. Like your whole family is in trouble if that kind of stuff happens. But still people found ways to do it. And there were also situations in which Paul had to allow it. This increasingly becomes the thing the longer the colonia gets. He can't stop everybody from doing this because he needs a lot of these people. There are men and women in the colonia who though loyal to him are too valuable to control totally. There's doctors and nurses.

Everything rides on these people, these skilled professionals. And they do have, like if you are an MD, you can leave and find something else to do, you know? Like you don't have to do this shit. You have a lot more leverage than other people. And so in order to stop there from being kind of a power struggle with these folks, Schaefer would allow some of these people to marry if they asked. Now, some of them, like the guy we talked about Hop, who's like the head doctor, he gets pretty much to live a normal life broadly.

He's at the top of this cult, too. He's not molesting kids, I don't think, but he's kind of co-leading things. He has a lot of autonomy. Other people generally had less, but of these people who are kind of more privileged, they could go to Schaefer. You couldn't say, I'm in love with this person and I want to marry them. But you could say, I think God wants me to marry, right? And they would go to Schaefer.

They would say this and it would Schaefer's job then, if this was someone that he decided to let marry, to pick the person that they were going to marry. Now, maybe sometimes people, he picked people that they wanted to marry. As a general rule, though, he used this as a situation to exert more control. Bruce Falconer describes it as a kind of sexual roulette, where you were just sort of hoping that he would pick someone you actually wanted to be with. But the way Schaefer usually did it, again, unless someone was high important enough that he couldn't fuck with them,

he would pick a woman that you couldn't possibly have a child with, right? That was a big part of it, because he doesn't want people having families. He doesn't want people having kids. So how would he determine that? Well, it's easy if the woman's been through menopause. So if some 20-year-old who's got like a valuable skill is like, I want to get married, he's like, here, marry this 65-year-old woman. That's your wife now, right?

So it's this... The strategy was effective. Only 60 or so children were born during the entire span Schaefer ran Colonia Dignidad, which was more than 30 years. And again, hundreds, like 300-something people here. Between 1975 and 1989, no children were born there at all. So this is an extremely successful control regime. He has a lot of control here.

Wow. I mean, what if he had thought about making a car that ran on water? Yeah, you do have to think about, like, what could this man have done? Yeah, how many diseases could have been eradicated? Yeah, yeah. The amount of human ingenuity, we would be doing Star Trek shit now. If every one of these guys... Our business is talking about these guys.

Every one of these guys with this level of dedication had instead been like, yeah, fusion seems like a good idea. Even just to be like the head of the department, you know what I mean? Yeah, not even to like, then as a scientist, just to organize it. Yeah, and to motivate people. Exactly. Yeah, if Donald Trump had dedicated every aspect of his charisma to feeding the poor, we would have a lot less starving poor people in the world,

because he's good at motivating a certain subject of people. I remember thinking that if he had, when COVID hit us, and if he had said, you know, we're going to John Wayne this, and we're going to do it better than anybody, we're going to beat this thing faster, like, but no, it's not real, it's going to be over soon. Yep, no, it's... But no, chug your bleach. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know who else wants you to drink bleach, Paul? Oh, God. No, who? The products and services and support. No, they don't. Are we not sponsored by Clorox anymore, Sophie? We're not sponsored by Clorox anymore, Robert. Well, you know, Paul, have I told you about my signature cocktail, Paul?

You're drinking out of a very fancy goblet here, and I wonder if you might be interested. Well, yeah, it's nothing but for you. I would love to hear about it, sure. It's called a 2021 highball. Now, here's what you do, Paul. You get a pint glass, and you fill that 80% of the way up with pure sparkling 409. And then just a drop of bleach. You want to keep a bottle of vermouth nearby?

Open it up. Don't pour it in. Just have it nearby, kind of like a good martini. And then you chug that whole thing as fast as you can. That's a 2020 highball. And let me tell you, at the end of a long day, it's just what you need. If I don't have 409, is fantastic an acceptable substitute? Well, Paul, you don't know this, but that's actually very offensive to my culture.

I'm very sorry. I do apologize. Now, if you want a 2020... I don't know. I don't know what to drink names. All right. Well, you can tell one of us is a professional improviser. Oh, man.

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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. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not on the gun badass 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. 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. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And Paul, you mentioned a specific cleaning product that often comes. You know the giant jugs that like those kind of like the like if you go to like a Mexican market and you get like the big cleaning supplies and the huge. Yes. Like purple and stuff. Fantastico is one when I was in Baja a few years ago. I was living with our friend David Bell, who is who is a rights for Cody Johnson's outfit and does his own podcasts. Then a guest on the show. I found something called Mezcalito, which is a horrible. It's like mezcal flavoring in sugar and liquor.

And it's this color of yellow that looks radioactive and it's sold in the same bottles they sell cleaning supplies in. I thought I'm a jug of it. And for like a month, it would just gradually decrease as he would drink it. And I'm sure it took years off of his life. I apologize to his mother for it. Wow. I miss it. Paul, ready to get back into this?

Yeah, Robert, let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Now, in the rare occasions where a woman did get pregnant at the Colonia, Schaefer would order her isolated from the community, kept in solitude until she gave birth. The child was taken from her immediately and put with nurses who would care for and raise the child while the woman went immediately back to work. As you might expect, people born and forced to live in such circumstances did not always turn out to be the apex of mental health. Turns out it's bad to separate children from people who love them and force them to live in a barracks. Jesus Christ.

