The Perfect Sect (Spanish Edit - Carlos Basso Prieto

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Index
Cover
Introduction
Part I. The Mother Cult
Chapter 1. The Message
Chapter 2. The Latter Rain
Chapter 3. Jonestown
Chapter 4. Sons of the
Klan Chapter 5. Te Park
Chapter 6. “Mr. Krefeld»
Part II. Parral's messiah Chapter
7. The final harangue Chapter
8. Dr. Schneider Chapter 9.
Escape to the end of the world Chapter
10. Herd of pigs!
Chapter 11. Dreams and confession
Chapter 12. Breaking wills Chapter 13.
The night terror Chapter 14. The third
strategy Part III A bipolar and conspiracy
world Chapter 15. An intelligence agency Chapter
16. GURMIR Chapter 17. Foreign agents
Chapter 18. Communist Paranoia Part IV. The
ghosts of Chenco Chapter 19. A corpse in
Florida Chapter 20. "One"
Chapter 21. The death of the

captain Chapter 22. Fertig Chapter
23. The disappeared Chapter 24.
The Maino case Chapter 25.
Withdrawal of televisions Chapter
26. A State within another State Party V.
Jeremiah 33.3 Chapter 27. The arms factory
Chapter 28. Chemicals and explosives Chapter
29. The guinea pigs of the colony
Chapter 30. "Me"

Chapter 31. The master's apprentice
Chapter 32. Great secrets
Acknowledgments Notes Credits
Introduction
Colonia Dignidad was a religious sect that not only manipulated its
followers and stripped them of their dignity, their money, their property
and even their children, but also when the belief in Schäfer's supposed
divine powers was no longer enough to prevent the proselytes fled
from that earthly hell, it did not hesitate to drug, beat, torture and
murder them to prevent them from fleeing and telling the horrors they
had experienced, while demolishing the houses of their neighbors,
spying on friends and enemies alike and trafficking weapons .
What this book reveals, however, is that this cult is related to

several other destructive communities that, like the one led by Paul
Schäfer, caused untold suffering to their victims.
The best known of these is The People's Temple, as the sect led
by the American Jim Jones was called, who led the largest collective
suicide known in world history.
There are several more, on different continents, and we will talk

about them at length, but what is important to understand is that they
all had (or have) the doctrine of the latter rain as their common axis,
a biblical interpretation that poses, in very simple terms, that the end
of time is very close. This movement had as its greatest exponent an
American pastor, William Branham, leader of the El Mensaje sect.
Branham was the model that, with different accents and even with
totally opposed ideological visions, was copied by Schäfer, Jones,
Leo Mercier, Robert Martin Gumbura and many others throughout
the world, including who is currently considered the main heir to their
ideology, the German Ewald Frank, also closely linked to Colonia
Dignidad.
This is the story of it all and much more, including how Schäfer
manipulated the Bible to terrorize his followers, his plan to take over
all the children around and run their families, and how he who
murdered and made dozens of people disappear.
This story was built thanks to twenty interviews (both on and off),
the review of almost ten thousand pages of judicial documents, the
46 thousand intelligence files of the colony that have been declassified,
the reports of State agencies , books and journalistic reports and the
disinterested help of many people, both in Chile and in the United
States and in Germany.
Part I
PThe mother sect
Chapter 1
The message
It is mid-August 1955 and the action takes place in an improvised tent

in the middle of Karlsruhe, a city located in what was then West
Germany, at that time occupied by North American troops. Thousands
of people flock there, taking advantage of the summer, to listen to one
of the superstars of the religious world of the moment: the American
pastor William Branham, leader of the sectarian group known as The
Message.
At that point in his life and at forty-six years old, Branham was a
celebrity who had toured Africa, much of Europe and practically all of
North America captivating crowds with a simple and Manichaean
oratory, in which everything was heavenly or demonic, white or black,
cursed or holy.
Soft-spoken and gentle in manner, Branham was originally from the
city of Jeffersonville, located on the banks of the Ohio River. His
followers called him "Master", because for them he was an envoy of
God, an intermediary on the same level as Saint John the Baptist or a
modern Elijah, his favorite prophet, to such an extent that today
Jeffersonville and the Tabernacle —as their church was called— are
what Mecca represents to Arabs, Salt Lake City to Mormons, and the
Vatican to Catholics: a place of worship and worship.
Like many other pastors of the thirties of the 20th century, Branham
claimed that he received divine messages, which in his case —he said
— he had begun to listen to in 1933, when the first voices began to
rumble inside his brain. Then, as he recounted, the voices were
embodied in a figure that in his opinion was Jesus and, later, a
supposed angel appeared to him.
After that, he claimed to have acquired a series of superpowers that
would delight any sci-fi writer, including seeing the future, having a
guardian angel come down from heaven every time the devil wanted
to ambush him and, of course, the ultimate superpower: healing the
sick simply by ordering the demons to leave the body of the sufferer.
He was pondering what to do with these supposed gifts when he

met his future spiritual mentor, a Pentecostal preacher named Roy E.
Davis, who convinced him that he should become a pastor.
Davis was the one who baptized him and later ordained in
Jeffersonville. Later, when the preacher was expelled from the temple
to which he had joined, he formed his own church, which he also joined.
Branham. However, he took his own flight and created his own body
of doctrine, known as The Message, a name that is also used to
designate his church.
Both are very important characters in a plot that began in the 1950s
in the United States and Germany, but which had numerous and very
serious consequences in Chile and other countries, since Branham's
doctrines had a decisive influence on the development of at least four
destructive sects in different places of the world.
The first of these is quite little known. This is the sect created by
one of Branham's lieutenants, Leo Mercier, in Prescott, Arizona,
called Te Park, rather short-lived, due to the early death of its founder.
The second sect in which Branham's influence was also decisive

was the group of religious fanatics led to mass suicide by Pastor Jim
Jones. Yes, we are talking about the sect The People's Temple,
established in Jonestown, Guyana, perhaps the most famous in all of
modern history, which became world famous for the suicide of nine
hundred and thirteen of its followers in 1978.
A third group of harmful characteristics derived from Branham's

teachings settled on another continent, Africa, where the Message of
the End sect was born at the beginning of the eighties.
from RMG times, by the first two names and the surname of its
founder, Robert Martin Gumbura, an extravagant pastor who died of
covid-19 in a Zimbabwe prison in 2021, sentenced to fifty years in
prison for the sexual abuse to which he subdued several of his
followers.
The fourth sect that we will talk about, and about which this book is
about, is a well-known one in Chile: Colonia Dignidad, on which
Branham also had a fundamental influence.
To understand it, let's go back to 1955. On the night of Branham's
debut in Karlsruhe, among the thousands of Germans excited by the
alleged biblical messages delivered by the American, there were
eight young people who were part of the most ecstatic group, so
much so that they attended all five nights. in which the evangelist
appeared in the city before leaving for Lausanne, Switzerland.
Several of them were ex-soldiers or officers who fought in World

War II, but essentially they were religious fanatics who followed to the
letter what their undisputed leader told them: former Wehrmacht
corporal and street preacher Paul Schäfer Schneider, then thirty-four
years old.
Despite the fact that communications in those years were not as

fast as today's, Schäfer knew very well who the Jeffersonvillle
preacher was and was elated by the prospect of his visit. So much so
that, after much insistence, he managed to get himself and his
followers accepted as part of Branham's security entourage, a
paranoid anti-communist —like Schäfer— who saw conspiracies and
attacks against him everywhere.
In the thousands of pages accumulated by the countless judicial

investigations undertaken in Chile against the leaders of the colony,
there is only one mention of Branham, whose author is one of the
highest hierarchs of the sect settled in the communes of Parral and
Bulnes.
This is the late group intelligence chief, Gerd
Seewald, who in the investigation for illicit association carried out
against the leaders of the colony and the heads of the National
Intelligence Directorate, DINA, Augusto Pinochet's secret police,
delivered a curious document entitled Curriculum vitae, in which he
recorded a series of data about the North American pastor, but also
He made an extensive account of the beginnings of the group to
which he belonged.
There he pointed out that "in the year 1955, Paul Schäfer and some
of his supporters participated in Karlsruhe in the meetings of the
American William Branham, evangelist and healer, and were very
impressed by the large number of healings", adding that later "Schäfer
had into practice several of his doctrines.”1 If you are wondering what
these were, Seewald himself points out some of them: “He constantly
maintained that we were the only faithful ones and, furthermore, he
maintained that woman was an inferior creature. He did not express
it so publicly, but whenever a young man bothered a girl, she was the
one punished because, according to Branham, women had received
their beauty from the devil, to seduce men.
Winfried Hempel lived until he was twenty years old in Colonia

Dignidad. Today he is a lawyer and as such represents many of the
victims of the sect. Regarding Branham, he points out that, according
to what Horst Münch, one of the original members of Schäfer's group,
told him at the time, he went to introduce himself to the American as
soon as he arrived in Karlsruhe, offering to provide him with protection,
along with his acolytes, during your stay.
Branham didn't pay much attention to it, but somehow Schäfer and
his people managed not only to become part of the group that
accompanied him, but to establish a close relationship with him.
One of Branham's most convinced biographers, Owen
Jorgensen, points out about his visit to the German lands that those
days "opened the eyes of Germany to the supernatural" and that
Branham faced great dangers there, among them that "communist
terrorists had threatened to assassinate the evangelist", and that,
says Jorgensen with great candor, "the leader of
a spiritualist sect” had promised that together with his diabolical

minions they would put a spell on one of the meetings, forming a huge
storm over the place to demonstrate their power.
The story says that while Branham was preaching, the
aforementioned storm arose, which generated "fifteen men sitting in a
row", who "pointed feathers at him and articulated words that he could
not understand". As if that wasn't enough, he then observed fifteen
other subjects at the same job and, of course, a series of demons and
a column of fire that surrounded him, all of which - of course - only he
saw.
According to Jorgensen, at that moment Branham detected a
woman in the audience who could not move, because she had
tuberculosis and her spine was split in two. As always happens in this
type of show, Branham ordered her —according to the biographer—
to walk, and she did. At the same time, the leader of the spiritualist
sect fell to the ground, as the American pastor had transferred all the
ills of the recently healed woman to him.
By the way, this is all part of the folklore surrounding Branham, for
in the audio transcripts of those sessions, all of which were recorded
on tape, there is nothing remotely similar, although there are many
references to the apocalypse.
In fact, the first night in Karlsruhe Branham announced that “we are
at the end of time. The sun is quenching civilization" and that "the
prophet promised that the sun will shine again at the end." Which is
the end? He himself detailed it, so that no one would be confused:
"We are living in that time."2 In the same way, he dedicated part of his
stay to explaining his misogynistic and racist points of view,
asserting that babies do not have maternal blood, because according
to him "Babies' blood comes from the father, not the mother," and also
argued that Eve "was perfect: beautiful blue eyes, her blond hair
falling down her back... the most beautiful woman in the world."
Consistent with the above, he commented that he imagined her

telling Adam: "It's my fault, I did it," while the
expelled from paradise Of course, Branham also made it clear that he

was a convinced creationist, who believed that the world had come
into being four thousand years before Christ.
It should be noted that many of Branham's followers also believed
in the "seed of the serpent" doctrine, according to which the biblical
Eve had sexual intercourse with the serpent, giving birth to Esau, a
half-human, half-reptilian being.
His second sermon in Karlsruhe made a deep impression on
Schäfer, as it revolved around the Bethesda fountain, a biblical
episode narrated in John 5, which tells the story of a pool located in
Jerusalem on which an angel came down to stir the waters, after
which the paralyzed, the blind and the lame entered into it to be healed.
However —it is pointed out in the same episode—, one day a man
paralyzed for thirty-eight years told Jesus that he could not be healed
because he had no one to lead him to the water, after which he healed
his legs. ills. This would have generated the indignation of the Jews
and the beginning of the persecution against Jesus, due to a purely
formal matter: the miracle would have been performed on a day of
rest (Sabbath or Saturday), when any activity was strictly prohibited,
including the healing of sick.
Over the years, the story of the Bethesda fountain would be

repeated over and over again by Schäfer, with accents very similar to
those of Branham, from whom he also extracted the idea that diseases
or sins are, in reality, demons entrenched in the body of people.
Schäfer, it is necessary to emphasize, was completely fascinated

by the American, not only because of his supposed healings, but
because behind the latter rain doctrine, the axis of what Branham
preached, there was a totalitarian, misogynistic and apocalyptic
message, perfect for brainwash all those who were willing to follow
him. And how not if the one who introduced Branham to that doctrine
had been another Pentecostal preacher, Ray E. David, who had
adapted a set of Pentecostal teachings and practices to his own vision
of the world, that of the Ku Klux
Klan, the American racist organization that sowed terror for decades
in the central and southern United States and that is part of the base
of the beliefs of Colonia Dignidad.
Episode 2
the latter rain
The assembly listens absorbedly to the voice of their leader, "the

permanent uncle", as they call him. It is 1976 and, although many
years have passed since he began to preach, Paul Schäfer is in his
prime as a pastor and keeps the audience electrified with his very
simple biblical preaching and the harshness of his words, something
completely opposite to the warmth that characterized Branham.
However, from him Schäfer, who was never soft or kind, learned
something much more essential, something vital for anyone who
founds a sect: that beyond how you address the people you manage
to capture, the secret of fidelity, the great trick by which it is possible
to convince them of any imbecility—such as, for example, that they
must commit suicide to board an alien ship that will take them to
eternal salvation3—is to convince them that he is a messiah, a special
being, someone superhuman characteristics, not just a person of faith
who possesses some higher degree of theological knowledge —which
he otherwise did not have— or something similar, but who is rightfully
an intermediary of God on Earth, someone who receives messages
that only can hear the illuminated.
"God has not spoken in vain with me for more than twenty years,"
he pointed out with conviction to his followers, emphasizing something
of which they are already convinced: that the vulgar and uneducated
man who commanded them was a prophet, a cable that connected
divinity with Earth, a chosen one; and that they were the privileged,
an elite that would be saved from the destruction that the arrival of the
Antichrist would bring thanks to the fact that they were part of that
group of believers who followed a being of light, a rather small little
man who spoke directly with God.
This type of message was repeated habitually in the assembly of

Colonia Dignidad, as they designated within the sect the meeting of
adults and some selected young people, which took place almost
every night inside the farm that they began to live in Catillo, Maule
Region, from 1961.
For these same reasons, the members of the assembly accepted,
in each session, the worst insults and humiliations that it is possible
to imagine. Bad that bad, whoever insulted them was a messiah.
«You are the biggest hypocrites. And why are you the biggest
hypocrites? Because God speaks to you as hypocrites, since you
speak of God, but do not listen to his answer! or "You are full...full of
dirt!
Full of worldly pleasures, full... full of sin, full of carnal plague!", he
shamelessly recriminated them, as multiple testimonies and also the
few audio recordings that have survived of those sessions held at a
time when Life seemed to smile on Schäfer, one of the worst criminals
that Chilean history has known. Despite all the crimes committed up
to that date in the country that had generously welcomed him, he
enjoyed total and absolute impunity. In fact, in the top pocket of his
jacket he carried a personal business card from Augusto Pinochet,
on which the dictator had written in his own handwriting an
unquestionable breaker: "The Armed Forces, Police and Investigations
will provide maximum collaboration to the bearer of the present."
Obviously, behind it there were superior interests that explained it.

By then, the colony had not only been converted into a detention,
interrogation, and disappearance center for political prisoners, but
also produced sophisticated weapons of excellent quality within the
farm —rifles, submachine guns, and hand grenades, among others
—, in addition to participating in international traffic networks of these.
Likewise, the colony had another very interesting "asset" for

Pinochet: the almost permanent presence in the place of Gerhard
Mertins, a former Nazi officer who in the sixties began to sell weapons
with the approval of the secret services of the
then Federal Germany, until it became one of the most important arms
dealers in the world. This was not a minor thing if one takes into
account the fact that the United States decided to stop supplying
weapons to Chile at the end of 1976, after the DINA assassinated
Orlando Letelier, Salvador Allende's former foreign minister, in
Washington DC.
So much favor had to be reciprocated and that translated into the
impunity enjoyed by the colony, which allowed Schäfer to manage his
flock at will (helped by a group of stalwarts with a clear awareness of
the crimes they committed). And, most importantly for him, abusing
children without ever fearing being denounced, as had happened in
1959 in Germany, forcing him to flee with his group to Chile.
The assembly meetings usually began around 9:00 p.m. and usually
consisted of three parts: Schäfer's preaching, the confession, and the
interpretation of dreams.
It always began with the hierarch sitting on a kind of elevated throne,
around which all the settlers were located, as well as a group of
children willing to listen to the stories of the wisest old man in the tribe.
At a certain distance, one of them was making a video recording and,
at the same time, without anyone knowing, hidden microphones were
capturing the audio of what was happening there.
Some of those recordings survived over the years and the burning
of evidence that took place from 1996, when the police began to raid
the enclave.
Thanks to those few audio files that remain, and to which I had
confidential access, we know part of what was happening there. But
this practice of recording everything was not Schäfer's invention, rather
he copied it from his idol, William Branham.
Within the inner circle that accompanied Branham everywhere,
included two assistants known as the tape-boys : Leo Mercier and
Gene Goad, who followed him wherever he went, recording all his
words with the purpose of, subsequently, commercialize his sermons
and commentaries in the form of books and records. On the basis of
those sermons a huge industry was generated.
Mercier, like Schäfer, learned very quickly from the "Master" and,
after his death in a traffic accident in 1965, founded his own sect, Te
Park, in Prescott, Arizona, which bore great similarities to Colonia.
Dignity. Like all the other sects mentioned in the introduction, it was
based on the doctrine of the latter rain, a biblical interpretation that
originated in some splinter groups of the Pentecostal Church in
Canada, towards the end of the 1940s, from a Verse from the book
of Joel—one of the Old Testament minor prophets—that says that
God sent the children of Zion “early and latter rain as at the
beginning” (Joel 2:23).
For the most radical Pentecostals, who imported this doctrine from
Saskatchewan to Indiana and other American states, the former rain
is an allegory for what they call "the outpouring of the Holy Spirit", in
the origins of the church as such, which would have been manifested
on the feast of Pentecost.
That was the moment, according to them, when the Holy Spirit
possessed the participants, a phenomenon that manifested itself in
that they began to speak "in tongues."4 Gunther Bonhau, who was
an apprentice bricklayer in Sieburg, where one of the first complexes
owned by the sect that we would later know as Colonia Dignidad, told
journalist Gero Gemballa that Schäfer ordered the construction of a
basement to pray there, but also ordered that, when such prayers
were said, trumpets had to be blown at full volume.
The reason was that there “they spoke in a strange language.

Nothing could be understood well. They always spoke with their
throats. It was scary. Some words still ring in my ears: rastalamonit,
nastri, urrabani”, Bonhau would recount years later, who was
convinced that these bizarre concepts were part of an exorcism ritual.5
However, the explanation is simpler: Winfried Hempel recalls that,

according to what the elders told, when the colony was already settled
on what was once the San
Manuel de Parral, "speaking in tongues" continued to be practiced in

the hangar where the planes were kept, an enclosure in which the
chosen ones who were invited to participate in the ritual fell into a
kind of mystical ecstasy and began to babble incomprehensible
things, the "speak in tongues". However, with the passage of time,
this practice fell into disuse, probably because it was considered that
the time of the former rain was ending and that of the latter rain was
arriving.
This, basically, is paralleled with "the outpouring of the Holy Spirit"
that will take place in the last days of the world, prior to the final
judgment. In other words, what the doctrine of the latter rain proposes
is that the end times are beginning and that only those who adhere
to this movement will be saved from divine fire.
Pastor Juan Sepúlveda is the president of the Board of Directors

of the Evangelical Development Service (Sepade), and states that to
understand the concept it is necessary to know that the Pentecostal
movement is deeply popular and that when it emerged, at the
beginning of the 20th century, it was highly rejected by institutionalized
evangelical churches, among other things because different preachers
appeared who, taking aspects of Pentecostalism, used them as an
instrument of power.
According to Sepúlveda, the interpretation of the latter rain is a
Pentecostal metaphor based on the rain cycles in Palestine about the
manifestation of the Holy Spirit, which appears as a kind of anticipation
of the return of Christ and the end of time.
By the way, we must look at the time when this idea hatched to
understand the obsession with the apocalypse. In 1945 the United
States had detonated the first two atomic bombs against Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and shortly after the Soviet Union announced that it
also possessed this technology, which gave rise to the theory of
Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD, for its acronym in English. 6
Throughout North America and Europe, houses and buildings were
filled with fallout shelters, and many far-right movements in the United
States declared themselves
"survivalists," moving to remote places, where they hoarded food,

water and weapons, lots of weapons.
Yes. There were reasons to believe that the world was on the verge
of destruction, and Bill Branham, Jim Jones, and Paul Schäfer, among
others, were obsessed with it. The latter, Hempel relates, "had the
belief that at any moment the universe was going to stop."
Branham, for his part, predicted that the world would end in 1977.
Although the latter rain movement started in Canada, as has been
said, it soon crossed the border to the south and settled in Chicago,
where its main exponents were the pastors Joseph Mattsson-Boze
and AW Rassmusen, great friends of Branham and with whom He
frequently preached in that city, as noted by researcher John Andrew
Collins.7 This, a former member of The Message, is without doubt
the leading researcher of this group in the world. He recounts that
the trio soon began operating in Philadelphia as well, where Mattsson-
Boze was editor of a religious newsletter, The Herald of Faith, half
"regarded as the leading voice of the latter rain movement."8
It was, in fact, one of the main vehicles for propagating Branham's

doctrine and prophecies, including one issued in Chicago in 1955, in
which he stated that communism would end up triumphing over the
other "isms" and that finally " it would burn Vatican City.”9 Shortly
after this prophecy, a young pastor named James Warren Jones was
anointed as such in Philadelphia, a city that the researcher said
had become “a strategic center for the latter rain movement.” ,10 due
to the constant presence in it of Branham and the action of Rassmusen
and Mattsson Boze, the latter, the person who ordained him pastor.
Chapter 3
jonestown
Like Schäfer, Jones was an acolyte of the latter rain movement. In

