A Missing American and a German Cult State in Chile
The Search for Boris Weisfeiler Led to Colonia Dignidad and ... Where to Even Begin?
In 2016, a Chilean judge, Jorge Zepeda, closed the case of Boris Weisfeiler, a Soviet-born American citizen and mathematics professor at Penn State, who went missing around San Fabian in central Chile on 4 January 1985. The Chilean State, under the military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet, originally closed the case within two months, concluding that Weisfeiler had drowned in the Los Sauces River near the border with Argentina. As the section of the river where Weisfeiler had supposedly been swept away as he tried to cross was “barely four feet deep”, this conclusion was viewed with some scepticism, including, the documentary record shows, by the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, though the U.S. never challenged the Chilean conclusion in public. In 2000, Weisfeiler’s family succeeded in getting the case re-opened. But Judge Zepeda closed the case again when the statute of limitations ran out. This was notable because Chilean courts, relying on provisions of “international law”, do not recognise statutes of limitations in cases concerning human rights violations amounting to crimes against humanity, which in practice means any government-sponsored crime from the 1973-90 era. Judge Zepeda’s finding was that Weisfeiler had not been killed on orders from the State, making the case a common crime where the statute of limitations could not be waived.
Here it should be noted that in 2014, while upholding the convictions of Chilean officers held responsible for killing two American citizens, filmmaker and writer Charles Horman and student Frank Teruggi, shortly after the September 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power, Zepeda had written in his opinion that U.S. intelligence played a “fundamental role” in the crime by “providing Chilean military officers with the information that led to their deaths”. Horman and Teruggi have been cause célèbres of the international Left since at least 1982 when Costa-Gavras’ film, Missing, was produced, disseminating the conspiracy theory that the two men were killed with American approval because Horman had discovered American agents in Chile helping Pinochet prepare the coup against the Soviet-supported government of Salvador Allende and had told Teruggi about it. This is part of the broader myth of U.S. involvement in the 1973 coup. It can be said that Zepeda’s evidence in the 2014 ruling was thin, and so it was, but empiricism was not the point of the ruling and the point here is not to contest the details of that case, merely to underscore that in making the 2016 decision Zepeda did so as part of the activist current in Chile’s judiciary, not as a holdover from the Pinochet regime.
In investigating Weisfeiler’s murder, Zepeda found—as two prior Chilean human rights commissions had—that the trail led to the “Dignity Colony” (Colonia Dignidad), located just east of Parral in central Chile, 220 miles south of Santiago, very close to where Weisfeiler was last seen. The Colony, a 37,000-acre (55 square miles) “State within a State”, was home to three-hundred Germans, about one-third of them children, who were part of a pseudo-Christian, apocalyptic-inclined cult run by Paul Schäfer, a fugitive paedophile who had served the Nazi government.
THE ORIGINS OF A CULT IN GERMANY
Schäfer, born in 1921, when the Nazi movement was in its infancy, lost his right eye as a teenager in a strange accident with a fork as he was untying his shoelaces, though he would insist in later years he had lost it in combat during the Second World War. In fact, Schäfer, a corporal in the Wehrmacht, had not been involved in combat; he served as a military medic. Schäfer had been in the Hitler Youth and after the war became a Baptist minister, volunteering as a leader of the youth wing of the Evangelical Free Church. Schäfer was dismissed from this role for reasons that were never confirmed, but it is said were related to “inappropriate behaviour towards his charges”.
Back in his hometown of Troisdorf, Schäfer began to gather a following. Schäfer’s followers were especially vulnerable, most of them war widows and orphans, many of them Germans ethnically cleansed from East Prussia by the Soviet Union after it conquered Eastern Europe in 1944-45 and annexed the zone to its Polish satellite. By the early 1950s, Schäfer’s ministry, which included an orphanage, was already taking on the lineaments of a cult: “He kept telling his charges that they had been chosen by God and that they would be safe with him. The only thing he expected was 10 percent of their income and daily confession.”
Schäfer had started following “the teachings of American preacher William M. Branham, one of the founders of the ‘faith healing’ movement in the 1940s and ‘50s. … Branham said he had been visited by angels and attracted tens of thousands of followers with sermons that advocated a strict adherence to the Bible, a woman’s duty to obey her husband, and apocalyptic visions, such as Los Angeles sinking beneath the ocean.”
