Latest news with #ColoniaDignidad
Japan Times
22-05-2025
- Japan Times
Chile weighs future of charming German village with dark past
With its pristine swimming pool, manicured lawns and lush forest backdrop, Villa Baviera, a German-themed settlement of 122 souls in southern Chile, looks like the perfect holiday getaway. But Colonia Dignidad, as it was previously known, is a byword for horror, as the former home of a brutal cult that was used for torturing and killing dissidents under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Twenty years after the cult leader, former Nazi German soldier Paul Schaefer, was jailed for the sexual abuse and torture of children at the colony, the Chilean state wants to turn it into a memorial for the victims of the country's 1973-1990 dictatorship. In June last year, President Gabriel Boric ordered that 116 hectares of the 4,800-hectare site, an area including the residents' homes, a hotel, a restaurant and several food processing factories, be expropriated to make way for a center of remembrance. But some of the inhabitants, who were separated from their families as children, subjected to forced labor, and in some cases sexually abused, say they are being victimized all over again. 'Heavy burden' Schaefer founded Colonia Dignidad in 1961 as an idyllic German family village — but instead abused, drugged and indoctrinated the few hundred residents and kept them as virtual slaves. The boundaries between abuser and abused were blurred, with the children of Schaefer's sidekicks counting themselves among his victims. Anna Schnellenkamp, the 48-year-old manager of the colony's hotel and restaurant, said she "worked completely free of charge until 2005," the year of Schaefer's arrest. "So much work I broke my back." Several years ago, Schnellenkamp, whose late father, Kurt Schnellenkamp, was jailed for five years for being an accomplice to Schaefer's abuse, finally found happiness. She got married, had a daughter and started to create new, happier memories in the colony, where everyone still communicates in German despite being conversant in Spanish. But she still views the settlement as part of her birthright. "The settlers know every detail, every building, every tree, including where they once suffered and were forced to work," she explained. Potato shed torture cell Around 3,200 people were killed and more than 38,000 people tortured during Chile's brutal dictatorship. An estimated 26 people disappeared in Colonia Dignidad, where a potato shed, now a national monument, was used to torture dozens of kidnapped regime opponents. But on the inside too, abuse was rife. Schaefer was captured in 2005 on charges of sexually abusing dozens of minors over nearly half a century. He died in prison five years later while in preventive custody. His arrest, and those of 20 other accomplices, marked a turning point for the colony, which had been rebranded Villa Baviera a decade previously. Suddenly, residents were free to marry, live with their children, send them to school and earn a paycheck. Some of the settlers returned to Germany. Others remained behind and built a thriving agribusiness and resort, where tourists can sample traditional German fare such as sauerkraut. Some residents feel that Chile, which for decades turned a blind eye to the fate of the enclave's children, now wants to make them pay for the sins of their fathers. "One feels a kind of revenge against us," said Markus Blanck, one of the colony's business directors, whose father was charged as an accomplice of Schaefer's abuse but died before being sentenced. The government argues the expropriations are in the public interest. "There is a national interest here in preserving our country's historical heritage," said Justice Minister Jaime Gajardo, assuring that those expropriated would be properly compensated. European-style memorial While several sites of torture under the Chilean dictatorship have been turned into memorial sites, Gajardo said the memorial at Villa Baviera would be the biggest yet, similar to those created at former Nazi concentration camps in Europe. It is not yet clear whether it will take the form solely of a museum or whether visitors will also be able to roam the site, including Schaefer's house and the infamous potato shed. The clock is ticking down for Boric to make the memorial a reality before his term runs out in March 2026. His government wants to proceed quickly, for fear the project could be buried by a future rightwing government loathe to dwell on the abuses of the Pinochet era.