1953 he was studying by correspondence to become a Methodist
pastor in Indianapolis, the capital of the state of Indiana, located a
hundred miles from Jeffersonville, when he attended a meeting in
Columbus, and although he continued for a while longer in the
Methodist Church, soon after gave up on her.
According to Jones, a first supernatural event in his life occurred at
that meeting, as he claimed that a woman had approached him
saying: "I perceive that you are a prophet... you will be heard
throughout the world and tonight you will begin your ministry." eleven
Soon after, Jones met Branham and, like Schäfer, fell in love with
him, finding in his apocalyptic doctrines the ideological foundation he
needed to found his own group. In fact, in June 1955, that is, a few
months before the trip to Karlsruhe, both participated in an act in
Indianapolis. The relationship grew closer as time passed.
The following year, while Jones was trying to establish a

congregation of his own in Indianapolis, he invited Branham to preach with him.
As John Collins explains in his book, it was a relationship of mutual
convenience, since at that time Branham was going through a very
difficult economic moment and, in turn, Jones benefited from the
enormous fame of the Jeffersonville preacher.
Advertisements began to appear in various publications inviting
Branham to hear from June 11 at the church called El Tabernáculo
de Cadle,12 together with the Reverend James W. Jones. The
announcements had an effect and, on the day the sermons began,
eleven thousand people crowded into the church and the streets
prepared to listen to the Master, since Jones,
at the time, he was an unknown preacher only twenty-five years old.
Jim Reiterman recounts in Raven, his biography of Jim Jones, that

the session began with Branham talking about his prediction that the
world was on the brink of the apocalypse, after which he introduced
who he called "my beloved son," referring to Jones, whom he familiarly
called Jim.
The meeting was a complete success. At the end, hundreds of
people besieged them to be "healed" or to receive a word from them.
It was also the occasion when one of the attendees, Archie Ijames,
who had come to see Branham, became close friends with Jones. In
the years that followed, Ijames, who was African American, was
instrumental in attracting people from that community to Jones' sect,
and ended up becoming his lieutenant. Obviously, like everyone else,
he was a fan of the latter rain movement.
As Collins notes, when comparing the doctrines of Branham and
Jones, the influence of the former on the latter becomes obvious, to
the point that "while it is clear that Jim Jones abandoned Christianity
in its traditional form, it is also evident that he never abandoned The
Message." ».13 After forming a first group called Community Unity, he
created The People's Temple, which would be the base of his sect
in Indianapolis. There, like Branham, he "healed" people during his
public presentations. Of course, as it happened with the first one,
these supposed healings were not such and others consisted of
previously prepared stagings.
Jeff Guinn recounts in the book The Road to Jonestown that many
times during services, Jones would ask who had cancer.
When someone raised their hand, the pastor invited him to go to the
temple bathroom, where he "removed" a bloody mass (usually a piece
of rotten chicken that one of his assistants surreptitiously passed him),
which he then exhibited. before the followers announcing that he had
removed the cancer. Despite the gross deception, the faithful thanked
God for such a miraculous cure.
Badly or badly, as social psychology knows very well, the human

brain acts through cognitive biases, such as confirmation, thanks to
which we discard contradictory information regarding what we want
to believe and we are left with only what we believe. confirms our
beliefs or emotions.
Little by little, Jones convinced his followers, including his wife, that
he was able to read people's thoughts.
The reality is that he implemented a technique similar to that of
Schäfer: having informants in each group and subgroup within the
sect, who informed him of everything that happened in it. Each
member also had to confess directly to him, therefore, he handled a
lot of information.
In the midst of paranoia about knowing everything that was
happening with his parishioners, Jones' panic at the imminent end of
the world gradually grew and in 1961 he made his own prophecy: the
Soviets, whom he admired, would attack the United States with
atomic weapons.
Faced with this situation, he decided that he should flee from there
and take his followers with him. For this, he began to look for countries
in which to relocate his sect. He had already visited Cuba and in 1961
he traveled to British Guiana, but he was not totally convinced that
this was the place where the saved could find refuge from the nuclear
apocalypse.
According to Guinn, in December 1961, Jones read an article in
Esquire magazine, titled "9 Places in the World to Hide," which
described places that would be the most favorable for survival in the
event of a radioactive disaster, according to the winds. , temperature,
geographic conformation and other variables. The list included some
cities in the United States, Mexico and Ireland, Australia, and also
Belo Horizonte, in Brazil; Mendoza, in Argentina, and the Central
Valley of Chile, the same place where months before, that year, the
first followers of Paul Schäfer had begun to arrive.
The three options that the pseudo messiah liked the most, according
to Guinn, were Brazil, Argentina and Chile. However, he opted for
Belo Horizonte, "which seemed to him more spacious than the Central
Valley of Chile" and "less dictatorial than Argentina."14 For this, he
left with his family to live in Brazil. After a time in Belo Horizonte,
he moved to Rio de Janeiro. After almost two years, he decided to
return to the United States and try his luck in the vicinity of one of the
North American cities mentioned by Esquire: Eureka, located north
of San Francisco.
Along with other members of The People's Temple, he ultimately
decided to stay in Redwood Valley, near Eureka, and persuade his
former flock from Indianapolis to move with him nearly two thousand
miles away. And he succeeded, among other things, because he
assured them that he now knew exactly the date on which the nuclear
attack would occur: July 16, 1967.
There was little time left. His prophecy about the nuclear holocaust
advanced Branham's proposed end date by ten years, so by the end
of 1965 nearly a hundred horrified churchgoers had left for California.
In the same way as in the case of Colonia Dignidad, Jones and his
wife did not arrive there with empty pockets but rather, quite the
contrary, overflowing with money. In any sectarian movement at this
level, the process is always very similar and is based on convincing
the unsuspecting members of the group that, in order to save
themselves, it is necessary for them to get rid of everything material
(property, vehicles, bank deposits, etc.). ) to give it to the prophet or
messiah, in order to be able to carry out what God dictates must be
done.
Like the sect established in Chile, they began very early to collect
weapons and carry out paramilitary training, which was reinforced
thanks to an increasingly paranoid discourse, similar to that of Paul
Schäfer. While he warned about the existence of a kind of secret
organization in the Chilean government, which he called "El
Departamento Cinco" (he was referring to Department V, the PDI unit
that began investigations against the colony in the middle of the
nineties), who wanted to destroy the colony, since it was directed by
the devil,
Jones convinced his followers, as Gunn recounts, that there were two
governments in the United States: a public one, known to all and
headed by the president, and a secret one, the one that really
governed, made up of the CIA and the FBI, and that he was bent on
destroying the people's temple.
In order to give credibility to this assertion, to victimize himself and
also promote conspiracy ideas among his followers, he came to do
very absurd things. One of them, as Guinn recounts, occurred in
1972. While parishioners were enjoying a meal in the open air, shots
were suddenly heard from which nobody knew where they came
from, after which "the Father", as Jones was called, was taken from
the place completely bloody.
After that, his shocked followers were informed that their leader,
unfortunately, had been assassinated. However, half an hour later
Jones reappeared, unscathed.
The explanation? Very simple: his healing powers were so great
that he had returned from the dead after a self-heal.
As the leader of any sect knows well, an essential exercise to

maintain control is to convince its members that the outside world is
evil, hostile and sinister and that the collective of which they are a
part is, in opposition, the only virtuous and honorable thing. that
remains on Earth, which is why its imaginary enemies seek its
destruction. In other words, it is what Branham preached.
At the time of his death in a traffic accident in Tucson, Arizona, in

1965, Branham was already quite estranged from Jones who, despite
his fear of the Soviets, declared himself a socialist, something that a
far-right man like Branham did not. could bear. Even at some point,
when The People's Temple was already established in Redwood
Valley, Jones proposed moving to live in Russia, which generated
quite a bit of controversy in his community. However, it is also
necessary to highlight that, at the same time, one of the historical
figures most admired by him was Adolf Hitler.
However, at least in public, he claimed to be interested in the

interraciality, something he wanted to achieve in his flock. In this, his

lieutenant Archie Ijames was essential to attract proselytes of African-
American origin, which does not seem to have been to the liking of
Branham either, a sympathizer of the main white supremacist group
that has existed on this side of the world, the Ku Klux Klan.
That is why it is not surprising that, upon learning of the death of
his mentor, Jones mocked it and even said that years before he had
prophesied the death of whoever would one day be his model and
mentor.
Even so, and perhaps unconsciously, he followed his steps to the
letter and even, like Paul Schäfer, materialized an idea that Branham
harbored and that he failed to see materialize: create his own
"commune", a small self-sufficient community, closed and far from
everything and everyone, where only those who believed in the same
thing as him coexisted. As Collins explains, although Branham never
expressed this project in public, this came to fruition shortly after his
death, when one of his subjects, Leo Mercier, founded Te Park, which
we will talk about later.
Around 1973, Jones began to say that the then President of the
United States, the Republican Richard Nixon, was a representative of
Satan on Earth. He feared that Nixon would unleash a nuclear
apocalypse and become a Hitler-style dictator. Therefore, he warned
his proselytes that it was necessary to flee Redwood Valley and look
for the promised land, because the end was imminent once again and
only those who went with it would be saved. Although it was a story
they had heard before and the end had never come, the amazing
thing is that no one questioned his words.
So, once again, Jones thought of Brazil, but other options

considered were Peru and Kenya, in Africa. However, in the end,
Jones and his close friends decided that the best place to settle was
Guyana, a country at that time governed by the socialists, a fact that
for the leader of the group seems to have been decisive.
A delegation from El templo del pueblo was sent to speak with the
Guyanese authorities, who welcomed it enthusiastically,
just as it happened when Paul Schäfer and his lieutenants appeared

in Chile in 1961.
In Guyana, the State leased them a 1,200-hectare field at a very low
price (750 dollars a year) and in this way, with the commitment of the
new settlers to cultivate the land and invest in buildings for the sector
that was ceded to them , Jones began sending his followers to South
America in August 1974.
By the way, the "commune" that was being created needed a formal
name and that is how "The People's Temple agricultural project" was
born, although no one called the small town that began to emerge in
the middle of the jungle that way, which everyone knew it as Jonestown
or The City of Jones, whose construction began with money donated
by members of the congregation, just as they had done years before,
when the world was supposed to end in 1967 and they had to flee to
California.
However, as in the case of Schäfer, the reasons for his escape to

South America seem to be more related to a search for refuge from
judicial persecution than to any divine revelation.
As early as September 1972, the most important newspaper in San

Francisco, Te Examiner, had set its sights on The People's Temple.
In a series of four reports by the journalist and pastor Lester Kinsolving,
the large sums of money that The People's Temple moved, the real
estate it had acquired in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Jones'
statements regarding the fact that it was capable of resurrecting dead
people - a statement made publicly by one of his followers, Assistant
District Attorney Timothy Stoen -, the cult of personality that existed
around him, the armed guards who monitored the environment of the
cult and much more. All this led to the California attorney general
launching an investigation into the sect and the conduct of Stoen, with
whose wife, Grace, Jones had a son.
Jones lobbied the newspaper and succeeded in not publishing other

four reports, in one of which he was accused of having appropriated the

property of a young woman who had committed suicide and of committing
sexual abuse.
It was a small triumph, but the sect made enemies again at the
beginning of 1973, when Jones was preaching in the temple that they
had erected in the city of Los Angeles and a woman in the audience
collapsed without Jones being able to revive her, before which they had
to call a very earthy ambulance.
When she arrived, some members of the sect opposed the patient
being taken to a hospital, as they thought it was still possible for Jones
to save her, but the paramedics called the police. The episode ended in
a brawl with the security team of El templo del pueblo, two of whose
members were arrested, but were soon released.
However, since then the Los Angeles police began to investigate the
sect and secretly follow Jones until December 1973 when he was
arrested in a movie theater bathroom for masturbating in front of an
undercover police officer.
Jones was released after posting a $500 bail, but it was clear to him
that this fact was a serious damage to his public image and that several
more could be unleashed from these accusations.
Like Leo Mercier, Robert Gumbura, and Paul Schäfer, among other
sectarian leaders raised under The Message and the latter rain doctrine,
Jones was a sexual abuser and a subject who forbade certain sexual
habits to his supporters, while he I practiced them. There is a clear
history that he had relationships with men and women throughout his
life, but after his arrest he began to tell his followers that all people were
homosexual, except for him, who was the only heterosexual on the
entire planet.
At the end of 1974, Jones settled permanently in Guyana and began

the gradual transfer of his herd, which reached almost a thousand
people. However, just as Colonia Dignidad did in Germany, they left
people they trusted in the United States. One of them was Bob Houston,
whose wife, Shawn,
she left the sect in July 1976, after which he followed her. On October 5,
1975, his body was found destroyed on a San Francisco railroad and,
although the event was classified as an accident, it generated many, too
many suspicions.
Houston's father was one of the most suspicious.
He had known California legislator Leo Ryan since he was a child, and
he became interested in the case, especially when his friend told him
that his daughter-in-law had been forcibly recaptured, along with her
grandchildren, and taken to Guyana, without being allowed any
communication. with the United States.
Other people also pointed out that their relatives had been kidnapped by
the sect and added more information: that no one was allowed to leave
there or talk to their close people, that they lived in conditions similar to
slavery and that the place was full of weapons. . In other words, exactly
the same thing that happened in Colonia Dignidad.
Ryan decided to travel to Guyana accompanied by press teams and

some relatives of people held captive inside Jonestown. Although the
delegation received a proper welcome, it soon gave way to hostility and
crime, when fourteen members of the sect tried to flee in one of the two
planes carrying the American delegation. Jones' guards attacked the group
with automatic weapons, killing Congressman Leo Ryan, three journalists
and one of the defectors.
When the police arrived hours later, all they found were bodies, bodies,
and more bodies. Not just humans. The mascots of the place (several dogs
and a chimpanzee) had been shot, as was the leader himself, Jim Jones.
The investigation found that after the attack on Ryan and his companions,
the cult leader concluded that government forces were going to kill the
children of Jonestown and convinced his followers that suicide was
necessary. Only a few tried to resist, but they were forced to drink a mixture
of powdered cyanide dissolved in fruit juice.
Seven years after those tragic events, a

A German couple, Georg and Lotti Packmor, were in front of the United
States consul in Toronto, Canada, where they had lived for nearly a
year. They had fled from Colonia Dignidad and were applying for a
tourist visa to travel to the United States. When asked for the reasons
for such a request, they began to tell their lives and gave details of what
they had experienced within the sect in Chile.
Almost at the end, Lotti said something that —at that time— the
consul considered an exaggeration: the leader of that sect located in
the south of a country, of which he had barely heard, was another Jim Jones.
Chapter 4
sons of the klan
For many years, Colonia Dignidad denied being a neo-Nazi

organization, despite all the evidence that confirmed it: from the raising
of children by wet nurses (something very similar to the Lebensborn
program of the SS), to the habitual presence of ex-Nazi officers in it,
including Walter Rauff, Cornelius Krieg, Reinhard Vöering, Gerhard
Mertins and Juan Mahler, the false name under which ex-Nazi
Reinhard Kopps moved through Chile and Argentina, of whom there
are testimonies indicating that he visited the colony.
According to researcher Friedrich Paul Heller, another important
former Nazi member who visited the sect was Luftwaffe ace Hans
Rüdel, who fled to Argentina after the war, and who was also an
adviser to Pinochet.15 It is true that several of the Colonial members
serving in the German armed forces during World War II does not
necessarily make them Nazis. But it is also a fact that, in practice, the
colony operated with a logic very similar to that of any National
Socialist movement.
However, today we have another element that points in that

direction: that the intellectual origin of the religious doctrine that
Schäfer implemented in 1955 in Germany, and from 1961 in Chile,
was actually inspired by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). This American
supremacist movement is in practice one of the many precursors of
National Socialism, like the "Patriotic Leagues" that appeared in
northern Chile from 1911.
The original KKK was born in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, and like
the latter rain movement, Schäfer's sect or Jim Jones' sect, gained
specific weight from interpretations
Biblical ones, above all the one carried out a few years later by
Edward Hine, who created "Anglo-Israelism". According to this belief,
the English were the true descendants of two of the ten lost tribes of
Israel, while the Jews were the descendants of the seed planted by
Satan in Eve.
The murders of ex-slaves and Unionists, that is, sympathizers of
the Yankees, as well as the harassment of Catholics and Jews,
became a common currency. This forced the United States Congress
to issue a series of amendments to the Constitution aimed at
repressing the Klan and, in addition, formed an investigative
commission on the matter.
As it was, all of this diminished the organization, which finally
ceased to exist as such at the end of the 1970s, although an important
market for novels and plays was created around his legend that took
advantage of his aura of mystery to extol or criticize it. Among the
first are those of the journalist and former Baptist pastor Tomas Dixon,
son of a former Klan member, who wrote the novel Te Clansmen, in
1905, where the role of the hooded was romanticized. The story was
made into a film in 1915 by David W. Griffith under the name of The
Birth of a Nation, becoming the first major Hollywood box office
success and an inspiration for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.16
Indeed, after seeing the film, a then-thirty-five-year-old man named
William J. Simmons, who had tried unsuccessfully to become a
Methodist minister and had been a member of Freemasonry,
Knights of the Royal Arch, The Grand Order of the Royal Arch and
about ten other organizations, decided to revive the KKK. For this, he
had the valuable participation of a lieutenant who was a pastor: Roy
Elonza Davis, the spiritual father of William Branham.
Both, Simmons and Davis, raised what was at the time the most
powerful organization in the United States and that, although it publicly
presented itself as a pacifist, non-racist and law-abiding entity, it was
the complete opposite, just like the original .
Simmons argued that African-Americans could not understand democracy

"because of their state of biological evolution" and, furthermore, he argued
that the true United States came from "a peculiar Nordic civilization and is
the creation, par excellence, of the whitest of all white European races.”17
Davis, like the others, was initially a Baptist minister, and it was in Atlanta
that he met the Klan's new top leader, “Imperial Wizard” Simmons. The
trust between the two was such that Davis became the official spokesperson
for the group. He claimed that the KKK "wasn't as bad" as its detractors
said, that it was no longer anti-black or anti-Jewish, but it continued to
preach "white supremacy, although now they sought it through peaceful
means. Likewise, Collins reviews,18 they sought “pure femininity”; that is
to say, that the woman would be relegated to housework.
By the way, Davis' affiliation with the KKK was not very strange.
According to Collins, one of the creators of Pentecostalism, Charles Fox
Parham, would also have been a member, although according to other
sources, he was only a sympathizer of the movement.
After Simmons was ousted from Klan command in 1922, he organized
a new group, the Knights of the Flaming Sword. Once again, at his side
was Davis, who at the same time continued to act as a pastor, although
from time to time he was arrested. According to Collins, he was arrested
several times for having crossed state lines carrying underage girls "for
sexual purposes."
In the midst of all this, he settled in a city we already know: Jeffersonville,

Indiana, where he was also arrested for child abuse. Collins recounts that
when he was appearing before the local court for that crime, a group of
sixty women belonging to the female branch of The Knights of the Flaming
Sword, called Queens of the Golden Mask, broke into the courthouse
causing a disturbance.
Davis was later apprehended for fraud and later for other charges, but
faith is blind and his hundreds of supporters refused to believe the
accusations against him, just as during
It happened for many years with the followers of Paul Schäfer, inside
and outside of Colonia Dignidad.
It was at the Jeffersonville temple run by Davis, The Pentecostal
Church of God, that William Branham was ordained, after he began
attending there and the pastor was "impressed by the young man's
sincerity and fervor." According to Owen Jorgensen's account, "after
observing him for several months, Dr. Davis suggested that Bill should
enter the ministry." Yes, like Schäfer, Davis liked to be called "Doctor,"
even though he did not have a Ph.D.
And of course, there was another element of union between

Branham and Davis, and that is that the Master was a determined
sympathizer of the Ku Klux Klan because, among other things, in his
childhood he had suffered a gunshot wound during a hunt, while his
two brothers suffered from other medical problems. The son of a
driver who was arrested for distributing alcohol during the prohibition
era, the medical bills, John Collins learned, were paid by the Ku Klux
Klan, for which Branham was forever grateful to the organization.
Well, it was "Dr. Davis" who also introduced him to his first wife,
Hope Brumbach, and began calling him Timothy, which was the
name of the apostle Paul's helper.
Davis introduced him to the meanders of healing and was also the
person who interpreted the supposed visions that Branham claimed
to have. According to Jorgensen, the two men went their separate
ways when Branham refused to ordain several women as pastors,
but all indications are that they actually drifted away for a few years
as Davis was once again arrested and extradited to Arkansas on
charges of robbery and murder. .
After that initial separation, Branham took off on his own and
became a rising star from 1933, when he began preaching in
Jeffersonville and later dedicated himself to performing mass baptisms
on the banks of the Ohio River. One of the voices that he said he
heard in his brain whispered to him that "just as John the Baptist
was sent to precursor the first coming of Jesus Christ, in the same
way you are sent to precursor his second coming».19
By 1955 Branham was already a celebrity in the United States,
Africa and Europe. His revivals (revivals, as healing ceremonies and
the movement of healers were called in general) were crowded with
thousands of people, and in addition to the supposed healings he
performed in them, his apocalyptic speech, dotted with stories about
how the demons stalked him and he defeated them over and over
again helped by his guardian angel, they earned him more and more
followers. At the same time, he spread a misogynistic and extremely
anti-communist message. Around the same time, he had resumed
contact with Davis, who in turn was busy creating one of the many
groups of the third phase of the Ku Klux Klan.
The second phase of the Klan, started by Williams and Davis, had
ended by the late 1930s, although the decline had begun several
years earlier, in 1925, when "The Great Indiana Dragon," David
Stephenson, was arrested and charged. of having raped and murdered
a young white woman. After the trial, Stephenson exposed a network
of corruption and bribery that compromised high-ranking authorities,
from the state governor on down, which led to further arrests and
prosecutions. All this was completely undermining the second version
of the Klan, until its disappearance.
However, the ideology as such continued to subsist, atomized in

the midst of various subgroups that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s.
They all had a new enemy in common in the late 1960s, when the
Catholic John Kennedy was elected president of the United States.
One such group was located in Dallas, Texas, and was called The
Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Your Creator? Roy E. Davis
himself, who had taken over as head of the new organization with the
pompous title of Imperial Dragon, which he liked to hoist publicly.
Collins recalls that while Branham began to criticize

Because of Kennedy's "idolatry" because of his Catholicism, Roy

Davis secretly acted against the president.
There is a US military intelligence report from August 1963 that
shows how various KKK members, including Davis and his son, were
planning a series of protest actions against Kennedy, according to a
person whose house they had gathered. In turn, in a book on the
assassination of Kennedy, Gayle Nix Jackson recounts that the
intelligence unit of the Dallas police was very attentive to Davis'
steps.20
They had him classified as an extremist and "a good example of
an extreme right with a hidden and clandestine past", although he
specified that around 1958 he had also become an informant for the
FBI.
According to a document cited in the book, Davis was the organizer
of a Klan front group called the Oak Cliff White Citizens' Council,
which sought to prevent the integration of African-American citizens
into schools.
Participating in this group, among others, was retired General
Edwin Walker, who was the victim of a shooting attack at his home a
couple of weeks before President John Kennedy was also shot dead
in Dallas by ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who according to the
official version used a 7.62 caliber Mannlicher Carcagno rifle. Although
it has not been proven, it has always been said that the person who
shot at Walker's house was Oswald himself.
What is relevant to this story, however, is that the morning President
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, November 23, 1963, the city
woke up covered in pamphlets against him, some of which read
"Wanted for Treason."
After the crime, the police immediately set their eyes on Davis, and
although for some time he was mentioned as a possible participant in
the assassination, he was never charged. He was suspected of
having printed the pamphlets against the president.
Kennedy's crime was an event with a global impact similar to the
attack on the Twin Towers. Everywhere there was a general shock
and branded with fire to
entire generations. Perhaps for this reason it is not surprising that in

the year 2000, after one of the many raids against Colonia Dignidad,
the Chilean police left there with striking evidence: it was an envelope
that the detectives had found inside the place. and that it had two 7.62
caliber bullets.
On its outside someone had handwritten a single word: Kennedy.
The leak of the confiscation gave rise to much speculation.

The Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín , among other media,
wondered if it was possible that the weapon that killed JFK was hidden
in the neighborhood, but in the end, as in many aspects related to the
sect, there was no concrete answer. What is clear is that the leaders
of the colony had an evident —and curious— interest in an event that
happened at a great distance.
Davis died in 1966, just as his name was becoming a national
scandal, as the US House of Representatives launched a vast
investigation into the KKK that year.
Chapter 5
you park
Had it not been for the crimes committed by Keith Loker, it is highly
unlikely that in a large part of the United States and also in Chile
there would have been knowledge of the existence of a sect called
Te Park, which, keeping the obvious differences, had a series of lurid
coincidences with Colonia Dignidad. And of course, if the ideological
origin of both was the same: William Branham, as already noted.
According to Deb Daulton Tibodeau's account in her book Te

Serpent's Tail,21 several years before his death, Branham gave his
blessing for one of his minions, Leo Mercier, to move to the city of
Prescott, in Arizona, the same one where he had settled. established
from 1960. In fact, his last years were spent in Tucson and when he
passed away he was driving from Arizona to his hometown.
It was logical that Mercier would be his successor. Together with
the other tape-boy, Gene Goad, they always stayed by Branham's
side, recording everything he said. Therefore, they were part of his
inner circle and knew all the secrets of those who made up The
Message, to such an extent that, in 1955 (the same year of the trip to
Germany), as John Collins details, Branham joked that within the
group “had formed a small FBI”,22 alluding to the famous US Federal
Bureau of Investigation, the country's main domestic intelligence
agency.
As we will see later, Schäfer not only copied from Branham the
idea of recording his sermons and everything he could, but also, it is
very likely that he was aware of the information gathering functions
that the tape-boys and others fulfilled within the The message. If you
didn't know, the coincidence is astonishing, since Schäfer created
within Colonia Dignidad a true agency of
intelligence that, without a doubt, far surpassed the imitation of the FBI of its
inspirer. We will return extensively to this later.
By the way, it is impossible not to mention another coincidence: while
Mercier was establishing himself in Prescott in 1961, Schäfer was doing the
same in Parral, in south-central Chile. However, unlike this one, which
created a closed area from which only the leaders of the community could
leave or enter, Mercier installed his group of followers in a trailer park —
hence the name by which it was known— , therefore, the possibilities of
circulation were much greater.
Despite this, the confinement was psychological. After the murders,

robberies and at least one rape committed by Keith Loker, a twenty-year-old
who belonged to one of the most important families in Te Park, the oppressive
system within the sect was exposed.
On November 22, 1991, according to the transcript of the trial to which he

was submitted, Loker assaulted the owner of a business premises in Arcadia,
California, who also stole her car. The next day, the young man entered a
bookstore in Fontana, California, and without provocation, according to the
prosecution's account, began shooting at the clerks and customers.
He murdered two people, stole the wallets of two others, left them injured,
took the money from the cash register and left with a bang. Something that
caught the attention of one of the witnesses was the calm with which he
acted. He didn't seem drugged or drunk or upset.
On November 24, Keith Loker robbed another location, this time in

Flagstaff, Arizona, seriously injuring a man in the head. Not content with this,
he kidnapped the cashier and stole her truck, which he drove to a remote
area, where he raped her and then left.
Again, the witnesses assured that he seemed very calm and

It didn't smell of alcohol.
A couple of days later, a cousin of the last victim saw Loker driving the
stolen vehicle and called the police. After a forty minute chase, he was finally
arrested.
They found in their possession the wallets and weapons. When the
police asked him why he had murdered his victims in California, he
claimed to have been drunk at the time of the deadly assault, which - we
have already seen - is not consistent with what the witnesses declared.
Regardless of the motives, the facts were quite clear. In addition,
there was abundant material evidence and testimonies. The prosecution
estimated that the trial would be practically a formality.
In an attempt to find mitigations that would help mitigate the possible

sentence that the young man would receive, his defense incorporated
into the trial a story that astonished the jurors and the journalists who
were following the case: his story in Te Park.
Indeed, as stated in the final judgment, issued by the California
Supreme Court on July 28, 2008, Loker, who was born in 1971, grew up
within the sect headed by Leo Mercier.
According to the ruling: “After Branham's death in 1965, Mercier
gradually became more authoritarian and used different forms of
punishment. He exiled people from the community and separated
families. Children were beaten for minor infractions, such as talking
during a march, or for not tying their shoes.”23 This is part of the same
repertoire of crimes that was experienced for years in Colonia Dignidad,
where children were sexually, physically, and psychologically from his
earliest childhood.
Mercier, by the way, as noted in the same document, was also a

predator of children. And just like in the colony, Mercier also meddled in
the private lives of all its members, even arranging some marriages.
This is what happened with Loker's mother, Marietta, who moved to Te
Park in 1962 with her husband Mark and their two older children.
However, Mark was not to Mercier's taste and, as recorded in the
sentence, the cult leader forced him to leave his wife. The children,
meanwhile, were handed over to other families for a period that lasted
for at least three years.
For her part, Marietta was forced to marry Roger Loker,

who —adds the text— was homosexual. Obviously, he did not want
to marry a woman, but his will was beaten and he had no choice but
to submit to the fate that was being imposed on him. Product of that
marriage, Keith and his sister Hannah were born.
Unsurprisingly, both of them, but particularly Keith, had very

unhappy childhoods, considering the brutal circumstances in which
their parents were forced into marriage.
Marietta was a kind of personal assistant to Mercier and was
completely dominated by him. When Keith was not yet three years
old, she used to hit him because Mercier told her to, saying that the
boy was stubborn. On one occasion, the woman whipped him for
several hours straight because their leader, the pseudo-messiah, had
determined so.
Education was not important within the sect, any more than it ever
was for Schäfer. In Te Park, young people were required to marry at
eighteen and were taught that non-cult members were "atomic food,"
that is, food for bombs. Leo Mercier was certain that there would be a
nuclear holocaust, that all "outsiders" were destined to die, and that
the only ones who would be saved were "believers."
Although the sect dissolved around 1975, when Keith Loker was
only four years old, his life was marked by abuse and the forced
dissolution of family ties. As is obvious, his parents ended up divorcing
and the young man's life was extremely eventful, all of which
persuaded the jury not to apply the death penalty: he was sentenced
to life in prison with the possibility of provisional release.
During the judicial process several relatives of Loker, ex-members

of the sect, gave statements. One of them was Deb Daulton, Keith's
aunt, who is a nurse and lives in Prescott to this day.
Talking with her is moving and at the same time chilling, due to the
parallels that it is impossible not to see between the
horrors she lived through as a child and those who had the misfortune
to grow up under the aegis of Paul Schäfer.
He says that his father was one of the founders of Te Park and that
he professed absolute admiration for Branham, whom everyone in
the group considered a prophet and was convinced that "every word
that came out of his mouth was the word of God." Although his father
was not a fanatical Mercier supporter, almost all of the money he
made was given to the former tape-boy.
As is known, criticism within a sect or in any totalitarian system is a
non-existent practice. And a sect is always a small totalitarian state
where there is no democracy or individual liberties. However, silencing
critical consciences is not that simple. History shows that doing so
requires brutal and bloodthirsty secret police (whatever political color
they are), concentration camps, massive propaganda systems and
much more. The same thing happens in a sect, although of course on
a much smaller scale. Undoubtedly, in the sectarian world, Paul
Schäfer was the one who best understood the above, but the followers
of The Message also knew a lot about it.
John Collins, whose family was very close to Branham, is perhaps

one of the most authoritative voices on the matter. He still lives in
Jeffersonville, the epicenter of The Message. Until 2011 he was
convinced that everything he had been told in the cult was true: "I
believed that Branham was a prophet sent by God, without a doubt,"
he said from his home, located five minutes from the group's church.
"I was indoctrinated to believe, and it was only months after I came
out that I realized that Branham was a fiction," he adds. On one
occasion, he added, he asked his grandfather if Branham's prophecies
were true, a more than legitimate question given that the world was
not destroyed in 1977, as he claimed. Outraged by the question, his
own grandfather expelled him from the church, but not satisfied with
the sanction, it was also applied to his wife and two children. Lifelong
friends stopped talking to him and even looking at him. When he ran
into one of them, they looked away as if they didn't know him. And
after the ostracism, the direct harassment began through telephone
calls.
threatening. Collins had to get used to being escorted after local police detained a man
who was trying to sneak into his home with a gun.
For her part, and returning to Deb Daulton, she recounts that to this day she harbors
strong pain for all the damage that Mercier caused her and her twin sister in full view
and patience of her father. That's something she still can't understand: how did her dad
let his religious beliefs and his obedience to Mercier take precedence over his daughters'
well-being?
As detailed in the trial against Loker, when Deb was six years old she was called in
front of the other children to confess her "sins". The questions she was subjected to by
the cult leader had a strong sexual connotation, absolutely inappropriate for a girl.
Today, from his home in Prescott, he affirms that this event "completely destroyed
my innocence and my life." However, no one protected her, despite the fact that
everyone in her family knew that shortly after they arrived in Te Park, Mercier had taken
his older brothers to the bank of a stream where he stuffed sand into their noses, ears
and legs. years. “He basically sodomized them with sand. He liked to strip them naked,
beat them up, and then make them run home.
He did that to a lot of guys. My story is just one of many."

As she recalled about that dramatic day in which Mercier insulted her in front of the
others, the afternoon had started in a way that seemed very playful, as the leader of the
sect put on a small magic show, using two glasses containing a transparent liquid. that
at first glance looked like water.
"He threw a red powder on one while pointing out 'This is the color of sin.' A second
later he added bleach or something like that and it became translucent. There he told
us: “This is what happens if we confess our sins. We will all be clean again, like clean
water,'” he recalled. The children were then invited, one by one, to sit on Mercier's lap
to confess their sins, ending with a red stamp stamped on the back of their hands that
read "Holy Ghost."
Deb pointed out that by then she was already afraid of the leader of
the sect: "I was petrified." When it was his turn to pass, it got even
more chilling: “He put me on his lap and started asking me the most
sexually violent things about me and my brothers. I couldn't understand
what he was asking me...
I couldn't say that I had done something wrong with my brothers. I
hadn't even seen them in their underwear! When Mercier realized I
wasn't going to tell him what he wanted to hear—that I was having
sex with his brothers—he told me to sit on the chapel steps” and then
go home without the seal in my hand.
«Leo told me that I was a prostitute, a lesbian, a whore. These are
words that I had never heard before," he explained with a thread of
voice.
The reprisals began to appear days later. Deb was taken away from
her family and sent to live with other people, without her parents
objecting to the move.
On one occasion they took her to be examined by a nurse, to look
for "worms". Of course, Mercier was present.
After the examination was completed, she was taken to the community
kitchen, where the subject told everyone that the examination had
revealed that she was "a dirty little girl who likes to play with herself."
In 1971, when she was only ten years old, Mercier had a "vision" in
which God commanded him to punish her. They cut her hair, beat her,
and gave her men's clothing. They even burned his fingerprints.
In his mind, Deb says, he was convinced that in twins there was
always a good one and a bad one; and since she had a twin sister—
Keith Loker's mother—he had decided that she was the bad twin and
therefore had to be punished. The foregoing in the face of absolute
inaction on the part of their parents, uncles and relatives. "This
happened because of the faith that everyone had in William Branham,"
he accuses.
“In Branham-associated churches, children are completely
subverted. They live giving sermons from the 17th or 17th century,
horribly misogynistic messages," he adds, referring to what still
happens there today.
In Te Park, minors had to be up at half past five in the morning.

“We had to put everything in the dining room for the adults to have
breakfast. After that we had to cut the weeds, fix the grass, the
sidewalks… and there were a couple of hours, before the summer, in
which we could play,” Deb Daulton recalled. «The girls always acted
as babysitters, washed the dishes, clothes, ironed, and things like
that. The children worked with the plaster company, which was very
successful, and they had been doing it since they were very young.
No one made it past eighth grade in school."
Another right of adults over children was even more terrifying: "Any
adult could punish you for anything." So used to it was she that when
her family left Te Park for the city of Flagstaff, where they began
attending another Branhamite church, she found it "very strange to
be around adults who suddenly had no right to hit or punish me."
The contempt and insults were directed towards all minors, but in
Mercier's case, particularly towards girls. Nothing very different from
what happened in Colonia Dignidad, one of the cruelest aspects of
which was the way in which children were enslaved, since they were
also forced to work every day.
And, like the Te Park leader, Schäfer also hated women.
"He talked to us like we were dirty, not even 'worth a bullet to kill us
with,'" Deb Daulton continues, recalling a quote from William Branham.
"He said that 'there is nothing as dirty or base as a woman' and that
we were 'a human sexual dump, made by Satan to tempt man'."
Regarding the Keith Loker trial, he argues that what was revealed
there had never been known before, because "we were indoctrinated
never to talk about Te Park." But the group dissolved in 1975, when
Mercier died, who had already been plunged into a life of excess for
several years.
He was extremely fat due to an excessive intake of food, to which
was added a very accentuated alcoholism and dependence on
various drugs, including demerol and morphine. Little by little, her
preaching began to make no sense and she
He thinks that it was only then that the adults realized that they were
in the hands of a maniac. However, the final break occurred after a
meeting between Mercier and his hierarchs, which took place after
several months of sexual abstinence had passed on his orders. In
the closed-door meeting, "exotic things happened," he explained,
detailing that when they got there Mercier forced them to touch each
other's genitals, which was not to the liking of many.
As what had happened leaked out, Te Park split into two camps.
“It was only then that I was able to have my family back. It was
strange to see how these adults reacted to something that happened
to them, but let it happen to their children." However, his family left
the group, but not faith in Branham or The Message.
Keith was very young when Te Park ended, but his mother (who
had already forcibly abandoned her husband) married another man
and they went to a new The Message church in Indiana, he says.
“They didn't live in a commune, but everything was just as strange
when it came to the children. Everyone knew about his situation," he
says, commenting that in addition to a minimal degree of autism, his
nephew faced harsh bullying all his life.
"It never fit in. He wasn't good with girls, because he had no social
skills and that made him furious. Before he was arrested, he had
started harassing women. I needed help, I remember telling my sister.
Not help from the church, but from a psychiatrist, a psychologist».
She is convinced that her nephew was ultimately looking to die in a
confrontation with the police. He does not deny that he committed all
the crimes with which he is charged, but he is certain that his criminal
behavior was the result of being born in Te Park, in a completely
dysfunctional family, and then growing up in a cult. "He did, but it's
the way he was raised that created the problem. Te Park killed him."
Loker died in prison a couple of years ago. Her mother, meanwhile,
died a little earlier, in 2013, plunged into alcoholism, something for
which Deb also blames the sect, because she believes that it is
impossible for someone who experienced what her sister could have
led a normal life.
Chapter 6
"Mr. Krefeld»
Let's get a little closer to the present: October 17, 2005. The setting is
the first floor of the old international terminal of the Arturo Merino
Benítez airport, in Pudahuel, and the action takes place inside one of
the booths of the Investigative Police, in which the detective on duty
notifies one of the most faithful followers of William Branham, the
German pastor Ewald Frank, that he does not have authorization to
enter the country.
Frank tries to convince the young officer that he does not represent
a danger to the nation or anything like that, but the detective is
unfazed, as the instructions he sees on his screen are clear: Ewald
Frank cannot enter Chile due to a decision by the Ministry of Interior.
For this reason, he stamps the corresponding "rejected" stamp on his
passport. After several hours inside a transit hall, the preacher has no
choice but to board a flight back to his place of origin, the city of
Krefeld, near Bonn.
Later, his lawyer in Chile filed a protection appeal, which included

a letter sent by Frank to the then Minister of the Interior, Belisario
Velasco. In it, he defined himself as "senior pastor of an important
congregation of Christian-evangelical faith, which in Germany is
recognized for the common good."
In the same way, he asserted that "in the last forty-two years I have
preached, evangelized throughout the world, similar to the way of Mr.
Billy Graham.24 I have preached in more than one hundred and thirty
countries, also in Russia, China and in twelve Islamic countries
without even the slightest objection from any government or church."
Due to the above, the prohibition to enter Chile, according to him, is

He had dictated on the basis of slander, since it had been pointed out
that he was "a second Paul Schäfer", in circumstances that he claimed
not to know him or to have ever exchanged a word with him.
In the same way, he described Colonia Dignidad as a "Nazi
dictatorship", asserting that in forty years no Catholic priest or
evangelical pastor cared about the settlers, but, referring to himself in
the third person, affirmed that "it was Ewald Frank who in their first
visit brought them their human dignity, human rights and freedom of
faith."
That was not all. Also imbued with the ideas of the latter rain and
the prophets of the last days, he said that “for these people it was a
new beginning. In the beginning of the New Testament, since John
the Baptist appeared, adult people were baptized. Do they want to
prohibit me from doing that?», he asked Velasco.
In the same legal action, his lawyer, Sergio Rodríguez Oro, a well-
known defender of former DINA members, as well as of some of the
leaders of the colony, said that "the protected person tried to enter the
country on October 17, 2005 for the effects of celebrating a marriage
of two faithful of the religion that he professes, since he is a minister
of Branhamite worship". This information was different from what
appears in other documents in the case, particularly in minute 291 of
the PDI, which contains the processing of the amparo and indicates
that when Frank was prevented from entering the country in 2005, he
He pointed out that "the reason for his trip was to visit former members
of Colonia Dignidad, those who were detained at that time, Gerhard
Mücke and Gerd Seewald." The same resource specified what the
Brahamite cult consisted of: «It is Christian in nature and its doctrinal
basis is based on the fact that the only valid source for faith is Holy
Scripture, in addition to William Branham's recognition of supernatural
graces and God's guidance. ».
According to the lawyer Rodríguez, before 2005 Frank had entered
Chile three times, but that is not consistent with the records held by
the authorities, since his immigration record indicates that before 2005
he was in the country seven times, the first of them in a trip of only two
days, in August 1998, a few months after Schäfer's escape from the
colony, which occurred at the end of 1997.
After that, always in very short trips, he traveled in the years 2000, 2001
(twice), 2004 (twice) and 2005, when he also arrived in Chile twice, in
February and in June, until in October they denied him the access.
It is at least doubtful, to put it considerately, that Frank

did not know Schäfer.
In fact, coinciding with other accounts, on the website of the Krefeld
Free People's Mission church, headed by Frank, he states that "I
consecrated my life to the Lord already in 1949 at the Hamburg Pentecostal
Conference and at the same time I learned about the special ministry of
Brother Branham. In 1955 I was allowed to attend his meetings in Karlsruhe
and was able to meet him personally during a first conversation.”25
In other words, he met Branham in person in the same activity in which

the American and Schäfer met.
By the way, this does not necessarily mean that Frank met the latter there,
but it would be strange if he had not, especially considering that Schäfer
was part of the American's escort and Frank, as Winfried Hempel points
out, officiated as his official translate.
The same was indicated by the German journalist Ulla Fröhling, who
stated that indeed at that time Schäfer met Frank and not only that.
According to her, during those days in Germany strong ties were forged
between him, Branham, Schäfer and some of his lieutenants, including
Alfred Matthusen, Walter Laube and Gerhard Mücke.26 For his part,
Hempel adds that, for a long time, the relationship between the colony,
Frank and Branham (until his death in 1965) was developed through
Mücke's wife, Briggite Baak.
According to the lawyer, she was the one who invited Frank to take over
as spiritual leader of the neighborhood after the escape of the pedophile.
In any case, it is clear that until July 2022, at the end of this investigation,
Frank was still acting as the spiritual guide of
the ex-settlers who escaped from Chilean justice and fled to Germany.
In fact, the most famous fugitive from the colony, the doctor Hartmut
Hopp, convicted in Chile for concealing sexual abuse against minors,
did not settle in the German city of Krefeld by chance, but because
Frank's church is there. . It is also no coincidence that other important
leaders of the colony who fled from Chilean justice, such as Albert
Schreiber, have come to Krefeld, and that many others have done
the same, despite the fact that Krefeld does not have many ties to
Schäfer's sect, whose initial headquarters was in the city of Siegburg,
located one hundred kilometers to the south.
For many people, Frank is the most pristine heir to Branham, with
whom he grew close after their initial meeting.
As he himself recounted, in 1958 he traveled to see the Master in
Dallas — where Roy E.
Davis—, after which he founded The Free People's Mission, in
Krefeld, a temple in which he preached on the doctrine of the latter
rain and the end times.
Regarding the North American, the official website of La Misión Popular
Libre compares him with the Apostle Paul and also with Saint John the Baptist.
They say he is a prophet, a seer, and the man chosen by God to
reignite the flames of evangelism after World War II.
In keeping with the doctrine of the latter rain, they consider it a

forerunner of the second coming of Jesus Christ: “We all know that
Brother Branham, the promised prophet (Mal. 4:5), was told on June
11, 1933: “As John the Baptist was sent to precede the first coming
of Christ, so you are sent with a message that will precede the second
coming of Christ”, reads the introduction to the Krefeld church.27
Frank also claims to talk to God. Indeed, in 1962, while he was
awake, he would have sent him an apocalyptic message from the
right side of his window, telling him that he should go preach in other
cities, to which he would have replied that they were not going to do
it. to listen. That voice would have
said: "My servant, the time is drawing near when they will listen to you.
Stock up on food and supplies, for a great famine is coming.”28 Shortly
thereafter, Frank traveled back to the United States, to tell Branham of
his supposed relief. After brainy hermeneutics sessions, they decided
that the food to which the revelation referred were, in fact, the recordings
of the American's sermons. However, as it becomes clear a little later,
the German in the end put the interpretations aside and seems to have
taken the message literally.
Frank continued in contact with Branham until his death and then with
his children, with the hierarchs that surrounded him and with their
children, in a scheme similar to that of Colonia Dignidad, according to
which those who today hold economic power are the children of who in
the first moments of the sect were close to Schäfer. He forged a huge
economic fabric, just as it did with Branham, whose main parent is the
company that distributes his sermons, Voice of God Recordings.
Everyone close to Branham, John Collins explained, became very

wealthy—including his grandfather, the same one who kicked him out of
The Message—and money began to flow not only as a result of the
Master-related products, but also because of means of donations One
of the most recent, $101 million, came to the organization anonymously
in 2011, not long after Schäfer's death.
In any case, there have always been very wealthy people around The
Message. One of them, Deb recounted, was Tatos Kardashian, the
patriarch of the celebrity family of the same last name, an Armenian who
emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1913, at which time he
changed his first name to Tom.
In Los Angeles, and already possessing a fortune, Kardashian married
Hanna Shakarian, niece of Demos Shakarian, one of the most important
hierarchs of The Message. Because of this, according to Deb, Kardashian
funded a "healing camp" in California.
Sarah Branham, daughter of the group's founder, asserted in a written

letter that, just as Collins recounts, or as happened to Deb Daulton once
she decided to denounce what had happened in Te Park, she had been
segregated from the church and from everything that had to do with her
father's legacy.29 The document, dated in New York in July 1989, is
intended for "The Bride of Christ," as followers of The Message also
refer to her group, and begins by explaining that he wants to make public
the reasons why she, unlike all other blood relatives and even politicians
of Branham, was at that moment in "a state of need."
Referring to his relatives, he points out that "they all live in the luxury
and comfort of the modern world", despite the fact that none of them had
ever worked, to later ensure that his father had been murdered.
Indeed, referring to the accident in which Branham died, he details that

«as you know, my mother and I were the only survivors. Now she has
passed away and I am the only living witness to what really happened in
that car."
Adding more intrigue to the matter, he specified that many times his
mother had told him "take it to the grave." Without being very clear, she
says that when they left Tucson for Jeffersonville her father was very
complicated, since his intention was to expose the names of members of
El Mensaje, including his own family. According to his version, he told his
wife that he was going to "report many things and give names this time,"
to which his interlocutor would have asked him not to do so, at which time
another vehicle rammed them head-on.
Sarah Branham spent two months in the hospital. Upon returning home,
she says that her mother was very nervous and asked her how much she
remembered of the moments before the accident, and then added that
whatever it was, she would take it with her to the grave.
Later, he showed him a note left by his father, in which he had written
an enigmatic phrase: "I will be betrayed."
by someone very close to me. Later, according to her, the page of the
notebook where the phrase was was torn out by Billy, her older
brother, whom she accuses of impersonating him after the death of
their father to transfer the company that was in his name. to another
entity.
At the time of his death, his father would have left an inheritance of
more than three million dollars at the time, of which he claims not to
have received any part; unlike Billy, who he says “suddenly started
handling large sums of money. He built himself a home to his liking,
with gold fittings and designer furniture."
After recounting a series of other events related to money, the letter

from the Master's daughter connects fully with the character of Ewald
Frank, who became important to The Message and the relations he
evidently had with the United States.
According to the letter, in May 1989 she had a vision, in which she
saw her father preaching to a crowd, at which point "they told me to
go see Brother Frank." He says that before that he asked if the voice
that ordered him that was referring to Frank. "Yes, go see Brother
Frank in Germany." Thus, "at the beginning of June of that year I
spent a week in the Mission in Krefeld, West Germany."
Sarah then wrote that "since I was told to go see brother Frank, I
spoke confidentially with him," without giving any further details, but it
appears that Frank persuaded her not to sue her brothers, which is
what she apparently said. I wanted to do.
Less than a decade later, Frank landed in Parral to carry out a mass
baptism. A former member of Colonia Dignidad, Georg Laube, pointed
out to Ciperchile that those who today manage what was left of the
old organization "are from the sect of Pastor Ewald Frank, and in their
religion women are second-class people, sex is a sin and all that".
One of those baptized, according to the same investigation, was
Hartmut Hopp.
In fact, when Martin Mathussen, one of the
current controllers of the colony, about the relationship that existed

between them and Frank, stated that "we have nothing to do with
Ewald Frank as an organization. I am a Christian, believer, and I do
not declare myself from any religious institution. When questioned
about whether he was baptized by the German, he dodged the
answer, declaring that "I believe that...religious rites are part of private
life and should not be a subject for the press."30
Frank's link to the colony exceeds, by the way, that of Hopp and
Mathussen. There are many more important leaders of Dignity who
as soon as they left the neighborhood went to Krefeld; to such an
extent that a report published in La Tercera in 2011 indicated that
inside the facilities of the Misión Libre, in Krefeld, there was a diamond-
shaped sticker that read "Casino Familiar, Villa Baviera."31 But let's
go back to that day . October 2005 when Frank was prevented from
leaving Pudahuel for southern Chile, and let's try to figure out what
was behind that ban.
On March 10 of that year, Paul Schäfer had been arrested in

