With the lights of the old Fuchs backhoe turned on, Erich Fege left the inhabited sector of the estate in the dark and traveled five kilometers to the Chenco sector, within Colonia Dignidad. He had orders from Schäfer to dig a wide and deep hole.

Fege, born in Germany in 1926, performed the excavation and was ordered by radio: “Get 200 meters away from the site and stay alert!” A group of Army personnel was already inside the property. They had come from Parral, but they belonged to the Linares Artillery School.

The “Doc,” as the military called Schäfer, called Gerhard Mücke and ordered him to lead the guests to the pit dug by Fege. He obeyed without question and, with a friendly demeanor, guided the visitors.

As they approached the indicated spot, Mücke (“mosquito”) lagged behind a little, but not before showing them the prepared site. From a pickup truck, the soldiers unloaded a group of detainees, presumably five, shot them to death, and threw them into the pit.

Mücke, the bodyguard of “Glasaugen”—as Schäfer was also called because of his glass eye—called Fege by radio to bring the machine closer: “Now cover the hole and don’t ask any questions!” he ordered. He immediately guided the officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers toward the houses of Dignidad, where the “Doc” entertained them with the typical delicacies of the Bavarian tradition.

Inside the sect’s barbed wire fences, the first political prisoners were falling and disappearing. Only a few weeks had passed since the 1973 military coup. Other prisoners—colonists subjected to the violence and terror imposed by Schäfer and his hierarchs—survived well-fed on the property, but suffering like peons at the service of the malevolent rigor.

A few days later, Schäfer repeated the order to Fege. “Go out in the dark!” he told him. With the old Fuchs that operated with a belt system, the German headed toward the same place and dug another similar hole.

A new Army contingent arrived at the estate from the vicinity. Once the task was completed, Fege moved away again to wait for them to call him by radio, shortly after hearing the gunshots. Presumably, this time the detainees were also five. They died in the same way and had the same fate. The entertainment was repeated. “Glasaugen” was an excellent host, although a very bad neighbor.

The disappeared of Parral

The macabre ritual was repeated at least two more times. In total, during the two months after the coup, “about 20” prisoners were eliminated and buried inside Dignidad, Mücke recalls in the judicial process against Colonia Dignidad.

A figure that approaches the 22 people from Parral who disappeared between September and October 1973 on four different occasions. First, on September 26, five detainees were transferred from the Parral jail to an unknown location by order of the area’s governor, the now-Colonel (R) of the Linares Artillery School, Hugo Cardemil Valenzuela.

Another five disappeared from the police station between October 11 and 15, 1973. The third group, also of five, disappeared on October 13 from the Catillo police checkpoint, about 10 kilometers from Colonia Dignidad.

And, finally, on October 23, seven prisoners were taken from the Parral jail by order of Cardemil. The data coincides with the memories of Mücke and Fege. They do not mention other detainees eliminated in the colony, although they do point out that in 1974 another group of prisoners arrived, but they were later taken away by the DINA to an unknown destination.

But the author of the 40,000 files on friends and enemies of the colony—businessmen, military personnel, priests, nuns, and political authorities of various eras—the “philosopher” Gerd Seewald Lefevre, always presented as the “director of the Villa Baviera school,” reveals that other prisoners did indeed disappear from the estate.

He mentions Hernán Sarmiento Sabater and Haroldo Laurie Luengo, detained in Parral; Pedro Merino Molina, in Coronel; Adán Valdebenito Olavaria, in Lota; and José Hilario San Martín Llancán, who does not appear on any official list, and another with the surname Santibáñez.

All correspond to the 1974 period, the year in which a large number of prisoners were interned in Dignidad. At that time, Schäfer commented to Seewald: “Sie dürfen nicht überleben” (they must not survive). Those mentioned appear in files seized last year at the German property.

“They were all burned” It was 1978 when one day Schäfer summoned his faithful “Uncle Mauk,” as Mücke was called, and ordered him: “We have to clean up the estate! Go, take them out, and get rid of them!” The house painter, as Mücke calls himself before the judges, asked Rudy Collen and Willy Malessa for help.

The “cleanup” took them a couple of weeks. It was during that year that, by order of Pinochet, “Operation Retiro de Televisores” (Operation Television Removal) began. In the various military garrisons, clandestine graves were to be located, the bodies of the murdered detainees unearthed, and thrown into the sea, tied to a piece of rail to make them disappear forever.

The alarm had sounded in the barracks shortly after the remains of 15 disappeared peasants were located in an abandoned mine in Lonquén. Although it was suspected, until now it was not known that the order also reached Colonia Dignidad.

This time the old Fuchs was driven by Collen, while “Uncle Mauk” directed the work and got his gloved hands dirty. The work progressed under the supervision of the “Doc,” determined to carry out his general’s order.

After unearthing the already putrid bodies, “though still with soft parts,” as “Mauk” recalls, he and Collen put each one in a tightly tied sack and then placed it inside another “that had a substance that was phosphorus and that burned strongly.

All the bodies were burned,” Mücke confessed. When the sinister operation concluded, “the ashes were thrown into the Perquilauquén River in a truck,” said the German with his thick, strained baritone voice.

And he refined the calculation: “There were between 18 and 21 bodies and I counted four or five pits.” A version, even more gruesome, unconfirmed but not foreign to the sophisticated ferocity of the “benefactors,” indicates that the remains might have been thrown to the pigs.

Face to face Twenty-eight years later, imprisoned and answering to justice for crimes against humanity, Mücke and Schäfer were confronted in July. Mücke faced his boss for the first time: “Enough! It is time you acknowledge your responsibility.

You gave the orders and then you told me: now we have to clean up the estate. Take them out, and get rid of them!” Schäfer looked at Mücke coldly and in poor Spanish said: “I have no idea what this man is talking about.” Mücke counterattacked: “The military entered the estate by your order and you ordered me to guide them along the interior roads!” “Well, they entered the villa and did whatever they wanted; they were the Government.

It is true that hundreds of military and police officers passed through. They arrived without warning. But I know nothing of what you say. We were together for 40 years, Gerhard, and everything that was done was decided in community!” “No, sir, you gave the orders!” “Mauk” snapped at him.