Arab News
19-05-2025
- Arab News
Chile weighs future of charming German village with dark past
VILLA BAVIERA: With its pristine swimming pool, manicured lawns and lush forest backdrop, Villa Baviera, a German-themed settlement of 122 souls in southern Chile, looks like the perfect holiday getaway. But Colonia Dignidad, as it was previously known, is a byword for horror, as the former home of a brutal cult that was used for torturing and killing dissidents under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Twenty years after the cult leader, former Wehrmacht soldier Paul Schaefer, was jailed for the sexual abuse and torture of children at the colony, the Chilean state wants to turn it into a memorial for the victims of the country's 1973-1990 dictatorship. In June last year, President Gabriel Boric ordered that 116 hectares (287 acres) of the 4,800-hectare site, an area including the residents' homes, a hotel, a restaurant, and several food processing factories, be expropriated to make way for a center of remembrance. But some of the inhabitants, who were separated from their families as children, subjected to forced labor, and in some cases, sexually abused, say they are being victimized all over again. Colonia Dignidad Schaefer founded Colonia Dignidad in 1961 as an idyllic German family village — but instead abused, drugged and indoctrinated the few hundred residents and kept them as virtual slaves. The boundaries between abuser and abused were blurred, with the children of Schaefer's sidekicks counting themselves among his victims. Anna Schnellenkamp, the 48-year-old manager of the colony's hotel and restaurant, said she 'worked completely free of charge until 2005,' the year of Schaefer's arrest. 'So much work I broke my back.' Several years ago Schnellenkamp, whose late father Kurt Schnellenkamp was jailed for five years for being an accomplice to Schaefer's abuse, finally found happiness. She got married, had a daughter and started to create new, happier memories in the colony, where everyone still communicates in German despite being conversant in Spanish. But she still views the settlement as part of her birthright. 'The settlers know every detail, every building, every tree, including where they once suffered and were forced to work,' she explained. Chile's dictatorship Around 3,200 people were killed and more than 38,000 people tortured during Chile's brutal dictatorship. An estimated 26 people disappeared in Colonia Dignidad, where a potato shed, now a national monument, was used to torture dozens of kidnapped regime opponents. But on the inside too, abuse was rife. Schaefer was captured in 2005 on charges of sexually abusing dozens of minors over nearly half a century. He died in prison five years later while in preventive custody. His arrest, and those of 20 other accomplices, marked a turning point for the colony, which had been rebranded Villa Baviera a decade previously. Suddenly, residents were free to marry, live with their children, send them to school and earn a paycheck. Some of the settlers returned to Germany. Others remained behind and built a thriving agribusiness and resort, where tourists can sample traditional German fare, such as sauerkraut. Some residents feel that Chile, which for decades turned a blind eye to the fate of the enclave's children, now wants to make them pay for the sins of their fathers. 'One feels a kind of revenge against us,' said Markus Blanck, one of the colony's business directors, whose father was charged as an accomplice of Schaefer's abuse but died before being sentenced. The government argues that the expropriations are in the public interest. 'There is a national interest here in preserving our country's historical heritage,' Justice Minister Jaime Gajardo told AFP, assuring that those expropriated would be properly compensated. Memorial site While several sites of torture under the Chilean dictatorship have been turned into memorial sites, Gajardo said the memorial at Villa Baviera would be the biggest yet, similar to those created at former Nazi concentration camps in Europe. It is not yet clear whether it will take the form solely of a museum or whether visitors will also be able to roam the site, including Schaefer's house and the infamous potato shed. The clock is ticking down for Boric to make the memorial a reality before his term runs out in March 2026. His government wants to proceed quickly, for fear that the project be buried by a future right-wing government loathe to dwell on the abuses of the Pinochet era.
Al Jazeera
06-04-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
A Deadly Nazi Cult in Chile
For nearly 40 years, a secretive colony in the Chilean countryside hid unspeakable horrors: child abuse, torture, and a twisted legacy of Nazism. Colonia Dignidad, led by ex-Nazi Paul Schäfer, thrived not just as a cult but as a brutal tool of oppression during Chile's Pinochet regime. How did this enclave evade justice for so long—and why did the Chilean government turn a blind eye, or worse, offer its support? In a story that goes right to the heart of the German and Chilean governments, what justice can the victims themselves hope for?
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands review
This is the concluding part of Philippe Sands's extraordinary trilogy – part history, part moral investigation, part memoir – that documents the legal and personal battles to bring to account Nazi war criminals and their disciples. In East West Street he recounted the plight of Lviv, the city now in Ukraine, whose Jewish population either fled before Nazi occupation or, like many of Sands's extended family, was thereafter wiped out. Two Jewish lawyers who got out early were instrumental in creating the legal concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide that were introduced at the Nuremberg trials. His follow-up The Ratline was focused on the Nazi Brigadefuhrer Otto von Wachter who died in mysterious circumstances in Rome after the war while trying to escape to South America. It is a haunting story of the feats of denial that enable otherwise 'normal' people to perform or excuse the very worst deeds. 38 Londres Street follows the Nazis metastasis to its sordid death throes in Chile, the fascist safe haven Wachter failed to reach. Here we meet Walther Rauff, a former SS commander who played a key role in the development of mobile gas chambers and was directly responsible for the deaths of more than 90,000 Jews. Having escaped from an Italian internment camp, he settles first in Syria, where he helps reorganise the country's intelligence service, before being recruited by an Israeli intelligence officer as a Syrian informant – the Israeli was unaware of Rauff's past and, presumably, his unabashed and lifelong antisemitism. After a brief return to Rome, he heads for Ecuador, where he meets a Chilean officer named Augusto Pinochet, before taking his new friend's advice and relocating to Chile. The book intertwines Rauff's shadowy existence with Pinochet's rise to dictatorial power, and examines the rumour that Rauff participated in the torture and disappearances that characterised Pinochet's rule. An epistemological problem bedevils any effort to summarise Nazi war crimes, and even those of their Chilean imitators, insofar as their scale and sadism defies understanding. But