Chivilcoy, near Buenos Aires. His fall, after being a fugitive for eight
years, finally made many of the settlers decide to speak up and
cooperate with justice.
Among the confessions and the unpublished information that the
police began to receive was the one related to the location of the
weapons from a large arsenal that, originally, was found at the head
of the airstrip of the town, which had been unearthed. and transferred
to two points, one within the same headquarters of the colony, in
Parral, and another in the family Casino of Bulnes.
Thanks to these data, the police agencies were able to find the
arsenals of the colony. The discovery was shocking not only because
of the three tons of weapons, explosives, ammunition, and chemical
elements that were there, but also because of the thousands of
documents contained in various boxes, including letters, folders, bank
documents, and forty-six thousand intelligence files.
This allowed the police and the different judges who were investigating
the network of crimes in Colonia Dignidad to form an idea
quite clear about the relations of the Krefeld pastor with the sect
settled in Chile.
The first indication that there was a very old relationship between
the two groups was found in a letter discovered among the documents
seized along with the arsenals. Dated June 6, 1970, it was addressed
to Hermann Schmidt—the nominal president of the colony—by "Your
people from Sieburg," an affiliate that had been the colony's first
headquarters before Schäfer decided to flee to the end of the world,
after being accused of sexual abuse in the area. Later, the
headquarters was managed for years by Hugo Bäar.
This letter and two others are related to the purchase and trafficking
of arms for the colony in Parral, through a person who is mentioned
with the ingenious cover name of "Mr.
Krefeld».
The first of them began by noting that "regarding the INFRA RED
special request, I immediately contacted Mr.
Krefeld. I will send you the answers you ask me for”,32 the senders
noted, explaining that “in Germany these things are subject to strict
controls, because they are only intended for the military and the
police” and specified that the acquisition of this item could be even
more complex. to buy weapons
To achieve this, the senders added -although most likely it was only
one, Hugo Bäar-, it was necessary to decide quickly. But there was a
problem: the prices were high and what they called "The Special Box"
was out of funds and "these things" had to be paid immediately, for
which they requested that they be deposited in the account of the
Private Social Mission (MSP, the original name of Colonia Dignidad in
Germany) at Deutsche Bank. They said goodbye asking if they had in
their possession "A brochure on the INFRARED technique", promising
to send it later, if not.
By the way, the INFRA RED special order is basically a list of

military and intelligence equipment, along with their values and
delivery times.
Among the things they were buying with the help of Mr.
Krefeld counted eight helmets with masks, four infrared light barriers,
radio receivers, an infrared camera, a small-format camera with
photosensitive film roll, nine voice inverters for radiotelephony,
decoders, an infrared aiming device, a detector of land mines and
another submarine, as well as a Homing No. 900 metascope (a night
vision telescope).
Another attached document in the Chilean judicial investigations gives

an account of what they called the "Krefeld special request expense", which
amounted to one hundred and twenty-six thousand marks and was much
more extensive than the "INFRARED special request".
Indeed, this second list included intercoms, radar alarms, vehicle
alarms, two bulletproof vests, another helmet, stethoscopes, five
telescopic sights, more infrared light barriers, another small camera,
another mine detector, "smoke" units , thirteen CS and five CN (tear
gas) units, among other things, as well as a huge amount of
ammunition for different weapons.
At the end of the list appeared a couple of rather cryptic words,

indicating that "three potato sorters and 1,500 potatoes" had also
been purchased.
Later, Kurt Schellenkamp confessed the meaning of some of those
words and others that they used in these communications. Today we
know that "eggs" and "potatoes" referred to grenades, while "fodder"
was ammunition for Schäfer's favorite Rheinmetall machine guns.
Two other cards completed the picture. The first was sent on
October 8, 1970 from Germany to Chile and the other is a reply in
reverse, from October 12. But before referring to them, it is necessary
to dwell on the dates, which are very important, since the first one
was sent only thirty-four days after the socialist Salvador Allende won
the presidential election on September 4 of that year.
Since it did not obtain more than fifty percent of the votes, on
October 24 the full Congress had to choose who would lead the
country for the next six years from among the two largest votes, that
is, Allende and former president Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez.
It was a fact that the person ratified would be Salvador Allende and
that idea had plunged the leader of the Parralina sect into a state of
extreme paroxysm, which is reflected in the letters, which show that
weapons were being acquired very rapidly because, As these letters
seem to indicate, the sect was part of a plan designed to prevent
Allende from taking office as president by force.
Yes, we are talking about the 1970 coup attempt, in which the CIA
and the DIA (US military intelligence), sectors of the army, Chilean
ultra-nationalists and, as we now know, Colonia Dignidad were
involved. In all this framework, “Mr. Krefeld" was an important part in
the acquisition of defense supplies, both in Germany and in the United
States.
The first letter, that of October 8, was sent by Hugo Bäar from
Siegburg. It was without an envelope and mentions some "oxygen
tubes" and supposed "PARI measurement and inhalation" equipment;
that is, medical equipment that had been sent through Lufthansa to
Chile.
Regarding the latter, Bäar expresses his hope that they will not
have problems at customs and adds that along with that letter are the
instructions for use of these two devices "from Krefeld to Eugen". He
adds that a third team will be sent once they know how the first two
arrived (that is, if they had been able to evade customs) and also
warns that he would soon send another two oxygen tubes "with the
other thing" (generally, what was traveling inside the tubes were
unarmed rifles), in addition to "other potatoes and some eggs."
In the same way, he reported that in about six more weeks he

would receive "a good disinfectant device, along with the corresponding
cleaning liquid." As detailed, “this device is only sold to the largest
pesticide factory in the United States and officially only to the armed
forces and police. Through these institutions, Mr. Krefeld asked for a
recording device to be sent to him.
sample for a demo and they promised to send it, but unfortunately it
will never be before six weeks, because they have to go through
several instances first ».
Then he referred, again, to the "cleaning liquid", which, judging by
the comment he made next, was tear gas, as he detailed that there
were three types and that "the strongest is so good that any little filth
will surrender to him", causing crying, breathing difficulties and
incapacity.
At the end he said goodbye with "affectionate greetings."
The return letter, dated October 12, 1970, was headlined
VERTRAULICH!!! (confidential), and although it does not have a
name, its author was evidently Schäfer, due to its contents, and its
addressee, Hugo Bäar.
In the letter, the sender began by telling Bäar that on Sunday he
had been at the house of his good friend Mario Mujica, in Parral, and
that there he had learned some unfortunate news: that the "pepper
injection" would only arrive six weeks later.33 Schäfer also noted that
he had been losing hope of "getting out of this without bloodshed," in
reference to Allende's election, and argued that one of the ideas he
had was to gas-spray the front of a shed, although it is not well
understood in what context.
In the same way, he said that they were going to need a lot of
practical and intellectual work, especially in relation to chemistry and
"mass manufacturing", since "we don't have much experience in it",
thus referring to the manufacture of weapons of all kinds: grenades,
submachine guns, machine guns, rifles, flamethrowers and toxic
gases, including sarin.
Next, the sender lamented to his interlocutor in Germany: "I would
have liked to have something very quickly, but the most difficult thing
is that they send the fodder here - that is, the ammunition - in the
quantity that is needed."
Then he detailed a series of ideas related to how to mount a radio
antenna in the MSP that would allow them to communicate directly
with Chile (as they finally did). To do this, it specifies that "it would be
necessary to ask Mr. Krefeld if Konrad or another person he trusted
or from radio control have this additional equipment and with them
capture the (illegible word) if it is possible to listen to the procedure in
Morse code from third parties."
Further on, he pointed out that Mr. Krefeld himself should indicate
to them, apparently regarding the transmissions he planned to carry
out between Chile and Germany, "if there are possibilities of being
detected." If that were the case, he added, they would connect only a
few hours a day, in case of an emergency.
This document has a third mention of Mr. Krefeld, since Schäfer
wondered if, regarding the “pepper injections, perhaps Mr. Krefeld
could not do something in the United States, taking into account the
characteristics of the CD (Colonia Dignidad).
In that case, naturally, two, three or four of these pieces of equipment
would have to be bought at the same time, so that the trip would be
worthwhile for him and also for us. But hey, that's my idea", adding
later that "we are impatient for the cleaning to finally be done and the
ghost of Allende to vanish forever."
We cannot say with certainty that the person referred to by the

author of that text as Mr. Krefeld was necessarily Frank, but it is
useful to note that no other connection of the colony to that city is
known and, much less, with someone who lived there and in turn had
ties to the United States, as the German shepherd did.
However, what he mentions below is much more incredible and

illustrates the level of contacts that Dignidad already had on that date,
since Schäfer indicated that a "coup" would take place and explained
"that "Eduard" is participating and a large mass of civilians, and that
Kennedy and the brother next door have made available the necessary
utensils, the best fodder, is very comforting. Then there is a mention
of what they say on the radio about "Washington and Chile", although
it is not clear what it refers to.
Subsequently, he commented that surely "it will be lost

lots of 'red' blood', before going into technical details about two types
of fodder that had just arrived.
Thanks to these details, everything indicates that it refers to rifle-
propelled grenades, such as those discovered in the 2005 raids, an
occasion in which the documents related to the shipment of oxygen
tubes, which were sent as a donation, were also recovered. of the
MSP for the Colonia Dignidad hospital.
According to the Lufthansa document in this regard, it was about

"drugs with no commercial value" and below, in English, with capital
letters, underlining and exclamation marks, they wrote LIFE AND
DEATH SHIPMENT!!!!, that is, "Life shipment Or death".
Let us dwell for a few seconds on the final part of Schäfer's letter,
which shows that he was fully aware that there was an ongoing coup
attempt, whose objective was to prevent Salvador Allende from taking
office as president of Chile.
Said coup is exhaustively documented through declassified North
American archives, thanks to which we know that the conspiracy
plans were activated between September 15 and 17, 1970, when the
Chilean journalist businessman Agustín Edwards traveled to
Washington DC and, through the owner of Pepsi Cola, Donald
Kendall, managed to meet with the director of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) and with the attorney general of the United States, who
brought Edwards' request to Richard Nixon.
Nixon agreed, remembering his old friendship with Kendall, and as

a consequence the CIA put together a "Task Force", which finally
designed an absurd coup plan, which would start with the kidnapping
of the commander-in-chief of the Army, René Schneider. .
The kidnapping, which finally took place on October 22, culminated

in a homicide. Its executioners were a group of extreme right-wing
youths, belonging to the wealthiest families in Santiago, and some
common criminals. In the operation they used submachine guns,
pistols, ammunition and tear gas grenades
that were entered into Chile through the US diplomatic pouch and
delivered by the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in
Santiago, Colonel Paul Wimert, although the sending entity was the
Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.
In other words, Schäfer was aware of two key elements. The first
is that someone named "Eduard" (which is how the name or surname
Edward is written in German) participated in the events. The second
element is that, although Schäfer (like Branham and all his entourage)
hated the assassinated President John Kennedy, the mention of his
last name must be understood as a veiled way of referring to the
United States and its participation in the plot. It is difficult, however,
to know what he meant by "The brother on the side." Argentina?
Canada? England?
What is clear is that Schäfer was aware of Washington's concern
about what was happening in Chile and also that "the utensils" and
fodder had been provided from there, which, he said, was something
very "comforting." In other words, he knew that there were weapons
and ammunition available to the conspirators, provided by US
intelligence, something that very few people in Chile knew about.
To these precedents against the presence of Frank in Chile would

be added another extremely relevant one, which appeared in October
2005 when one of the settlers, Michael Müller Altevogt, testified
before Judge Zepeda explaining, among other things, that there was
a new pastor who was visiting them in the village: Ewald Frank.
According to Müller, he was soon to travel to Chile again, and from
what the witness stated, he was very concerned, "since he follows
the religious line imposed by Schäfer";34 in other words, Branham's.
He added that he was trying to stop Frank from continuing to attend
the enclave, but it had been impossible. At that point, there were no
major access restrictions in what was left of the sect and therefore
"videos sent by Ewald Frank arrive in the town, which are seen by
some of his
followers. I have personally seen them. The pastor is to be met at the

airport by settler Manfred Skrabs, long one of the legal representatives
of the Dignity Welfare Society. I know that he is linked in Germany
with some people from the town. I do not know if he has any link with
ex-hierarchs like Albert Schreiber ».
The mention of Schreiber is not free. It is actually his response to

a question from the judge, which was not transcribed. For several
years the Chilean justice system had been looking for Schreiber, one
of the men who knew the most in the colony about weapons, human
rights violations and the sect's economic network, but for a long time
no one knew how to accurately report Where was it. Of course, there
were rumors, but these were only confirmed on October 11, 2005 —
three days before Müller's statement—, when a DVD that came from
Germany reached the hands of the PDI.
It was a record that contained one of Ewald Frank's sermons who,

as in the case of Branham and Schäfer, liked to be recorded.
The official letter with which the Human Rights Brigade sent images
to the judge specified that these images had been captured "in a
missionary center in Krefeld, Germany, where the church, printing
press and television studios of that ministry are located."
The video was dated July 29 of that same year, 2005, and at the
twenty-ninth minute it was possible to see Albert Schreiber and his
wife in the audience. He was one of the most important fugitives in
the colony, whom Chilean justice had also been looking for for seven
years and there he was, as one of Frank's flock.
The work of the Krefeld pastor in Parral during 1998 and in February
and June 2005 was fruitful for him. In his various trips, he led mass
baptisms of colonists in the Perquilauquén River and also officiated
at some marriages, although it was not to everyone's liking, not just
Müller.
Gerd Seewald pointed out in his court statements that in
In 2004, a couple whom he described as "very mentally flexible" traveled

to Germany and returned with the tapes of Branham's preaching (yes,
the one recorded by the tape boys), generating the enthusiasm of those
who had heard him in 1955 in Karlsruhe. After that, he asserted, the
sermons of Branham and Frank were the main religious material
disseminated in the town.35 In any case, just as Frank distanced himself
from Schäfer, Seewald did the same with respect to the former, asserting
that when he visited the colony "preached his false doctrines, which
are based on falsifications of scripture, sometimes with fantasy porn, and
managed to baptize one hundred and twenty-six people."
During the years that Frank was prohibited from entering Chile, he
wasted no time, because according to researcher Jan Stehle,36 at least
two of his most faithful followers, Urs Graff and Helmut Myskies, traveled
to preach to the Parral sect.
It is worth mentioning that the last time Hartmut Hopp was seen inside
the colony was on April 30, 2011, just when Graffen was leading a
religious act in which Hopp was present.
Some time later, he would appear already based in Krefeld.
After the Supreme Court agreed with Frank at the end of 2014, he
entered Chile on at least one more occasion.
Currently, the propagation of latter rain ideas is in the hands of at least
two settlers from the younger generations.
However, it is necessary to bear in mind that Frank is not the only

notorious follower of Branham, nor is Colonia Dignidad the only sect
whose leaders have ended up being persecuted by the courts of the
countries where they have established themselves, for different types of crimes.
One of the most violent examples is that of the sect headed by Robert
Gumbura, in Zimbabwe, who founded the Church of the message of the
end times RMG, whose final acronym corresponds to the first two names
and the last name of the prophet, a rubric that gives account of his
enormous megalomania.
In the style of Colonia Dignidad, Gumbura lived in a complex
fenced off on the outskirts of Harare, the capital of the country, inside
which there were several cabins where his eleven wives and thirty
children lived, as well as his closest collaborators. He had for himself
a luxurious two-story mansion, decorated with "exquisite furnishings
in most of the rooms."37 A large impressionist painting showing
Jesus flanked by William Branham and himself was displayed in the
central hall.
After being arrested in 2014, accused of the rape of at least nine
women, the pastor told the police that the furniture was to be donated
to the poor and that the large amount of pornography seized in one
of the rooms was actually , material that the new followers gave him
for his destruction.
Like Branham and Schäfer, Gumbura handled large sums of
money, as many executives of one of Zimbabwe's largest banks,
Stanbic Bank, were members of the sect, thanks to which they had
a constant flow of money. Like the Messiah of Colonia Dignidad, he
deeply despised democracy and had been implicated in an attempted
coup in 2007. 38
In 2014 he was put on trial, and although it is estimated that he

sexually abused close to two hundred victims - practically all the
women who were part of the sect - he was only found guilty of three
counts of rape and one of storing pornography. However, the
sentence was very harsh: fifty years. He died in 2021 in jail, after
being infected with covid-19.
Another famous Brahmin in serious trouble with the law is Vinworth
Dayal, who heads the Third Exodus Assembly church in Trinidad and
Tobago. The subject was arrested in 2021, accused of attempting to
launder nearly four million dollars whose origin is unclear, since he
could not explain its origin. It was cash, which he transported in
twenty-nine suitcases to the Central Bank of his country to exchange
for more modern bills when the ones he was carrying stopped
circulating. Later, he assured that they were the donations of his
faithful and that "Satan is trying to make me famous",39 but none of
this has convinced
the Trinidad and Tobago Financial Investigations Unit, which is still

investigating him.
It is estimated that today El Mensaje has close to two million
followers around the world and a presence on all continents, although
its essential focus is North and South America, especially in countries
like Peru and Paraguay, where there are several "tabernacles" In the
midst of the covid pandemic, the latter country became the favorite
destination for nearly two thousand anti-vaccine German citizens,
who fled to that country seeking supposed freedom from its imposition.
Of course, there are other reasons. Many of them are also anti-
immigrants (although now they are), conspiracy theorists who believe
that there is a "world government" and subjects who are against
paying taxes. And, of course, many of them are Branhamites too.
Part II
Parral's Messiah
Chapter 7
the final speech
—"They want to destroy us !" —Shouted that night at the end of

1997 Paul Schäfer. His frightened followers nodded their heads,
convinced that everything the leader said was true.
Just as they had done almost every night for the last forty years, they
were meeting in the colony assembly, although this would be one of
the last times.
For a year now, the police had searched the place unsuccessfully
for the "permanent uncle", as they also called him, who was clear
that he had to get out of there before they discovered the tunnels and
bunkers where he hid every time the detectives and police officers
they entered the place.
—"These pigs want to destroy our community, our work!" —Schäfer
reiterated, pointing directly to the images that were projected on the
curtain, a video with material edited from television (a privilege that
only he and some of his lieutenants enjoyed), in which three faces
were repeated obsessively.
The settlers kept nodding their heads, growing angrier and more
frightened, because for years they had heard the same refrain: that
everything outside the colony's fences was bad, perverse, and
conspiring against them. In the almost three years that Popular Unity
lasted, Schäfer and his leaders obsessively told them that an army of
communists led by Salvador Allende would come to take over the
farm, there in the Parral foothills, and that for this reason they should
manufacture weapons, ammunition and poisonous gases, to defend
themselves.
After the coup, and despite having an intense understanding with
the dictatorship, the imaginary enemies continued to appear: the
miristas,40 the communists, the socialists and, for a long time, in one
of the most insane chapters
from the history of Colonia Dignidad, the nuns of San Manuel, whom
Schäfer was convinced were communists disguised as women. Then it
would be the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, and even members of the
Army's Military Intelligence Service, to name a few.
No sect subsists without enemies, be they imaginary or real, since

thanks to them the messiah on duty unites his followers around that
supposed danger, something that is maximized in sects such as the
colony, based on the doctrine of the latter rain and an imminent end of
the world.
That is why that night Schäfer knew very well what he was doing by
repeating over and over again the message that he had propagated in
the community for so many years. Their prophecy that one fine day the
communists would come for them was finally being fulfilled and, of
course, that would be a prelude to the end of time.
"And what are you going to do?" he asked loudly, pointing to the
three faces projected by the curtain.
The first was that of the visiting minister from the Talca Court of
Appeals, Hernán González, who was investigating the sexual abuse
committed by Schäfer since the end of 1996. The second, that of the
prefect inspector Luis Henríquez, head of Department V of the Talca
Police. Investigations, and the third that of the plaintiff lawyer Hernán
Fernández.
While the faces appeared again and again, in a kind of infinite loop ,
the voice of the "general" (as the DINA officers called Schäfer)
thundered like a volcano and asked again and again what the members
would do. of the assembly regarding those three men, those
representatives of Satan on Earth, as he called them.
It was not a simple question. All the attendees understood that the
message was unequivocal: something had to be done and, in the
paranoid logic of the colony, that meant only one thing.
The moment was critical for Schäfer, who was clear that a final stage
was approaching for his sect, because after almost four decades of
absolute impunity, at the end of 1996 an event had happened that was
previously unthinkable: Chilean justice began to
act against the colony, five years after a first milestone, which occurred
when President Patricio Aylwin ordered the dissolution of its legal personality.
Although the community lawyers had already sniffed out the environment
very well and, consequently, had transferred the properties of the community
to a series of anonymous companies —among them Abratec, Agripalma,
Bardana, Cinaglosa and Cerro Florido it was a very strong signal , after
—, almost forty years during which the Chilean authorities had preferred to
look to the side every time one of the countless crimes within the enclave
was reported, especially those in which the hand of its leader, Paul Schäfer
Schneider, was guessed. .
It was not, of course, the first time that someone, somewhere in the
Chilean judicial, police or administrative structure, had such an occurrence,
but all those who had confronted the sect had ended badly.
The first authority that challenged Schäfer, the mayor of Linares Héctor
Taricco, ended up dismissed from his post by Parliament. For his part,
within the community, Wolfgang Knesse, the first young man to try to
escape, was not only recaptured twice —with the complicity of the
Carabineros in one of the cases— and returned to the enclave, but also
ended up convicted of alleged insults and slander, in a ruling that the
Supreme Court of Justice reversed only in 2016. Both cases occurred in
the 1960s, with democratically elected governments. In 1968, in fact, there
was a first investigative commission in the Chamber of Deputies, which
concluded that nothing anomalous was happening in the colony, just as the
German embassy in Santiago had pointed out for nearly thirty years.
Then, when the first serious onslaught began in 1996 and did not let up,
it became clear to Schäfer that time was running out very quickly and that
maybe, maybe, if any of those pesky emissaries of the devil were out of
sight, he would have still a few years to continue abusing children, the only
thing that really mattered to him.
According to different testimonies, the night of the video was the last time
that Schäfer was openly seen on the main premises. He remained

hidden for a couple more weeks, until around December 1997,
according to most sources, on an unusually rainy night, a jeep driven
by Erwin Fege Fabian and manned by Peter Schmidt and Matías
Gerlach took out Schäfer from the property, in the direction of the town
of Trabuncura, on the other side of the Perquilauquén river. On inland
roads, the vehicle headed south until it reached the outskirts of San
Carlos, some thirty kilometers north of Chillán.
There, according to Fege's testimony,41 there were two vehicles

waiting in the dark with several people inside, two of them Chileans
that the jeep driver said he did not know, although he did make out one
of the leaders of the neighborhood next to them. : Hans Jurgen Riesland.
Schäfer, Gerlach and Schmidt got out of the jeep and got into the
two cars.
According to another source, the Chileans were subjects related to
intelligence agencies of the military dictatorship, who would have
transferred Schäfer at full speed to the city of Los Angeles, where he
remained hidden for two more days. There he was picked up by his
great friend Maximiliano Rudolph, the pilot of the colony, the same one
who months before, in a crude distractive maneuver, had posed as
Schäfer in a hotel in Bariloche.
This time, however, Schäfer was sitting next to him, in a four-seater
plane in which they made a risky trip, circumventing the Andes
mountain range at the height of Alto Biobío, to later land in the
Argentine pampas, where « the permanent uncle” was expected by
other members of the colony, who welcomed him not only to see him
again, but also because he had three or four large suitcases full of
dollars.
Although the colony came to have a large number of accounts and
deposits in banks in Chile, the United States, Germany, the Cayman
Islands, St. Kitts and Neves, Canada, Uruguay, Liechtenstein and
other countries, all money received in cash from the colony
they delivered to Schäfer personally, who kept them in his room,

according to Hugo Bäar.
Years later, the colony's accountant, Erica Heimann, would confess
to the court that from 1985 to 2002 (when she had already been hiding
in Argentina for four years), she had to send at least ten million pesos
in cash from the the company Abratec to Schäfer, every month.42 In
addition to the above, the hierarch received money from all other
businesses in the colony, including the most important, arms trafficking.
This, without taking into account that it appropriated the pensions of
all the older inhabitants of the farm who had contributed to the German
pension system and the profits from everything that was produced in
the colony (such as food or gravel).
It was a lot, a lot of money, but no one questioned anything he did,

said or even suggested, as explained in 2005 by two of the attendees
at that final meeting in Parral, who "confessed" what they tried to do
after receiving the Schäfer's martingale regarding the need to "do
something" against Fernández, González and Henríquez.
In April of that year, both had already escaped from the colony and
were at the premises of the German embassy in Chile, on Las
Hualtatas avenue, in the upper neighborhood of Santiago.
In front of them were the then consul of that country in Santiago,
Ulrich Fischer, and two of their most bitter enemies, according to what
their former leader had led them to believe: Wolfgang Kneese and the
lawyer Hernán Fernández, two of the most tenacious pursuers that
Paul Schäfer had in life.
Seeing the lawyer, one of the ex-settlers came over to shake his
hand and thank him for all he had done. Fernández, in turn, thanked
him for the recognition. It was perhaps that gesture that led the first to
tell him something that had been choked in his throat for many years.
According to what he told him, after the episode in the video in

which Schäfer ordered the attendees to act, he and other members of
the colony stayed all night organizing a trip to Santiago
with the aim of assassinating him. Just like that: murder him. Moral
issues about it? Any transgression of religious or civil precepts? Any.
The leader had suggested it and that was law for them.
After devising several ways to end Fernández's life, they finally