Disappointed, “Mosquito” joined what a couple of weeks earlier had been the harsh complaints before the justice system by another dangerous man from the Dignidad politburo, Kurt Schnellenkamp, against the “Ewige Onkel” (the “Permanent Uncle”): “Paul deceived us all and on top of that he kept our money.” Something similar had been uttered in the trial by the “philosopher” of the files, Seewald.

Born in 1922, he maintains that he studied philosophy at the University of Hamburg and there he learned “how to file.” “He managed us all,” he stated. Now, everyone felt deceived by the extreme cunning of the former Nazi corporal who, as the story goes, did not lose his eye in the war, but by untying his bootlaces with a fork.

From Carrasco to Mertins

“Ku,” as they still call Schnellenkamp inside Dignidad and by his Chilean friends outside, had plenty of reasons to be angry with the “Doc.” For years, it was he who stood up for the south and the north to carry out Schäfer’s order to obtain weapons and ammunition to defend themselves “from the communists.” A task he performed in parallel as head of the crushing plant in Bulnes, where they produce gravel and other materials that they still sell to construction companies and, they say, even to the State.

It is in his recent words in the Colonia Dignidad process that new names of high-ranking officers appear who, during the dictatorship, had close ties to the sect. Dedicated to obtaining war supplies or military scrap that they creatively transformed inside the estate, he stated that “it was on this occasion that I made contact with some officers from Concepción, such as Washington Carrasco, Luciano Díaz Schneider, and Dante Iturriaga, and others whose names I do not remember at this moment.” Whether they also received prisoners from them that they took to the estate, he does not say.

Likewise, he associated with armorer non-commissioned officers from different regiments in the country, with whom he also obtained some weapons and ammunition under the table “in exchange for cheese and things of that type.” The Germans had decided to increase their arsenal, which later “moved up in class” and sophistication, for example, in deals with the international arms trafficker and former SS officer Gerhard Mertins. “Ku” himself admitted the contacts that, accompanied by Helmuth Seelbach, another German from the colony, he had with Mertins at his estates in Durango (Mexico) and Bonn (Germany). This becomes the first open acknowledgment of these deals with Mertins made by a member of the hierarchy of this criminal illicit association.

Alone with Willoughby

“Ku’s” memory also does not fail him to remember that one day in 1974 he drove the colony’s Mercedes Benz bus to the Talca stadium: “The trip was to transport about 15 prisoners to Villa Baviera. When I arrived back, I left them in the potato shed in the middle of the night and I said to Paul: mission accomplished!” What happened to them afterward he is not sure, he says, but he states that it seems to him that the DINA took them away in a bus.

In July 1974, Schäfer told Schnellenkamp: “You are going to take me to the Las Palmas estate, between Melipilla and Las Cabras. We’ll talk on the way.” When they arrived at the place, Schäfer explained to him: “Well, now you wait for me here because I have an important meeting with Mr.

Federico Willoughby; he is like a minister of our Government.” “Ku” maintains that he waited for about an hour. When the “Doc” came out and they started back in the vehicle, he told him: “The DINA agent Miguel Becerra died in the villa, and it is not convenient for it to be known that he died inside.

When we arrive, you and Rudi [Collen] are going to load his pickup truck into the Magiruz [Deutz, a truck] with his body inside. You take it out, in Parral you unload the pickup with his body, Rudi returns, and you drive the pickup to the highway in Linares.

You turn off onto some road that is not very busy and leave him there, sitting at the wheel. Make it look like anything. Someone will follow you to bring you back.” “That’s how I did it. The body was already decomposed.

I think Becerra, whom we nicknamed ‘One’ because he was always alone and lived with us inside, wanted to get out of the DINA,” “Ku” recounted in the process. Who knows why, “Glasaugen” seemed to regain the gift of memory when, questioned about the Becerra episode, he expressed almost in an allegory: “Someone came one day to show me a chewed apple that was in Becerra’s room.

I cut a piece and gave it to the mice. They fell dead immediately. Becerra liked to eat an apple at night. My theory is that they poisoned him, because of the mice, I think.”

Magaña’s puppy The military operation that the Germans called “Cerro Gallo,” a mountain located east of the Perquilauquén River, which crosses the 17,000-hectare property, was carried out in 1974. According to Mauk, “Ku,” Fege, and a new witness, Franz Baar—a Chilean stolen from his parents as a child and adopted illegally—a contingent of about 500 Army troops arrived at Dignidad one afternoon.

They slept inside and at dawn they went out on a hunt, but a human one, supported by helicopters. None have said until now if people were detained, although some presume so. However, the episode yielded another name unknown until now—outside of those of Manuel Contreras, Pedro Espinoza, and Pinochet himself, who walked around the estate.

An officer with the surname Magaña who, according to the witnesses, belonged to the Chacabuco Regiment of Concepción, was in charge of the operation. “He was walking around with a little dog under his arm,” Baar and Mücke recalled.

What seemed to them to be devoid of all military martiality was that Magaña, before the sweep operation began, caused a great scandal because his pet had been lost and put Germans and soldiers to work searching for it. “The strange thing is that, when they found it, he got on the helicopter with the little pet,” “Uncle Mauk” commented sarcastically.

At the end of the operation, Magaña gave Schäfer a diploma of appreciation that read: “To the General, Doctor and Professor.”

Source: lanacion.cl, July 23, 2006

Before traveling to Germany, José Efraín Morales, kidnapped for 36 years in Colonia Dignidad, provided information about the hiding of the cars of the forcibly disappeared and the death of Boris Weisfeiler.

For years Paul Schäfer moved around in different cars with fake license plates or plates modified with electrical tape, but his favorite vehicle was a brown and beige double-cab Chevrolet, says José Efraín Morales Norambuena, who fled the former Colonia Dignidad after remaining there for 36 years against his will and where he was renamed José Efraín Vedder Veuhoff.

In 1988, Morales recalls, that Chevrolet was buried in an interior valley of Villa Baviera along with twelve other dismantled cars that belonged to the forcibly disappeared. Like their owners, the vehicles also had to disappear.

