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UNHOLY ALLIANCE: A HISTORY OF NAZI INVOLVEMENT WITH THE OCCULT |
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12. Is Chile Burning? The Overthrow of Allende, the Murder of Letelier, and the Role of Colonia Dignidad
The followers of Crowley also speak of a magical current. In their worldview, the operative wave of energy for the New Age is something called the "93 current"; and, like the current described in Heiden's biography of Hitler, this current "in all men creates the same thoughts." To the Thelemite, these thoughts are of personal freedom: a freedom that is not bestowed, like a favor, by some benevolent authority but inherited as a birthright; in other words, the 93 current is akin to what most people think of as the New Age or the Age of Aquarius ... except, perhaps, with a bit more of a bite. To Hitler, however, these "thoughts" were instead of the master/slave complex: a mutual need for subjugation within the heavily ritualized context of the necromantic cult. As we shall demonstrate, his necromancers are hard at work restoring the current to life in Latin America today. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Nazi underground in South America -- established long before the war began -- was in full swing in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Yet, after the death of Juan Peron -- probably their strongest supporter among the South American dictators -- the Nazis knew they had to find another venue for protecting their lives and their interests. Isabel Peron (Juan Peron's third wife) was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, but a trifle insane. She surrounded herself with occultists, Rosicrucians, and other psychic sycophants (such as Jose Lopez Rega, the right-wing fanatic and occultist, and P-2 initiate, known as El Brujo, "the Witch") in a style that would have made Rudolf Hess blush. She was eventually eased out of power and placed in an asylum. So, the natural destination for refugee Nazis thus became Chile. Sharing a long border with Argentina striated with hidden mountain passes across the Andes through which the Nazis could secretly come and go as they pleased, Chile also boasted a large German-speaking population that had been in place for nearly a hundred years. These descendants of Chile's first German immigrants were now in positions of power and influence in the country, so much so that when I returned from my visit to Colonia Dignidad my seatmates on the plane -- business people from Florida -- solemnly affirmed that no commerce of any kind was possible in Chile unless you went through "the Germans": lawyers, bankers, industrialists, manufacturers of every type ... like an anti-Semitic stereotype in reverse, all these (they said) were Germans. This means not merely Chilenos with German-sounding last names, but people who steadfastly hold onto their language, their culture, and their German heritage in the midst of what used to be the longest-running democracy on the continent. Certainly, the capital city of Santiago boasts many fine German restaurants -- a disproportionate share, one might think. One evening during my stay, I happened to be dining in the downtown Sheraton Hotel. Pages carrying signs with small bells paraded through the lobby and dining rooms, looking for "Sr. Schwarz" or "Sr. Muller" or "Sr. Schulz," rarely a Gonzalez or Rodriguez. Never a Smith. And Santiago's version of Central Park boasts an enormous sculpture -- replete with busty Valkyries and heroic Nordic workingmen -- dedicated to the German Immigrant. This, across the street from one of Santiago's finest German restaurants, an establishment that shares the same building with the Israeli legation! And all was just fine until 1970, when the unthinkable happened. A professed Socialist and longtime political celebrity in Chile, Salvador Allende Gossens was elected president of the Republic in a three-way vote. During the height of the Vietnam War, the drug-and-peace culture of the sixties, and worldwide student revolt against the establishment, there was suddenly a democratically elected Marxist president in America. This was cause for rejoicing everywhere there was even a hint of liberal or left- ing sympathy, even though quite a few of those who applauded Allende's election were not Marxists. For many people, Allende's success at the polls was simply an indication of the strength of the democratic process. A Socialist had become the leader of his country without firing a shot, in a free and open election, and in the Western Hemisphere besides. Allende became the toast of the revolutionary elite. He is seen chatting now with Fidel Castro, now with Pablo Neruda, now with Gabriel Garda Marquez. A kind of Latin Camelot was taking place in Chile as artists, writers, musicians, philosophers, and academics crowded around the new president, talking of