Branham, initially a Baptist and subsequently more Pentecostalist, influenced many other cults that developed in the mid-twentieth century, most infamously the “Peoples Temple” or “Jonestown” set, whose 900 followers committed suicide at the instigation of their leader, Jim Jones, in Guyana in November 1978. And Branham’s influence was wider than that. Branham’s version of Pentecostalism captivated that subculture in the U.S. in 1946-47 and in time his charismatic presentation, Biblical literalism, and views on the imminence of Jesus’ Second Coming—as well as the cult of personality he developed around himself, his fraudulent business practices, and exploitation of his followers—would have a major impact in setting the template for the development of the American televangelist scene.
The scale of the German enthusiasm for Nazism was buried in official discourse after the war, not least by the Nuremberg Tribunal that for practical political reasons concentrated the guilt of a nation on a handful of people, but beneath the surface the old ways persisted for many, Schäfer among them. Branham’s close association with the Ku Klux Klan was part of the fascination for Schäfer, mirroring as it did the Nazi government’s attempt to fuse its racialist doctrines with the Protestant churches—a theological trend among modernist German Protestants that preceded Hitler’s rise and outlasted his downfall.
FLEEING TO CHILE
In 1960, several mothers accused Schäfer of sexually molesting their boys, and similar accusations were surfacing from the Troisdorf orphanage. The evidence was strong enough that an arrest warrant was issued. Schäfer had already fled West Germany, apparently first to the Middle East with a couple of trusted aides, and there had met a Chilean diplomat, whom he convinced of his benevolent intentions to serve the poor. Schäfer was invited to establish himself in Chile and did so, arriving in Santiago in January 1961 during the presidency of Jorge Alessandri (r. 1958-64), the Rightist candidate Allende defeated (with Soviet assistance) in the 1970 election.
Schäfer had arrived with about sixty of his followers—some of them children brought under false pretences, without the knowledge of their parents—and over the next year established his settlement near Parral. Scores more people trickled in from Europe to join Colonia Dignidad, presented to the outside world as a model colony, whose German efficiency and productivity had taken it swiftly from an agricultural commune to a traditionalist but prosperous and generous godly society:
It maintains its own airfield, 65-bed hospital, wheat mill, bakery, meat processing factory, dairy and cemetery … According to witnesses, the settlement has a fleet of heavy trucks, a mechanics workshop, a power plant, and facilities for making bricks and slate tiles. It also has a powerful radio communications system, with which it stays in touch with ancillary operations, including an office in a house in Santiago. It operates a school and provides free medical attention to neighbours, a service that supports the settlement’s claim to be a charitable organization. The colony opened a roadside restaurant near Bulnes [in 1985], where its brown bread, honey, cheese, sausages, and cakes are sold.
Behind this idyllic façade was an absolute horror show.
A HOUSE OF HORRORS
One sign that perhaps all was not as it seemed was that the Colony was surrounded by two layers of barbed-wire fences that were patrolled by armed guards with attack dogs. This was claimed to be a security measure against bandits and other outside threats in what is admittedly a rugged part of Chile; even early on there were whispers this might have more to do with keeping the colonists in.
Inside the camp, contact with the outside world was cut off, of course; it was not just televisions and radios that were forbidden, but calendars. The sexes were segregated; women were subordinated and regimented, inter alia banned from wearing short skirts and make-up, forcibly dressed in baggy clothes; and children were separated from parents, given over to cult elders to be brought up. Schäfer preached against “sins of the flesh” and tried to enforce total celibacy on the colonos, but this became untenable, so his back-up scheme was to keep children in their sex-segregated sections of the Colony, ruled by “aunties” and “uncles”, until they were aged-21, and thereafter to select for them whom they could partner with, attempting to pair males with women who had been through menopause. There were just thirty children born in the first thirty years the Colony ran.