Only a handful of colonists know where they hid the remains of the hundred political prisoners whose trail is lost inside the German enclave, when after the 1973 military coup, the DINA used the facility as a center for political imprisonment and torture, with the complicity of the colonists.

Many more found out about the burial of the cars. It was not every day that perfectly operational vehicles—some even recently painted—were dismantled to be loaded onto a truck and given a “burial” somewhere in the 17,000 hectares that Dignidad possesses, 40 kilometers from Parral.

The colonists do not know when the vehicles arrived at the Colony—with or without their owners—but they did know that the fifteen vehicles kept in a shed at the disposal of the enclave’s bosses had belonged to the forcibly disappeared.

Only a handful of colonists know where the Villa Baviera hierarchs hid the remains of the hundred political prisoners, whose trail is lost inside the German enclave, when after the military coup the DINA used the facility as a center for political imprisonment and torture.

Years before their unusual burial, the vehicles—including the favorite Chevrolet, a green jeep, and a Citroën—had been painted, their engines refurbished, and their license plates changed to pass checkpoints.

They were fully functional when Schäfer ordered them to be gotten rid of. For long years no one had bothered them, but in 1988, without their allies in power, the situation was going to change. That year, Minister Guillermo Navas had been designated by the Supreme Court to investigate the links of Colonia Dignidad to human rights violations, at the express request of the government of Germany, which had withheld a loan to Chile on that condition.

Despite Minister Navas’s friendly attitude toward the colonists, the Villa Baviera hierarchy feared that they would detect the vehicles in an eventual raid. As a precaution, Schäfer ordered Willi Malessa, one of his most trusted men, to hide the clumsy evidence.

Malessa, a specialist in weapons handling and an expert karateka, together with Ulrich Schmidtke Miottel, dismantled and loaded the vehicles onto a truck. For two weeks, Malessa buried the remains with the help of a Caterpillar 235 backhoe in a nearby valley, under the attentive protection of the enclave’s head of security, Erwin Fage, another unconditional follower of Schäfer.

José Morales recalls that at the end of 1988, Malessa and Fege—shooting instructors for the most loyal colonists, in the long underground of the potato warehouse—were also in charge of making the prisoners’ remains disappear.

Schäfer had ordered them to “remove (versetzen) the package (paket)” and hide it in one of the valleys outside the fence, in anticipation of possible excavations by judicial order. Once again, Malessa set off alone to an interior valley, taking the paket, which according to the oldest colonists, undoubtedly referred to the remains of the gesuchten, the sought-after, the disappeared. “Today perhaps a forest has already grown in that place and it is impossible to know where the remains are.

But they are worried, because the issue is not closed. When will they wake up and help so many Chileans by saying what they know? Malessa and Fege will one day reach heaven and will have to give an account to their God. But today they have houses in the south and live like kings,” Morales stated.

THE KINGS OF THE SOUTH

Both Malessa and Fege live today outside Villa Baviera; however, there are strong suspicions that they only carry out new orders from Schäfer. In mid-2002, Willi Malessa received 90 million from the former Colony to settle in a villa-house with 12 bedrooms and 12 bathrooms in Los Angeles, VIII Region.

Erwin Fege left in March 1998, after visiting Minister Hernán González ordered 30 days of police surveillance inside the enclave. Together with his wife Brigitte Malessa, they abandoned the facility and asked for protection from the government of Germany.

They lived there for a few weeks until Fege found out that he would be summoned to testify; he traveled to Canada, but since they did not authorize him to stay, he returned to Chile and settled in Purranque, near Osorno.

Although Fege said he was fleeing the Colony in search of freedom, upon returning to Chile, he strengthened relations with the directors of Dignidad. José Morales Norambuena was kidnapped for 36 years in Colonia Dignidad.

Faced with the indifference of the Chilean state, he traveled to Germany in search of help. In May 2000, Fege, his wife, and four German partners bought for $100 million pesos Lot A-2 of the Tres Puentes Estate, in Purranque, where they installed the Sociedad Agroindustrial Tierra Nueva, Ltda.

His old colonist friends gave him livestock, trucks loaded with fodder, and various products. Despite having been responsible for security and the surveillance, control, and communications systems throughout the property and its buildings from 1970 to 1998, Fege assures the Chilean police that he knows nothing of what happened in the enclave.

But according to Morales, Erwin Fege can also clarify the fate that befell the Russian-American Boris Weisfeiler.

THE JEWISH “SPY”

It was Fege who, in January 1985, received Boris Weisfeiler from the hands of a military patrol. According to an Army non-commissioned officer and member of the CNI who participated in the mathematician’s detention, “the prisoner was handed over to the head of security of the Colony.” This was reported to the United States embassy when, using the pseudonym ‘Daniel,’ he made contact in 1987, 1990, and 1997.

The military patrol was reportedly composed of seven men from different units that guarded the northwest perimeter of the Colony. Under peremptory orders from the vice commander of the Army, Julio Canessa, they were to arrest any stranger and hand him over to the Germans.

Weisfeiler was backpacking near the crossing of the Ñuble and Los Sauces rivers, a few kilometers from Villa Baviera, and almost at the foot of Cerro Maravilla, where it is suspected that political prisoners were sent to labor camps, in complicity with the Army, which controlled those lands.

In the Villa Baviera cemetery, no remains of forcibly disappeared persons have been found. After arresting the tourist, accusing him of being a Jewish spy, the patrol led him to a guard post on the southern perimeter of the enclave, where the lieutenant in charge handed him over to the head of security.

A large part of the detainee’s belongings was sent to the CNI headquarters in Santiago. Between January and May 1985, “Daniel” said he had seen Weisfeiler from afar working inside the Colony’s property.

Two other times he entered the German enclave from the east side, occasions on which he spoke with a young guard, who asked him if he had participated in the arrest of the “Jew.” The guard expressed his anguish over what other colonists had told him: that Weisfeiler was tortured in the Colony and lived like “a Jewish dog in animal conditions.” The guard was Miguel Becerra Monsalve, who at age 13 was taken to the Colony by his father, the DINA agent Miguel Angel Becerra Hidalgo, who believed that the boy would receive a good education from the colonists.