human rights, emancipation of the working class, and the extrication of Chile's economy from the death grip of the norteamericanos. For years in the streets of New York City one had become familiar with posters showing the bearded-and-bereted Che Guevara -- the martyred Argentine hero of the Cuban revolution -- and one grew accustomed to the various Socialist and Communist splinter groups who marched in the streets of Greenwich Village shouting i Venceremos! But here, in Chile, it had actually happened. Legally. In the fine old democratic tradition that the United States was supposedly sworn to uphold throughout the world and particularly in the sphere of influence covered by the Monroe Doctrine: Latin America. But Richard Nixon was president of the United States, and Henry Kissinger was his Torquemada. Democratic or not, freely elected or not, chief executive of a sovereign nation or not, Salvador Allende Gossens had to go. And nowhere was that sentiment more strongly shared than among the members of the Nazi underground. The Mountains of Madness Is it the Andes Mountains, perhaps, that give Chile its unique spiritual character? One of the most literate nations on earth (at the time of Allende, anyway), it surpassed the United States in the proportion of its people who could read and write. And this relatively tiny country had given the world not one but two Nobel Prize-winning poets. To the metaphysical Chilean author Miguel Serrano, [2] the Andes are the West's equivalent of the Himalayas. Where a North American might expect llamas instead of lamas, he sees these venerable peaks as the spiritual domain of ancient supernatural forces; he believes a secret priesthood resides somewhere within the Andes chain, possessing the secrets of immortality, and of communion with the gods. Serrano -- whose books on Jungian-type themes are familiar to North American readers -- also wrote on the metaphysical aspects of Hitler's Germany in a volume which has not been translated into English nor made available in the United States, even in the original Spanish. While I was in Chile, I bought a copy and was startled by the fact that this author of the charming little alchemical love story, El/Ella, would have written so extensively on the initiatic aspects of the Third Reich in such terms of open admiration, insisting -- thirty years after the war -- that National Socialism would be the salvation of Chile! I purchased the tome in an enormous bookstore, the size of one of our superstores except that this was in Chile in 1979. At the same table browsed a tall, thin, well-dressed man in a full-length, grey beard. I had seen this man at least once before, in New York. At the moment, I could not place the connection but thought it strange that I would run into him here, so far from the streets of Jackson Heights. This man would dog my steps during my stay in Chile. It seemed wherever I went in Santiago, he would be there; sometimes even ahead of me. And he would be one of the last people I would see before I had to leave the country in an expeditious manner two weeks later. In Chile, it was suddenly becoming difficult to tell the mystic from the Fascist. Colony of Righteousness Those who follow those stories of ritual child abuse we read about in the tabloids and hear about on such talk shows as "Maury Povich," "Oprah," "Donahue," "Geraldo," et. al., know that the thread that runs through all of them involves a satanic cult in a remote area that kidnaps or breeds children for sexual abuse, torture, and human sacrifice. To those who scoff at these outrageous claims, we have only to point to Colonia Dignidad as a prime example of all the "survivors'" worst nightmares. Paul Schafer was one of the founders of the Colony of Righteousness and was, and is, its only leader. Schafer jumped bail in Germany in 1961 on charges of child sexual abuse, [3] but that did not stop him from taking a group of families with him when he fled to Chile, arriving there in 1962 at the age of forty with around sixty "blond, blue-eyed settlers" [4] ... including some children who were brought there under false pretenses, taken from their families back in Germany. His flock came from the town of Siegburg, across the Rhine from Bonn, where Schafer claimed to be a psychologist, and where he ran a youth home where the sexual-abuse charges originated. Schafer, also the leader of a Baptist sect (a sect which evidently condones sexual intercourse between adults and children among other peculiarities), bought an old ranch called El Lavadero about 250 miles south of Santiago in the Parral region and quickly converted it into a self-sufficient, model community known as Colonia Dignidad, the "Colony of Righteousness" or "Dignity Colony." The population of the Colony eventually grew to about 350, composed of 250 adults and 100 children. [5] According to reports in the Chilean and German press, the sexes are