Who could have known? It also turns out that it's unfortunately pretty easy to make people who've already been manipulated to accept the torture and repeated assault of their loved ones. It's easy to make those people torture strangers for profit. And that brings us back to Augusto Pinochet. Germany and Chile actually had a long military history together prior to the Cold War. In 1871, the Germans beat the French in a little scuffle called the Franco-Prussian War. Prior to this, if you were a new country and again, colonialism is like fading away in a lot of Latin America during the 1800s, right? All these different countries are getting their independence and stuff.

And they're all like figuring out, like thrust into the modern world independent, like, well, we need an army now. Who's going to train them? At the start of the 1800s, it's the French, right? The French are historically, like, this gets ignored a lot because of how World War II goes. But like, for most of modern history, the French are like the army guys, like the best soldiers in the world. A lot of people consider them. That shit changes in 1871. And all of these Latin American nations that had lusted after getting, like, French people to train their armies start hiring Germans.

And that's where the kind of relationship between Chile and Germany starts. A lot of German military advisors, Prussian officers, are the ones who formed the Chilean armed forces in the late 19th century. And it actually, if you want to know, like, how did fascists take power in Chile? Well, all of the guys who built the Chilean military, which is responsible for the coup, were guys who later were Nazis. And sometimes some of them were Nazis when they were doing it. So like, yeah, it didn't make sense. During the Second World War, a new Lieutenant General, who had been trained by German officers named Augusto Pinochet, sympathized with the Nazis and expressed his enchantment with Erwin Rommel,

easily the fifth or sixth most overrated general officer in that war. Well, now you don't need to be snarky, Robert. I bring the Rommel shade. That's what I'm here for. Anyway, we've already discussed the privileges Pinochet gave the colony, but those privileges did come with a responsibility. As I introduced in the last episode, Colonia Dignidad's expertise in torture made them a perfect auxiliary to the DINA, or DINA, Pinochet's secret police force. We don't know how many people they tortured, but thousands, maybe? Like, a lot.

They tortured a shitload of people. And by the way, this is actually, again, a lot of these people are former Nazis. A lot of people are organized. We don't know what all of them did during the war. But there's an ugly and a pretty global history of former Nazis, specifically being the people who helped train secret police for dictators to torture. And the U.S. supports a number of these guys. Syria's infamous Sidneyah prison, and it's incredibly, Syria has one of the most horrific torture programs of any nation today. It was all organized by a former member of the SS who put together their torture program.

And the United States funded it from 2004 to like 2009 or 10 because we would take people we captured in Iraq and we would send them over to Syria because we couldn't torture them the way that the Syrians could torture them. Robert, wait, wait, wait. You're talking about the United States of America? Of America. Yes, that's right. That's right. But that's the country where I live. I know. And it turns out, I mean, we were also funding Pinochet while he was using Nazis to torture people. So we do this a lot. Well, I hope we don't do it anymore.

No. This is, I think it's safe to say that the 1970s was the last time the United States did anything questionable in Latin America. It has been nothing but smooth sailing. Exactly. Well, we got that out of our system. Yeah. Look, it's like, you know, you got to, you got to, you got to, I don't know. I don't know what else it's like. One of the people tortured at the Colonia Dignidad was a guy named Louis Peebles. He was, which is tragic story, but very funny name. He survived so we can laugh at the fact that his name is Louis Peebles. Peebles, again, amazing, was the former commander of a left-wing militia.

You have to really be a frightening man if you're a militia leader named Peebles and people take you seriously. That's an extra like boy named Sue level of like, yeah, don't laugh at the name. It is funny that I never thought twice about the name Van Peebles, but Peebles by itself, it's absurd. Yeah. And Louis Peebles, Louis Peebles. So Peebles runs a left-wing militia. It turns out running a left-wing militia pretty hard in a country that's been taken over by the fascists. He lasts a while. 73 is when Pinochet is out of power. Most of the resistance is stomped out in a week or so.

Peebles isn't captured by the government until 1975, February 1975. Whoever he's, he's pretty canny son of a bitch, but you know, nobody's that canny. He was initially jailed in a military base, but then early one Sunday morning soldiers bound him, blindfolded him and drove him several hours away to Colonia Dignidad. Next from the American scholar, quote, he was taken to an underground cellar that smelled of linoleum and wood polish, stripped to his underwear and fastened down with leather straps to an iron bed frame. His blindfold was replaced with a leather cap that came down over his eyes.

It had a chin strap that held his jaw firmly in place and ear flaps equipped with metal wires. More wires were taped to his ankles, thighs, chest, throat, anus and genitals, all hooked into a voltage machine. The first session lasted six hours. As Peebles was being shocked, they stabbed him with needles that caused his skin to itch. Then they put out cigarettes on his body and applied a sticky substance to his eyes and mouth. Sometimes if he screamed, they shoved it down his throat. I mean, I guess at least they polished the floor.

Yeah, they did polish the floor. They're Germans. They're clean people. Sometimes to a problematic degree. So the guy who's doing all this, he hears a German man talking and when all of this becomes public later in Shaffer's in the news, he realizes the man torturing him was Paul Shaffer. He was teaching them how to do their job, Peebles later said. He was saying, you have to do it slowly. You have to push here. Once or twice, he punched me very hard below the belt.