Today Becerra Monsalve continues in the Colony, is an expert karateka, and has received training in the use of weapons from Erwin Fege. “Daniel” said that in June 1987 he was informed by another former member of the military patrol that arrested Weisfeiler that he was still living in the Colony, but that shortly before, the order had been given to “clean” the underground areas that were thought to be used to hold prisoners.

In October 1997, “Daniel” stated that Weisfeiler was murdered “by the Germans, without the presence of Chileans,” but he did not specify on what date. By that time, the mathematician had been declared dead by drowning and the case dismissed.

Although the American was not included as a victim of human rights violations in the Rettig Report, the case was reopened in 2000. When “Daniel” made that last contact, the Colony was going through one of its worst moments.

It had already lost its legal personality as a “beneficent society,” and in 1996 investigations into sexual abuse of minors had been reactivated, opening more than ten cases against Schäfer. By mid-1997, Dignidad had accumulated about thirty legal lawsuits for crimes ranging from fraud, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, and cover-up, to sodomitic violations and kidnapping, involving a large part of the leadership. “I don’t remember dates, but the hierarchs were worried about the Weisfeiler case when there was a protest by human rights organizations with signs at the entrance of Colonia Dignidad. I heard about him. It was said that he was murdered there, but the traces were erased,” stated the former colonist José Morales to LND, who abandoned the German enclave in December 2002, and last March left the country. Morales recalls that Ricardo Alvear, a Chilean and spokesperson for Villa Baviera, compiled and processed all the press, radio, and television information on the Weisfeiler case. He personally communicated his conclusions to Schäfer. The latter was worried about the case and wanted to know how implicated Dignidad was, in the eyes of the public and the investigators. Alvear is in charge of maintaining contacts with the outside. It is stated that he has ties in the Armed Forces, ministries, intendancies, and Congress. He also made use of his relations with SAG officials in Parral, with doctors and politicians. He also organized a hunting club in Colonia Dignidad, so that the colonists would be authorized to carry weapons.

WAR NAMES

To avoid his arrest, in 1998 Paul Schäfer vanished from Villa Baviera with three of his assistants—Friedhelm Zeitner, Peter Schmidt, and Mathías Gerlach. A week later, the hierarchy got rid of incriminating documentation.

In the kitchen and with a cheerful complicity, Rudolf Cöllen, Karl Van Den Berg, and Hans Jürgen reviewed a large number of files. “From the documents, they read the ‘war names’ they had used in their operations with the military, and they laughed their heads off,” says Morales, who was five meters behind a curtain. “Sometimes they would get up and burn some documents in the large kitchen oven.” Two years later, on September 19, 2000, the Investigative Police seized the purged “archives” of Colonia Dignidad, displayed in a hallway and organized in three metal card files and hundreds of binders. Dozens of folders were found empty, including the one labeled “Boris Weisfeiler.” by Pascale Bonnefoy M.

Source: lanacion.cl, April 11, 2004

Miguel Ángel Becerra was poisoned: Judge Zepeda accuses Schaefer of the crime against the former DINA collaborator

The minister presiding over the Villa Baviera case established that Miguel Ángel Becerra, a liaison between the enclave and the DINA, was poisoned with an apple covered in pesticides to prevent him from deserting his work for the repressive agencies.

The victim's son remained working in the German enclave for years, unaware of everything, and was a close collaborator of Paul Schaefer and his group.

The visiting judge Jorge Zepeda Arancibia closed one of the bleakest chapters in the relationship between the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) and the former Colonia Dignidad, and issued indictments against Paul Schaefer Schneider and two other members of the enclave for the death of the repressive agency's collaborator, Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo.

The magistrate issued an indictment against Schaefer as the perpetrator of the homicide of Becerra Hidalgo, a DINA collaborator who worked at Villa Baviera, and filed charges against Kurt Schnellenkamp Nelaimischkies and Rudolf Collen Franzkowsky as accessories to the same act.

The judge was able to establish that Becerra Hidalgo was poisoned with some type of organophosphate pesticide in apparent retaliation because he intended to abandon his collaboration with the repressive groups.

Becerra's relatives were informed that the agent, who prior to the military coup had been a collaborator of the ultranationalist group Patria y Libertad, had died from carbon monoxide inhalation inside his truck, which had allegedly suffered some type of mechanical failure on a road adjacent to the Colony.

Judge Zepeda's resolution establishes that “Between Monday, July 26, and Thursday, July 29, 1974, inside the premises of the so-called Colonia Dignidad, composed of immigrants of German nationality, located east of the town of Catillo, near the city of Parral, Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo, 33 years old at that date, was put to death by poisoning.

He was a militant—prior to the 1973 military coup—of the so-called Patria y Libertad movement and—subsequently—a member of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) and an irregular agent for the 'intelligence' work implemented in the former Colonia Dignidad, where he was assigned the designation of 'One' for that purpose.”

Zepeda's investigation managed to determine that agent Becerra had gone to live inside the German enclave to carry out better intelligence and coordination work between the DINA and the German enclave, which consisted of the detection and control of individuals who supported the Unidad Popular whose trail was lost at the German estate.

Likewise, Becerra was often a driver for the Germans, transporting detainees, and also piloted the backhoe machines used to dig pits to illegally bury people inside the grounds of the former Villa Baviera.

Judge Zepeda's inquiries managed to determine that “The cause of death of Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo, according to the evidence obtained by the Legal Medical Institute—specifically, from the chemical-toxicological examinations of samples of his viscera—was poisoning by ingestion of organophosphate elements of the 'Bidrin', 'Tapona', or 'DDVP' type; highly toxic substances capable of causing a person's death.” The same investigations establish that the “murder weapon” was an apple that was given to Becerra to eat, the remains of which were found as the last food he had ingested in his stomach.

The magistrate establishes that due to the circumstances of the act and the precepts of International Law, the homicide of Becerra is a crime against humanity, “because the conduct that determined the victim's death is related to and was executed by someone who understood the broad and general context in which it occurred; that is, forming part of a systematic and generalized attack against part of the civilian population, on a political basis.”

A fact that marks this case even further is that Becerra's son, Miguel Ángel Becerra Monsalve, was taken by his father in December 1973 to the school in the German enclave to be instructed by the Germans, and from that date on, he was kept isolated from all contact with his relatives, just as happened with hundreds of children from the vicinity of the property.