rigorously separated and sexual intercourse is forbidden [6] (except, one gathers, at the discretion of Schafer). And, since sex is prohibited, the only way the Colony has been able to increase its population has been by "importing" children from Germany. [7] German authorities have been investigating charges that from thirty to forty children reported missing from the Bonn and Cologne areas have wound up at the Colony. [8] Thus, charges of both child abuse and international child abduction have been leveled at this remote cult community by eyewitnesses, escapees, and responsible members of the West German and Chilean governments. The parallels between Colonia Dignidad and the stories told by "satanic cult survivors," however, are even stronger. Spanish is not spoken; instead only German, and, oddly, English are used. [9] Old- fashioned, 1940s-era clothing is worn and fourteen-hour workdays are the norm. No television, radio, or newspapers are allowed in the Colony. There is, however, a shortwave unit on the premises which is used to communicate with an office the Colony maintains in Santiago and which was probably the radio I heard being used during my visit. The Colony established a free clinic on its premises: free, that is, on specific days of the week to members of the local population. They also have their own factory for processing meat, a sixty-five bed hospital, a bakery, dairy, flout mill, machine shop, power plant ... and their own airfield. By 1985, they had even opened their own roadside restaurant on the Pan American Highway. Accounts of the size of the Colony vary from news report to news report. Everything from 12,000 acres [10] to 37,000 acres [11] has been offered, and accounts of its operations also include a mine, a lumber mill, and a gravel factory. The author believes it is safe to say that the Colony has grown considerably over the years and that estimates of a 37,000-acre settlement might not be far from the mark, considering the other purposes to which the Colony was put both during and after the Allende regime. In 1963, a year after the Colony first established itself in Chile, the Partido Nacional Socialista Obrero de Chile (the National Socialist Chilean Workers Party) was formed under the leadership of Franz Pfeiffer. [12] Taking more than its name from the National Socialist German Workers' Parry, it became famous for its swastika banners, armbands, Fascist salute, and Heil Hitlers as it attracted approximately ten thousand members its first year. And Pfeiffer's was only one of many neo-Nazi organizations in Chile -- including the lethal, swastika-brandishing Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty) Party founded by Pablo Rodriguez Grez, [13] a member of Jorge Alessandri's unsuccessful 1970 presidential campaign -- but it was the only one to host a "Miss Nazi" contest, to which Nazi organizations throughout South America sent their dewy, swastika-eyed contestants. For those who like to keep track of such things, the winner in 1968 was the rather chubby brunette Senorita Portena, obviously selected more for her value as a sturdy breeder of future Storm Troopers than for any traditional, chauvinistic, petit-bourgeois esthetic considerations. [14] It was in this climate that, in 1966, the first of many accusations against Schafer and the Colony surfaced when Wolfgang Muller escaped the "watchdogs, electronic alarms and six-foot barbed wire fences" [15] to describe life inside the Colony. Muller -- who had been brought over from Germany as a member of the original Siegburg group when he was sixteen -- claimed that he had been forced into slave labor at the Colony, was beaten, and had been sexually abused by Schafer in Germany when he was twelve years old. One of Muller's more interesting claims -- especially in light of later events -- is his insistence that Schafer had given him "memory-altering drugs" [16] when Muller attempted to rebel or to reveal the details of his abuse at Schafer's hands. He also complained of electroshock treatments being administered by camp doctors (shades of Barbie at Montluc Prison). After his third escape, he wound up at the West German embassy in Santiago and now lives in that country under an assumed name, still afraid for his life. [17] Muller also revealed the existence of several former Nazis who lived at the Colony but denied that Nazism was part of the Colony's ideology. Later that same year, another escapee -- Wilhelmine Lindeman -- appeared with the same story of mind-altering drugs. This time, there was medical proof of her story: doctors discovered evidence of injections on her body. [18] The author has been unable to obtain Schafer's war record, but it is clear that -- born in 1922 -- he was of draft age when the war was in its early stages. As virtually every able- bodied man was eventually pressed into Hitler's "total war," Schafer must have spent at least a few