Colonia Dignidad ?
Tilman Hausherr
still exists, and what Paul Schäfer is doing currently (i.e. is he in jail or not).
Tilman
===
Time, May 16, 1988
Colony of the dammed; bizarre allegations plague a West German settlement. (Chile)
By Guy D. Garcia
To the impoverished peasants of Chile's rural Seventh Region, the
arrival in 1961 of los alemanes (the Germans) seemed at first
like a godsend. The 60 or so blond, blue-eyed settlers of
Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony) quickly set to work
constructing what they called an ''educational and benefactory
society'' on the site of an old ranch near Parral, 250 miles
south of Santiago. Before long the newcomers had built a model
community that offered many of the area's 20,000 residents access
to employment, trade, free hospital services, an elementary
school and, eventually, even a European-style restaurant on the
nearby highway.
In recent years that utopian vision has gradually given way to a
darker, more sinister image. According to accounts provided by
former Colonia Dignidad residents, the colony, which now numbers
about 350, has become a virtual prison camp under the control of
its founder and leader, Paul Schafer, 66. A self-proclaimed
psychologist, Schafer fled Germany in 1961 with his small flock
after police launched an investigation into charges that he had
sexually abused two boys.
Schafer has also been accused by former colony residents of
engaging in the illegal importation and manufacture of light
arms. Most chilling, perhaps, are accusations by victims and
ex-agents of Chile's dreaded intelligence service, DINA (renamed
CNI in 1977), that Colonia Dignidad has been involved in the
torture of leftist opponents of the military regime of General
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. ''These are gruesome matters,'' says
Hugo Baar, a colony co-founder and a former associate of
Schafer's, who calls the colony a ''group that has become
poisoned with lies.''
The first sign that something was seriously amiss came in 1966
when Wolfgang Muller, then 20, escaped from Colonia Dignidad for
the third time and begged the West German embassy in Santiago not
to send him back for fear he would be killed. Muller, who now
lives in West Germany under a different name, claimed that
Schafer had molested him when he was twelve. He told of regular
beatings and the use of electroshock and narcotics by camp
doctors, and described Schafer as a dictator who condones drug
experiments and torture and enforces hard labor from sunup to
sundown.
The colony again became the object of international attention in
1976, when a United Nations human rights commission report
identified the camp as one of Chile's detention centers. The
next year the West German branch of Amnesty International
denounced Colonia Dignidad as a DINA torture center. The colony
responded by launching a defamation suit in West Germany against
Amnesty International, a legal dispute that continues today.
Last February four former Colonia Dignidad members went before a
Bonn parliamentary subcommittee and described their lives as
regimes of terror. Lotti Packmor, 55, who left the colony with
her husband in 1985 and now lives in Canada, said she had seen
young boys given injections in their testicles and described
Schafer as having beaten a young girl until ''blood spurted from
her no se.'' Added Georg Packmor: ''No one dares even to think of
escaping.'' A colony spokesman denied the charges and said that
such alleged witnesses were mentally ill, alcoholics, adulterers
and drug addicts.
One of the most serious blows against Schafer came from the
testimony of Baar, a onetime member of the colony's inner circle
who escaped in 1984, leaving behind nine children. Baar decried
his former colleague as a paranoid dictator who rode around the
compound in a bulletproof Mercedes-Benz carrying weapons and
ammunition.
Later the same year, the unexplained disappearance of Boris
Weisfeiler, a Moscow-born U.S. citizen who was hiking near the
colony, aroused the concern of the U.S. State Department. Since
then, a Chilean government investigation has concluded that
Weisfeiler drowned in a nearby river. U.S. officials consider
the case still open. The Pinochet government has given the
colony its tacit support. West Germany, for its part, has been
reluctant to speak out against Schafer in the past because of
close ties between Colonia Dignidad and officials at the West
German embassy in Santiago.
That reluctance has begun to fade. Last fall, in connection with
the Amnesty case, a West German judge asked the Chilean courts to
arrange an inspection tour of the colony. Last week the managing
director of Amnesty International's West German section announced
in Parral that inspections of the surrounding terrain have so far
supported testimony by former DINA prisoners who claim they were
taken to Colonia Dignidad to be tortured. During the next two
days a group that included a Chilean judge, Amnesty Attorney
Maximo Pacheco, colony lawyers and representatives of the West
German government was allowed inside the colony. According to
Pacheco, the group identified four underground rooms that matched
descriptions by DINA torture victims. The visitors had less luck
with their request to interview Jurgen Szurgelies, 24, who was
returned to the colony by local authorities after escaping last
month. The West German embassy in Santiago has initiated a case
in a Chilean court to put Szurgelies under legal protection, and
the court is expected to decide this week whether he was taken to
Colonia Dignidad against his will.
Meanwhile, some human rights officials are afraid that Schafer,
if pushed too far, might take drastic action. Said Baar: ''I
fear for the lives of the Dignidad people if it comes to conflict
t here. I am certain that shootings cannot be avoided, and I say
that out of deep conviction.''