decided on the most deadly weapon that the sect possessed, the
same one that for many was the "detente" that prevented Argentina,
during the Videla military dictatorship, from attacking Chile in 1978;
the same one that was intended to be used in the murder of Orlando
Letelier; the same one that killed DINA agents Miguel Becerra and
Manuel Leyton, and several other people in Chile: sarin gas, which
had been produced within the sect in the 1970s and perhaps even
earlier.
At that time, they knew that they still had a tube with the deadly
gas, although they did not know (nor did they care to find out) if it
would work or not after so many years.
“We started with a single mission: locate your car in Santiago and
put sarin on the door or the steering wheel. But we searched all day
and couldn't find it. When we got back, Schäfer harshly reprimanded
us. He told us that we were useless," the colonist recounted,
saddened, before his astonished listeners, as confirmed by Kneese
and Fernández.
The latter could not believe what he was hearing, not only because
of the murderous intent, but also because the assassin commando
had acted with unparalleled clumsiness, behind a non-existent car,
since he neither drives nor has a vehicle. To this was added another
fact worthy of a comedy of errors: they barely knew Santiago,
therefore, they were going around different sectors, without finding
the address of the alleged victim.
That level of improvisation shows the state of decadence that the
organization had reached at that point. Until just a few years earlier,
he was capable of carrying out deadly intelligence operations (more
on that later), harassing innocent people without leaving a trace, and
intimidating anyone who got in his way. However, by those dates
most of the leaders of the colony were already old and sick men, and
many of them had
quite clear that it was most likely that they would end their days in jail, as
punishment for the multiplicity of crimes committed with their leader.
That is why Schäfer's emphatic message was addressed to the youngest,

to the sons of the hierarchs, who at that time were between twenty and thirty
years old, boys who blindly believed in him, so much so that they were
capable of leaving for a unknown city, with a lethal poison on his hands, just
because he had hinted that "something had to be done."
How could they not? They had grown up thinking that "the permanent
uncle", the führer, "the master", as some even called him, was a messiah,
an exceptional being who had the gift of communicating with God.
Who best expressed the level of indoctrination that Schäfer imposed was
Hugo Bäar, second in command of the sect until his escape at the end of
1984, after which he gave an extensive statement in the German city of
Cologne: "Mr. Schäfer is
the only and final authority. He is the only pastor of all (and) knows everything
about everyone," he said.
His testimony, the first given by one of the leaders of the colony, is key to
understanding its composition, how it spread and how it came to control so
many people.
Bäar related that, after several years of studies in the Association of Free
Communities of Germany, he received his preaching degree in 1949. As
always happens in the postwar period, thousands, perhaps millions of people
sought solace in religion and, therefore, there were a significant number of
pastors or pseudo-pastors circulating everywhere.
One of them was Paul Schäfer Schneider, whom he met in the early fifties
at a kind of outdoor show organized by him in Brunswick.
Bäar recalled years later—supposedly repentant and ashamed—that from

that moment on he never ceased to be under the influence of that man, which,
he asserts, occurred because "he gave me the impression of (being) a very
decided. In his sermons he strongly emphasized
especially the confession and the determined imitation of Jesus Christ

without conditions; that is, the surrender of one's whole life to God through
Jesus Christ».
Chapter 8
doctor schneider
Schäfer was born in 1921 in Siegburg, a town located just ten

kilometers from Bonn and which today is part of the metropolitan area
that forms that city together with Cologne and several others.
According to the German journalist Gero Gemballa, author of the book
Colonia Dignidad,43 Schäfer's best friend in his childhood “was
Danilo, a fairground artist who lived with his dogs and cats in a small
room. Danilo presented the trained animals and then collected the
coins. Paul Schäfer helped him».
A few antecedents on the life of who would become the most
famous fugitive in the country appear in the file prepared by the
Chilean Medical Legal Service (SML) in September 2009,44 when
Schäfer was in prison, after having been detained four years before in
Buenos Aires and after the minister of jurisdiction who was investigating
him, Jorge Zepeda, asked the service to determine if the prisoner had
any mental problem.
Already eighty-seven years old at that time, the first thing the
document indicated regarding Schäfer was his paranoia, which was
expressed in the reiterated idea that "some people had come to see
him who wanted to kill him, attack him." , according to what he told the
gendarmes in charge of his custody.
By the way, this idea was old-fashioned. As Hugo Bäar said of him,
“he lives in continuous fear. His need for security is limitless” and so
he carried a semiautomatic pistol with a full magazine, but he also had
at least one machine gun on hand, always, in addition to all kinds of
security gadgets.
The forensic report specified that, in terms of the prisoner's life, one
of the events that marked him as a child was having lost his right eye.
In this regard, the researcher Paul Friedrich Heller points out
that "as a child he was irascible and in a fit of rage he emptied one
eye",45 although in his research on the sect, Álvaro Rojas gave a
different version. In it he mentions that "as a child and while trying to
untie a shoelace with a fork, he lost his right eye", as a result of which
a glass prosthesis was grafted.46
Heller asserts that in his adolescence Schäfer was a member of the

Eichenkreuz evangelical sports organization, at the age of fourteen he
began working in a dynamite factory located in Troitsdorf and at
eighteen he joined the army when war was declared after the invasion
of Poland, being assigned to an infirmary section as a stretcher-bearer,
which is due —according to other authors— to the fact that he was not
fit to be sent to the front due to the lack of an eye.
Despite this, he liked to say that he had been a captain—something

very difficult, since he did not even have a secondary education—that
his eye injury had occurred in combat and that, in addition, he had had
a girlfriend in Paris during the occupation, all false facts.
Something similar happened with another examination that was

carried out later at the SML, when the experts who physically examined
him stated that when asked about an old scar that he had in the
thoracodorsal area, Schäfer attributed it to a war wound. However,
"confronted with the fact that the experts have other information in this
regard, he finally concedes that it is the product of an accidental shot
during a hunt."47
In addition to his fake officer rank and fake war wounds, he also
liked being called "doctor," which of course he didn't have. In fact, the
former head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) in Parral,
Fernando Gómez Segovia, told the court that when he met him in June
1974, he was introduced as "Dr. Schneider."48
Obviously it was a badge, a false name, something usual in the

world of intelligence, espionage and totalitarian systems, but Schäfer's
obsession with doctorates went further. The
he wanted to be a doctor, whatever it was, since there is no doubt

that he felt diminished in front of the man who handled all the
information in the colony, Gerd Seewald.
«Once he convinced the community that he was the director of the
hospital and not me. That marked the impossibility of developing
myself autonomously,” said the colony's doctor and “chancellor”,
Hartmut Hopp, who, indeed, was — at least on paper — the director
of the colony hospital in one of his statements.49
In another court testimony, he was asked about a diploma, found
in a raid, in the name of Paul Schäfer and issued in the United States,
which gave him the degree of doctor of Theology.
To this, Hopp replied that "in 1969, in circumstances that I was in the
United States, for the sum of fifty dollars, I acquired this diploma with
the name of Paul Schäfer and I gave it to him when I arrived in Chile."
But let's go back to his younger years. Gemballa recounts that one
of Schäfer's first jobs after the war was as a children's manager at an
evangelical community church in Pirvitscheide, east of Bonn, from
which he was expelled on suspicion of child abuse. Despite this,
several young people had already entered his circle of followers and
it began to grow rapidly thanks to his street preaching, in which he
not only insinuated that he was sent by God, but also made use of a
resource that had given excellent results. results to Branham:
announcing that the apocalypse was fast approaching and that
humanity was in the age of "the latter rain."
Regarding his relationship with him, Mücke would explain, many

years later, that in 1948 he met Paul Schäfer at meetings of the
Christian Youth of the Lutheran Church, but that they later continued
independently. Since then they have never been separated. He
participated in all the activities that the leader carried out together
with his partner Hermann Schmidt and, while attending religious
activities, he also carried out construction and painting work in various
places, especially in Heide, Siegburg, a city where in 1954 Schäfer's
followers bought a
land with money from their own tithes, from the inheritances of some
and from the pensions of others.
As Bäar would recount much later, there was a wooden cabin there
that began to be enlarged in order to build a children's home run by
Schäfer, despite the fact that on paper the director was Schmidt, a
former Luftwaffe officer.
In 1956 the circle of friends went on to have a more official name:
Private Social Mission (MSP), a name very similar to the one that
currently identifies Ewald Frank's group in Krefeld, Free Popular
Mission, MPL.
The first president of the MSP was Hugo Bäar, although he clarified
that it was just a facade, an invented position, since he continued to
preach everywhere at that time that "the true rector of work" was
Schäfer.
The proselyte base grew very quickly and was nourished by more
young men, among them Johann van Den Berg would later become
one of the leaders of the colony.
He was born in Gronau, north of Bonn, but in 1956 he went to live
in the MSP, after meeting Mücke and Schäfer at a holiday camp. "We
became friends and (the latter) invited me to Siegburg," he
commented, explaining that his decision to leave the family home
was based on the fact that "after the war I had many financial
problems, I was cold, (I had) an uncle and a cousin killed in the war,
in Russia. I was very sorry in my soul, I wanted to help children in
poor condition, orphans, without parents ».
Rudolf Collen, another of the young men, recounted for his part: «I
met Paul Schäfer in a suburb of the city of Hamburg in 1950, at a
meeting of Christians. I then followed Paul to the city of Möchen-
Gladbach, where I worked as a carpenter at the Maria Hilf hospital. I
did repair work at that hospital, as there was a lot of damage from the
war. I did not participate as a soldier in the aforementioned world war,
I only participated together with the Hitler youth at first, in Hamburg”.50
Another who was part of the beginnings of the sect was Wilhelm
Wagner: “in 1956 in Germany, in circumstances that
I worked in a textile factory, I met Paul Schäfer, who was an

evangelical preacher and taught the word of the Lord. When I listened
to his words, I very much agreed with what he was saying regarding
religion».51 Hartmut Hopp, who was always considered Schäfer's
successor, declared to the Chilean justice system that since his
father died during World War II , his mother remarried when he was
seven years old. The stepfather turned out to be a very religious man,
an extreme Baptist who forced Hartmut and his brother to hand out
pamphlets about Jesus. Due to that fanaticism they met Schäfer. At
the age of twelve Hopp decided to run away from home and asked to
be admitted to the Heide home, where he finished his secondary
studies.
As Gemballa recounts in his book, many of those who joined the

Private Social Mission were “refugees from the Baltic, from East
Prussia and others, Germans from Russia. They were large families,
with many children, deeply believing Christians who had learned to
submit to the authorities without resisting, and artisans, simple people
who felt threatened by communism in their own homeland. Likewise,
there were "many single women, who had lost their husbands in
World War II."
However, Schäfer was most interested in small children.
A case that dramatically illustrates the foregoing appears in the

testimony given by another of Schäfer's lieutenants, who, despite the
fact that he became a victimizer as an adult, was also a victim as a
child, which is why we will protect his identity, which told that he
arrived at the colony when he was ten years old and on the same day
of his admission Schäfer began to abuse him.
Despite this horror, everyone fell bewitched by his charisma and
everyone was convinced that the leader of the nascent sect was an
enlightened one, a messiah chosen by divinity to bring heavenly
messages to Earth. Proof of this are the judicial testimonies of various
people in this regard.
Rudiger Schmidtke noted: “I learned faith and belief in God from

his example. Plus, I learned to sing ». For Erica Tymm, "he is a
religious man and I trusted everything he said because he was talking
about the Bible and I personally found God." Wolfgang Müller Arendt,
in turn, assured something very similar: "He is a religious man, who
explains the Bible." For his part, Waltraud Schaak affirmed that the
colony was the object of persecution, "mainly from group V",52 while
Dorothea Wittham, wife of Hartmut Hopp, pointed out that Schäfer
did not believe anything he was accused of, since he he knew from
Germany and believed that he was a correct and kind man. Walter
Laube assured that Schäfer was very good and Gisela Grulke, Gerd
Seewald's wife, argued that everything denounced about the sect
was false, since she had known him for more than forty years and he
was an honest and kind man, who loved him very much. children, but
nothing else.
By the way, Grulke was a doctor. In the same interrogation, he

referred to the death of the ten-year-old boy Hermann Munch, which
occurred due to the firing of a shotgun fired by the unfortunate Manuel
Contreras during a hunting party with Schäfer, a fact that they passed
off as an accident through a false autopsy, where a fall appeared as
the cause of death.
When many years later it was possible to exhume the boy's body,
the wounds in his skull unequivocally evidenced the impact of the
pellets. But Dr. Grulke did not see them and insisted in court that the
boy had died after hitting his head on the bumper of a moving truck.
There was, he claimed, no evidence of ammunition.
To all of them, Schäfer was a god, someone they couldn't say no

to, someone they were all willing to fight, die and even kill for,
especially the youngest.
Chapter 9
escape to the end of the world
It is always so. Every sect is structured around a charismatic and

attractive leader, who is blindly believed. David Koresh, the head of
the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, was a "long-haired, fine-looking
young man, a rebel and a born leader. He was intelligent, enterprising,
ambitious and determined. He had the fluent, confident verb of a
lawyer or a television preacher. And he knew the Bible. He had a
photographic memory and could recite chapters and verses of the
Old Testament without omitting a word of the text,” Clifford Linedecker
recounts of him.53
The founder of the famous sect of Scientology, Ron Hubbard, was
an equally attractive subject. He seemed to be “the divine authority
whose every word was considered a kind of holy scripture” and, at
the same time, “the handsome and funny hero of a B-movie who had
seen it all and somehow understood it all”,54 while Luis Alberto
Caamaño Mora, an evangelical pastor sentenced to seventeen years
in prison in Concepción for sexual crimes committed against minors
who were part of the group he led in Talcahuano, was seen by his
followers as someone "who had been revealed by the Lord and with
whom they selflessly shared the word of God, which captivated them
(and made them) follow him unconditionally.”55
We could go on citing examples for a long time, but the idea is

simple: the common denominator in all these cases is that they are
individuals endowed with great charisma and who are indisputably
attractive to their followers, which has nothing to do with their physical
appearance. or the way they dress, but with the strength of their
convictions, the way they express themselves, the security with which
they convey what they say or imply has been revealed to them
to them and only to them; that is, a message that is never fully transmitted
to its adherents, perhaps because of that old idea that the strength of
secrets lies not so much in the secret itself as in the fact of possessing it.
The one who is the bearer of secrets forbidden to others is, therefore, a
chosen one, someone superior to the rest of mortals, a being endowed
with divinity, the only one capable of guiding his flock towards the promised
land or who will make it possible for them to leave. their earthly bodies and
ascend to a planet hidden behind a comet, or any other nonsense of this
kind.
Thus, in the 20th century the world knew saucer sects, such as Heaven's
Gate; cults based on a Beatles song, such as that of Charles Manson,
who believed that Helter Skelter contained secret messages intended for
him; anti-communist sects, such as the Moon; others dedicated to group
sex, such as the Rajneesh movement, and many more.
In general, these individuals, says Rick Ross, present narcissistic

personality disorder and also show "a progressive pattern of behavior that
reflects grandiosity, a need to be admired and a lack of empathy."56 In
some cases, adds Ross, citing the psychiatrist Louis J.
West, the leader, is rightly psychopathic and often "charming, brilliant and
very persuasive. They quickly gain people's trust and are mysteriously
prone to manipulating and conning people."
Referring to the videotaped will Marshall Applewhite left behind before

he led thirty-seven people to commit suicide in California in 1997, West
asserted that he was "delusional, sexually repressed and suffered from a
clear case of paranoia," characteristics that could also be attributed to
Paul Schäfer, except for one detail too egregious to be a simple detail: it
is very likely that at some point in his life he was convinced that he was
God's chosen one or God himself, but he did not suffer from delusions or
hallucinations of any kind. type.
On the contrary, as established by the SML, Schäfer does not

He had mental illnesses that could affect his sense of reality and
render him incapable of standing trial. The leader of the colony, as
well as the hierarchs who accompanied him for years, was a cold
criminal and lacking in empathy, who also had a very structured plan
for his ultimate purpose, which was to abuse children. In addition, he
lied compulsively. On the few occasions when he came forward to
testify in court, starting in 2005, he always denied everything: he knew
nothing about weapons, sexual abuse, disappeared detainees,
nothing at all, despite the fact that at that point most of his hierarchs,
trying to find a way out for themselves, had begun to talk to the police
and justice. He was also an obsessive paranoid. Paranoia is a trait
that very often occurs in the type of messianic leader, who habitually
believes that he is persecuted by sinister powers that inhabit the
world outside the community they have formed. Hence, they confine
their proselytes with the argument of protecting them from the
antichrist, from 5G, chemtrails, or whatever. And while publicly they
make up a fantasy out of paranoia, privately it's because, at some
point, the police will descend on them.
In the case of Paul Schäfer, despite his delusion of persecution, he

clearly knew that one day they would arrest him for the many crimes
he had committed. Even so, he created impressive security measures
that, together with the protection of local and national authorities and
the psychological and physical coercion he exerted on his victims
with the help of his lieutenants, gave him absolute impunity for more
than four decades.
But this awareness of his legal situation was due to a basic factor:
the case No. 14.Js.173-61, opened around 1959 in the criminal court
of the city of Gronau, given the complaint of at least two parents, who
they accused Schäfer of having sexually assaulted their children.
With a slowness rather unbecoming of traditional German efficiency,

the police began to investigate in a rather lax manner, which allowed
Schäfer to travel through different countries looking for some
place to settle (as Jim Jones would do just a couple of years later).
In this regard, Hugo Bäar recounted that «in 1960 Mr. Schäfer, Mr.
Schmidt and I undertook a three-month trip through various Arab
countries and through Israel, by car, to learn about the social situation
and work with orphans. Mr. Schäfer returned a month earlier, leaving
Jordan.'
There are two aspects of that journey that, however, Bäar omitted.
The first of them is that what they were doing was looking for a place
to settle. The second, that Schäfer returned from that trip with an
irregularly adopted child in Palestine. His name: Hussein Siam.
They finally decided on Chile, according to Bäar, because when they

returned to Germany they met someone whose ancestors had
emigrated to Chile, who spoke highly of the country, after which they
went to see the Chilean ambassador in Bonn, Arturo Maschke.
They sold Heide's home for nine hundred and fifty thousand marks,
and all who had property did the same, putting their capital into a
common pool. In any case, money was not lacking.
As Georg Packmor recounted after his escape from the sect in 1985,
all those who were part of it contributed a tithe - that is, ten percent of
their income - to Schäfer, "in order, according to him, to ensure a place
in heaven for us." . According to his sermons, this was the first goal: to
get rid of greed.
Let us continue with Bäar's testimony: «At the beginning of 1961, Mr.
Schmidt and Mr. Schäfer flew to Chile. The car was transported by
ship. I moved completely to the youth home in Heide, near Siegburg,
and took over the management of the home.'
What a coincidence: Just two weeks after Schäfer's flight to Chile,

"two officers of the Siegburg criminal police appeared and explained to
me that three boys had given statements to the Gronau criminal police
that Mr. Schäfer had committed sexual crimes against them in the
youth home", asserted Bäar, who would recount years later that "they
were only boys who spent their holidays in our home" and
that "when taking statements from the boys who lived in the home,
the officials did not find any confirmation for such crimes."
Another fact that Bäar was careful not to mention is that Schmidt
and Schäfer's flight to Santiago was not alone. They were
accompanied, in the same row of seats, by a third German, of whom
we only know his last name, Falk. Since he had already begun to
suspect that there was something strange in those two subjects, he
would later tell Rudi Cohn —another German, who welcomed them
into his house in the La Reina commune for a long time— that in the
middle of the trip he became the one asleep to hear what they both
said: «They would found a company with Germans brought to Chile,
they would make them work for free, since they had heard about
Chilean legislation, which allowed social contributions -retirement and
health insurance- not to be paid to members of a benevolent society.
Nor was it necessary to pay salaries. In this way, they could make
people work for free, thereby making huge profits, but at that moment
they realized that I was listening and changed their attitude towards
me, treating me very antagonistically.”57 But Schäfer not only chose
the country because of Falk's references, but because of a very
important aspect, and which has become evident in recent years:
there is no extradition treaty with Germany, something essential for
those who are fleeing from justice.
Indeed, Hartmut Hopp, who in 2011 was sentenced to serve an
effective sentence of five years and one day as an accessory after
the sexual abuse of Schäfer, today enjoys complete impunity because
he managed to escape to Krefeld. The same happened with Albert
Schreiber and much more recently with Reinhard Döhring, a key man
regarding the information on the whereabouts of the remains of the
political prisoners executed inside the premises.
Schäfer certainly knew what he was doing, but moving more than
a hundred people from one continent to another is not that easy. In
addition to money, significant amounts of persuasion are needed,
and the main argument for this was obviously religious. Georg
Packmor recounted that most of the
people who left the first world to settle in the foothills of the Andes did
so "because they were convinced they were going to the promised
land, the promised paradise."
But of course, that wasn't reason enough for everyone.
Wolfgang Kneese points out that, in fact, at least three other excuses
were invented to justify Germany's departure. Those within the sect,
especially children, were told they had to leave because the Russians
would invade the country; The Chilean authorities, including the
ambassador to Germany, Arturo Mascke, were told that they would
travel to help the orphans of the Valdivia earthquake, while the parents
of the children who were being abducted were reassured that there
was nothing wrong with them. What to worry about, because the
young people would go on a musical tour of Denmark and return
soon.58 However, they were not the only versions. Gerhard Mücke
would say that the reason for leaving Heide was that "space was
very small". Wilhelm Wagner, in turn, recalled that “on one occasion,
Schäfer, while we were in a meeting, told us that we would travel to
Chile in order to teach the word of the Lord and help poor and sick
people.
As we were coming out of the Second World War and with the
purpose of opting for a better personal and family life, Schäfer asked
us to sell all our belongings, to raise enough money and be able to
fulfill our dreams of peace and harmony in Chile»59.
Rudolf Collen heard something similar: «The fact is that after this
home had been running for about four or five years, Schäfer held a
meeting where he stated that there were problems due to the religion
they professed and that he was going to request the company of two
people to go out. to find a new home in distant lands.”60
For his part, Willi Malessa recalled that on any given day in 1960
or 1961, just as it happened thirty-six years later in Chile, they simply
stopped seeing Schäfer. A few months after he disappeared, "one of
his trusted men, Kurt Schnellenkamp, took several children in a van to
crossing the Belgian border, where we surprisingly met Schäfer, who

made contact with each of the children and gave us separate instructions
on what to say if the police questioned us about sexual abuse by him."
.61 Like most of his life, Schäfer was very lucky. No one questioned the
children and in Chile they were generously received.
Then they bought a farm, San Manuel, which had formerly belonged to
Italian settlers, in the Catillo sector, some thirty-five kilometers to the
east of Parral, at the foot of the foothills and with a beautiful natural
environment, especially due to the snow-capped peaks. of the mountain
range, which undoubtedly remind one of the Bavarian landscapes.
In the country they gave legal form to the sect by creating a

corporation; that is to say, a non-profit legal person called "Sociedad
Benefactora y Educacional Dignidad", which in a short time began to
expand through the purchase of neighboring properties and properties
in other places. Only the main property, which reached Argentina, is
estimated to have an extension of at least seventeen thousand hectares.
Among the acquisitions, there is another large property in the Bulnes
commune, eighty kilometers from Concepción, where a crushing plant
works, which extracts aggregates from the Itata river, and the family
Casino was installed in 1977, a restaurant that was staffed by Germans
with wandering eyes and to which the entry of women with accentuated
necklines or very short skirts was prohibited.
Through front companies, they bought real estate in other cities such
as Parral —there, a house owned by the sect was later ceded to DINA
—, Santiago, in the Ñuñoa commune, where they had a large house, or
Concepción.
It was in this last city where they kept important bank accounts and
where Fernando's law firm was located.
Saenger, who for years represented Schäfer, but cut ties when he
decided not to go to court summons, to
from 1997, and also where the doctor Hartmut Hopp worked in a
private clinic.
Later, the city of Los Angeles became another epicenter of activity
for the colony.
At the same time, the MSP continued to maintain an office in
Siegburg, but very few privileged people were able to travel, not even
to places as close as Parral or San Carlos, the other commune close
to the main property. In reality, for the majority of the inhabitants of
the property, the only thing that existed was confinement.
Proof of this is the ordeal experienced by Wolfgang Müller Lilischies
- today Wolfgang Kneese - who met Schäfer in 1957, when he was
twelve years old and living in Heide, when his mother sent him on
fourteen days of vacation to the home run by the excavato german.
For Knesse, that moment was "the beginning of years of unimaginable
oppression, slavery and torture", since he was never able to leave
there again, he was prevented from any kind of communication with
his mother, Vera Lilishkies, he was forced to work, and what it is even
worse, subjected to the abuses of the leader. The young man was
one of the first people sent to Chile. Already in Parral he began to
think about escaping. In June 1962 he tried for the first time mounted
on a horse until the Panamericana. At the first service station he
found, he left the horse tied to a post, with a piece of paper indicating
that both the animal and the saddle belonged to Colonia Dignidad.
That day it was raining torrentially and, not knowing what to do or
where to go, and barely stammering a little Spanish, he hitchhiked
until a family from Chillana stopped and took him home.
However, a few days later he was arrested, accused of stealing the