years in uniform. But whose? The Wehrmacht's, or the black-and-silver uniform of the SS? His open friendship with anti-democratic, pro-Nazi regimes and his hosting of several former Nazis indicates that he did not spend the war years in the camps as a persecuted Baptist minister. His self-professed background -- however flimsy or fraudulent -- in psychology, his knowledge of mind-altering drugs, and (as we shall see) of specific forms of torture seem to indicate a somewhat more sinister education than Baptist Sunday school or Wehrmacht close-order drill. Indeed, when I "met" Paul Schafer in 1979, he was the epitome of the "Hogan's Heroes" stereotype of the SS officer, although he wore a brown uniform with a Sam Browne belt and a campaign cap, an outfit that was more Storm Trooper than Schutzstaffel. One imagines that the SA commander Ernst Rohm was more his idol than Heinrich Himmler ... but who can say? The charges against Colonia Dignidad in the sixties came to nothing. Authorities tended to disbelieve Wolfgang Muller's more outrageous claims, and Wilhelmine Lindeman later recanted her story when the Colony informed her that her husband had arrived from Germany and was living at the Colony. She disappeared back into the sadistic embrace of Schafer and his cohorts, and was never heard from again. The Chilean Senate, to its credit, began an official investigation ... but "amid charges of bribery, the inquiry was dropped." [19] Then, came the election of Salvador Allende, and the Colony took on a more active role in the political life of Chile and within the criminal milieu of the United States of America. The attempt to deprive Allende of his electoral victory began immediately after his election, and the telexes flew like curses between Santiago and Washington. The Chilean generals conferred day and night on the feasibility of staging a military coup that would prevent Allende from taking the oath of office, and this plan almost succeeded except that incumbent President Eduardo Frei finally refused to support antidemocratic measures; a heroic move considering the amount of pressure being put on him by ITT, the CIA, and the generals. While this is not the place to go into a deep discussion of the Allende regime and its aftermath, a little of the background is necessary to appreciate the extent to which Nazi organizations -- and specifically the Nazi cult centered at Colonia Dignidad -- maneuvered to overthrow yet another South American government. Eventually, Allende was sworn in as president and the generals began a series of conspiracies aimed at destabilizing the new regime with the connivance of Chilean business interests, the US Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry, and ITT. (It should be remembered that ITT had a history of supporting Nazi regimes. Walter Schellenberg, head of the Foreign Intelligence section of the SD, was named to ITT's German Board of Directors and remained on the Board for the duration of the war, and was paid a director's salary by the home office in New York.) [20] Funds were routed through to the truckers' union, for example, to enable it to go on a protracted strike. Anyone who has been to Chile knows that the country needs the truckers to survive: it is one, two-thousand-mile-long highway from the desert in the north to the snowy wastes of the south. On December 2, 1971 -- after a year's worth of destabilization attempts by Chile's agricultural, industrial, and mining oligarchies -- a tightly orchestrated demonstration of roughly fifty thousand housewives marched on the Presidential Palace, La Moneda, to protest Allende's economic policies. It is worthwhile to mention that these fifty thousand women were the wives, mothers, and mistresses of Santiago's wealthiest citizens and that the march originated in the exclusive Providencia section of the city that the upper class calls home. They marched on the palace carrying pots and pans which they banged together, creating a cacophonous din, and were accompanied in their procession by members of Patria y Libertad acting as a kind of bodyguard. [21] The "Empty Pots" demonstration -- in which some women actually clashed with police -- was carried on most major wire services and scenes were shown on the nightly news in the United States with the implicit suggestion that these women represented the poor people of Chile who were starving due to Allende's mismanagement of the economy. It was an artful piece of disinformation, and it certainly worked to great effect outside Chile. By the spring of 1973, however, rumors of an impending military coup were rampant in the capital. Among the conspirators creating discord both in the city and in the countryside was a young American, Michael Vernon Townley. Townley was a member of Patria y Libertad and an associate of other right-wing terror groups. A right-wing fanatic himself who carried out assignments for a