He realized that they weren't doing anything to me down there. So he said, you should also do it here. And he started beating me. And I think this is him training the kids, the young people. I think they're not children at this point, but when they grow up, the ones who don't pull away from him because he molested them, the ones who are like bonded to him because that happens too, they become like his torture people. Oh, god damn.

It's pretty bad, Paul. He doesn't know when to quit. Well, no one has stopped him yet. He has not encountered a tremendous number of consequences to his actions so far. Everything's coming up Shaffer at this point. I'm very interested now because we've talked about cult people before and there's always the moment where they go, they do a thing that they, like it builds and builds and builds.

And there's a thing like, what if I tried this and then that's when it all falls apart. I cannot even imagine what it's going to be for this guy, given what he's already done. I'm interested to see if you'll consider it like, because it's easy. I know what it is. That is coming. Like you're right. You know you're cult guys. I'm interested if you'll think it's kind of like a deceleration. And by the way, because of the midpoint of the story is he murdered Santa Claus.

There's not a lot of pressing the gas from there. I tell you what, if it is a deceleration, that's fine by me. I wouldn't say no to a deceleration. Yeah, to like pulling back on that throttle a little bit. Jesus Christ. So people's survived his experience. And again, one of the Pinochet kills a lot of people, but he's not a mass murdering fascist on the scale. If he's more like Francisco Franco, he's not like a Hitler kind of guy.

Like his whole thing is, I'm not going to kill them all. If I torture them until they're too scared to do anything, that's fine. Like Pinochet's body count in the grand scale of dictators is not tremendously high. He tortures a shitload more people than he kills and he doesn't have people's killed. In fact, the guys eventually released and he quite wisely flees to Europe, which I think works out fine for Pinochet, right? People's pieced together what had happened to him over the next several years. His new stories began to trickle out about Colonia Dignidad's relationship with Pinochet.

He realizes, oh, this guy, and again, there's stories filtering back to Europe. We've talked to, there's a couple of people who escape and they go to the media. Since the beginning, there have been occasional stories in the media about allegations that this German compound in Chile is host to a pedophile. Once Pinochet is in power, there start to be stories that come out that they might be torturing some people. There's a constant kind of background conversation in Germany and in Europe about what might be happening here. When Pibles gets to Europe, he goes to Amnesty International. In 1977, they put his testimony with the testimony of several other people who had been tortured there and survived

into a 60-page report with the subtitle, A German Community in Chile, A Torture Camp for the Dina. Schaefer's lawyers filed libel charges against Amnesty International in a German court. This started a legal battle that would last almost 20 years and delay the publication of the report until 1997. 20 years, they're able to stop this from getting out in mass because he's got money. They've got money for lawyers. It's the Scientology shit.

So much of all of these different kind of cults that are usually aren't involved with each other. Usually, if you've got the hardcore, got them a less children and murder people cult, they don't really have the resources for good lawyers and stuff. Scientology never goes that far with the brutal torture stuff because the reason that they have the money is that they keep it on the edge of that. Schaefer does all of this stuff. He does all of the quasi-respectable making money, interacting with the real world, having a legal team,

and we're balls out, unspeakable evil kind of stuff. It's really a pretty remarkable story. So, like other escapees of the colonia, people settled in Europe, Brussels to be specific, because again, this goes on for 20 years. So, he does live a life which is good, and he continues, he spends years. Anytime anyone's willing to talk about Paul Schaefer, he will tell his story. Meanwhile, the torture continued. In fact, as Pinochet's regime went on, Pinochet came to rely on Schaefer more and more.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Dina started taking dissidents to the colonia for execution. The bodies were eventually buried in mass graves. We don't know how many. All of them were dug up and burned at some point after this. We know there were mass graves, because number one, you can tell that there was a grave. There's little bits and pieces of clothing and stuff. The cars of missing persons were found buried on the property and whatnot. So, we know what was going on, but the remains themselves were all destroyed.

Again, they're Germans. They're very thorough. Yeah, and former Dina agents have admitted to taking people there to be disappeared. We also do have testimony from people who were dropping off dissidents to be murdered, who were like, yeah, that's what we did there. Again, no idea how many people were killed, but a lot. A mass grave number. I mean, these former Dina agents, where are they that they're in a position to say,

oh yeah, we disappeared all these people? After, this is one of those things, when you have a dictatorship like this that ends, and it doesn't end in a massive civil war, when it ends in a massive civil war, yeah, those guys, when they tend to get murdered if they get caught, right? That's what you do if it's a civil war to the old secret police. You fucking kill a lot of them. This doesn't end that way. Pinochet's regime ends, but it's kind of like a negotiated thing,

and Pinochet gets to be like a congressman for life kind of thing. And things get a lot better in Chile. No one would disagree with that. But they have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It's like in South Africa, right? This system of apartheid ends, but they don't murder all of the people who did the apartheid. They have to integrate them into society. And so a lot of these guys, they say, okay, there are some people who do get punished.

There are people who go to prison for the stuff they did in the Pinochet regime. But a lot of these people are basically like, we need to know what happened, but we're not going to kill you over it. And I think there are people who feel bad, yada, yada. I don't want to spend a lot of time trying to morally... No, but basically in exchange for information, we won't execute you. Yeah, or we won't put you in prison necessarily, because we're trying to figure out what happened, who disappeared.