-------------------------
The New Republic, May 2, 1988
Camp Nazi. (Postcard - Chile: Colonia Dignidad)
By Tina Rosenberg
POSTCARD CHILE CAMP NAZI
SOOTHING MUSIC PLAYS. The screen shows a chubby blond girl
milking a cow, women taking whole-wheat loaves from the oven, and
boys in lederhosen dancing. This is Chilean television's report
on Colonia Dignidad--Dignity Colony--a 37,000-acre German farming
community in the Andean foothills of southern Chile. The message
is idyllic: it's a typical pastoral day for Colonia Dignidad--a
retreat of 350 inhabitants that happens to have been founded by
an ex-Wehrmacht nurse with one glass eye fleeing an Interpol
warrant for sodomizing young boys at the orphanage he ran in
Westphalia.
The Chilean government's insistence that there is nothing
mysterious about the place adds another layer of mystery to the
26-year-old Dignidad. The Colonia is encircled by a double fence
of barbed wire. According to new reports by defectors, children
are taken at birth, raised separately, and know their parents
only as "aunt" and "uncle." Members who flee and are caught are
treated with electric shocks and mind-altering drugs. Ex-members
of the Chilean secret police and former political prisoners say
the colony was a torture camp after Gen. Augusto Pinochet's 1973
coup. Other reports speak darkly of underground tunnels, arms
stockpiles, children kidnapped from Cologne and Bonn, and plastic
surgery for Nazis. A left-wing West Berlin magazine is carrying
a story that the Colonia is a communications center for neo-Nazis
in Latin America and Europe.
To the Pinochet government, Dignidad is exactly what it says it
is: a "Beneficial and Educational Society" whose logo is a nurse
holding the hands of two children. There is something to this.
The Colonia runs a hospital, open free to the public on Tuesdays
and Fridays, which has treated 20,000 local residents, and a
primary school for Chilean children. The colonists seem a bit
like high-tech Amish: the women dress in long skirts, aprons, and
kerchiefs, but colonists use modern farm machinery, a fleet of
trucks, two Mercedez Benz autos, two planes, and an airstrip.
Dignidad grows everything residents eat except rice, salt, and
coffee. Its doctrine does not include Nazism, anti-Semitism, or
even religion at all. The journalists who have been permitted
entry in recent years--all from state-controlled TV and two
pro-government newspapers--have painted the colony as an
industrious German Village, although one newspaper did note the
tendency for children to answer questions in unison. "We are
being persecuted only because we are hardworking and want to be
left alone," said Harmutt Hopp, the Colonia's spokesman.
NOT EXACTLY. Dignidad was founded in 1961 by Paul Shaefer, the
manager of an orphanage in Siegburg, Westphalia, who fled Germany
after numerous accusations that he was sexually abusing the boys
who lived there. His co-founder and current second-in-command is
Hermann Schmidt, a former Luftwaffe official. The first known
escapee, 18-year-old Ernst Wolfgang Muller, charged in 1966 that
when he came to the orphanage Shaefer raped him on his first day.
Muller said that in Chile, each boy in the colony took turns
being an "aide" to Shaefer, a job that did not stop at sundown.
As Muller described him, Shaefer is charismatic and quick with a
joke, ruling the colony with a mixture of tyranny and charm.
Muller said that Shaefer gave him memory-affecting tranquilizers
when he was rebellious. When leaders figured out he was not
swallowing the pills, they gave him injections. The same year
another defector charged that she was regularly beaten in the
Colonia and never allowed to see her children.
In 1985 two couples escaped. One of the men was Hugo Baar, one
of the colony's founders and leaders. When he fell out of favor,
he said, he was put in the hospital, given drugs and shock
treatments, then sent to work in the woodworking shop. The
newest testimony is that of the other couple, Georg and Lotti
Packmor. Their report to the German ambassador found its way
into Stern magazine in November.
It portrays a nightmare world. The Packmors said that Colonia
inhabitants are allowed to see their spouses only once every two
weeks for a short while. One of her jobs, Lotti said, was to
sleep under a bed in the children's dorm. "If a child moved an
eyebrow, it meant that he was awake. In that case, he was taken
from the bed and would be beaten," she wrote. She said that
Shaefer made the boys confess their thoughts to him, which he
would then use to manipulate them psychologically. Once, she
said, she saw a doctor give boys injections in their testicles.
According to the Packmors, Shaefer tells colonists that people
who want to visit, even relatives who write asking for permission
to see family, are communists seeking to destroy Dignidad. Only
trusted leaders go out alone. Lotti wrote that she had tried to
flee several times. Each time she was brought back by colonists
and Chilean police using search dogs, given "medical treatment,"
and put into the hospital. Fleeing is difficult, she said,
because many colonists do not know Spanish, have never even seen,
much less possess, Chilean money, and do not know the countryside
or anyone from outside. The Colonia can also count on the
Chilean police to help bring refugees back.