variety of masters, Townley also contributed to the development of the interrogation program at Colonia Dignidad. [22] Working directly for, and reporting to, the generals, Townley was given the rank of major in the Chilean Army and together with Colonel Pedro Espinosa and the Chilean Secret Police (DINA), liaised with Patria y Libertad to create a climate of terror in the country conducive to a military coup. Patria y Libertad had already planned one coup attempt earlier in the Allende regime and was ripe for another. When the time finally came -- in September 1973 with the military invasion of Santiago, the bombing of La Moneda, and the assassination of Allende -- the roving, Freikorps-like bands of Patria y Libertad and the Chilean Nazi Party were cleaning up the streets and rounding up the usual suspects: intellectuals, students, artists, Communists, outspoken opponents of the army, and outspoken defenders of the president. [23] Most of these prisoners were taken to the National Stadium, including two young American men who were subsequently murdered. [24] Many were tortured and then executed. Many others were simply "disappeared," their bodies found later -- sometimes years later -- in shallow graves and in roadside ditches. A few others -- the most unfortunate of all -- found themselves at the Colony. Concentration Camp Chile One of Townley's tasks in the immediate aftermath of the coup was to establish a state-of- the-black-art detention center at Colonia Dignidad. [25] The following story would seem fantastic were it not supported by eyewitness accounts, statements of DINA defectors, and later United Nations, US, German, and Chilean government and Amnesty International reports. If we were to believe Paul Schafer, Colonia Dignidad is nothing more than a Christian religious commune organized around somewhat Calvinist lines of hard work and prayer. If we are to believe virtually everyone else, Colonia Dignidad is an after-hours club on a side street in Hell. Colony leaders had already established firm ties with the military long before the coup. According to Farago, it was a favorite hangout of Chilean Air Force officers (and, of course, Martin Bormann and Josef Mengele). Schafer cultivated government connections through both his Santiago-based office and his Colony, where he also maintained a radio link with various DINA (secret police) operatives abroad in Colombia, Venezuela, and Europe. [26] Inquiries into the Colony's operations were effectively hushed with the strategic placement of bribes, all the way up to the Senate. And somehow the Colony had bribes to spare. According to the soldiers I spoke with that night in Parral, the mail arrives virtually every day with envelopes full of money for the Colony. As it turns out, some of this money comes from pensions being paid to Colony residents from the (formerly) West German government [27] (one of the reasons all the Colony residents are German citizens?) But the soldiers I spoke with insisted that money came in from allover the world, including the United States. Its source can only be a cause for speculation, and concern. With the coup, however, the Colony got a chance to put its electroshock and narcotics "therapies" to the test. Townley and DINA agents had the run of the Colony, both at Parral and at the Colony office in Santiago. [28] While DINA maintained contact with its agents allover the world through the Colony's radio link, Townley helped design the specially equipped interrogation cells. These were tiny, soundproofed rooms built underground where "political prisoners" were taken not only for actual interrogation of a political or military nature, but also for the purpose of developing new methods of torture. At first, each prisoner was questioned closely to obtain sufficient information concerning his or her personality in order to develop an appropriate torture and interrogation scheme. This individualized approach is already well known to the intelligence professionals the author has come into contact with over the years. The ostensible goal is to enable the interrogator to so finely tune the torture procedure that the victim surrenders his or her will more completely, more expeditiously. In practice, however, and with such a "scientifically" adjusted scheme of programmed sadism, there is tremendous room for an interrogator who is so inclined to subject the victim to unimaginable suffering over a long and sustained period of time. That this is what, in fact, took place at the Colony is beyond doubt for, certainly, there was nothing "scientific" about the dogs.
I have used the exact words of the United Nations report of October 1976 to avoid being charged with unnecessarily embellishing my account with sensationalistic hype. According to the same UN report:
(When the Colony was finally visited in 1986 by a group that included Chilean, West German, and Amnesty International officials, the underground rooms where prisoners had been held and tortured were discovered and identified.) [31] What has been described, therefore, is a scene that not even the Nazi death camp commandants were able to invent: torture and interrogation by remote control! Individual prisoners in hermetically sealed, soundproofed cells underground, tied to metal frames, being asked questions by invisible interrogators over a loudspeaker and being jolted with electricity from a remote control panel when slow in answering. And the man who helped design this infamy was the electronics expert and radio freak, the American Michael Townley. A Death in Washington Townley would probably have remained unknown to most Americans had it not been for the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffit in downtown Washington, D.C. Letelier had been Allende's ambassador to the United States and his minister of defense in the last days of the president's administration, and had been one of the first to be arrested once the generals took over. Letelier had then been transferred, first to the prison ship Esmeralda and then to Dawson's Island, a frozen wasteland at the far south of Chile, where he was tortured and starved for months before pressure from the world's governments forced General Pinochet -- who had named himself dictator-for-life of the country -- to release him and send him into exile. Letelier was not one to turn his back on his country. He waged what can only be called a tireless, global campaign to destroy Pinochet's government by peaceful means. He spoke eloquently before trade unions, longshoremen's unions, and whoever else would listen, urging them not to cooperate with the Chilean regime. The result was the refusal of these unions to unload Chilean vessels, to transport Chilean goods, and a general consciousness-raising among world governments concerning the severe human rights abuses that were taking place under the openly pro-Nazi Pinochet and his Nazi-trained secret police, the DINA. That is when Pinochet ordered Letelier killed and -- through his henchman Colonel Contreras of DINA -- selected Michael Townley to carry out the assassination. [32] Townley had already met Pinochet in the company of Stefano delle Chiaie, the Italian terrorist and compadre of Nazi conspirators Klaus Barbie, Freddy Schwend, and others. [33] Delle Chiaie had brought his friend, Prince Valerio Borghese, with him. The prince had been the main organizer of the aborted coup against the Italian government, and was a member of Licio Gelli's Masonic P-2 society.34 Between them, they were able to provide professional advice, logistical support, and commandos sufficient to carry out the program of hunting down all of Pinochet's enemies including, but not limited to, Orlando Letelier. By August of 1975, Townley was in Europe on an assignment from DINA to murder Carlos Altamirano, a Chilean Socialist leader. Delle Chiaie had intervened, saying that Altamirano was too difficult a target, and recommended another enemy of the Chilean junta, Bernardo Leighton. Receiving the green light from Santiago, Townley arranged for the hit to be carried out. Leighton survived the attack, however, even though he had been seriously wounded. [35] Pinochet, Townley, and delle Chiaie would meet again, this time in Madrid, where Pinochet was attending the funeral of colleague and fellow traveler Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the Fascist dictator of Spain since the days of the Spanish Civil War. [36] Then, in 1976, Townley -- with the aid of a group of the ubiquitous anti-Castro Cubans -- set the bomb which blew up the car carrying Orlando Letelier and his assistant, Ronnie Moffit. The car exploded by radio remote control just outside the Chilean Embassy in Washington, D.C., in full view of Letelier's mortal enemies. Eventually, Townley would be apprehended and would plea bargain his sentence by giving details of his escapades to the US government and turning in the Cubans who helped him carry out the assassination. The resulting revelations enabled the US government to issue an arrest warrant for Townley's longtime boss, Colonel Manuel Contreras of DINA; a warrant that, predictably, was never honored by the Chilean government. [37] The Colony Under Siege This century has seen its Waco, its Jonestown. It has survived, limping, its Auschwitz, its Cambodia. It stares with a kind of numb horror at its Bosnia and Somalia. But there may be yet another conflagration awaiting its last years in Colonia Dignidad. Shortly after Letelier's murder, a DINA informant -- Juan Rene Munoz Alarcon, a former member of the Socialist Party -- made a deposition to a human rights group in Santiago run by the Catholic Church. [38] In that taped statement, he identified Colonia Dignidad as one of the sites where the "disappeared" had been sent in the years following the Pinochet coup. Juan Munoz