There's a lot of people who have questions. I don't know if my family members are alive or dead. I'm not trying to come down one way or the other on it, because it's not my country and not my decision what should happen afterwards. But yeah, that's what it's not... Pinochet's dictatorship doesn't end because the people murder him. So Schaefer's nickname with the Dina was the professor. And the eyewitness accounts of people being sent to the colonia for execution

all point to Schaefer being the man who received victims and led them to their execution. He is a hands-on dude. He's not delegating this shit. Hitler's a delegator. Schaefer is, if we're going to be executing people, I'm going to be there. I'm going to be picking them up. I'm going to be taking them to the site. One former member of the colony told Bruce Falconer that he had been ordered by Schaefer directly to drive a busload of 35 political prisoners

into the hills of the colony and leave them by the side of a dirt road. As this person drove away, he heard machine gun fire. No bodies were ever found. And there's a bunch of stories like that. That's generally how they go. By 1980, the colony had expanded from its initial 4,400 acres to more than 15,000 acres. A sizeable chunk of this was stolen from locals and the Catholic Church. Again, this comes to like, you've heard of liberation theology.

There's this chunk of the Catholic Church in South America during this period that's fighting back against all of these like fascist dictators and militias and stuff. So they don't have a lot of resistance from the Pinochet regime when they just like show up one day. Schaefer has his people like surround this group of nuns who own farmland and is like, what are you going to do? And so they leave and he gets it. Yeah. And this is probably like the mid 1980s is kind of when his control is at its peak.

But while his personal control of his cult is at its peak, he's now lost control of the international narrative. And as this Washington Post report from 1980 makes clear, his Nazi past had started to catch up to him on the international stage. Quote, There have also been charges over the years that the colony is a way station in the South American Nazi underground where war criminals wanted by German, Israeli or other authorities are allowed to hide. A Chilean who visited the colony several years ago said that he was told by Ursula,

a nurse in the colony's ultra modern hospital, that the doctors there were expert in performing plastic surgery. Last December, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal said that he had evidence that Joseph Mengele, the third Reich's infamous angel of death had lived in the colony for a time last year. The FBI had similar information. And the colony, they have a spokesman, the colony denies that Mengele or any other Nazis live in the colony. We know Nazis lived there.

Some of them had, like I was in the, I was in the Veribach whatever. We don't have as much as I want, it would be good to have on like what extent they were actually part of the underground Nazi railroad. But it kind of seems like they were a key aspect of helping like hardcore war criminal Nazis move around and change their appearance and stay in the underground and avoid prosecution. And also like everything suggests that that is a thing that he would do, that he would make happen. This is the guy.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if Mengele was there. Nobody does, obviously. But I think he helped a lot of hardcore Nazi war criminal side. That seems completely on brand for the day. I mean, why not at that point? Yeah.

And honestly, on the low end of his crimes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe he did that to feel more respectable to himself. Yeah. Yeah. Just smuggling some genocide committers.

They already did the genocide. You should see the shit I'm getting up to. It is unclear whether or not any other famous Nazis hung out there, but there were definitely Nazis. Schaefer and a lot of the older men were Nazi veterans. They were huge fans of Pinochet, who was himself a fascist. That 1980 article from the Washington Post is maybe the first place to describe the colonia as a state within a state, which it was.

And they note that the private airstrips and private communication system would make it simple for someone to fly into the colonia from outside of the country without going through customs or being registered in any way. So they're in the ideal situation to help Nazis stay underground. The reporter on that article noted that he attempted to visit the colonia, but was threatened with arrest by local police, who swarmed him before he could get close and destroyed his film role, just to be sure. They claimed to be acting on orders from the Capitol.

Quote, the Chilean government takes the attitude that the colony is located on private property, which, unless there is a problem, should not be entered by the police. Neither the police captain, who almost arrested me in December, nor the government officials in Santiago could explain how the police would know if there were a problem without regularly entering the vast commune. Chilean peasants from the surrounding area, who hold the colony in high regard, are given three medical care at its hospital, but only during certain pre-established hours.

One Chilean who spent three nights there said he had uncovered microphones hidden in his room, which his hosts then explained were there to anticipate his needs. He also said that he was followed wherever he went and was not allowed to have spontaneous contact with members of the sect. I love the idea, explaining a bug by saying, oh, yeah, we just want to know if you want stuff. We just want to be better hosts. Yeah.

It's like, wouldn't it be better rather than you having to ask, like, can I make a sandwich in here? You know, we just make a sandwich. We just make a sandwich. I would like a sandwich right now. I'm going to go ask for one. We just want this to be the best damn hospital you've ever been to. It is funny that you would even like, yeah, try to justify it.

But yeah, that is. And you also see in that quote, everything he's spent years doing coming home. Like he's got all of this local support, not just from the government, but from the people. Like there is no getting in there. There's no, he has. This might be the most total control I've ever heard of a cult leader establishing. Yeah.

Like, to be honest, this is. It's wild. Yeah. It's something else. He's got this shit locked up. Yeah, he does. And you know who else has their shit locked up? Paul, please tell me the products and services that support this podcast.

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Oh, we're back. Paul, so we just talked about how there's some weird shit going on with Nazis maybe getting smuggled through here. To add to that, there's a bunch of stuff we just don't know enough about as I would like. There's a lot of unexplained financial irregularities behind the Colonia and Schavers who was funding it. You don't say.