The Germans informed Miguel Ángel Becerra Monsalve, who was 11 years old at the time of the homicide, that his father had died in the vicinity of Linares as a result of a car accident. The Germans also isolated him from his mother and told him that his family had abandoned him, with which the boy became an active collaborator of the enclave.

Only a couple of years ago, and after reading a newspaper article, Miguel Ángel Becerra Monsalve was able to find out how his father had died, and from that day on, he cut all ties with those he considered his circle of trust and protection.

Source: elmostrador.cl, January 31, 2007

France to try thirteen Chilean repressors in absentia

After nearly ten years since the French justice system decided to try a group of Chilean repressors and one Argentine for the kidnapping and disappearance of five Franco-Chilean citizens, the Paris Grand Criminal Court has set the trial date for May 19–23.

The 13 Chileans and the Argentine will be tried in absentia (according to French legal procedure) because neither Chile nor Argentina accepted the extradition requests formulated at the time by France. Among the Chileans are the former head of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, and the leader of the German sect Colonia Dignidad, Paul Schaefer.

Four of the initially requested Chileans are already dead: the dictator Augusto Pinochet, General Javier Palacios who commanded the ground assault on La Moneda on September 11, 1973, Air Force Colonel Andrés Pacheco Cárdenas, commander of the Temuco air base, and the former civilian agent Osvaldo “Guatón” Romo.

The Chilean officers (all retired) who will be put on trial are, in addition to Contreras and Schaefer: Emilio Sandoval Poo, a southern businessman; Joaquín Ramírez Pineda, former commander of the Tacna regiment; Rafael Ahumada Valderrama; Carabineros Lieutenant Colonel Gerardo Godoy García (“El Cachete Chico”); Basclay Zapata Reyes (“El Troglo”), a DINA Army non-commissioned officer; Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, a DINA brigadier and former head of the Águila brigade; Marcelo Moren Brito, a DINA colonel and former head of Villa Grimaldi; Pedro Espinoza Bravo, a brigadier and former second-in-command of the DINA; Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann, a DINA general and former head of its foreign department; José Zara Holger, a DINA brigadier and former head of its foreign department; and the former civilian DINA agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel, who last year finished serving a prison sentence in Buenos Aires for the 1974 assassination of General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert. Also to be tried is the former head of Argentine Army intelligence (SIDE) in Mendoza and Bahía Blanca during the last dictatorship, José Osvaldo Riveiro, alias “Balita.”

The fourteen criminals, most with long records for crimes against humanity, will be tried for the kidnapping and disappearance of Alfonso Chanfreau Oyarce, Jean Ives Claudet Fernández, René Marcel Amiel Baquet, George Klein Pipper, and Etienne Pesle de Menil.

The five victims: Chanfreau was detained in July 1974 in Santiago, and his name appears on the list of the 119 disappeared of Operation Colombo—a preamble to Operation Condor—by which the Chilean dictatorship tried to make it believed that they had fled to Argentina.

Claudet was detained in Buenos Aires in November 1975 as part of Operation Condor, in which the intelligence services of Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Uruguay also participated. In this case, Arancibia Clavel, or “Luis Felipe Alemparte,” sent a memorandum from Buenos Aires (November 1975) addressed to “Luis Gutiérrez”—the alias for the position of DINA foreign chief, at that time Iturriaga Neumann—which stated: “Claudet was subjected to interrogation...

He no longer exists, he is RIP (Réquiem in pace).”

The memo, along with others similar to it, was investigated in Buenos Aires by Judge María Servini and formed part of the file opened there for the Prats-Cuthbert crime.

Amiel was arrested in Mendoza by Chilean and Argentine agents in 1977. Klein was an advisor to Allende and was detained at La Moneda on the day of the military coup. Pesle was a priest kidnapped in Temuco in September 1973.

Source: lanacion.cl, February 12, 2008

Defense seeks to save Schäfer due to progressive dementia

Citing dementia—the same argument used to permanently dismiss the former dictator Augusto Pinochet in the trial for the crimes of the Caravan of Death—the defense for Colonia Dignidad leader Paul Schäfer is seeking his dismissal in the cases affecting him.

This attempt had its first result yesterday, when the Fourth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals accepted the request of lawyer José Luis Sotomayor for Schäfer (87) to undergo psychiatric examinations.

With this, and in a progressive judicial battle, the defense intends to remove him from all the proceedings being instructed against him.

Although his legal representative requested only a psychiatric test that had been denied by the judge of the cases against Colonia Dignidad, Jorge Zepeda, the chamber expanded the range of tests to a general examination of the German's state of health. Schäfer is currently serving three years of confinement in the hospital of the former Santiago Penitentiary, following his capture in Argentina.

"He is in a truly bad state; he practically no longer hears or sees out of the only eye he has, and he does not coordinate his thoughts. He eats very little and his state is in frank physical and mental deterioration," explained lawyer Sotomayor.

But according to plaintiff lawyer Hernán Fernández, "this is nothing more than a strategy to save Schäfer, who is not demented but is feigning deafness, pretending not to understand, and inventing that he lacks vision to read the questions the court asks him."

Fernández recalled that two years ago, the Legal Medical Service (SML) prepared an initial psychiatric report on Schäfer that considered him to have "full mental faculties" to face a trial.

In the case of Pinochet, after his return to Chile in March 2000 from his arrest in London, and after being dismissed in the Caravan case, the majority of the ministers of the Santiago and Supreme courts changed their opinion regarding the alleged dementia argued by his defense, realizing that they had been deceived, as several acknowledged in private.

A few days after the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court issued his final dismissal in this process in July 2002, Pinochet went out to the streets to live a public life, attending social gatherings, restaurants, bookstores, and gave an interview of more than an hour to a Miami channel.

To present the request ruled on favorably yesterday, Schäfer's defense chose a case involving injuries to German colonists who have already emigrated to their country, which has no opposing plaintiff.

But lawyer Fernández stated that "we are going to request a report on how Schäfer has a normal life, afflicted only by the ailments of age, and feigns when he is interrogated."