There were strong hints that the workers, whose productivity was advertised in the rather sophisticated media apparatus the Colony possessed, were not quite the volunteers they were publicly presented as. Channelling the “arbeit macht frei” (“work sets you free”) spirit of Schäfer’s former colleagues, the Colony’s deputy Hartmut Hopp explained: “Work should be the purpose of human life, and one should not feel that one must rest after eight hours of work. There is a malformation in modern man that makes him think he is obligated to rest and have fun after eight hours of work.” Steps were taken to correct this malformation.
The reality of the working conditions was somewhat nearer slavery: colonists were not paid, except in occasional kind words from Schäfer; they had to work in silence; and were under constant threat of corporal punishment if they made any sound or broke any of the other pettifogging rules. The beatings on the farms were the least of it. Schäfer’s Council had its set-aside torture rooms where electricity was freely available. Victims were tied down on metal bed frames and subjected to electric shocks, mostly to their genitals; the guard dogs were trained the attack the same area. Those who screamed during the torture were thrown into ice baths, and then electrocuted again. Ironically, given that part of Schäfer’s justification for his settlement’s structure was that it was necessary to keep Communism at bay, there are signs the Soviets’ East German colony was involved in training the cult’s torturers.
The brutality was all either in full public view or common knowledge. It could not be easily hidden: one-hundred people were murdered in a camp that at any one time never had more than 350 people. While it was too much for a small number of people, most of the colonos not only remained in line, but were repentant if and when they were tortured or otherwise punished. The daily struggle sessions were full of people confessing their sins against the Leader’s orders, and this helped maintain social control: by their own admission, Schäfer’s followers were not good enough to replace him.
It might be assumed that the religious framework is what sustained the cult’s authority—that Schäfer claimed his actions as the will of Lord and this is why the colonists accepted them—but that aspect appears to have been quite muted. Schäfer largely replaced God in the minds of his followers, and this charismatic authority is what held the Colony together. References to Christianity or religion generally in survivors’ testimonies are rare. An investigation in 1980 noted: “There is no church [building in the Colony]. Whatever religious affiliation or basis the group might once have had in West Germany seems to have disappeared since it was transplanted to Chile.” As one diplomat who had been tracking the Colony tersely summed up: “The religious and social aims of this group are very uncertain. It is all very strange.”
Schäfer, unsurprisingly, continued the predatory behaviour he had begun in Germany. To ensure that the children did not lavish their affections even on imaginary alternatives to Schäfer, he at one point staged the assassination of Father Christmas. Having isolated children from their parents, and keeping the parents under his spell (and in fear), Schäfer had virtually uninhibited access to victims. “One or two boys would be taken to his room every day, and one day I was called,” recalled Werner Schmidtke. “I was about seven or eight. That is when the abuse and rape started.”
As early as 1966, stories of Schäfer raping children at the Colony came to public light, and the (male) victim, then-19-year-old Wolfgang Muller, claimed Schäfer “had used memory-altering drugs on him when he became rebellious.” The second child victim to escape, a young woman named Wilhelmine Lindeman, provided concrete medical evidence that drugs were being used to control and sexually attack the Colony’s inhabitants. The scandal reached the Chilean Senate and an investigative committee was sent to the Colony, before the issue mysteriously faded away. There was talk of a well-placed bribe.
MILITARY RULE IN CHILE AND THE NAZI DIMENSION
After the 1973 coup, Pinochet reached a modus vivendi with Schäfer. The General had his own claims to religious, specifically Roman Catholic, support, being “guided by ‘the mysterious hand of God’ and reported to enjoy the protection of the Virgin Mary”. The understanding with Schäfer was distinctly earthy, though. Pinochet would leave the Colony to run its own affairs, continue to officially regard it as private property effectively outside State administration, and even exempt the Colony from paying taxes on its exports, everything from timber to wheat and pastries. All this, and the State would provide funds for the upkeep of the Colony’s hospital, too. In exchange, all that was asked was that part of the Colony’s territory be opened up for use as a prison camp run by DINA (National Intelligence Directorate), the secret police.
The Colony’s collaboration in the Pinochet regime’s repression was first exposed in 1977 by Vicariate of Solidarity, the Catholic Church’s human rights group in Santiago. The Colony did manage to deflect the accusations for a time when it won part of a libel case in 1979 after Amnesty International said the Colony was used as a government interrogation site.