You don't say. Really? Yeah. I would have thought that's the one thing that Paul Schavers insisted upon was, I will be scrupulous about the books. That 1980 Washington Post article noted that the Colonia maintained what it called a motherhouse in Siegberg, Germany, where it would take care of single mothers and would raise funds. They continue to operate an orphanage in Germany, which they use, the establishment of this

orphanage means there's a charity in Germany, which means anonymous people only described as partners can donate money to that orphanage and all that money goes to the commune in Chile. Those partners are maybe former members of the Nazi party who were trying to help smuggle people or get funds to them. A lot of this might have been a money laundering operation where we need to get money to this fucking SS general who's been hiding out in Argentina. We donate to the Colonia.

They take a cut off the top and they pass the money onto this guy because they're able to travel without customs documents. All sorts of shady shit is going on here. The thing to me when it gets to this point, especially when there's Christianity involved, is that what level is the Christianity entering Paul Schaeffer's brain at this point? Does he still consider himself a religious person? I say, my prayers every night, or is it just like at this point, it's just like I am fully embracing my own godhood and the sham.

It's always to me the balancing, like we talked about before, the balancing of how much do I believe in myself to be this thing and how much of it is just a con and I know it's a con. Yeah. But then when you still are considering yourself a Christian or you're having some sort of Christian aspect to your scam, how much do you believe in our Lord Jesus Christ on high is smiling down upon me and the things that I'm doing? It is, I don't know, I really have no idea because you're pretty far from the teachings

of the Bible when you are smuggling Nazis through Latin America while raping hundreds of children and torturing people for Pinochet and laundering money and not very Christian, I would say. That's the only peak I would like into their brains is to know what are they thinking at that moment or is there a point where it's just abandoned and they're just like, I got a good thing going here, I'm going to keep it up. It's a useful means of control still to say that there's a power even greater than me that's guiding everything.

Yeah. I have trouble imagining that Schaefer believes in anything but power and indulging his wants. I do have trouble believing that. Me too, yeah. I don't know though. Obviously, there's a lot of belief in this organization with a lot of skills. I think there's also just a lot of very cynical Nazis using it for their own shit, right? Which to me is the worst kind of Nazi.

Yeah, cynical Nazi, at least be a believer, yeah, I don't know. It is hard to really wrap your head around what is going on in Paul's head if it's anything but just cold and it might because he's got to be a calculator, right? I could see it just being sort of like a dial tone in there, just like, I get what I want. These are the things that I'm doing in order to get the things that I want. It's not like these guys ever really lay it out at the end where they're like, yeah, it was all bullshit, I admit it. Yeah.

They don't ever do that, but yeah, I don't know. There were constant rumors of foreign backers for the colonia, rumors that old Nazi war criminals had funneled money into it. It's hospital, again, super good at plastic surgery, which is a little odd for a rural Chilean medical facility that deals primarily with obstetrics. They of course ran several successful businesses, tortured people for the Chilean state, so a lot of the money may have come from that, it's hard to say. One diplomatic observer cited by the Washington Post noted that, quote, no one knows who is

behind the central organization, which he claimed was located in Siegberg, Germany. This guy claimed that they'd put millions of dollars into the colony rather than the colony funding its own endeavors, which I just don't know what's going on here. The observer went on to say, the religious and social aims of this group are very uncertain. It is all very strange. That is kind of the untold story here, is like, how much of this, how much of this, how much of Paul was, if you keep this operation going for these underground Nazis, you can do whatever you want.

Like how much was he an instrument of other people who helped him get established and helped him do all this? I don't know. I don't know how much of that is underpinning this. I don't know if they come in later and are like, shit, this guy's got a good thing going. Let's pump some money into it and we can take advantage. Or if it's from 61 from the very start, there's this shadowy cabal of Nazis being like, we need to build this thing.

I really just don't know. So-called could just be an innocent dude. Could be an innocent pedophile, just working for the Nazis, just an innocent Nazi pedophile. He's just a regular Nazi pedophile. Upon a force is greater than him. Exactly. We've all felt that way at some point. Yeah.

Yeah. Journalists in 1980 noted how suspicious it was that the colonia, ostensibly a religious mission, had no church. And I actually think they're wrong. That didn't even occur to me. Yeah. There's not a single church there. But where are these services happening?

They're all in the cafeteria. And I actually think it's very funny that this religious mission has no church. But I think the reason these journalists think that it's weird and suspicious is because they don't actually understand what these people believe. There was no physical church because Schaefer was the church. Whatever he is, is the church. And he could not abide the thought of worship that was not centered around and directed by him.

And he hated the idea that there would be a church because then people could go there when he was not there and worship. Right. Right. Like, I am the worship. I am the vector of this faith. Yeah. That's my suspicion.

All the while this is going on, the abuse continued. In 1970, one girl, Matilda Schergelis, wrote to her mother back in Germany, no one is getting in here and nobody is getting out. Which is certainly how she felt at the time, but is not quite true. Now, Werner Schmitke was one of the kids we talked about in episode one. He sailed to Kolonia Dignidad in 1962 as a two-year-old. And a few years later, he began being molested by Paul Schaefer. Schmitke tried to escape the Kolonia five times over the years.

And even though he was never caught in doing this, he was always, he was never, like he was always, he got out successfully every time. He was always forced to return. And this is what's interesting to me is like, he would get out, he would be free and clear, and then he would have to go back because as he explained, I had nobody to go to. As a child, you need your parents to go to, to cry to and say, I can't take it anymore. But the only answer was to run away. So he kept winding up back at the colt after escaping and getting punished and stuff.