Schäfer is sentenced to 20 years in prison in the first instance by Judge Hernán González (Parral) for sodomitic rape and sexual abuse of minors, and to three years for the discovery of weapons in Dignidad.

In addition, he has other open trials for illicit association and kidnapping and disappearance of persons.

Source: elmostrador.cl, March 5, 2008

Santiago Justice Center: Supreme Court confirms conviction against Paul Schäfer

The Supreme Court ratified the convictions of four members of the former Colonia Dignidad for violation of the Arms Control Law due to the arsenals found in Parral and Bulnes in 2005.

In a unanimous ruling, ministers Nibaldo Segura, Jaime Rodríguez, Rubén Ballesteros, Hugo Dolmestch, and Carlos Künsemüller rejected the cassation appeals presented against the sentence of the Court of Appeals that convicted Paul Schäfer (3 years and 300 days), Karl Van der Berg (2 years and 300 days remitted), Kurt Schnellenkamp (2 years and 300 days remitted), and Harmut Hopp (90 days, served in preventive detention).

This is the first conviction issued by the Supreme Court for crimes committed in the former Villa Baviera, which is being investigated by visiting judge Jorge Zepeda Arancibia.

Source: lanacion.cl, July 3, 2008

Supreme Court confirmed conviction of Schäfer for torture

The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court confirmed the conviction of three years and one day against Paul Schäfer for serious and less serious injuries in the process investigating the torture suffered by eight colonists over 10 years, during which they received different medications to keep them controlled in the former Colonia Dignidad between 1980 and 1990.

Judge Jorge Zepeda also established that the experimental use of electroshock, sleeping pills, and other medications against the colonists was authorized in order to keep them supervised and controlled for forced labor.

Thus, the second conviction for Schäfer is ratified; he remains confined in the High Security Prison in the Penitentiary Hospital due to his 87 years of age.

On July 2, 2008, the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court sentenced the former leader of Colonia Dignidad to three years and 300 days in prison for violation of the Arms Control Law, due to the war arsenal he kept in the enclave.

Source: cooperativa.cl, May 13, 2009

Court of Appeals issues sentence against Paul Schäfer

The Santiago Court of Appeals confirmed this Monday a ruling that sentences Paul Schäfer, former leader of Colonia Dignidad, to seven years in prison for the 1974 homicide of Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo, an agent of the DINA, the secret police of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

In a unanimous ruling, the magistrates of the Eighth Chamber of the appellate court also sentenced Kurt Schnellenkamp Nelaimischkies and Rudolf Cöllen Frankowsky, collaborators of Schäfer, to 541 days in prison as accessories to the crime, although it granted both the benefit of supervised release, judicial sources reported.

In addition, the court determined that the three convicted must jointly pay a total compensation of 170 million pesos to nine plaintiffs in the case, all relatives of the victim.

Schäfer, 87, is currently serving a sentence of three years and 300 days in prison for the storage of war weapons, another of three years and one day for torturing German members of Colonia Dignidad, and a third of 20 years as the perpetrator of five rapes and 21 sexual abuses against children residing in the enclave.

The former Nazi Army non-commissioned officer has been hospitalized for more than two weeks in a penitentiary hospital in serious condition due to progressive heart problems, according to doctors, who have indicated that his prognosis is uncertain.

Miguel Ángel Becerra Hidalgo was a former member of the far-right group "Patria y Libertad," which used terrorism against the government of Salvador Allende, and who became a DINA agent after the 1973 military coup.

According to the case file, he was 33 years old when he was poisoned between July 26 and 29, 1974, inside Colonia Dignidad, where he lived, and his body appeared days later in a nearby area, to which it was taken by Schnellenkamp and Cöllen, who tried to simulate that the man had been run over by a vehicle.

The motive for the crime was that Becerra was expressing dissatisfaction with the torture and mistreatment applied to political prisoners.

Source: elmostrador.cl, July 13, 2009

Minister Zepeda issues indictment in human rights case

Minister Jorge Zepeda issued an indictment in the investigation into the aggravated kidnapping of Pedro Juan Merino Molina, which occurred starting September 14, 1974, in the city of Coronel, Bio Bio region.

The magistrate charged Sergio Rigoberto Apablaza Rojas, Manuel Rioseco Paredes, Orlando José Manzo Durán, Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, Paul Schäfer Schneider, Fernando Gómez Segovia, and Gerd Seewald Lefevre as responsible for the aforementioned crime.

The magistrate determined that the victim: “after being detained by State agents on the dawn of September 14, 1974, in the home he occupied in the Yobilo Dos neighborhood, 817 Aconcagua Street, in the city of Coronel, was taken to the 'Lo Rojas' Carabineros station and immediately driven to Parral, specifically to the clandestine detention center of the former Colonia Dignidad, where there was a record of the interrogations carried out by German colonists acting together with State agents belonging to the National Intelligence Directorate, DINA; with whom the former cooperated in the persecution, deprivation of liberty, and elimination of civilians for political or ideological reasons; said agents proceeding to keep the aforementioned victim deprived of liberty, making him disappear to this day.”

Source: lanacion.cl, July 17, 2009

Nazi Paul Schaefer, founder of Colonia Dignidad, dies in a Chilean prison

The German Paul Schaefer, founder of Colonia Dignidad in southern Chile, died today in prison, prison sources reported.

This former Nazi Army non-commissioned officer was 88 years old and died as a result of a chronic heart condition in the prison hospital, where he was serving several sentences for various crimes, the sources specified.

Schaefer remained in the hospital for practically the entire time he was in prison, after being detained in Argentina and expelled from that country in March 2005, and his death occurred after 07:00 hours this Saturday (11:00 GMT), Gendarmerie (Prison Service) authorities noted.

The top leader of the German enclave installed in the vicinity of the city of Parral, about 380 kilometers from Santiago, was sentenced to seven years in prison for aggravated homicide; three years for violation of the arms control law; three years and one day for torture; and 20 years for sexual abuse against minors who lived in the Colony.

Schaefer and other Germans founded Colonia Dignidad, which they called "Villa Baviera," in 1961 and, gradually, generated a powerful network of influence and transformed it into a true closed enclave, outside of Chilean laws.