The oft-made suggestion the Colony lent Nazi torturers to the Pinochet government does not seem to be true, and the broader description of the Colony as a “Nazi cult” does not seem to be quite right. There is good reason from intelligence reports and other sources to think that European neo-Nazis took an interest in and visited the Colony, and that some servants of the fallen Third Reich ended up there for periods of time, including possibly some wanted war-criminals. Exactly who, how many, when, and for how long is impossible to know: the Colony’s “airstrip, private communications system, and proximity to the Argentine border” made it easy for people to enter and leave the Colony without leaving any official paper trail. Nor does there seem any reason to doubt that many if not most inhabitants of the Colony—from Schäfer on down—were sympathetic to Nazi ideology. That said, Nazism and antisemitism were not per se “part of the community’s ideology”, as one escapee from the Colony put it.
In December 1979, Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal said Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor whose hideous experiments on Jews in the concentration camps made him one of the most well-known war criminals in the world, had spent time living at Colonia Dignidad over the previous year. The FBI thought the same thing at the time and this accusation still shows up in some of the coverage of the Colony. It is unlikely this was true. Indeed, it does not seem Mengele ever went to Chile at all: he spent his time in South America in Argentina and—after a brief stay in Paraguay—in Brazil, where he died after a stroke while swimming in the sea in February 1979. Wiesenthal later withdrew the accusation Mengele had been at the Colony—and in fact rather over-corrected himself. After a visit to the Colony, Wiesenthal told the Chilean magazine Cosas in mid-1983 that “it was a ‘model colony’ and Chilean exiles had tarnished its reputation merely because Germans lived there.”
SCHÄFER’S LAST YEARS IN CHARGE AND THE CHILEAN RETURN TO DEMOCRACY
By the mid-1980s, Schäfer’s brutal regime was beginning to create resistance even among the cult’s leadership—and this is where the story intersects with Boris Weisfeiler. Hugo Baar, a Russian-born co-founder of the Colony, had fled the encampment around Christmas Day 1984, taking shelter in the house of Heinz Kühn, an earlier defector from the Colony. Weisfeiler, who had got into the habit of taking solo trips to deserted areas like Siberia to escape the anti-Jewish persecution of the Soviet Revolution, got very unlucky that many of the Colonia Dignidad operatives were outside the Colony scouring the area for Baar at this time:
[M]uch about Mr. Weisfeiler would have seemed suspicious [to the Colony guards]. 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”. …
Mr. Kühn … monitored radio transmissions from Colonia Dignidad, and early in 1985 … taped a conversation between Mr. Schaefer and two subordinates apparently discussing what to do about an unnamed intruder. “Don't worry, the problem has been solved,” Mr. Kühn recalls Mr. Schaefer being told. “He is already eating potatoes underground.” When Mr. Weisfeiler's disappearance was made public …, Mr. Kühn went to the United States Embassy in Santiago with the tape, which he said was duplicated and enhanced there. …
Two years later, the embassy in Santiago was again approached about the case, this time by an informant who claimed to be a member of a military patrol that had captured Mr. Weisfeiler and handed him over to Colonia Dignidad. Given the code name “Daniel,” he said he was talking because he had a guilty conscience about what had happened to Mr. Weisfeiler. “Later on, we found that this person, after being savagely interrogated, was made to kneel on the ground and was murdered with a shot in the nape of his neck,” the informant said, according to declassified records. “This execution was carried out solely by the Germans, who took advantage of the absence of Chilean authorities.”
An embassy document dated November 1987 concluded that Daniel’s story “contains enough truths and plausibilities to make it believable, especially given Colonia Dignidad’s reputation.” …
[I]n statements … [the Colony’s] leaders have portrayed themselves as victims of “a war campaign” led by Communists and Zionists. They denied that prisoners have been held, tortured, or killed there.
The Weisfeiler case brought negative attention to the Colony and public opinion in West Germany, heretofore favourable to Schäfer, began to turn in 1988 after two escapees went public in Canada with what had been happening.