In 1988, it was 1988, so Werner is escaping a bunch of times, a number of kids get out, a lot of them get brought back, some of them flee to Europe. But it's 1988 before an escape happens that generates enough news in the right media climate for the international community, Germany in particular, to start taking the allegations of abuse at the Kolonia seriously. And it happens when two young people, George and Lottie Packmore, manage to escape to Canada and then get to Bonn, where they testify before the Reichstag that German citizens were being sexually assaulted and forced to stay against their will.

Lottie implicated a number of high ranking officials in the Kolonia, including Dr. Hoppe, saying that he'd been allowed to marry and own a car in return for enabling a regime of mass child rape. Dr. Hoppe had been the Kolonia's foreign emissary. He was the guy who would go overseas whenever there were questions about the Kolonia. He's the guy who's talking to the press a lot of the time. He had connections with German diplomats. He brought people back sometimes when they would flee to foreign countries.

When Lottie had first escaped in 1980, he'd convinced foreign officials to send her back because she was a child. And she claims that when she protested, he threatened her. You're peep out of you and you'll get an injection to keep you quiet. This guy gets to have a wife and a car and a family and a job because he's doing this. Since Paul Schaefer was still a wanted man in Germany, he sent Dr. Hoppe to represent the cult in parliament. According to Reuters, Hoppe testified that, quote, the group was one big family, which

in a quarter of a century had not a single divorce or suicide and whose members were free to leave at any time and were not subjected to forced labor. Quote, despite this, there have always been people or groups who have slandered our society or individual members in an incredibly scandalous way by feeding misinformation to the press. So this is what he says in his testimony. In 1990, the people of Chile forced Augusto Pinochet out of office via a plebiscite. He stepped down to a term as senator for life and we'll talk about all this more at some point, I promise.

After he leaves office, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is formed to investigate human rights abuses during the regime. Everything was paid quite naturally to Colonia Dignidad and an investigation into missing persons there, including Boris Weisfiler, who we opened the episode with, started back up. It would be a gross misuse of the word slow to say that justice was slow in this case. For more than half a decade, the Colonia stayed closed to the world due in large part to the fact that the police were still very sympathetic to the old regime and thus to Schaefer.

In 1996, Schaefer launched a new, so Schaefer is still in control doing his thing after Pinochet leaves and they're being investigated. They're kind of stonewalling, forcing police out, fighting it in court and he kind of continues business as usual. And in 1996, he launches a new educational initiative called the Intensive Boarding School. This was an immersive teaching program for local Chilean kids to study and live in the Colonia until they reached 18. Like everything else Schaefer did, the Intensive Boarding School was a way for him to molest

a lot more children. Local parents saw it as an opportunity for their children to get a Western quality education and work experience for free. So they sent their kids to the Colonia and Paul Schaefer molests a lot of these kids. This situation goes on until the winter of 1996 when a 12-year-old named Cristobal smuggles a note out to his mother. The note read, take me out of here, he raped me. Jesus.

Yeah, yeah. And this is the bridge too far for whatever reason. This is the thing that is the step too far. So she rescues him, which was a dicey proposition, very dangerous thing to do. There's armed guards at all times, but she gets her kid out of here. And once they're free, she takes him to a nearby clinic where a doctor verifies that the boy had been raped. This is the first time there is medical evidence of sexual abuse of one of the kids who is

claiming that it's done by Paul Schaefer. She did not believe local police would help her, obviously. So she flees to the capital of Santiago and finds the chief of Chile's national detective force, Luis Henriquez. We don't often have cop heroes on this show, but I will give Henriquez a lot of credit here. He is a good guy. He does the right thing here.

And it's one of those things where most of the police in Chile were fundamentally sympathetic to Pinochet. That's why they're willing to protect this massive child rape operation. But Luis Henriquez had been one of Salvador Allende's bodyguards. He had been there in the presidential palace when Allende committed suicide. So he was not a Pinochet loyalist. And he hears about what's going on, and he sticks to this case like glue. In mid-August of 1996, he succeeds in getting a judge to issue a warrant for Schaefer's

arrest. Henriquez takes a team to capture the Nazi pedophile cult leader, but Schaefer's got a good intel apparatus. He's got cops inside who are loyal to him, and he gets warned before the raid hits. Bruce Falconer writes, quote, A meeting was called on August 20, 1996, to discuss what should be done. Schaefer seemed badly shaken. As the colonos discussed how to proceed, he kept his head down and never spoke a word.

Shortly thereafter, he disappeared into the colonia's network of subterranean bunkers and tunnels. It is widely believed that he was there underground when on November 30, 1996, Henriquez muscled his way into Schaefer's utopia for the first time. Henriquez had hoped to capture Schaefer by surprise. He went in with 30 armed policemen in a caravan, but as his team made its way up the long dirt road, it was spotted by the colonia's lookouts, who gave warning. The caravan busted through a sequence of gates and only slowed as it approached the

village itself. Henriquez had given orders to his men should they come under fire, not to retreat, but to move deeper into the village for cover. To his surprise, though, resistance was minimal. The colonos were like zombies, or maybe like robots, Henriquez would later recall. They were machines, on off, on off, on off. They didn't change moods like normal people. Though Schaefer's followers were generally subdued, at times they became aggressive,

and in a few cases, they physically assaulted the police. Henriquez assumed these outbursts signaled that they were getting close to Schaefer, but in the end, Henriquez and his police went home empty-handed. Got to be, yeah, what a thing to see, breaking into this cult for the first time, seeing the way these people react to the outside world coming in. It's really chilling, like the description of how they behaved. So the obvious question is, where was he? Was it that he wasn't there, that they couldn't get to where he was?