horse, and re-entered the colony. In 1963 his mother finally received
the chance to see him from Schäfer. To do this, they put conditions
on him: he had to leave Germany, join the colony in Chile and work
for it. Desperate, she accepted and moved to Parral. Shortly after
arriving, "they locked her in a punishment room, with abuse and
drugs, after they found out that I had told them about my escape,"
says Kneese. In order to avoid contact between the two, they decided
to move the young man to Santiago, to the house
that the colony kept in Ñuñoa, from where he managed to make his
second escape. Thus, he arrived in San Bernardo and managed to go
to Chillán to seek help with the same family that had helped him before,
who found him lodging with some friends in Temuco.
He had been there for about two weeks when a police patrol appeared
and took him out of the place and returned him to the neighborhood,
without explanation.
Gemballa recounts in his book that the recaptured Wolfgang had his
hair cut very short and "he was sentenced not to speak for three years.
He always received less to eat and drink than the other workers in the
field. In the camp cemetery I had to dig graves.
Kneese assured that “the repression after the capture was as brutal
as in the first escape. This time they isolated me, I had to sleep in a cell.
One day they told me I had a disease and they started giving me pills
every day." Realizing that the pills made him dizzy, he began to avoid
taking them, hiding them under his tongue when he was required to open
his mouth to see if he had swallowed them. But, of course, it didn't take
them long to realize the deception, so the colony's doctors replaced the
pills with injections. In the same way, they dressed him in red during the
day and white at night, to make it easier to identify him in case he tried
to escape.
Despite this, in August 1966 he tried again, fearing that he would

suffer the same fate as Ursula Schmitke, a young "rebellious" like him,
who months before had died of an alleged pneumonia in the middle of
summer, a death that has always been suspected. the presence of a
chemical agent such as sarin gas.
Former colonist Ingrid Szurgelies recounts that Ursula was murdered
because in the colony they thought she was a young woman who "liked
to look at boys, it's normal, but that was not well received by Schäfer.
Schäfer always needed victims to challenge, beat up, isolate, and she
was one of those victims."
For the third escape, Kneese jumped into the Perquilauquén River,
which he swam across, followed by patrols of armed men and by
sheepdogs and Dobermans. Completely bloodied, he managed
arrive at a small restaurant in Catillo, where they gave him food and
new clothes. Thanks to the help received, he was able to reach Parral
and take a train to Santiago. There he immediately went to the German
embassy. They took statements from him for several hours and sent
him to the German nursing home in Pudahuel, where, at the request of
the diplomatic legation, he was kept in the custody of the PDI.
Said measure, it would be verified later, was more than necessary,
since on March 8, 1967, fifteen settlers tried to assault the home to
kidnap him. However, the presence of the police frustrated the plans of
the failed assailants, some of whom were arrested. The event caused
a lot of interest in the press and in the following days the young fugitive
was interviewed by various media, which the colony used to file a
complaint against him.
According to a lawsuit for libel filed against him by lawyer Luis Ortiz
Quiroga, Kneese had told Ercilla magazine that "his former colleagues
from the neighborhood are looking for him to kill him." Likewise, they
found it insulting that he said that "we in the Colony are slaves and we
lead a life of dogs"; In the same way, that a third person, Melania
Sepúlveda, owner of the restaurant in the Cuatro Esquinas sector,
where they had helped him, pointed out to the newspaper Las Últimas
Noticias that, according to Müller, they were chasing him with dogs
and carbines, in addition to adding that "he told us that they beat them
when they did not do the work well, that they locked them in a basement
and tied the girls by the arms to the wall and whipped them».
The complaint sponsored by Ortiz Quiroga maintained that all these

accusations were "totally false" and that, on the contrary, the directors
of the benefactor society were "serious, honest people and dedicated
exclusively to work."
That judicial process was riddled with irregularities. According to
Gemballa, “although Wolfgang Müller spoke Spanish, in court he was
only allowed to speak German. The management (of the colony)
treated the interpreter in a particularly deferential way. He was invited
along with his wife and son to the Colony
Dignity, they were hosted and cared for, they gave him small and
large gifts.
On February 25, 1967, Müller/Kneese was sentenced in the first
instance by the Parral Court of First Instance, Hernán Olate Melo. In
the midst of all these ups and downs, the young man had already
spent several months in jail, accused by the directors of Colonia
Dignidad of alleged acts of sexual connotation -in circumstances in
which he was the victim- and was not willing to go to jail again. .
Thus, still confined in the Pudahuel home of the German embassy

and with his mother in Santiago at that time, who had to be released
by the colony, due to public pressure and the scandal that arose after
the attempted assault on the home for the elderly, Wolfgang began
to devise some way to escape, in which the German diplomatic
legation in Chile also intervened, the same one that would later turn
a blind eye to what was happening in the colony. But thanks to the
willingness that existed in 1967, staff from that entity put Wolfgang's
mother, Vera Lilishkies, in contact with a family of Swiss origin named
Jakob, who was willing to help.
Everything was planned in detail with them and on July 9, 1967,

the day of the Christ the Redeemer festival in Los Libertadores Pass,
the Swiss set out by car for the mountains with the young German,
knowing that due to the number of people there would be that day the
controls would be less strict and the police would be more busy with
the crowd.
A couple of kilometers before Chilean customs, the car stopped to
the side and one of his "guardian angels", as Kneese defined them,
got out of the car with him and led him into a path, explaining to him
where to go. continue in order to cross the mountain range on foot
and surrounding the customs and police facilities, through what he
remembers as "a clandestine journey, over precipices, mountain
edges and non-existent roads."
A few hours later, back in Argentina, he was reunited with the
Jakob family, whose members dropped him off in Mendoza, from
where he made a phone call to a number in Santiago that
had written down on a piece of paper. When they answered him, he

only said: "The pregnant woman gave birth." The number corresponded
to an annex of the German embassy in Santiago, where they waited
for the password to be pronounced in case of arriving safely in
Argentina. More than fifty years later, Kneese was acquitted of all
accusations by the highest instance of Chilean justice.
Chapter 10
Herd of Pigs!
From William Branham, Schäfer embraced the ideas that were most
accommodating to his goals and, of course, discarded others, as did
Jim Jones, Leo Mercier, Robert Gumbura, and other sectarian
leaders. His main emphases, inherited from the American, were on
three formidable mind control mechanisms.
In the case of the pedophile settled in Chile, "healing" was not

something that caught his attention or for which he awarded dowries.
However, he took into consideration the episode of the Bethesda
fountain, basically because he was very interested in cultivating the
idea of the existence of the supernatural, since with it he reinforced
in his followers the belief that he was a superior being and a messiah,
a a prophet, someone they had to blindly obey, someone they had to
give their lives for if necessary.
The second mechanism he used was the public confession of sins,
small and big. Thanks to this and the creation of his own network of
informants within the sect, Schäfer knew everything about everyone.
One of the rules that existed within the farm, as Bäar explained,
was that "about everything that has been discussed in a meeting or
conversation within a group, or about things that one finds out about,
even by chance You cannot talk to any other person, not even with
the person who knows the matter, much less with others who know
nothing about it. This is valid both for the spouses towards each other
and for the behavior of the children towards the parents, and vice
versa. Children can never approach them with any personal problem,
with something that has happened, or with a question to their parents.
If the children had a problem at their workplace, the only competent
person was Mr. Schäfer or the group,
or inside the workshop, the boss. Also when a matter is discussed

within the group, Mr. Schäfer must be informed». So there was nothing
he didn't know about. And if something did not reach their ears through
these routes, there were other ways of knowing, thanks to the cameras
installed at all entrances, as well as motion sensors, even on the wire
fences, which warned of any attempted escape. Of course, the
justification for all these security measures was other: to prevent
communists from entering the property.
In addition, the place had been fenced off. In Packmor's words,

“with tripping wire; that is to say, of fine wire spider webs... Any person
who unknowingly walks or passes with a vehicle over those wires
triggers a signal at the central station, which is observed day and
night, and immediately German shepherd dogs and some young men
come in fast cars to the place.
Every movement was observed from the reception house by

Schäfer, who "directs and inspects those who pass, the visitors, from
within, and decides whether they can pass the door or not, be it to the
hospital, be it to the guest house, after that the documentation of the
car and their own licenses and passports have been withdrawn ».
The third aspect that was central to Schäfer was the interpretation
of dreams, since just as the colonists were obliged to tell what
happened to them in their daily lives, they also had to give an account
of their dream activity, with the excuse that one of they could have a
divine revelation. Thus, the leader and his hierarchs even found out
what was happening in the subconscious of his followers.
Isolated from the outside world, separated from their families, forced
to work as slaves, sexually abused, stripped of money and identity
documents, and spied on in their privacy, hundreds of people lived for
decades under the rule of Schäfer, who did not even make the effort
to be cordial and close. At most, from time to time he released hollow
expressions like "my children."
Georg Packmor would recount many years later that "what we

It was strange upon arrival in Chile was the absolutely dominant tone,
not to say brutally cheeky, in which rudeness was not spared, which
was accepted by the members of the community. Indeed, Schäfer
began to constantly insult his already frightened followers, with
disqualifying, profane, humiliating expressions, as recorded in the
surviving audios. "Hlock of pigs!", "You're a snake!", "Shut your mouth,
you have nothing to claim here", "He must be a damn pig!", "You must
be a huge piece of shit" are some of the epithets with which he
rebuked them.
At one of the assemblies, he is heard calling a young girl "shameless,

cool." The context is not understood, but then it says that the person
to whom it refers has "a demonic tendency" and that he was observed
by Satan; He then describes her as a "possessed girl", to add that she
is "a woman whose soul is completely atrophied", after which he asks
the assembly for permission to hit her. In another record, he refers to
a young woman as "cow" and "pooped chicken", although, of course,
he claimed to have a justification for it, since he assured that if he
used that type of language it was because "God has not given me the
grace that you learned to retain" (his teachings, of course).
Like the good Branham heir that he was, Schäfer hated women.
When Lotti Packmor was made to travel from Germany to Parral in
1970, she was shocked to find that adolescent girls had practically no
underwear in good condition, much less comfortable.
Naive, she provided them with some clothes that she brought with
her and allowed some parents to share brief moments with their
daughters. After a few days, she was summoned to an assembly in
which everything revolved around her.
Schäfer reproached him that "how had it occurred to me to put
these girls in contact with fashion again that he had brought up so well
and so cleanly, with whom he had already had many problems, and
tell them about Germany and how things were going." in Germany".
According to Lotti, all he had done was explain a little to

girls about clothing stores, because "children here don't know such
things exist." As punishment, she was sent to work in the chicken coop,
but not before receiving a good dose of insults.
She also affirmed that “all the women of the farm are prohibited from
stepping on the carpentry, the electricity workshop, the lathe workshop,
the mechanics and locksmith workshop, the vulcanization workshop, etc.
The ban comes from Schäfer himself. Before the assembled village
community he said: "If I find a woman in a workshop, I will kick her to the
ground if she doesn't follow my orders."
Gerd Seewald would say years later on the matter that every time a
young woman flirted with a boy, she was punished because —following
Branham's teachings— "women had received their beauty from the devil,
to seduce men." 62
Chapter 11
dreams and confession
As we have already said, one of the biblical stories that Schäfer liked
the most, like Branham, was the one related to the source of Bethesda.
In his preaching, he pointed out that it was "a place where miracles
happen", asserting that "these are historical facts", as if they were
scientifically proven data. He also affirmed that there the blind were
able to see and the lame to walk, arguing that "this happened" and
that they were "documented and historical" events.
As heard in one of the audios, "the Lord Jesus said that when two
or three meet in my name, I am there in the midst of them", to then
ask if he was Jesus, since they were gathered in his name, which led
a good part of the assembly to say yes and only one of its members,
hesitant, to mumble "no"».
The answer Schäfer expected was the first: “You

say no. The others say yes. But what I have said... that
It must be true, at least from me: "That here is God"».
For his astonished audience, who had not noticed such an
distinguished visit, it was then clear that the man who was speaking
to them was, indeed, an enlightened person, someone who could see
what was forbidden to ordinary people, a conduit, an antenna that he
connected them with divinity, which was made even clearer when he
stated that "I am here with the mission of the word of God, to preach
the message, call everyone to repentance and conversion, and to
turn away from evil."
The message? Yeah right, Branham's favorite word.
However, there were times when he was much more explicit: "God
has not spoken to me in vain for more than twenty years," he pointed
out on one occasion, with the same words used by the
American healer and his compatriot Jim Jones, openly claiming to

have divine contacts of the highest level.
In several of his sermons, he also boasted of his lack of preparation,
but he did so because, in exchange for it, he had something more
interesting to offer his proselytes: "Yes, I say it, without theological
studies, that's how God has given it to me." pointed out, that's how I
have to transmit it ».
Along with the above, he encouraged fear of the devil, which he
often compared to communism: "Put on your red glasses, those that
the devil encourages," he used to say, and of course, as a good
acolyte of the latter rain, he also habitually spoke about the apocalypse,
which he also believed was a sign of the times: "If we agreed here
and prayed now for communism to disappear completely from the
earth, a new Antichrist would come."
In this regard, Hopp confessed that the violent psychiatric treatments

that were applied in the villa to the rebellious settlers, which implied
strong medication, the application of electroshocks and constant
beatings, were used "as a way of breaking the will of the people who
they opposed him (Schäfer). The use of these interventions by Mr.
Schäfer was not due to medical treatments, but because he thought
that people had a demonic possession».63 Trying to determine his
responsibilities in this matter, given that as a doctor he supervised
many of these treatments, he argued that “the father of the Schaffrik
brothers, Mr. Helmuth, suffered from schizophrenia that was treated
by Dr. Marcelo Varas and Mr. Schäfer maintained that these illnesses
were of a demonic nature and were inherited. As I have learned, Mr.
Schäfer marginalized me from these practices or treatments because
he considered me an intellectual who did not understand religious
arguments.
As we pointed out previously, another of the methods that Schäfer

used to control his followers was the interpretation of dreams, even
though the usual thing was that he dealt quite
derogatory to those who dared to speak about them. A sample button:

“I don't give a damn what you understand, I don't buy anything from
you. I could express it even more ordinarily, but I will not do that this
afternoon. And what you understand I don't give a shit. Here it is not
about your vision, "he replied to a young man who recounted his dream
the night before, as recorded in one of the audios.
One woman, Gudrun, recounted during an assembly that she had

dreamed that she was in a ring asking for forgiveness from "Uncle
Paul", after which she cut a hose into twenty-eight pieces, and that she
had woken up, convinced that "God He talked with me".
This statement was not to the liking of Schäfer, who demanded

evidence that he had spoken to God, and then blurted out: "You're
crazy, girl", adding a peculiar insult afterwards: "frog mind".
Ingrid Szurgelies explained that “I was often afraid of him, because

every night there were meetings in a common room and he wrote
names on a blackboard when people were guilty of something.
My name was also written there, before the whole assembly, and
sometimes I didn't know why. Many times it was for minor things, like
breaking shoes, and he sent young people like me outside, to receive
punishment with sticks.
One of his closest friends, Hartmut Hopp, would explain many years
later that "I always considered what Schäfer said, morally and
religiously, as the last word."64 Hence, he followed the leader's
mandate without question and accepted all the punishments.
According to him, the basis for the beatings rested on a phrase that
Schäfer had taken from the Bible and which said: "The just one who
punishes me with reason."
It would be, then, punishments based on the authority of the Bible,
and which were also justified by the fact that they were imposed "to
expel the devil, to be spiritually better." He also stated that regarding
Schäfer's crimes there were always "doubts among adults", but that
they did not question him for
religious reasons: "People felt that to rebel against Schäfer was to

rebel against God."
Another method that Schäfer adopted from the latter rain movement
was the public confession of alleged sins. In fact, he had his followers
convinced that he was something unique, exceptional and virtuous, as
reflected in one of the audios, in which he asks the assembly (although
it seems to be addressing a particular person) if "do you know of any
association where the stolen and the lie are made publicly known? As
he explained below, the public confession of these and other "sins"
such as laziness allowed a clean slate to be made.
«Another principle of Mr. Schäfer that has stuck into everyone's

conscience, Bäar relates, is the following: “No one can have a secret!
Everything has to come out in the light of day. Jesus is the light, Jesus
is also the truth. The one who believes in Jesus, the one who belongs
to him, says and does the truth. Every secret thing and lie is the devil.
Going deeper into the above, he argues that "Mr. Schäfer uses the
Bible as the main instrument of violence and oppression, simultaneously
taking advantage of the sincere intentions and dedication of the
individual, above all the fear of committing sins against God".
And according to Lotti Packmor, for Schäfer "all concealment is a

sin."
Another of his ideas in this matter was that the parents would be
guilty of the sins of the children. For Parral's messiah, a sin was
something as simple as eating wild berries from the field, judging by
the following sermon, addressed to one of the fathers present at the
assembly, although he did not identify him. “Does he think that he
really does (his son) good, when he hides behind the blackberries, or
behind the stable door and makes the child swallow the things, so that
the others do not notice? Does the father really think that something
like this is a blessing, that this is the true love of a father?" he
wondered, to later explain that by doing this the father "has stopped
taking God into account." «You have raised your son in secrecy, in
the lack of camaraderie, not in true love, the one that should be had
for his fellow men. you have tied it to you
by means of small gifts, (you have tied it) to your flesh, to your paternal
feelings, but not to God, to the true love of God, if you had communicated.
You seek to earn your life for yourself. And you lose. This afternoon you have
lost again... He has approached God and for that he has sacrificed you...
shamed before the whole community».
A case widely discussed in the assembly, and recorded in the hearing

records, was that of a boy who stole some eggs and hid them behind his bed.
After a few minutes, he was afraid of being discovered, so he took them
underground, but decided to confess such a transgression to his father, who
was determined to get rid of the dangerous evidence and buried the eggs.
Not calm with it, he dug them up and hid them in another place, after which
he finally decided to throw them into Perquilauquén.
However, the boy could not take it anymore with his tormented conscience.
and ended up confessing to the crime.
Thats not all. Another surreal episode recorded by the audios is the theft
of two coffee jars, which were confessed to the assembly by their author, a
young man who had already had a similar problem months before, by stealing
some portions of kuchen.
Ordered by Schäfer to continue confessing other sins, the boy ended up
making a scandalous revelation: «More than a year ago I found a knife. It
was up there and I kept it." Schäfer branded him a thief of property, saying
that the knife was a deadly instrument, very dangerous, after which he began
to pressure him to admit if he had murdered someone with the weapon, after
which he began to yell at him in his harsh accent and guttural: “Acknowledge,
acknowledge, acknowledge, give it back, command! Clean! Fury!". The
screaming treatment gave its results, because then the transgressor reported
another serious crime: he kept a spool of sewing thread that his mother had
passed him.
The secret, according to Schäfer, was darkness, and that was against
God. He said that “God is just, God is the truth, God is light and he who strays
from those norms strays from God and enters darkness and makes mistakes.
If I avoid sunlight, I will get sick. Yes
I enter the darkness, because that is where I feel best, I have not
been created for that, I have been created to live under the laws of
light and the sun».
Chapter 12
breaking wills
All the apparatus of internal repression, intelligence, violations of

human rights and the economic empire that Schäfer was able to build
had one essential objective: to be able to rape children with absolute
impunity.
As Wolfgang Knesse said: "If you don't know where you are
Schafer, you must be with children, because you need them as an
animal needs meat. More explicitly, he noted that "the organization
created is only for Schafer to have children for his own sexual
gratification and nothing else."
The testimonies that the courts collected about these crimes show
how Schäfer deceived many parents in Germany to bring their
children to Chile, as well as the illegal adoptions carried out in Catillo,
Parral, San Carlos and other nearby areas, which were they started
in order for Schäfer to have more children to abuse.
When that strategy began to falter, at the end of the eighties,

Schäfer designed a new one: a summer boarding school that lasted
for years and that ended up being the beginning of its end, after
complaints filed in 1996 by some mothers, due to the abuses to which
their children had been subjected. As a result of them, the judicial
and police persecution of Schäfer began, which lasted for almost ten
years until his arrest in Argentina, in 2005.
Although many of the abuses and rapes were committed by the
pedophile in his own bedroom or in the bathrooms, there is information
regarding a child being raped in front of other minors. Background
compiled by Wolfgang Kneese indicates that at least one mother
committed suicide in her car with her three children abused by
Schäfer, in order to prevent the children from being kidnapped in
Germany and taken to Chile.
Hugo Bäar, who would appear so remorseful years later, at least in

his speech, was an essential part of a well-oiled gear, in which many
lawyers were involved, through which families were separated and
minors sent to Latin America. by force in many cases.
Heinz Kuhn met Schäfer around 1955 or 56 through Bäar, and once
he fled, the latter was left in charge of the PSM, along with him.
However, shortly after the escape, he received an enigmatic call from
Santiago.
It was Hermann Schmidt, who told him that something had happened
to Schäfer and that he (Kuhn) had to travel to Chile immediately.
Alarmed, he did so, without realizing (he understood it when it was too
late) that it was all a stratagem designed with a single purpose: to
prevent him from getting married, something that could not be done
without the approval of the messiah.
Indeed, Kühn had become a boyfriend in Germany with another
young woman belonging to the sect, without asking anyone's
permission, as appropriate. He had even exchanged rings with her.
When he arrived in Santiago, Schmidt was waiting for him. The
journalist Mónica González pointed out in a report published in the
Análisis magazine in 1989,65 that he told her that Schäfer was dead.
From the airport, he took him to the house of Rudy Cohn, a German of
Jewish origin who lived in La Reina. To his surprise, there was Schäfer,
very much alive.66 At that time, Kuhn was accused of the worst moral
and sexual aberrations. They forced him to hand over his engagement
ring, his passport, his return ticket, and letters from his girlfriend. They
had him without food for almost three weeks and finally had to give all
his property to Schäfer. But perhaps the most tragic thing for him was
that he never heard from his girlfriend again, who was also part of the
Private Social Mission. Years later he would find out that that sweet
young woman who made him sigh was in the villa, turned into an expert
in the application of electroshocks.
Despite everything, in a picture very similar to the syndrome of

Stockholm, once Kuhn started receiving food again
He returned to work for the leader and participated in the search for
and purchase of the El Lavadero farm, from which they initially
acquired forty hectares. They then began harassing neighboring
homeowners to get them to sell.
Later on, and already settled in the Parral foothills, Kuhn was
appointed Schmidt's driver and in that capacity he had to accompany
him many times to the Parral Court, between 1964 and 1966, with a
very clear goal: to become friends with the secretary of the court and
obtain copies of the judicial case for sodomy, which they obtained at
a very low price: giving him bread, kuchenes and cookies. They did
something similar with the secretary of the Court of Appeals of Chillán,
who informed them about the decisions that the visiting minister who
was later appointed to hear the case would make.
Curiously, what happened with Kuhn was repeated a few years

later with Hugo Bäar. Around January 1975, he was still in Siegburg,
very ill, when Schäfer told him that he had to urgently travel to Parral,
since Augusto Pinochet was going to visit them.
Therefore, he had to appear immediately in the colony and wear a
suitable suit for the occasion. At that time, he recounts, he had not
seen his wife for thirteen years, who remained inside the colony, so
he thought it would be a reunion, but he did not realize that, in reality,
he had fallen out of favor and into a trap.
He only realized this when he entered the compound, when