During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990), the Colony, which covered some 16,000 hectares, was used as a concentration and torture camp, according to testimonies from survivors.

Former President Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994) defined the place as "a state within a state" when his government undertook a legal offensive to dismantle it.

In 1996, Schaefer fled from justice and for several years was the most wanted fugitive in Chile, until he was detained by Argentine police on March 10, 2005, in a town near Buenos Aires, where he lived protected by several of his followers.

The Argentine government decreed his immediate expulsion to Chile, where he was prosecuted and sentenced by the Justice system.

Source: abc.es, April 24, 2010

The murderer Schäfer and his accomplices of the dictatorship

Following the death of the murderer, torturer, and pedophile Paul Schäfer, which occurred last Monday the 24th in the high-security prison in Santiago, the dismantling of Colonia Dignidad as a criminal organization seems to be near.

The Dignidad Beneficent and Educational Society is located on a 16,000-hectare estate situated on two properties located in the vicinity of Parral, 350 kilometers southeast of Santiago.

It was founded in 1961 at the behest of Schäfer, who, appearing to be an exemplary religious man, persuaded three hundred faithful from Baptist communities in northeastern Germany to travel with him to southern Chile, with the intended purpose of establishing a kingdom of justice and kindness, “far from the communist threat.”

At the time of traveling, Schäfer was escaping from German justice, which was looking for him for the rape of two minors.

In an interview with Apro, lawyer Hernán Fernández, who legally represents 11 victims of sexual abuse committed by Schäfer and who was his main pursuer, maintained that Colonia Dignidad came to be “one of the most dangerous criminal organizations that have existed in the world.”

At the time of his death, Schäfer (88 years old) had two convictions ratified by the Supreme Court of Chile, two other first-instance convictions, and three trials open in their final stages, which would have meant at least 33 years in prison for him.

The crimes: proven sexual abuse against 26 minors, illicit association, aggravated homicide, kidnappings, torture, money laundering, violation of the arms and explosives law, among others.

Lawyer Fernández estimates that although the crimes committed by this organization were known shortly after it was installed in Chile, there were “powers” that prevented it from being subjected to Chilean law.

However, he states, “what political power could not do, what the authorities who in some way with their actions and omissions strengthened the power of Colonia Dignidad could not do, was achieved by the courage of the victims, of humble families who faced the power of Colonia Dignidad, who did not yield in their demand for justice, and who finally obtained as a reward the imprisonment of Paul Schäfer, who died as a common prisoner.”

Paul Schäfer Schneider, the top leader of Colonia Dignidad, had been detained on March 10, 2005, in the Argentine town of Tortuguitas, 40 kilometers from Buenos Aires. This was his last refuge as a fugitive from Chilean justice, a status he maintained for seven years.

Most of that time he was inside Colonia Dignidad itself, from which he had to escape after the constant police raids to which the German enclave was subjected.

The “mission”

In 1954, Baptist pastor Hans Baar, who led a community of immigrants in Gronau (Westphalia), met Schäfer. In the book Paul Schäfer: Savior or Demon of Colonia Dignidad, written by Pía Lecaros and Marcelo Araya (Cesoc, Santiago de Chile, 1998), Baar maintained: “He seemed to me a very determined Christian.

In his sermons, he emphasized a lot the need to confess and to be unconditional imitators of Jesus Christ.”

In 1956, Baar and Schäfer gave life to the Private Social Mission, whose first task was to create the boarding school for children who were victims of the war (Missionhauss). After four years, the deviant inclinations of Schäfer, who was sexually insatiable, began to be exposed.

Willy George, a primary school classmate of his, was the first to file a complaint against him. His firstborn son was another of his victims.

Wolfang Müller, who in 1966 would star in the first successful escape from Colonia Dignidad, would also know the evil of the man who would be known as the “permanent uncle.” When he was 12 years old, in 1957, he visited the Missionhauss. “Only SIX hours had passed since I entered when Paul Schäfer took me to his bedroom and sexually abused me,” he would confess to the German justice system after his escape.

The Missionhauss was built with the unpaid labor of the parishioners, as would be characteristic of Schäfer's works. He surrounded it with very high walls, prohibiting anyone from leaving without his authorization.

Men were separated from women, who “were treated like the lowest trash,” as Christel Schwoll recounts, who had a sister kidnapped by this sect, as cited in the book The Secret History of Colonia Dignidad by Álvaro Rojas.

Schäfer performed alleged exorcisms that were always done on women, whom he hated for being the main obstacle between him and the children.

After the rape complaints made by minors, the German police appeared at the Mission house at the beginning of 1961. However, Schäfer and Baar managed to escape.

First, they went to North Africa. Then, with the help of the Chilean ambassador in Bonn, Arturo Mashke, Schäfer obtained a visa to travel to Chile. He did so in the company of a handful of adults and 12 children, who left their country with the authorization of their parents.

Once in the South American country, he bought—on October 9, 1961—the San Manuel estate, located in the foothills of the Andes, on the side of the Perquilauquén River. There he would found the aforementioned “Beneficent Society.” Now, the objective would be to give shelter to the orphaned children left by the earthquake of May 22, 1960, which devastated southern Chile.

Despite the enormous walls that quickly surrounded the entrance to Dignidad, the Germans were able to inspire an idyllic image. Schäfer, who was astute, organized visits by authorities in which he used a script that made an impression.

This included the use of typical Bavarian costumes by the women, who entertained the attendees with kuchen, bread, butter, cheeses, and jams that were prepared by them.

He also showed off the architectural works and the advanced agricultural development that Colonia Dignidad achieved, the result of slave labor.

Fascist den

In the German enclave, the colonists were practically prohibited from sex... except for Schäfer and a few couples whom he authorized to live together in 1978. The others had to live separated by age and gender. They would not enjoy a private life.

The main obsession of the top leader of Dignidad was the repression of sexuality and all manifestations of heterosexual love. “Sexual desires are distorted and premarital erotic expressions are strongly punished, even in the form of small love letters.