We don't entirely know. The leading theory, and Henriquez's theory, is that he was there. He was very close by, but they had spent years building a system of underground bunkers. Of course! And he's hiding underground. Of course! Of course, right? Yeah!

Of course, this guy's got underground bunkers. Of course, he has fucking underground bunkers and tunnels. Goddamn! Yeah, I mean, he's not an unprepared man. To try another Boy Scouts comparison, Paul. So to his immense credit, Henriquez sticks with the case for years. He executes more than 30 raids on the Colonia. They don't capture Schaefer, none of these capture Schaefer, but they all get things.

They all find evidence of what's been going on, evidence of the tortures, of the executions, of the child molestation. Henriquez believes that Schaefer probably stayed underground for some time, maybe even years. We don't know when he fled Chile, but at some point in the late 90s, he did finally leave the country. I guess I think Henriquez, I suspect a few of these raids happen and he gets closer and closer and eventually Schaefer's like, they're going to get me eventually, I have to leave.

And he gets smuggled out. Life in the Colonia changed little at first. One of his senior officers became the new leader and they try to keep up a lot of the old rules, but gradually things start to shift and change, right? The molestation certainly seems to have ended when Schaefer left and things thaw a bit. Eventually the Colonia adopts a democratic council of leaders. Now this doesn't work very well, it's dissolved very pretty quickly under intense debate, but gradually the closed society cracks open and like normalcy starts to creep in.

In time, some Colt members started to break free of their mental programming, Schaefer's hiding for years and individuals who had been in the Colt and who had been defending him start to cooperate with the investigation. Just like the, I don't like the term brainwashing, but whatever is going on, some of these people realize like, you know what, this was bad. Some of them are probably people who defended him because they'd been five or six when they came to the Colonia or even born into the Colonia and it's not easy to overcome all that kind of programming.

So they start to give more and more information to Henriquez who just keeps like really doggedly keeps going after this place, keeps trying to figure out what's happening. And gradually these people open up to him. They show Henriquez where the files from Pinochet's torture operations were kept. They hand over information that led to the largest private arms cache in Chilean history. Thousands of grenades, dozens and dozens of rifles, surface to air missile launchers like, he's got quite an arsenal. And they also showed Henriquez the site of the mass graves, which again are empty, but

there's stuff there that ties back to people who have gone missing. Now one of the tips that Henriquez gets over the years leads to investigators moving Schaeffer's bed and finding a trap door hidden underneath it. In the secret chamber, they found what police described as an arsenal of fantasy weapons, the Colt leader's private like weapons cache. He had three pencils rigged to fire 22 caliber rounds, two pencils that could shoot darts. I think these may have been pins than it may be a translation error because I don't know how a pencil could fire a bullet without the wood.

Maybe it's a mechanical pencil. It had to have been if it's a pencil. A camera that could fire darts and several walking canes with guns built into them. Because Schaeffer was a very old man at this point, they found a walker that he had an electrocuting machine built into that could deliver a 1200 volt shock, a fucking weaponized walker. That's pretty cool. I'll give it up for that and only that.

But the weaponized walker, all right, look, we're fair here every now, yeah, it's incredible. Life in the Colonia did not become what many of us are likely to consider normal, but it did stop being a child rape cult slash torture site, which is all I've ever asked of anyone. Don't, don't rape kids and torture people. If you do one thing for me, make it this. Yeah, if you do one thing for me, don't be a pedophile Nazi torture, and that's all I'll ask. That's all I'll ask, yeah.

So meanwhile Schaeffer continued to be in the wind with a handful of his bodyguards. He was eventually tracked down not by the law, but by a Chilean TV journalist, Corolla Fuentes, who spent more than a year tracking down leads. She eventually found him in Buenos Aires in an expensive gated community. On March 10th, 2005, a 24 member SWAT team busted down the gate and entered his house. Fuentes followed them in order to make the arrest, quote, I saw this old guy very lost in space, lying on the bed. He was absolutely not dangerous.

I remembered what the bars had told me. He didn't match the image of this bad evil guy. Schaeffer did not resist arrest as he was being hauled away in handcuffs. Schaeffer only groaned and mumbled a question over and over, why, why? Do you need a list? By the way, we must acknowledge that Corolla Fuentes is an awesome name. It's incredible. And apparently an awesome journalist.

Yeah. And I, oh, I was going to say, is Dwight Schaltz still alive? Because maybe he could play the older Paul Schaeffer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. Maybe a Walton Goggins could play him as a young man.

Yeah. Yeah. Goggins is what this story needs to really, to really pop. Netflix is already, there was, there was a movie recently made about the Colonia, but it's like a fiction movie. Really? Yeah. It's, and it stars like big names.

Yeah. 2015, a historical thriller starring Emma Watson, Daniel Broul and Michael Nyquist. Wow. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Big names. Directed by Florian Gallenberger.

For sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's how you get for that. Yeah. Emma Watson. There's an Emma Watson movie about this. If, if you thought that's what this film needed, I think a Goggins, nothing against Emma Watson,

but this cries for a Goggins. It screams to the heaven, Goggins. So Schaeffer gets extradited to Chile. In May of 2006, he is convicted of child molestation and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He receives further sentences after this for possession of illegal weapons and for torture. He gets more time than he could possibly live for a number of different bad things. At one of his first interrogations, he is approached by Louis Peebles, one of the dissidents that he had personally tortured.