was stabbed to death shortly after making his deposition. That same year, 1977, reports were published concerning testimony by one Samuel Fuenzalida -- a former DINA agent -- who admitted transporting political prisoners to Colonia Dignidad in 1974 and turning them over into the personal custody of Lagerkommandant Schafer. [39] In 1984, Georg Pakmor and his wife Lotti managed to escape the Colony. Tragically, their adopted son was left behind. They confirmed reports of beatings, drug injections, and other brainwashing techniques by Schafer and his medical staff to the West German government. [40] According to reports published in the Washington Post on Christmas Day 1987, the West German government at that time was sending anywhere from $48,000 to $80,000 in pensions to Colony members each month. [41] That same year, an American citizen mysteriously "disappeared" while hiking near the Colony. Boris Weisfeiler was an American who was born in Moscow. Although his body was never found, the Chilean government officially concluded that the hiker had drowned in a river near the Colony. [42] In 1988, the Pakmors appeared before a Bonn government subcommittee and gave detailed testimony about the conditions at the Colony. They testified that young boys were being given injections in their testicles, and that Schafer was observed by them viciously beating a young girl bloody. [43] Testimony from another witness -- Hugo Baar, a cofounder of the Colony who escaped in 1984 -- referred to the famous Mercedes-Benz limousine, the one that blocked my escape in June of 1979. According to Baar, the limo is bulletproof and heavily armed. Occasionally, Schafer is known to loan it to his good friend, General Pinochet. [44] Obviously, in spite of the rising storm of publicity, nothing was being done to stop Schafer or to close his hideous Colony. Yet, all that began to change in 1990 with the establishment of the civilian government of Patricio Aylwin (a former Allende opponent). On February 1, 1991, President Aylwin ordered the revocation of the Colony's nonprofit charter after an investigation that began shortly after his inauguration. [45] Unfortunately, Paul Schafer's right-wing friends in Chilean Congress have been running interference in the courts and thereby prolonging the ugly situation in Parral. [46] Germany's former ambassador to Chile, Horst Kullak-Ublick, who was one of the few people allowed inside the Colony, was interviewed in a Chilean newspaper about his visit.
And, in case there was any doubt, President Aylwin's own commission reported that, indeed, the Colony had been used as a DINA torture and detention center. More importantly, the report revealed that the Colony had loaned its own doctors to the secret police. These doctors spoke only German, and -- in a sickening replay of the selection ramps at Auschwitz -- listened to recordings of Wagner and Mozart in the torture cells while they "treated" the prisoners. [48] The government report also revealed that the Colony had served as a conduit for gun- running, the weapons having been smuggled in from Argentina . . . and Germany. This was, of course, during the same period of time that Klaus Barbie was running guns into Chile from Argentina, Bolivia, and Germany: a circumstance that is highly suggestive. Put together Barbie, delle Chiaie, the Italo-Argentine P-2 Society, Schwend, Rudel, and Skorzeny, the overthrow ofAllende with the connivance of neo-Nazi groups like Patria y Libertad and the Chilean Nazi Party (not to mention the CIA and ITT) and Wolfgang Milller's sworn testimony concerning Nazis at the Colony, and you can easily come away believing that Farago was right, after all. In fact, Farago didn't know the half of it. Perhaps the most sobering evaluation of all was given by former Colony leader Hugo Baar who said -- in an interview published in Time magazine -- "I fear for the lives of the Dignidad people if it comes to conflict there. I am certain that shootings cannot be avoided, and I say that out of deep conviction." [49] Waco in the Andes? A Nazi Jonestown? With the exception of Farago's statement concerning "voodooism," the news reports are all suspiciously silent about the religious practices conducted at the Colony. Although Schafer is represented as a schismatic Baptist, nothing is said of what -- if any -- religious services were being held there. That the Colony leadership is fanatically German and devotedly anti-Communist is a given; but, then, so are many upstanding German citizens. That the Colony leadership proudly supported a right-wing military coup against the constitutionally elected Socialist president is also now beyond doubt. That the military junta itself was blatantly pro-Nazi -- as was virtually the entire nation during the Second World War -- is also proven. Why would Schafer have picked Chile as a place to run to once things got hot in Germany, if not because