one of Sands's strengths as a writer is that he resists the impulse to demonise. He can find signs of humanity in the most unpromising cases, which serves, paradoxically, not to mitigate but to aggravate their crimes. These perpetrators of monstrous acts did not always take the form of monsters: both Pinochet and Rauff are described in avuncular terms by some who met them. The one time Sands's rational composure deserts him is when he stays overnight at Colonia Dignidad, a German colony set up by a depraved paedophile called Paul Schäfer, a crony of Pinochet who enthusiastically hosted and partook in the torture and murder of the regime's opponents. Sands barricades himself in his room with chairs and is relieved to leave the 'grotesque' site of so much horror. Running through the book is the unprecedented case, eight years after the end of his presidency, of Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998 on a warrant issued by a Spanish judge. While Pinochet remained under house arrest for almost 18 months in the comfortable surroundings of the Wentworth estate, Sands advised the prosecution in his role as a human rights lawyer. The legal principles and political manoeuvring that led to the granting of the old tyrant's extradition to stand trial in Spain, a series of appeals, and finally his repatriation to Chile on dubious health grounds are not without interest but are told in rather too much detail. Sands the lawyer may have felt a professional obligation to do justice to the complexity of the wrangling, but the effect is to slow the momentum of the narrative. By contrast the book comes vividly to life in Chile, where Sands methodically follows the various strands of Pinochet's and Rauff's separate histories to expose their cynical claims of innocence – Rauff stuck to the familiar line that he was only a soldier following orders, while Pinochet affected ignorance of the atrocities committed by his subordinates in what he insisted was an existential fight against communism. The title of the book refers to a building in downtown Santiago that once housed the Socialist party but was turned into an interrogation and torture centre by Pinochet's secret police, the DINA. There is hearsay that Rauff had some link to Londres Street, but Sands encounters shut doors, closed mouths and missing documents before eventually establishing the disturbing facts. As with the previous two books, a personal motivation helps propel the author's inquiry. In this instance Rauff almost certainly extinguished the life of one of Sands's (then young) relations in eastern Europe, and there is also the plight of Carmelo Soria, a Spanish UN employee brutally tortured and murdered in 1976 who was distantly related to Sands's wife. These connections are not used for emotional purposes but as a means of establishing the victims as real people, with lives and family, who were killed in their thousands because of their leftwing sympathies. Part of a South America-wide and US-backed campaign, known as Operation Condor, this reign of terror aimed to crush all opposition to the continent's rightwing dictatorships. There were those in the Tory party, such as Norman Lamont and Margaret Thatcher, who visited Pinochet in Wentworth, who preferred to see him as a misunderstood cold warrior, despite ample evidence that he was personally involved in the selection of the victims and approved the brutal methods employed to extract information. Moreover, for all his posturing as a patriot, he stashed away in foreign bank accounts many millions of dollars that he had stolen from Chile. But what of Rauff? He lived for much of his time at the country's southern extreme in Patagonia, working as the manager of a crab-canning factory. He won protection from extradition in a landmark case, put together by a Jewish lawyer, and yet managed to slip back to West Germany for a visit in the early 1960s. Myths enshrouded this odd character in his isolated cottage with his resolutely bad Spanish. Both Bruce Chatwin and Roberto Bolaño referred to him in their work, though neither was able to create a picture quite as damning as Sands achieves with his understated doggedness. He writes of the impunity with which the old Nazi and Pinochet acted but also the immunity they managed to attain from laws they otherwise held in contempt. They may have avoided justice, but thanks to the courageous testaments of survivors and perpetrators alike, not to mention Sands's own commendable efforts, they could not escape the truth. 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands is published by W&N (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from Delivery charges may apply
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Chilean leader vows to expedite Colonia Dignidid memorial
Chilean President Gabriel Boric assured German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Wednesday that Chile wants to expedite construction of a memorial for the victims of Colonia Dignidad sect. At a joint press conference with Steinmeier, Boric referred to a recent decision to expropriate a large area of the site of the former colony. "This government wants to implement the expropriation as quickly as possible and build the memorial together with the victims," Boric said in Santiago. Steinmeier emphasized that Germany and Chile owed it to the victims to ensure that this memorial is built. "We know the pain of the victims and we know the victims' desire for a place of remembrance." Steinmeier had spoken to victims himself the day before. They described their harrowing fates to him. "Everyone in the room realized how much the issue still moves people," he said at the press conference. Steinmeier thanked Boric for vigorously pursuing the issue. In response to the question of whether the memorial would be built in the remaining two years of Steinmeier's term of office, so that he could inaugurate it, he replied, "We will make every effort to get it done." Abuse and torture in ColoniaDignidad Colonia Dignidad was a place of unimaginable suffering. The German lay preacher Paul Schäfer moved from Germany to Chile with his followers in 1961. He founded a settlement for the sect around 400 kilometres south of Santiago. For decades, Schäfer made the sect members work there without pay until they were exhausted. Schäfer tore families apart and abused German and Chilean children. During the military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990, opponents of the regime were tortured and murdered on the settlement grounds. In 2005, the Chilean government placed Colonia Dignidad under administration. Today, the area, renamed Villa Baviera, is open to visitors. Chancellor Scholz had already promised support For years, there have been efforts to build a memorial for the victims of Colonia Dignidad. During a visit in January 2023, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised the support of the German government. Boric thanked the German government for "its willingness to help find the truth." Steinmeier praises Chile as a reliable partner Steinmeier praised Chile as an important strategic partner of Germany. "At a time when the multilateral world order and even the United Nations itself are being called into question, we not only want to, but must work even more closely together as friends and partners."