The youth in Colonia Dignidad do not have clear knowledge about the generative act of human birth. Pregnancies are aborted, pregnant women are hidden from the sight of the youth (...) couples who want to marry need Schäfer's approval, which only those over 40 years old could achieve,” according to what is read in The Dignity of the Colony, written by Paul Heller and Jaime Lagos (Mares del Sur, Santiago, 1998).

In this book, it is asserted that, to a large extent, the control that Schäfer achieved over the colonists was based on the annihilation of their sexual feelings. The fugitive Lotti Packmoor recounted: “At night, the children were left in a hospital room with 12 beds placed in a circle.

They had to lie down naked, on their backs, and behind each bed, or sometimes every two, an inspector stood to observe them; if a child moved their eyelids, they were lifted from the bed and slapped. But if any sexual organ moved, they were lifted and treated with electric shocks, even on the testicles, and subsequently thrown into ice-cold water.”

Given that the children were running out, as a result of the almost zero births, Schäfer became a kidnapper of minors.

The sophisticated surveillance system that existed in Colonia Dignidad sought mainly to keep the perverse world that Schäfer managed to build hidden. Also to prevent escapes.

“The fence of mesh and barbed wire around the colony is only the visible part of a staggered security system. There were two surveillance posts with telephoto lenses and radiotelegraphs, cameras hidden in beehives, microphones in the houses, armored windows, alarm wires underground, sensors in the terrain, a silent car with infrared devices, and surveillance commandos with machine guns and police dogs,” according to what is asserted in The Dignity of the Colony.

Schäfer, who had been a Nazi militant, had a sickening anti-communism. He had all his “warriors” prepared to counter an imminent attack by groups of peasants who, from the mid-1960s until the end of Salvador Allende's government in September 1973, carried out hundreds of land seizures of agricultural land in central and southern Chile.

Dirty business

Due to the tax exemptions achieved by his “beneficent society,” Schäfer was able to do lucrative arms deals, which entered camouflaged in the impregnable suitcases that arrived tax-free to his redoubts.

Between 1970 and 1971, when the Colony worked hand in hand with far-right groups—such as Patria y Libertad—that were preparing the way for the military coup against Allende's government, Baar was able to send shipments of weapons from Frankfurt that entered Chile as “charity goods.”

During that period, the workshops of the German enclave began to manufacture machine guns and grenades. Although it was not profitable, this activity satisfied Schäfer's dreams of grandeur, who boasted that Dignidad was an autarkic community.

Colonia Dignidad was used by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) to develop the final phase of Project Andrea, which sought to lay the foundations for unconventional warfare in which chemical, biological, and atomic weapons would be used. It began in 1975 and was directed by DINA chief Manuel Contreras.

The most feared conflict hypothesis at that time was that of a simultaneous confrontation against Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina, a war event for which Chile was not prepared.

According to the version provided by the aforementioned Paul Heller to journalist Lucía Sepúlveda (Rebelión, April 16, 2006), dictator Augusto Pinochet, to counter the adverse geopolitical situation his country faced in the mid-seventies, hired the services of weapons expert Hans Ulrich Rudel, a Nazi officer very close to Hitler, who collaborated with the implementation of Project Andrea.

The secret facilities necessary for the development of this project were, in part, provided by the aforementioned Colony. According to Heller's version, the German secret service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) had contributed to the development of Project Andrea.

The existence of bunkers, tunnels, airports, hospitals, radios, and decentralized production of weapons in various modules, verified in Dignidad, can only be understood in the context of a larger plan developed with the support of the Chilean armed forces.

In the context of the aforementioned project, weapons as lethal as sarin gas were manufactured. With this toxic substance, the Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria and the prominent journalist Eugenio Lira Massi, among other opponents of the Pinochet dictatorship, were eliminated.

The collaboration of the DINA with Colonia Dignidad is absolutely proven. In a resolution from April 2006, the special judge for human rights cases, Jorge Zepeda, accredited the existence of an illicit association between Paul Schäfer's sect and the DINA, whose objective was to keep prisoners, torture, and make opponents of the Pinochet regime disappear.

This resolution requested prison for four former DINA members—among them Contreras—and 14 members of Dignidad led by Schäfer. The findings of large arsenals of weapons, found in this compound in June 2005, convinced Zepeda that international arms trafficking was being carried out in the aforementioned Colony in order to provide profit to Schäfer.

Currently, 25 men from Colonia Dignidad are convicted in the first instance as perpetrators, accomplices, and accessories to the same crimes committed by Schäfer. It is expected that in the first fortnight of May, these sentences will be reviewed by the Talca Court of Appeals.

Lawyer Fernández maintained in this regard that “as plaintiffs, we are requesting that the convictions be ratified and that, due to the gravity of the crimes, the sentences be increased.” If this were to materialize, it would be the end of Colonia Dignidad as a center of torture, disappearance, and death.

To know the whole truth of Colonia Dignidad, it is necessary for Judge Zepeda to lift the secrecy existing over the 40,000 files found—in 2005—in the archives of this den of perversion and death.

Source: proceso.com.mx, May 4, 2010

Manuel Contreras convicted in human rights case in Colonia Dignidad

Visiting judge Jorge Zepeda issued a first-instance sentence in the case regarding the disappearance of communist militant Pedro Merino Molina, which occurred on September 14, 1974.

The case refers to one of the facets of the proceedings for human rights violations that occurred inside the former Colonia Dignidad. Thus, the magistrate determined to acquit of all charges the person who was the main accused, Paul Schäfer, who, due to being deceased, cannot be subject to criminal action.

However, he issued sentences of 5 years of minor imprisonment in its maximum degree without any type of benefit to the person who served as head of the dissolved DINA, General (r) Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda.

The same sentence was received by the head of the repressive organ in the city of Parral, Fernando Gómez Saravia, and Brigadier (r) Pedro Espinoza Bravo. The resolution also determines that the Chilean Treasury must pay a total compensation of $155 million to the mother and siblings of the victim, which is divided into $50 million for the woman and $15 million for each of Merino Molina's seven siblings.

Judge Zepeda also ordered the acquittal of Orlando Manzo, Sergio Apablaza, Manuel Rioseco, and former colonist Gerd Seewald due to lack of participation.

Source: lanacion.cl, June 29, 2011