IN EARLY NOVEMBER, after ten years of trying, the West German
foreign minister was allowed to send representatives to visit
colonists, almost all of whom are German citizens. Der Spiegel
magazine later printed parts of the 30-page-report. It said that
inhabitants, who work 16 hours a day with no salary, are slaves
of Shaefer, who has taken away all personal liberties and uses
"mind-altering drugs, shock treatments, and terror to convert the
population into a docile force that works like robots." When the
Germans tried to send a more complete investigating commission,
the Chilean government said that investigators would be treated
"like any other tourists." Der Spiegel reported that when a
helicopter carrying the ambassador tried to land, Dignidad
residents covered the landing strip with a magnetized wind
machine in an attempt to cause a crash.
Reporters from outside the pro-government press have had no
better luck. When I tried to visit the colony with another U.S.
reporter, we got as far as the first gate, an hour's dusty drive
from a paved road. We rang the bell, which played some musical
notes, and a woman speaking German-accented Spanish said through
the intercom that there would be no interviews. "Do not take
pictures without permission in writing from the director," she
said. "And with that, goodbye." We rang the bell again, but the
buzzer did not play its little song. Bowing to new German
pressure to extradite the Colonia's leaders--a move that could
embarass Pinochet internationally--the Chilean government has
said it will allow investigators to enter in late April.
Chileans who lived near the Colonia drew a picture of a state
within a state. In 1977 three nuns moved to a small house on
land claimed by Dignidad, which the nuns contend the Church has
owned for 30 years. Shortly after they arrived, an anonymous
letter went to local residents, saying that "false nuns" had
arrived, "paid Marxist-Leninist agents of Russia who had come to
defeat the government and cause a bloodbath." The nuns' sewer
pipes were broken, their water cut, their animals stolen, and
their house burned down. In 1984 they moved out.
The Colonia sued the nuns for taking their land and won the case.
The Colonia sues often, usually for libel, and has never lost a
case in Chile, where the courts are not noted for their judicial
independence.
The Chilean government nas never investigated any of the charges.
"When they first came here, they [the Colonia] had some respect
for authority," said one farmer. "Now they order the authorities
around." Despite the complaints of residents we talked to, local
police said they had never had a single problem with the Colonia.
Local executives and judges decline to talk. An employee in one
of the government offices pulled us aside and said in a low
voice, "No one is going to complain about these people. They are
big fish, a power independent of the government--they're playing
in a bigger court than we are. The police here are eating from
their plate."
IT IS HARD to understand why the governments that preceded
Pinochet never investigated Dignidad; a possible reason is the
lack of many reports from escapees until recently. Pinochet's
affection for Dignidad may have a darker explanation: former
prisoners and secret police agents have testified that the colony
was a torture camp for DINA, the Chilean secret police, after the
coup. Juan Rene Munoz was known as the "hooded man of the
National Stadium." A youth leader during the Socialist government
of Salvador Allende, Munoz cooperated with Pinochet's forces
after the coup. When soldiers brought Allende supporters to the
football stadiums, Munoz, his head covered, haunted the ranks of
the prisoners, silently pointing the torturers to people who had
been the left's leaders. Munoz swore to the Catholic Church's
human rights office that Dignidad was a DINA detention center in
the mid-1970s. He said that the colony's radio transmitters were
used to communicate with other detention centers to coordinate
the movement of prisoners. Three months after he made his
declaration, Munoz was found stabbed in a field outside Santiago.
His death was never investigated.
A dozen former political prisoners have told Amnesty
International that they were taken to be tortured on routes that
match the route to Dignidad. One said that when his blindfold
slipped he could see a sign that said "Colonia Dignidad." Many
said their torturers, who gave them drugs and electric shocks to
their genitals, spoke in German. Dignidad has sued Amnesty and
Stern, which published the allegations, for libel. The suit has
not yet been decided, partly because the Chileans have lagged in
taking the depositions ordered by the German court.
The night before the TV news show on Dignidad, I went to see
Elena and Aristedes Becerra, a brother and sister whose nephew,
Miguel, was taken to Dignidad in 1974. The boy's father war
rumored to have been Shaefer's messenger and a DINA agent. A few
months after he took Miguel to the Colonia he was found dead in a
nearby field, poisoned with insecticide. Elena said that during
a family visit to the Colonia in 1974, Miguel eluded his guard
long enough to whisper "take me with you" to his sister.
Miguel's mother told Dignidad that Miguel wanted to leave, but
instead of releasing the boy, they increased his guard during the
next visit and then stopped the visits entirely. Elena and
Aristedes filed a lawsuit, which failed when their lawyer
abruptly retired in the middle of the case.
Elena and Aristedes were excited about the TV show, their first
chance in 13 years to get a glimpse of Miguel. It paid off:
Miguel was interviewed at the end of the story. "I am very happy
here," he said, speaking with a German accent. "I have everything
I need." "There are some people who think that you are here
against your will," said the TV reporter. "How do you answer
that?" "I am very happy here," Becerra said again. "I've never
lacked for anything."
Ten years ago, his mother had written a letter to the first lady,
asking her to intervene. "Don't worry," Mrs. Pinochet wrote back.
"Your son is in the best of hands."