Schäfer's thugs surrounded him, who took him to a cabin in the middle
of the woods, where they began to inject him with drugs and apply
electroshocks. He spent several months in complete unconsciousness,
watched day and night by characters like Rudolf Cöllen and Kurt
Schnellenkamp, as well as the villa's nurses, including Kuhn's ex-
girlfriend. In all that period, he would relate, "my lady was not allowed
even once to visit me."
When, later, they allowed him to gradually rejoin the life of the
colony, at no time did he think of escaping. He only dared ten years
later.
Just as dramatic is the story of Franz Bäar, one of the children
Irregularly adopted in the colony, "son" of Hugo, whom he only saw a

couple of times. Born Francisco del Carmen Morales Norambuena
into a home that suffered from extreme poverty in Chile in the 1960s,
he was adopted in the colony when he was about ten years old. His
entry into it was so remarkable that he almost completely forgot
Spanish. But, just as he assimilated a new culture, very soon, the
year after he entered, he realized the abuse and mistreatment that
was inside him and began to fantasize about the idea of escaping,
although he knew that it was not very simple.
One day in 1969, the keys to the youth dormitory were lost. They
accused Franz of having them and since they did not believe him
when he said that he did not know where they were, he received a
formidable beating from Schäfer himself and eight of his assistants,
all armed with thick telephone cables.
"Several times I fell. I had no air at all," he recalls,
breaking
down.67 After the beating, Franz was taken to the colony hospital,
where he remained confined for almost thirty years, during which he
received countless injections of unknown drugs and electroshocks, in
addition to suffering an attempted murder. Franz does not hesitate to
describe himself as a true guinea pig, who received at least three
injections daily from nurses Maria Strebe and Dorothea Witthahn,
Hopp's wife.
It was not until 2002 that Franz was finally able to leave the colony,
accompanied by his wife, Ingrid Szurgelies, and his in-laws.
They were in Germany for a while, but soon returned to Chile.
Uprooted, they lived in Chiloé, in Santiago and also in Lo Zárate, in
the sect led by Paola Olcese. After returning to Bulnes, they finally
settled in a rural area of Aysén.
In 1974, and while he was still hospitalized, one night several
hands pounced on Bäar and threw him out of a second-floor window,
due to which he suffered injuries that afflict him to this day, but he
categorically refuses to go. to any health center or see a needle near
you.
As the lawyer Hernán Fernández explains, he was tortured for

three decades in a hospital, with daily injections, but also with
electroshocks. His panic at hospitals is more than obvious.
Ingrid Szurgelies, Franz's wife, says that in turn the nurses were
monitored, in order to make sure that they applied to patients like him
the doses they were prescribed. The days after the coup, Franz
recounts, almost every night he heard terrifying moans, from people
who he supposes were being tortured there, although he clarifies that
"I don't know if they were detained-disappeared", since it could also
be other settlers.
What he is sure of is that he saw how Schäfer, Mücke and a soldier
beat a person on the floor, in an adjoining room. Shortly after, despite
his precarious state of health and still taking pills that kept him doped,
Franz was put to work on a circular saw. As expected, one fine day
he lost his balance and fell on the blade, which almost severed one
of his forearms, which shows the traces of the accident.
Destined for carpentry, he gradually began to "rehabilitate" himself

in the eyes of Schäfer, but always with one goal in mind: to escape
from there.
Chapter 13
the night terror
As verified by the courts, as well as by an investigative commission of

the Chamber of Deputies, in the mid-1990s, the idea of family was
completely dissolved within the colony, in a very similar way to what
Leo Mercier did in Te Park.
A living example of this is Dieter Scholz, a man in his fifties who was
literally stolen from his mother shortly after he was born in the Colonia
Dignidad hospital.
In 2015, someone found his birth certificate and thanks to it he
discovered that what he had always believed was his name — Dieter
Scholz Laube — was actually hiding his original name, Rafael Labrín
González, born on November 17, 1972. In other words, someone —
Schäfer, no doubt— had decided that this child, whose mother lived in
the Trabancura sector, should remain forever within the sect. With
that intention, they told Maria, his mother, that the child was very sick
and therefore had to be hospitalized. When a few days later he went
to look for it, the answer was the same. The same thing happened in
the days, weeks, months and years that followed. In the end, they
didn't even answer him anymore.
Today, she says that in the end she lost hope and preferred to convince
herself that her son was dead. Despite this, sometimes he thought that perhaps
it was not so and that one day he would come looking for her.
Dieter, meanwhile, was told as a child that his mother had died
giving birth to him. Officially, her father was Klaus Scholz Laube, with
whom she never had contact. I only saw it from afar, as part of the
scheme implemented by Schäfer, in order to destroy the concept of
family. They lived apart and the children were prevented from hearing
words like "mama" or "dad". The "correct" thing within the sect was to
call all adults "uncle" or "aunt".
(onkel and tante, in German), even if it was the parents themselves,

with whom there was no cohabitation. The children and adolescents
slept in the kinderhauss (children's house) and the women in the
basement. The children did not know their last names, only their first
names and the nicknames by which they were called.
Until the mid-1980s, Schäfer had only allowed eight couples to
marry, but the marriages took place in secret. In fact, children and
young people were sent to a picnic several kilometers away while the
celebration took place, of which no one could speak afterwards. It
was unthinkable to see couples holding hands or kissing.
When a woman became pregnant, she disappeared from everyone's

sight. She was hidden until she gave birth and as soon as the baby
was born "she enters the children's home (and) the mother goes
there to breastfeed, (but) another woman takes care of the child,"
detailed Hugo Bäar, who asserted that Schäfer wanted to avoid
marriages at all costs, because "it is not only the enemy of women,
but also of families."
Georg Packmor would detail that «men and women sleep in
principle separated in bedrooms, in houses, in bedrooms, but children
are rigorously separated from the other sex, and if a boy or girl is
interested in the other, then the consequence is a severe quarantine
and torture methods that Paul Schäfer applies».
His wife complemented the above by specifying that, after marriage,

the couples lived apart again and for this reason generally had furtive
encounters "in some corner of a shed or in a workshop... so that no
one sees them", with the aim of secret of spending the night together.
«In the morning, before dawn, before there is light, these people
separate from each other to return to their sleeping places or to their
work stations. This is how marriage is lived in Dignity.
Of course, what he forbade others, "the permanent uncle" allowed

himself. In 1967 he adopted a Chilean girl, who from that moment on
was called Rebeca, with whom he was very close. He always referred
to her as "my daughter" and
he had towards her demonstrations of affection vetoed for others.

Despite the fact that she was faithful to him until the end, she admitted after
being arrested with her father in Buenos Aires, that the one who actually took
care of her until she was ten years old was a woman from the neighborhood,
Irma Wellnitz, whom she thought was her father. mother. In any case, she
was privileged and she recognized it as such: "In the colony I had everything,
it was like a paradise for me."68
Consistent with the foregoing, Dieter was raised by the kinderhaus parents ;
that is, the children's house, the place where they lived together, in the style
of an orphanage.
No one questioned any of that. The underlying problem, Müller points out,
is that many of them are so afraid, so afraid, that they don't dare to get out of
there. They don't know another world... what are they going to do out there if
they don't know another life! Plus, they hang out every night with Paul Schafer,
who indoctrinates them."
Regarding Dieter's education, and like everything in his life, his curriculum,
carried out inside the colony many years ago, when the legal personality of
the enclave was dissolved and they had to create work contracts for the
settlers, shows that he studied their basic and secondary education in
establishments in the Catillo sector.
"All those certificates that say that the settlers completed their studies are
false," says lawyer Hernán Fernández.
The regime of forced labor to which he was subjected for almost thirty
years ended up taking its toll on his back and, like Bäar and other colonists,
he began to be drugged as soon as he entered adolescence.
He remembers in detail that from the age of fifteen he was administered

pills daily, which made him very sleepy.
Fernández comments that this was due to a tactic by the colony aimed at
keeping the young people appeased, so that they would not run away and
thus continue to rely on slave labor. And as with Franz Bäar, Dieter was
subjected to beatings, which in his case were monthly. He remembers a
particularly fierce one, which was given to him because Paul Schäfer accused
him of having lied.
He received blows all over his body and face with sticks and hoses.
Dieter Scholz is a good worker, but he has a problem: if he is

exposed to heavy work for a long time, his back immediately begins
to take its toll, because from about the age of ten he began to carry
out all kinds of work, without rest: « He worked night and day on the
machines. In the days he worked as a plumber and at night in
agriculture, night and day. (During the) week I worked (in the) farm
and weekends (in the) casino, putting up cement poles, parks, carrying
sacks, gallons of juices, everything," he explained a few years ago in
his forced Spanish that dispenses with articles and prepositions, in the
house where he lived at that time in Bulnes, adding that on Saturdays
and Sundays the days were the same: pure work. Even Leo Mercier
was not so brutal, for unlike Te Park, the children of the colony were
not entitled to even a few hours of play a day.
The justification for these forced labors was of a religious nature,

since the founders of the colony maintained that "work is divine
service."
Thanks to this, everything shone in the sect's facilities.
There were beautiful paths and manicured gardens in the two Dignity
facilities and, above all, in the Family Casino, which continues to be
visited by hundreds of people, indifferent to the fact that much of it
was built on the basis of child slavery.
Like Franz and other colonists, Dieter always entertained the idea
of running away, but trapped in the strange world in which he lived, he
never dared to do so. However, in the 1990s he had a moment of
rebellion and one day he approached the German woman in charge
of the money and asked her for her salary. The woman looked at him
as if he had asked her to donate a kidney and asked him why he
wanted money.
—I signed my contract, why don't they pay with money? -answered
Dieter.
—You have everything for free here: food, where to sleep,
everything. You don't need money,” was her response, offended that
this young man had tried to receive payment for his work.
After so many years of horror, Dieter's life took a turn
enormous from the moment he discovered his birth certificate, a story

that was published in El Mostrador,69 after which another Chilean
"adopted" in the colony told him an enormous secret: that his mother
was alive.
A few days after that revelation, Dieter got her phone and called
her, explaining who he was. A little later they met again at the Parral
bus terminal, after more than forty years of separation. Dieter currently
lives with her and some of the seven siblings that she only found out
at that time that she had.
It is certainly a small triumph of truth over lies and evil unleashed

by Schäfer and his henchmen, but still not enough to erase all the
damage he suffered, both physical and psychological, marked (among
many other things) by what happened at night, when the children
went to bed and the kinderhauss became a house of horror, since
all men had to go to bed naked.
Obsessed with sex and restrictions on others —as was the case
with many totalitarian leaders— Schäfer had dictated that rule with
the aim of discovering those who masturbated, something strictly
prohibited in the colony, except for him. In fact, Hopp explained that
Schäfer “exploited in an unlimited way saying that masturbation was
religiously prohibited, but then he said that masturbation was allowed
only to him. He forced them to confess and, as a reward, he
masturbated them. He convinced me that masturbation was a sin and
that I had to confess it.”70 Then, as soon as a supposedly suspicious
movement was detected in the bedroom, the prevailing norm in the
colony was applied: hitting.
But many times the night watchmen went much further, as detailed
by Lotti Packmor, who explained that children had to lie on their
backs. Then, "behind each bed or every two beds there was a
watchman, among whom I was in the first period."
If any of the children moved their eyelids, it was a sign that

he was awake and therefore was beaten out of bed. But “if something
moved in the genital area, then the child was taken out and beaten
with the cattle whip, also on the testicles, and put under a cold
shower. The gentlemen who were present beat him and then returned
him to bed. It was cruel. I couldn't with that. He was not capable of
announcing “here, here is someone awake”». Consequently, Schäfer
removed her from there after a few days. Other testimonies, from a
time after the escape of the Packmors from the colony, show that the
alleged attempts at masturbation were repressed with the application
of electricity to the genitals.
The next morning, the young people supposedly discovered "in

fault" the night before had to go to the messiah to confess. If he
considered that it was a recurring offender, the punishment was
worse. There are testimonies of how Dr.
Seewald would give young men injections into the testicles, which
would swell and remain sore for weeks.
Years later, Dr. Gisela Gruhlke, Gerd Seewald's wife, would end
up confessing that she had instructions from Schäfer to perform
"treatments" on all young people who thought about sex and other
distractions, consisting of medication and electroshock, as well as
drugs, among which which mentioned chlorpromazine, haloperidol
and diazepam. "Schäfer pointed out to me that these children had to
be treated, because they did not pay attention, they were rebellious"
and that the messianic leader "had the obsession that the children
had demonic manifestations, which were healed with electroshocks
that were applied to the forehead." 71
Looking back, he said that none of this was justified, but he tried to
reduce his responsibility in the application of those torments, assuring
that in front of Schäfer "the führer, a religious leader, did not feel the
right to oppose him, less in my womanhood." He did not say anything,
however, about other cruel treatment, such as the one applied to a
young man who was kept without food for several days for criticizing
the taste of food, and who
later Grühlke, in the presence of Schäfer, circumcised when he was

already a teenager and without any medical reason for it.
"The permanent uncle" was not only a morbid spectator of the
treatments to which the colonists were subjected, but also an actor.
Helmuth Seelbach recounted having seen him several times injecting
drugs into the penises of those who were detained in the "Neukra",
where at one time they had many children and young people.
Seelbach knew exactly what he was talking about, having been part
of the night watch for a long time. In this condition, he explained, one
day Schäfer gave him an electric prod to apply it to the boys' genitals,
because it was necessary to "fight sin." The reason? According to
Schäfer, their erections had to be controlled, as that was "a vice and
a sin." For this purpose, the charge nurses administered various
medications to the alleged sinners.
As a result, "the young people who were under these surveillances

always looked listless, sleepy, and with signs of being under the
influence of some drug."72 One of these victims, interviewed thirty
years later by the police, would explain that They gave him green
pills every day and also applied electroshocks to his genitals. As a
result, he lamented, he simply no longer had sexual desire and
therefore could not even dream of ever starting a family.
Another way to suppress sexuality was through censorship.

The colony's cameraman, Bernd Schaffrik, handed over valuable
audiovisual material to the court in 2005: ten eight-millimeter tapes
that he buried in the field in 1996, when the raids began, as well as
some photos and an edition of the Schild des children's bible.
Glaubens (Shield of Faith), which belonged to his wife Waltraud, in
which "one can clearly see how Paul Schäfer manipulated the readings
that had to be read, as he ordered Dr. Gerd Seewald to review all the
books and texts that circulated within the enclave, especially what the
young people read. The Bible that I deliver is crossed out or
covered the parts related to the love of a couple, marriages, births,

etc.”73 Even from the privileged few who did receive some education,
any information about it was also hidden from them, to the point
that biology books were ripped from them. all the pages related to
human and animal reproduction. As a result of all this, until adulthood
the colonists were practically unaware of the anatomical differences
between men and women.
Ruth Szurglies recalls that "once we were punished, everything

about men was taken off the books" and "there was no way a girl
could look at a boy and if she did, she was punished."74 According
to Gerd Seewald, this was because Paul Schäfer attached great
importance to "moral purity in general and the protection of youth
against sexual temptations."75 Yes, it sounds like a bad joke, but the
group's intelligence chief justified it by arguing that "for that served
the strict separation of the groups of boys and girls ».
All this created in the youth the impression that marriage was dirty
and sinful. Schäfer often said that "father" and "mother" were any
man or woman who kept the word of God, thus eliminating the true
meaning of both terms.
As well as the readings, the correspondence was also tightly

controlled, to the point that if someone wanted to write to their relatives
in Germany, the letter had to be deposited open in the office managed
by Gerd Seewald, which —as we will see in the third part of this book
—was a real intelligence agency.
Schäfer usually justified this procedure in front of his frightened

proselytes with the argument that «your mothers or relatives in
Germany give your letters to the press and take advantage of them.
Everything they write turns against us and is interpreted falsely,
"explained Lotti Packmor, complementing what
previous with which according to Schäfer these letters, in addition,

were sent to the communists of the then Democratic Republic of
Germany, where they analyzed them. To avoid this supposed
situation, it was then proposed to the inhabitants of the town that the
missives be delivered open, in order to review them and avoid
something "inappropriate" appearing in them. In this way, "if there is
something in those letters, be it longing for relatives, Germany, etc.,
the letter is returned to the sender or the office is called." There, with
great kindness, Seewald would say things like “look at this sentence.
If it falls into the hands of the communists, then it is interpreted in this
sense and unleashes a wave of persecution against Dignidad.
Isn't it better to skip it? Do you really care to do it? Can you word it a
little differently or delete it? The inhabitant of the farm nods his head
in the affirmative and writes the letter again. That's one thing. Another
is that ultimately no one knows if the mail actually goes out or not.
Indeed, everything indicates that almost nothing came from there.

Parliamentary investigations in the early 1990s confirmed through the
German embassy in Santiago that only twenty-six Germans (out of a
total of 257 known to be living in the sect in Parral) received and sent
letters regularly. In other words, only ten percent of those who lived
there had contact with their families or friends back home.
While these were the laws and norms of relationship with the world
that Schäfer imposed on the youngsters, he sexually abused them
without inconvenience, helped by all his hierarchs, men and women
alike.
Chapter 14
The third strategy
Paradoxically, at the beginning of the nineties, when Schäfer was

already a seventy-year-old man and his power began to diminish,
thanks to the decision of President Patricio Aylwin to cancel the legal
status of the sect in 1991, it was when more abuses documented
occurred in it.
As a way of reacting to the government decision, followed by the
closure of the colony's hospital, Schäfer organized groups of Chilean
residents in the vicinity in order to create "the permanent vigil", which
basically consisted of a kind of white guard who It was intended to
hinder any police action in the sector.
However, looking back, it was nothing more than a new strategy

for recruiting children. We have already discussed the other two. The
initial one was the simplest: equipped with the sectarian tools copied
from Branham, Schäfer was immediately able to recruit dozens of
families, thus securing many children to become his victims. And
once in Chile, and when those first children had already grown up,
they were the adoptions of Chilean minors, almost all carried out
illegally and with the connivance of the justice system at that time.
But those minors also grew and, faced with that fact, Schäfer
created "permanent vigilance", which was only a first step in that third
phase. Taking advantage of the fact that the parents of many children
were practically living outside the Parral compound, they were offered
to have their children stay inside the neighborhood from Friday
afternoon to Sunday night.
Unlike what Dieter, Franz and all those who grew up on the property
lived through in the sixties, seventies or eighties, the treatment
seemed to be different. There was no longer forced labor or beatings
inside the villa, but children's games, songs and food, lots of food. It is
not surprising, then, that many of those future victims did not want to
return on Sunday night to their modest homes in Catillo, Perquilauquén,
San Gregorio or San Carlos, where there was no heating, no abundant
delicious food, and no arcade games. force or German rounds with
which to forget about poverty, cold and hunger. The third strategy
worked with German precision.
To continue implementing it, the colony made heated buses available

to the children that would pick them up and drop off their
houses.
Every weekend about three hundred minors came to the town and,
as the Germans boasted of cleanliness and hygiene, they told the
parents that it was necessary for all the children to shower in the
collective bathrooms set up for that purpose, where Schäfer appeared
always, supposedly to supervise that the children were bathing properly.
Many of these children began, little by little, to stay longer and longer
in the colony. The weekend usually turned into a week, or two, or a
month, and very soon many mothers and fathers realized that their
children were simply not going to be returned to them. It was there that
the figure of the "intensive boarding school" was born, a school regime
in which parents were promised that their children would be educated,
that they would be medically controlled and that they would receive free
food and clothing. Some accepted, but many of them, suspecting or
knowing what was happening, received a resounding "no" when they
went to ask for their children to be returned to them.
The final phase of the plan was to implement a curious program

called "Parral, Parral, special case", as Schäfer explained in a meeting
with fathers and mothers close to the neighborhood, to whom he told
them that behind that insipid name what was an incredible intention: to
become the head of all families.
For several years, no one dared to do anything about it.
Some parents consulted with lawyers in Parral, San Carlos, Chillán and
Talca, but the answer was invariable: when the
professionals found out who to sue politely said they were very, very
busy.
In 1996, the mother of a teenager kidnapped inside Dignidad took
a bus to Santiago in order to find a lawyer who was willing to represent
her. That was how he found Hernán Fernández. This determined
action by the woman was the beginning of the end for Schäfer,
because from that moment on, justice began to persecute him, as it
had never done before.
Thanks to this, today we know in detail everything that happened
in the place, such as the fact that in Schäfer's room there was a
bathroom with two toilets, that he always had a gun at hand, that his
glass eye constantly wept and that already in the nineties he had to
use a hearing aid, to hear better.
Always, always, near him there was a German he trusted recording
everything that was said, openly, just as Branham did, and another
brought him a large magnifying glass, which he used to read.
The children who fell under their aegis were not just made to play.
In reality, he was putting together a kind of children's army, since the
minors (as he had done years before with the sons of the hierarchs)
were taught karate, self-defense, swimming and survival techniques,
in addition to dressing them in green uniforms, force them to march
and wear a badge that read "Permanent Vigil Youth," which they
received after taking an oath before the "Permanent Vigil" flag.
In addition to the two or three Germans who brought him the

magnifying glass, the briefcase or the recorder, who were basically
Schäfer's security team, there was always at least one of the so-called
Sprinters with him, as the minors who were walking were called .
with the pseudo messiah both day and night. Minors, meanwhile,
were called Keiles.
From the list of those children, one of Schäfer's addicts, Georg
Schmidtke, chose the children who were going to be abused by
Schäfer; that is to say, the Sprinter of the night, the ones that
changed every day. The next morning, the night Sprinter had to get up
early, to wash Schäfer's car, prepare breakfast and give him the pills
he took daily.
The Sprinter on duty, moreover, was the one in charge of carrying
the heavy radio equipment that Schäfer used, with which he was
aware of everything that was happening, because from the security
center, Flipps, they constantly informed him, but from his radio also
communicated with Bulnes or Santiago.
A witness who requested anonymity knew the colony up close when
a group of them came to camp on a farm near Longaví in the early
1990s. It was a kind of summer camp made up of about twenty small
tents and one large one, for the sect's messiah, belongings that were
transported in helicopters.
At a general level, he observed that everyone wore old clothes, that

they only worked, that they did not watch television or radio, that
women could not wear a cleavage, or make-up, or bracelets or rings.
Regarding Schäfer, he commented that for the Germans he was a
kind of supreme being, the only and maximum leader. Obviously, this
Chilean was very intrigued with everything he saw those days and
one of the things that caught his attention is that no one seemed to
have sexual desire. Discussing this with a couple of compatriots who
had been helping in the camp for several days, one of them told him
that he had not felt a sexual impulse since he ate the German food,
for which he concluded that they added firestone to it.
By the way, Schäfer never admitted the enormous number of crimes

he committed (the list is long: at least twenty-five sexual abuses, illicit
association, homicide, kidnapping and much more) and it is only
known of once in which he referred to the accusations. that were
formulated.
It was in June 1996, when he made a speech about children's
showers, after which he began to pray: “My God, you know very well
which side is abuse. You know, sir, that I strive to protect the children
in body, soul and spirit, to free them from all evil and those people
(alluding to the officials of
Investigations) come to do the opposite. Lord, you know.

