Nazi Who Led Cult Like A God Is Apprehended in Chile

[Leopolds Ghost]

Nazi who led cult like a god is jailed for child sex abuse

85-year-old preacher is also accused of letting General Pinochet use
colony to torture enemies

The Sunday Times, London/May 26, 2006
By Tom Hennigan

A former Nazi soldier who founded an extremist religious cult in Chile
has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for sexually abusing children.

Paul Schäfer, 85, was jailed for abusing children at the Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony), which he founded in 1961 with several hundred followers from Germany, over whom he exercised absolute control for the next 36 years.

Keeping his followers in almost total isolation from the outside world, Schäfer sought to re-create a rural Bavarian idyll in the shadow of the Chilean Andes, 320km (200 miles) south of Santiago, the capital.

There he preached a harsh regime of work and discipline. He cultivated a godlike image to his followers, who allowed the man they knew as Permanent Uncle to regulate their intimate lives, letting him decide who would marry and when they could have sex.

http://www.rickross.com/reference/schafer/schafer27.html

I found this on the same anti-cult site as one of the links referred to
on the "Bible Beating Foster Parents" thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1300069

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Sounds reminiscent of Col. Kurtz in "Apocolypse Now".

Colony, ex-military leader becoming a pseudoreligious leader, things spinning out of control . . .

[LiberalPartisan]

2. Stories like this serve to remind me

how the followers of this world vastly outnumber the 'leaders'. So many people have an inate need for their life to be determined for them and there will always be those who take advantage of that. And it's is so prevalent in this country today amongst the 'conservatives' of just about every order.

[sweetheart]

3. Cheney? Bush? Rumsfeld?... oh, another nazi

The cult of mass murder, begs a kill for its god.

[Bucky]

4. Say what you like, at least Cheney does his own killing... of quails

That cult thing is just too weird.

[Bucky]

5. I like the little cult icons on the home page of CultNews.net

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Not sure I agree with Mormons being a cult, but they at least got a pretty tag:

[Judi Lynn]

6. It's great to know he's in the hands of the authorities.

He has committed so many atrocities it's an enormous crime he hasn't been brought to justice far, far earlier.

He allowed Pinochet to use his property for a torture camp. How bad is THAT? If that were not enough, he's a pedophile.

A DU reader who lived in Chile for a time says Schäfer actually has two colonies: one is more of a completely self-contained farming community, and the other is in the Chilean mountains.

Here's the Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_Dignidad

http://www.dw-world.de/image/0,,1839136_4,00.jpg http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,3273,00.jpg




Certain people in the States have been concerned about this place, considering there's an American man who went in there who has never been seen again, and they are convinced he was murdered.

Published on Sunday, May 19, 2002 in the New York Times
Chilean Mystery: Clues to Vanished American
by Larry Rohter

SAN FABIÁN DE ALICO, Chile —The vacationing hiker spent the night under the summer stars, his only companion a local herdsman. The next morning, the traveler, an American mathematics professor named Boris Weisfeiler, made his way toward a spot where two rivers converged, hoping to wade across.
It was Jan. 4, 1985, and the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet was at its peak. After the herder's brother told the police there was a "foreign extremist" in the area, they sent a patrol.

Within hours a second patrol, this one from army intelligence, joined the hunt for the foreigner in the Andean foothills east of here.

Mr. Weisfeiler, who taught at Pennsylvania State University, was never seen again and to this day his fate remains a mystery. Of more than 1,000 people cataloged by human rights groups as having "disappeared" during the 17 years General Pinochet was in power, the only American citizen is Boris Weisfeiler. He was 43 when he vanished.
(snip)

In 1975, however, Mr. Weisfeiler was allowed to immigrate to the United States, carrying his few belongings in the same backpack that would be with him when he disappeared. Because of his brilliance as a mathematician he was soon offered university posts, first at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and then at Penn State. In 1981 he became an American citizen.

As a first-time visitor to Chile, Mr. Weisfeiler did not know that his route through verdant country hills had brought him close to Colonia Dignidad, the home of an anti-Semitic apocalyptic religious sect. Founded in 1961, the settlement today has about 300 inhabitants who follow the teachings of Paul Schaefer, a former nurse from the Nazi air force who was forced to leave Germany after he was charged with sexually abusing young boys in an orphanage he ran.

During the Pinochet dictatorship, military and intelligence officials often visited Colonia Dignidad, which occupies a 37,000-acre site about 225 miles south of Santiago. Both the military and the police took political prisoners there. According to reports compiled after democracy was restored in 1990, some of those captives were tortured and others were killed.

Colonia Dignidad changed its name to Villa Baviera a decade ago. But the sect continues to operate and still has powerful friends within the state security apparatus. Mr. Schaefer, now 80, is currently wanted on charges of sexually abusing 28 young boys from the colony. But early this month a judge shelved the case on the grounds that it had been impossible to locate him.

"Colonia Dignidad continues to be impenetrable and the armed forces continue to be loyal to Colonia Dignidad," said Hernán Fernández Rojas, a Chilean lawyer who is an expert on the cult and represents Ms. Weisfeiler in her legal efforts to determine her brother's fate. "In any other country, Colonia Dignidad would already have been dismantled. But here no serious investigation has ever been done, and so we have no way to tell what happened to Boris."

To Colonia Dignidad's allies within the Chilean state security apparatus, much about Mr. Weisfeiler would have seemed suspicious. His American passport listed his place of birth as Moscow, and his battered old backpack had Cyrillic lettering on it. According to court records, he wore khaki pants that could have been easily confused with military dress.

According to declassified documents and sworn statements in Chilean court records, local residents and members of the police and army patrols were told at various times, presumably by their superiors, that Mr. Weisfeiler was either a "Soviet spy" or a "Jewish spy." In addition, Colonia Dignidad was itself in a state of turmoil at the time Mr. Weisfeiler appeared in the area.
(snip/...)

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0519-05.htm