After General Pinochet stood aside in 1990 and democracy was restored to Chile, the State began to scale back its support to Schäfer’s enterprise. The new president, Patricio Aylwin, was a long-time opponent of the Colony; he revoked its charitable status, withdrew the subsidy for the hospital, and sent the auditors down to the camp. Aylwin wanted the democratisation process extended to the Colony and for its inhabitants to be integrated into the nation. But, if anything, things got worse for the next half-decade.
Schäfer skilfully orchestrated protests and hunger strikes, claiming his community was being persecuted; changed the Colony’s name to Villa Baviera (Bavarian Village) in 1991; and initiated the “Intensive Boarding School” program, which invited local Chilean children to live, work, and study at the Colony until they were 18. This seemed like a good deal in an area of the Andes that is poor, and lacked the medical facilities and educational and employment opportunities at the level they were available in the Colony. It served the immediate purpose of creating popular local support for Schäfer that made the central government in Santiago back off and even restore some of the Colony’s funding.
For the Andean peasants whose children had gone to the Colony, evidence was mounting that something was wrong. It turned out the program was very intensive—and immersive. In one of the countries that made los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) an international term, it did seem the children and teens had dropped off the face of the earth. Parental attempts to get word of their children’s status went nowhere. You might possibly see where this is going. In the first months of 1996, a 12-year-old boy, Cristobal Parada, managed to smuggle out a note to his mother that simply said: “Take me out of here. He raped me.” The boarding school program had provided Schäfer a new pool of child victims after the Colony’s children had all grown up.
A warrant was issued for Schäfer’s arrest and in November 1996 the camp was raided by police. The Colony’s lookouts tipped off Schäfer and he hid, probably in the underground bunker system. Thirty more raids took place over the next decade: weapons caches and graves were found, but never Schäfer. At some point—likely shortly after the first raid—Schäfer had left. The terrible thing is that for years after the colonos admitted—to the police and to themselves—that Schäfer had gone, they remained enraptured. A brief experiment with an elected leadership collapsed: they wanted the men who had been closest to Schäfer to rule over them.
THE CURRENT SITUATION
In 2004, Chile convicted Schäfer and twenty-six other cult members for child sex crimes. Schäfer was finally tracked down in 2005, aged-84, in Buenos Aires, and returned to Chile where he was imprisoned. Given that Schäfer was convicted for sexually attacking twenty-five children, the sentence of twenty years was grossly inadequate. The additional sentences—seven years for homicide (not of Weisfeiler), and three years each for torture and violating weapons laws—were, likewise, ludicrously soft. Still, it was enough to see that Schäfer died in prison, of a heart attack it seems, on 24 April 2010.
Even more outrageous is the case of Schäfer’s deputy, Hartmut Hopp, who was convicted in absentia by Chile in 2011 for his part in the molestation of children, but he remains free in Germany, where the question of his extradition was ended in 2019. Another founder of the Colony, Reinhard Döring, one of the personal points of contact with DINA, is also at liberty in Germany. There does at least seem to be a bad conscience in Berlin about its policy: simultaneous with quashing the cases against Hopp and Döring, a German State fund was created to pay compensation to Colonia Dignidad’s victims.
As for the Colony, when Schäfer was apprehended a spokesman declared that the inhabitants were pleased, adding: “Our colony has reorganised itself as an open free colony, fully integrated into Chilean society”. There did seem to be some moves in that direction around this time, especially from younger colonists who had never been under Schäfer’s spell. The Colony has been reinvented as a tourist attraction in the years since, which is a controversy of its own. There are lingering doubts about how much reform there has been at the Colony; some say the imprisoned leaders continue to run the show. It is difficult even now to assess the extent to which membership in the sect is consenting in a proper sense. Above it all is the issue of commercialising an atrocity site—bad enough in any circumstance and worse when there has not been a full accounting, when bodies are still missing, and no space has been made for memorials to the victims. The present situation was colourfully compared by one critic to “installing a McDonald’s in Auschwitz”.
P.S. I have not seen either, but I found while writing this up that there is a six-part Netflix documentary series, ‘A Sinister Sect: Colonia Dignidad’ (2021), about the Schäfer cult, and a fictionalised film based on the same events, ‘Colonia’ or ‘The Colony’ (2015), which has Emma Watson in it, so it can’t be that bad.