he knew it was -- and largely still is -- a Nazi refuge? Why would he allow his premises to host Nazi war criminals -- as has been testified by Wolfgang Muller, for instance -- unless he were in sympathy with the Third Reich? And what services did he perform for the Reich as a young man during the war? From the foregoing, the author feels it is safe to assume that Schafer was not hiding in the Andes Mountains to practice a particularly devout form of Baptist Christianity. The only other evidence the author has to offer is what he was told by soldiers of the Chilean Army the night before his visit to the Colony. "They have their own religion," they assured me. "They celebrate festivals that are not on the Christian calendar." Accepting for a moment that Chile is largely a Catholic country and that the practices of a traditional German Baptist might seem strange or unusual to a soldier of rural background and upbringing, the celebration of holidays "not on the Christian calendar" gives one pause. Christmas, after all, is still December 25 whether or not one is a Catholic or a Baptist. The only possible deviation from that date for a Christian would be Russian Christmas, celebrated by members of the Russian Orthodox Church who still employ the Julian Calendar. There was nothing remotely Russian Orthodox about the Colony, except perhaps for its anti-Communism. (Elements of the Russian Orthodox Church during the war were notoriously pro-Nazi, but that is another story.) So, we are left with a bit of a mystery. The soldiers went on to reveal that these celebrations took place at night and involved candlelit processions and chanting. At times, great bonfires were burned. These could either be harmless religious processions such as those the author himself was a participant in as a child, or something a bit more sinister. With the Colony's activities over the last thirty years being relentlessly revealed in all their revolting glory, one must assume that its religious practices were more in keeping with the pagan cult activities of the Third Reich than with the holy day festivities of Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church of Commercial Avenue, South Chicago. Although the author did what he could to get out of candlelit processions as a boy, he was never able to concoct a story about injections in the testicles or demonic dogs. If the author's informants were correct, the only reasonable assumption to make is that the sect practices a form of Teutonic paganism, observing the traditional sabbaths of April 30, August 1, October 31, and January 31 in addition to the solstices and equinoxes. These, of course, are the same festivals celebrated by the child-snatching, baby-breeding satanic cults currently the object of so much attention in the American press; they are also the holy days of many other, much more benign, pagan sects including the embarrassingly folksy Wicca phenomenon. As the Colony is known for child-snatching, child sexual abuse, and weird religious observances, it gets the author's vote as the only real, verifiable, satanic cult fitting the profile, a cult from which "satanic cult survivor syndrome" is more than today's psychological fad. Further, it goes some length to represent the fears of Dr. D. Corydon Hammond, who posited the existence of a satanic cult run by former Nazi brainwashers. In other words, Colonia Dignidad has it all. The Colony has since changed its name from Colonia Dignidad to Villa Baviera (Bavarian Village), [50] an innocuous-sounding title that nevertheless emphasizes its sinister heritage, for we have now come full circle in our study of Nazi occultism: from the elegant Four Seasons Hotel in Munich, Bavaria's capitol, in 1919 in the days of the Thule Gesellschaft and their successful overthrow of the Communist regime to the "Bavarian Village," a concentration camp in modern Chile, and its involvement in the successful overthrow of a Socialist president ... and the fiendish torture and murder of its opponents and the brainwashing of its residents. The murder of Letelier and Moffit; the assassination of President Allende; the military coup in Chile; the detention and "remote control" torture of political prisoners; the training of sadists; the Western Hemisphere's own concentration camp; missing children; sexual abuse; more murder; Nazis in the Andes, running guns, drugs, and escaping justice, keeping their twisted faith alive for Fatherland and Race; a monomaniacal cult leader, prepared to take his people down with him; brainwashed slave-laborers; soundproofed rooms for rape and torture; bizarre religious rituals far from the prying eyes of society; doctors torturing and killing in the service of the State. The many separate strands that make up the fabric of the late twentieth century are snarled in a tight little knot known as Colonia Dignidad.
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