Schaeffer seemed to recognize the man again. He's very old at this point. And he asks Peebles like, oh, were you a lawyer who worked for us at some point? And Peebles responds, no, I was once a guest in your home. You were very unkind. I never did anything to you or the colonia. So why were you so cruel to me? And at this point, Schaeffer stops talking and pretends he can no longer understand

Spanish. He can't actually even like, for all that, can't even fucking confront this guy and admit what he did to him. In 2010, at age 88, Paul Schaeffer died in a prison hospital from heart failure. Dr. Hopp, one of his chief lieutenants, lives in Germany today. They refuse to extradite him to Chile to stand trial for his crimes. The German government has a policy of not extraditing citizens for most reasons pretty much.

So he's that this guy, big part of it, still doing fine. I mean, Germany, I feel like this is a good reason to yeah, I feel like I feel like this would be a good reason if you're going to do it for any reason at all. This is the one. I feel like Nazi, oh wait, no, no, no, oh wait, no, a Chilean court in 2013, yeah, a Chilean court approved an extradition request. But as of 2018, yeah, that's from Germany, well, the Guardian article from 2018 is Germany won't jail doctor from Nazi pedophile sect convicted in Chile.

That's now, there's a headline for you. There's a headline right there, yeah. If you're Germany, if you're Germany, you might not want there to be headlines that involve the phrase Germany won't jail doctor from Nazi pedophile sect. This is classic, are we the baddies situation where it's like, oh wait, we're Germany. Look where we are in that headline. You probably ought to get on this one, huh? Yeah.

Does this look bad? Yeah, this might look bad. Several of Schaefer's lieutenants have been convicted though and wrought in a special war criminal prison in Chile to this day. Colonia Dignidad still stands. It now goes by a different name, Paul. It calls itself Via Bavaria and it has rebranded, yeah, you're going to want a new name after that.

That is like a restaurant in a theme park, Via Bavaria. It's kind of like how the town of Auschwitz changed its name to Happy Town. The branding of this isn't going to go good. So they are now a tourist destination for foreigners. They advertise that it's basically like it's an old German village from the mid-century, frozen in time in the middle of Latin America. Come here and stay and enjoy the later Hosen and the Bratwurst and the German dances. Don't worry, there's no church.

Yeah, there's no church, none at all. Don't ask what there used to be here. Wow, that's a hard no thanks from me. Yeah, I don't think I will be going there. I'm very excited to see Chile one day. I don't think I'll be visiting Colonia Villa Bavaria. In fairness, a lot of the people who run it now were like victims of shavers, right? They were kids he molested and they're like, this is the only life I know this is my home.

I'm not going to say they shouldn't like... Oh, hey. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm certainly not the person to say what you should be doing is one of the kids who survives this. Do what you got to do. I will not be swinging by. Yeah, I will not be taking a visit there though.

They have returned some of the land that was stolen from people, including from the Catholic Church that gave back a bunch of the land that was taken under shaver and a little bit of fear. Oh, thank God the Catholic Church got some of their land back. Yeah, I know you were really worried about those nuns. That's all I could think about, did Catholic Church ever get their land back? That way we know at least some of the land is still being used to abuse children. If you're viewing this story a different way and you were afraid there wasn't going to

be a happy ending, don't worry. Don't worry. The Catholics are still on the ground. Yeah, the German state has offered a small stipend to victims of Paul Shaffer. It's like a few thousand bucks basically, although they are emphatic about this. Even giving the stipend does not mean they take any responsibility for his crimes. Wow. Yeah.

It's like no one's asking that, but you could have taken responsibility for like trying to get him extradited. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that makes it seem a little more like you're claiming responsibility. Yeah, that makes it seem like maybe there were some people in the German government who were involved in funneling money through this in order to protect Nazis and maybe you don't want anyone looking that going entirely into it.

I don't know. Paul. How you doing? Hey, hold on. Man, I mean, this is the worst one I've done with you yet. Yeah, it's pretty bad. This is the worst one you've inflicted upon me. Pretty bad.

I will not forget this. Yeah. Yeah. It's really like that is just every aspect of the story is just true, horrific, evil and it's one of those things where you, it's hard to fathom that this person is the same species as you. There are people like that that have walked this earth and currently walked this earth and maybe will find out an even more hideous person exists in our midst that somebody's

walking around right now that's committing crimes like this. It's just impossible to wrap your mind around the enormity of it. Yeah, it really is. But I will say, Paul, I have you on speed dial if I do find a story that you can say Santa Claus. Oh, you? Why? I will tell you what.

That might go right to voicemail. I'm going to get a signal put up in the middle of Los Angeles. It's just a silhouette of Santa Claus with a pistol to his head. I'll know what it means. Yeah. Oh, good. Robert did more research. Oh, Paul, got any pluggables to plug?

I mean, not right now. I've got some more live shows coming up in the future, but nothing that's available yet. But yeah, follow me on Twitter at pftompkins and my live shows are at paulftompkins.com slash live. And I update that when I got a new thing. So yeah, I'll be I'll be announcing things as they are announceable. Yeah, check out Paul's stuff and just check out for a while, chill out. Everybody needs a little bit of a little bit of time to de-stress from this one.

So sure. You'll find a cat or a dog somewhere. Absolutely. Okay. 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 was 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. Find Alphabet Boys on the I Heart 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 and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

According to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts 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 I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.