Please help me. Amen".
Part III
A bipolar and conspiracy world
Chapter 15
an intelligence agency
Schäfer and his minions took Branham's idea of having some kind of
FBI to the extreme. Obsessed with weapons and apocalyptic ideas,
"the permanent uncle" also wanted to know everything about
everyone, friend or foe, and for this he ended up turning the colony
into a veritable private intelligence agency, which during the
dictatorship cooperated with state agencies such as the National
Intelligence Directorate (DINA), while conspiring against members of
others such as the Military Intelligence Service (SIM).
The basis of any intelligence agency is information, whether

obtained from open sources (media, directories, books, etc.), closed
sources (informants) or through intrusive mechanisms such as
interception of communications, monitoring, interrogation , etc. Dignity
used all of this, but it also had a fourth source of information,
something that any intelligence agency would like: the denunciation.
And Schäfer was very successful in implanting it too.
All this was suspected for many years, but the physical evidence
became clear in June 2005, when the police found forty-six thousand
chips along with a gigantic arsenal.
Now, this figure sounds like a lot, but in reality it is a small fraction
of the chips that was accumulated by the person who was the
operational head of the colony's intelligence, Dr. Theology Gerd
Seewald, in whose office located in In a subway, dozens of tokens,
sometimes hundreds of them, were produced every day for a period
of more than thirty years. It is impossible to calculate how many they
accumulated, but assuming that there were hundreds of thousands
does not sound exaggerated. What we do know with certainty, from
multiple testimonies, is that when the
massive raids, around 1996, most of them were cremated. Except for
those found next to the arsenal, in addition to envelopes, letters and
folders, the most compromising were devoured by fire. However,
what was left is more than enough to get an idea about how that
private intelligence agency operated, as it shows some of the
obsessions of Paul Schäfer and those close to him.
In addition to seeing communists and miristas everywhere, they
were very interested in artists —for Nemesio Antúnez alone there
were close to sixty tokens— as well as Freemasons and especially
members of the AMORC (Old Rosa Cruz Order), which seemed to
have several members in San Carlos, who were followed and
photographed, attributing all kinds of negative characteristics,
bordering on infantilism; They did the same with practically all the
people who belonged to the Catholic Church, starting with the bishop
of Linares, Carlos Camus, whom in one of the files they described as
a Marxist.
But the colony was not limited to keeping a file, but also taught
intelligence classes to the members of the DINA.
Likewise, he managed extensive networks of informants and infiltrators
and followed, photographed and intercepted the communications of
anyone who seemed to them a threat; pretty much everyone, actually.
Perhaps the most evident confirmation of this paranoia and the

way in which it operated as an intelligence apparatus are the nearly
three hundred records in which the constant surveillance of the nuns
of the Little Sisters of Peace congregation is reported, who arrived in
1977 to settle in the San Manuel sector, a few kilometers from the
main estate of the colony, inside Parral.
Led by Paulina Camus Larenas, sister of the then bishop of Linares,

Carlos Camus, they suffered harassment from the settlers for years,
until in 1985 they had to leave the place after the convent was burned.
More than half of the files (167) focused on their director. One hundred
correspond to photographs that were surreptitiously taken not only of
her, but also of her personal documents, the other nuns,
those who visited them, the cars that entered and left the convent and,
in great detail, the modest rooms made up of Franciscan furniture and
few objects. There are also aerial and ground photos of the convent and
its buildings, a freehand plan and many photographs of the nuns walking,
getting on or off vehicles, etc.
Paulina Camus was fully aware that her communications were being
intercepted, and for this reason she always sent messages to the
Germans: «Every time I spoke with the little sisters, before starting, I
greeted the German brothers.
"Good morning, I know you are listening to us, so we want to tell you that
God loves you very much, that he knows you and is with you," she told
me when I interviewed her in 2014. However, she did not suspect the
extent of the espionage that was revealed the cards and laughed to learn
that among their contents there were many letters and photos of her.
However, he changed his tone when asked if any of the informants in the
colony were a convent worker, which he flatly denied, assuring that he
did not know who "Reca", "Mami" or "Mina" were, the main informers
about their activities. , as stated in the files, in which they were always
identified with acronyms or nicknames.
Despite this, he felt the harassment of the Germans every day, to the
point that he once confronted Paul Schäfer on a public road. Imitating
the German accent, he recalled that he, very annoyed, asked him what
he wanted.
—To talk to you, Don Pablo.
"We can't talk. Write me a letter.
—But now that we're here next door, you get out of the car...
let's talk...
-What does he want?
"To know why you persecute us."
"Send a letter," was the response of the then almighty
messiah of Parral, while his driver started the vehicle.
It was not the only time he was face to face with who became the most
wanted man in Chile. Actually, she saw him many times and her
impression is that he “seemed like he was kind of afraid of us.
It was funny, because we had no power outside of prayer." But what

she never understood, the reasons for the colony's rancor against the
congregation, is evident in the records. The one identified with number
12 records a visit by the then mayor of Parral to the nuns, when they
had just arrived in San Manuel. This meeting would be key to the
subsequent persecution against the nuns.
As stated in the file, the informant "Mami" told the Germans, on

December 31, 1977, that "the nuns are very dangerous, according to
information from the mayoress", who "believes that they are not nuns,
she believes that they are only They are people who are trying to
watch and see the entrance to Colonia Dignidad, seeing the vehicles
that pass and those that leave and controlling. It is very possible
because of the noise that they sensed that they had (sic) a transmitter.
The mayor did not hear it, but the Departmental Director of Education
heard a noise like it was from the radio. There is a young nun who
did not speak a word, who they think is a foreigner, who is different
from the others because she wears a different robe. The other, when
the mayoress came in, he hugged her and pulled her around,
practically in half a second he knew if the mayoress was armed or not
armed. That same nun used a blanket, possibly carrying a weapon under it.
In file 13, "Mrs. Elda", another informant, asserted that "they are
people who are prepared to do more than one thing or transmission
and send everything abroad. Be very careful," he warned.
All of this, it is pointed out, was reported by the mayoress to the
governor of Linares, including her suspicion that there was "a very
tall, very large nun, who seemed more like a man than a woman," as
well as a fat nun who they believed was some kind of bodyguard of
Paulina Camus. «All the time, the fat nun had taken care of her from
behind, she never went forward, just in case there was some
movement or something, like defending the sister of the bishop, who
was in front of them. The fat woman is the one they believe is a
prepared extremist, because she is the one who hugged them and
brought them very quickly, "says the text.
In file 14 everything becomes more explicit: «They have nothing of
nuns and a lot of spies».
And leftist spies, by the way. The same report states that "on 1-4-78,
when the ballot box for the national consultation opened at the women's
table in San Manuel, three NO votes were found at the top —the only ones
among 297 YES— and the nuns they had paid for
final".
There was more: «On the day of the National Consultation, the nuns
went out very often to observe the voters, the military and the board
members; to hide they drew water from the well in the schoolyard, where
people voted.
The difference between these two pieces of information with the previous
ones is that they do not mention a source of origin, which indicates that
from there it was the colony that collected the data directly. There are
detailed minutes regarding their movements, as well as records of all the
nuns and also of the aspiring monks of the Brothers of Peace, who came
from a convent located between San Javier and Constitución and who
usually went to San Manuel.
Indeed, the colony's networks extended well beyond its immediate

purview. File 41 on Paulina Camus states that an informant named "Mk"
told the Germans that the "Intelligence Service in Parral" —that is, the CNI
— had taken an interest in the nuns, as had the Carabineros.
In file 16 on Mother Paulina, meanwhile, it is read that "at the house

where these nuns live, some young men, most of them wearing beards,
who claimed to be monks, who made contact with the local peasants
knowing the topography, constantly arrived. of the land and standard of
living of the inhabitants, they would also be carrying out a political campaign
against the current government”.
In November 1978, things became more critical when the settlers

identified a car that was driving near the access to their farm and saw that
“the car stopped and PAULINA, a red-haired woman, another woman, and
the driver got out. The redhead took a photo of PAULINA, from the door
towards the house; then the driver photographed PAULINA and the redhead
sitting in front of the house.
So they went up and out. The Mercedes car followed them and asked them
delivery of the film to reveal it, resisting more PAULINA. In the end
they delivered the film.
In the Manichaean world of the sect and its adherents, the nuns
became more and more fearsome and perverse enemies because,
as we already know, no organization of this nature subsists without
enemies.
For the inauguration of the church of San Manuel, in 1979, headed
by Bishop Camus, an informant told the settlers that "they began to
sing, touch their hands, they waved as if they were dancing a cumbia,
a true paganism" . She asserted about the priest that he had "eyes
that give the impression (of) an image of a demon, large, penetrating
eyes, eyes that are not kind."
After these assertions, the harassment increased, as did the

espionage. Added to the frequent shots fired at the convent were the
interception of everything the nuns wrote or received, and around
1982, when the owner of the San Manuel farm sold the nuns' property
to Colonia Dignidad, the settlers cut off their access forever. destroying
their pipes with a bulldozer, but the worst would come in mid-1985:
«That day I was in Linares talking with Father Juan, because they
had just asked us to move from San Manuel so that something
would not happen to us. The little sisters were having eleven at about
half past seven and they heard a sound like tiles. They thought they
were shots from the Germans, but when they came out they were on
fire," recalled Paulina Camus. After this episode, the nuns were finally
relocated.
It was a new triumph for the sect and all its paranoia, which is
manifested in an extreme way in the files, in which it is stated that
they spied on friends and enemies of the colony, but also collected
wild rumors, data on dock workers, teachers and teachers, service
center firefighters and even prostitutes, showing a Manichaean world
full of prejudices.
Like any intelligence agency, the colony had a good number of informants, with
operative agents—mostly Germans—who carried out surveillance and photographed
people. His information file contained, among many other things, the almost complete
list of those who were part of different police and military units.
Of these, they were greatly interested in the Military Intelligence Service (SIM), which
they were convinced had been infiltrated by the communists, although the main
emphasis in these signings was placed on the military who carried out these functions
in regiments from Concepción, Chillán, Talca, Los Angeles and other cities
located within the zone of influence of the colony.

Also, as has already been said, they spied on their friends, as there are many
records relating to DINA agents, two in particular referring to the DINA chiefs in Parral,
Army officers Fernando Gómez Segovia and his successor, Eduardo Guy Neckelmann
Schutz. The cards of both are the only ones that show sequences of some kind of
code. Gómez Segovia's contains an alphanumeric code, while Neckelmann's shows a
handwritten notation (the only one that includes it, since all the rest is typed) with
inscriptions in what appears to be a runic alphabet, like the one used by the ancient
Germanic peoples.
The symbiosis between the DINA and the colony, which in the eyes of the Chilean
justice system formed a single illegal association, for which several leaders of the sect
and the heads of Pinochet's secret police were convicted, did not eliminate, however,
the constant idea that everyone was spying on them or conspiring against them. The
foregoing is very well illustrated in the two files dedicated to Eduardo Soto Henríquez,
an Army corporal belonging to the ranks of Manuel Contreras and based inside the
enclave, whose file number 1 states that "this official has demonstrated to date an
excessive interest in finding out or investigating activities that are clearly private in the
Colony, which has caused mistrust and fear on the part of its inhabitants.
In effect, they said that he had shown himself “lively interested

in knowing the corresponding password" after going through a door

that obviously had a security system. In addition to this, "he asked
two different people what the origin of the rifles was", surely inquiring
about the weapons that they themselves manufactured.
It was not his only sin. Point 4 of the report indicates that "he began
to open drawers, from an emergency kit, looking at their contents"
and that "despite the fact that his companion told him that they were
going to continue the trip immediately, he got out of the vehicle in
which they were traveling and lifted the tent in a doorway to look
inside. "Fortunately, the things that Don Mamo already knows were
not there at that time," the document says in an intriguing way, without
explaining what it was that the all-powerful DINA chief, Manuel
Contreras, better known as El Mamo, already knew. . The text
continues with several other misdemeanors committed by the
indiscreet non-commissioned officer, and then notes that "it is left to
Don Mamo's discretion whether he should continue working with the
colony or be changed."
Fortunately for Soto, as the same file points out, he was only
sanctioned "for his behavior on the farm." Neither he nor his girlfriend,
whose address was on the file, suffered any damage, as far as is
known, unlike other rogue agents of whom we will speak later.
And the following is something that must be understood: they

registered anyone and any information was useful to them. In the
records relating to Carabineros Major Carlos Dondero, who was a
Parral commissioner, he is highlighted as "a right-handed man", who
had been Allende's bodyguard in the UP and who "reported on the
GAP" from there, referring to the Group of Personal Friends, as
President Allende's security device was informally called. In addition
to this, it was reported that he had been in Iran for a year and that he
had brought a Volkswagen car from there. The file describes him as
tall and thin and also points out something even more irrelevant and
that even sounds a bit fanciful: «The informant has never seen
someone who enjoys eating so much. One time he ate 24 empanadas,
another time 8 to 10 hot dogs."
They also filed anyone who had any contact with the colony. And
all those who came to eat at the Casino Familiar in the Bulnes
commune were recorded and photographed, but also many had their
cars opened while they were eating strudel and they photocopied
the documents they found inside.
In short, it functioned as a kind of Chilean Stasi, controlling
everyone's movements, drawing up lists of suspects for anything and,
above all, collecting any rumors that were heard and incorporating
them into their databases. Most of these portray the Manichaean
world of the sect, in which all the opponents of Pinochet—supposed
or real—were immoral, dirty, thieves, communist people engaged in
gruesome businesses, who hid weapons in their homes and who did
not hesitate to deceive anyone to meet their evil objectives; repeated
disqualifications regarding a series of Catholic priests and Army and
Carabineros officers who, in one way or another, were not inclined to
the colony, who, if they did not submissively submit to Schäfer's
dictates, were "leftists ».
An example of this is the record relating to Police officer Manuel

Valdebenito Remsses, one of whose officials controlled, in 1974, a
truck loaded with weapons that was destined for Colonia Dignidad.
The card says —in which, of course, there is no mention of weapons
— that «before 9-11-73, Valdebenito bought Clarín and in his
language he used UP terms-, referring to the newspaper that, during
the time of Popular Unity, was one of the most enthusiastic supporters
of Salvador Allende. With these words they slipped that it would be a
possible Marxist infiltrated in the police.
The "nationalists", on the other hand, were good people, honest

and upright, examples of virtue and rectitude. This is evident, for
example, in the case of former Army generals Bruno Siebert and Julio
Canessa, both qualified as "excellent person" in their respective files.
As in every sect, in this conspiratorial and closed world, the "good"

was the leader and his acolytes, or those he sanctioned.
as positive elements for the community, while the "bad" was everything related to what
represented a different thought, starting with the Catholic Church, Silo and even the
Ancient and Mystical Rosicrucian Order (AMORC), which seemed to have many
members in the city of San Carlos, and which earned one of the most famous Chilean
informants in the colony, Oscar Muñoz Hildebrandt, identified on the files with his initials
OMH, infiltrate the interior of that group, in order to obtain details of who made it up.
The first record regarding them is from July 5, 1985 and the
Information source is OMH. It says verbatim:
¡AMORC=Ancient Mystic Order Rosy Cross.

It is a rite in the shadows.
There are groups in Chillán, San Carlos, Temuco, Talca, Viña del Mar,
Concepción.
In Santiago is the Lodge (Central) AMARNA.
In Viña del Mar it is called “Chapter”.
In San Carlos, Chillán, Talca, Concepción, etc. It is called "Pronaos".
Neophyte = beginner.
Frater=brother.
Soror=sister.
They have 20 degrees, from 1 to 20.
The following cards were basically a list of names of people from San Carlos, Chillán,
Talcahuano, Concepción and other communes that according to OMH belonged to the
Rosicrucians, each of which appeared with a key in the style "4-931575-S", in addition
to their home address and in some cases a photo of the person, many of them cut from
group photos. Some of the files included more information, as in the case of a teacher,
who was recorded as "acting politically in an underhanded and self-righteous way in
the group of socialist teachers from San Carlos."
But perhaps one of the most amazing files of all was the one referring to Fermín
Marticorena Carvacho, residing in Las
Condes, whom they identified as a surveying engineer and technical

draftsman and who they recorded as having visited the AMORC
headquarters in San Carlos.
The date of the document is August 3, 1987, the informant is Muñoz
Hildebrandt himself, but the note about this person borders on a kind
of childish naivety and, at the same time, evidence of the wonderful
real world in which they lived. in the sect and also his followers,
convinced of the action of supernatural forces in the world, since the
file indicated that «with certain rites he can extract 30 cm long rays
from his fingers. They are esoteric powers.
Although at some point they even installed photos of Anne Frank in

the Family Casino, to prove that they were not Nazis, the chips show
an obvious contempt for the Jews.
For example, from Alberto Camhi, a businessman from Los
Angeles, they had a card that said "Jew, Freemason." It added that
he "belongs to a group of upheaval Jews."76 A file made in 1974
survived from Senator Tomás Chadwick Valdés that stated that he
was "married to a Jewess, his children are raised in a Jewish way."
They had also made several files regarding the brothers Marcos
and Jacob Israel, both closely linked to the University of Concepción.
Of the second, a doctor by profession, the source of the information,
who identifies himself as "Hgam", points out that he is very intelligent,
a good organizer and that "I consider him politically dangerous. He
could have links to Israel's intelligence service." On another of the
cards it reads: «Jew. Sanitation officer III Division of the Army. Blond,
average height. It was also asserted that he belonged to Freemasonry
and that he was also a Marxist, something absurd considering that he
was director of the Concepción Health Service between 1986 and
1987. Regarding his brother Marcos, the corresponding file, based on
information provided by "Riq", revealed him. he also qualified as "Jew
and Freemason."
There were also twenty-one files with press clippings relating to
Angel Kreiman (who was Chief Rabbi of Chile) and one more about
someone from Concepción with the last name Liebrecht, of whom it

is only pointed out that he would be a "Marxist Jew." Another of the
files found mentions that "The teacher's house" in Curicó "was used
to hold political meetings by a group of Marxist and Jewish professors."
The same was the case with Freemasonry. There are many people
accused of being such, and in the file of a professor named Godoy,
from San Carlos, it is noted that he is "the only Godoy on the list of
Masons." In other words, there was a list of people who belonged to
Freemasonry, just as there must have been lists with different
classifications, which was surely cremated.
And just as they made records of those who aroused the religious,
esoteric or paranormal curiosity of the sect, they also did it with their
friends and with those who were supposed to be.
In the first category there were numerous files on DINA officials.
Among them, three related to the biochemist Eugenio Berríos, three
about Schäfer's great friend, Manuel Contreras, and two of his second
and also a good friend of the Germans, Pedro Espinoza.
They also had records of Samuel Fuenzalida Devia (who we will

talk about later), including copies of his documents, and absurd
comments that sought to disqualify him as a witness, since it was
indicated that "it was possible to establish that he has not belonged
to the DINA, nor to the DINA." CNI", in circumstances that he was
part of the first entity, from which he deserted, revealing an important
part of the atrocities that were committed there. In addition, they filled
him with disqualifications as a quarrelsome type, a blackjack, but
really totally incapable ».
Whoever was one of the first deputy directors of DINA, Mario Jahn,
was described as "intelligent and open, pleasant." Another file
corresponded to the DINA agent Miguel Krasnoff, prepared with
information from the press; Similarly, there were files regarding
Fernando Laureani and Carlos Labarca, both also men of Contreras.
Regarding the latter, it was mentioned that "this person participated
in the affairs of General Schneider,
he was sentenced to relegation in the south and they are still not able
to pardon him, with a lot of promises involved”.77
Sergio Arellano Stark, sadly famous for having led the Caravan of
Death, and who was said to be a sympathizer of the Christian
Democrats and Opus Dei; Major Ángel Astorga, from Concepción, of
whom they highlighted in bold letters that he had told another officer
that "Dignidad gave my General Pinochet a Mercedes car" (which was
effective), after which they qualified him as "a clown" and someone
who is "good for nothing"; and General Washington Carrasco,
designated as mayor of Concepción after the coup, whose file they
noted that "it was bad luck that (...) he was in Concepción on 9-11-73,
because his vision of the process was very shy", were three more
names from the extensive list of records. In the same tone, the latter
was accused of having surrounded himself "with people who were
amorphous, who were neutral, who had not had any participation in
the fight against Allende." This file also included a kind of reflection: "If
Colonel Luciano Díaz Neira, who was much tougher, had been left, it
is likely that at this moment we would be in a different position."
Regarding Nilo Floody, Carrasco's successor as mayor and with

whom the colony had business for gold panning, as we have already
mentioned, the chips were much more generous. According to them,
when Carlos Prats resigned from the Commander-in-Chief of the Army
in August 1973, he planned to carry out a military coup "and should be
president." They claimed that he was a severe, intelligent man, a
profound and convinced anti-Marxist, and a close friend of Manuel
Contreras. And as if that were not enough, “he does not drink or
smoke. Live ascetically. Quick and hard in his decisions. Open to
anyone who comes to him with a problem or matter."
Despite their enthusiasm for him, he still recorded a source identified
as "Li" who claimed that he was a Freemason, something that, as we
know, they did not like in the slightest.
Individuals belonging to other intelligence services as well

They had their space in these "unofficial files." One of them was an
enigmatic Navy officer named Raúl Monsalve, implicated in the
disappearance and homicide of US citizen Charles Horman a few
days after the coup d'état, an event in which DIA agents (the
Intelligence Agency of the Defense of the United States) in Santiago.
The record of Monsalve, who officiated as liaison between the

Chilean Armed Forces and the US military mission, refers to a visit
he made on October 18, 1973 to the Parral compound, where he
arrived accompanied by "two foreigners" who, according to him, were
walking looking for nazis The document stated verbatim: «RAUL
MONSALVEZ POBLETE. Commander. Santiago.
Naval Security, Ministry of Defense 7th Floor, Phone 393987 and
393932... he was on his way to Talcahuano and wanted to take the
opportunity and speak with AS, with whom he had spoken 1 year ago.
He wanted to deal with the same matter of common interest. But he
had not thought that the road was so long... Two more gentlemen
accompanied him. One of them arrived in Chile m/m 7 years ago, he
is English, but he comes from the US The other is Irish... after
notifying the competent people, Major Gómez arrives and talks to
them. He believes them with complete confidence. At 02.10 they
retire. Memo: "I know him for being an idiot." The escorts were from
the US Secret Service. They were looking for Nazis (8-13-75)».
The initials AS stand for Albert Schreiber, who was in charge of the
colony's legal affairs and who was also heavily involved in arms
trafficking. The "Memo" mentioned in the file referred, as Gerd
Seewald explained at the time, to Guillermo Marín Estévez, a well-
known businessman from Parral. Gómez, by the way, was the head
of the DINA in Parral.
The files related to the Carabineros were generally quite appreciative
as well, although in some cases there were negative comments, such
as the one that appeared in the information related to a Carabineros
general, who was said not to be one hundred percent reliable (yes, to
Seewald liked percentages), and that
With him, care had to be taken not to show assets or resources, and
that no relationship with the DINA should be revealed either.
In the case of Captain Óscar Azagra, his file stated that he was
"profoundly anti-Marxist", that he had the capacity to command and
that he possessed a professional, legal and technical culture. In the
same way, it was indicated that he had been “linked to the events of
the Tacnazo, the military coup led in 1969 by Army General Roberto
Viaux.
About an ex-prefect of Chillán, his file assured that "he had something
to do with the psychopaths of Viña" and that after the death of his wife
"he leads a totally disordered life." According to that same report,
whose author was the informant designated as Jgfsch, “he frequents
parties everywhere with a blonde lady, discos, dances. The next day
he doesn't show up at his office."
In the case of a major from San Carlos, it was said that after the
coup he had been invited to a barbecue in which someone sang a
popular song against Allende, before which the officer would have
become "very serious", later commenting "in a bad mood that that
should not have been sung". It was also assured that in 1978 he would
have voted No and that he also "defended the electoral propaganda
rights of the Marxists."
Very interesting are the files on Alberto Fernández Mitchell, a
lieutenant of the Carabineros de Laja who was sentenced to life
imprisonment for the killing of nineteen people arrested after the coup
in that commune and in San Rosendo. Precisely about him it was
highlighted that "in Laja he acted harshly against the extremists, he
does not know the word fear."
And so with dozens of members of the Army, Carabineros,
Investigative Police, etc., registered, classified and shredded in this
veritable arsenal of data.
By the way, they were also very concerned about what was
happening in the universities, especially the University of Concepción,
where the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR, was born in
the mid-1960s.
Thus, among the forty-six thousand records declassified in 2014
there are three about designated rector Heinrich Rochna Viola, a

retired Army lieutenant colonel who was described as a highly
prepared man, since he had a doctorate in Physics, but at the same
time it was indicated about him that "he is not capable of make
decisions, he is indecisive" and that he was "very capable as a
teacher, but as an administrator... nothing."
There were the same number of files on his successor, Guillermo
Clericus, although they were only press clippings in which he was
mentioned. Two files referred to Galo Gómez, who was vice-rector of
the UdeC in democracy. It contains Gómez's personal data and a
brief summary about the elections in which he won, according to the
colony, with the support of the MIR and the PS, and also indicates
two characteristics attributed to him by the person who prepared the
document: Freemason and Marxist .
There are six other records of the former director of the former
School of Education of the UdeC, Carlos Haquin Aguirre. The first is
a sample of the way in which the colony operated, obtaining
intelligence, since it indicated that he had been one of the founding
members of the Colegio Concepción de Chillán, in accordance with
the deed of incorporation of said establishment, dated 27 August
1981. In other words, they had access to said document, something
that was not so easy to obtain in the pre-internet era.
It was assured that due to personal differences he was leaving

Chillán to found a new school in Concepción (Toquicura). The other
six files were press clippings related to the activities of this last
establishment and his death in 1986.
Many of the records relating to the University of Concepción had
the word "With" as a source of information, which corresponded to
one of the colony's star informants, Rafael Conejeros, who held an
important position at the University of Concepción, the equivalent to
that of Director of Student Services today.
By the way, that did not exempt him from also being signed. The
first file regarding him starts indicating that he had been rector of the
traditional religious college Institute of Humanities and that he had a
son who studied at the University of Concepción. It is detailed that he

had been an advisor to the provincial government and that when the
designated rector of the UdeC decided to remove the director of the
school of education —that is, Hernández— "they asked me if I would
take over as director of the School of Education , to clean up and raise
the academic level and get rid of all the Marxists». However, the
designated authorities at the UdeC had other plans for him and sent
him to Student Affairs.
Another thing that they attribute to Con is having organized “an

intelligence and sabotage group from 1971 onwards. We acted
actively with the team in the two truckers' strikes and we used dynamite
profusely and made assault groups.
And we also make a large part of the lists of the unions, of the Marxist
union leaders.
Another professor they had on file, although the source was not
Con, but a certain León, was the German Eckhard Schmidt, who was
a visiting professor at the U. de Concepción, whom they described as
a "KGB-type" person. They added that “this man is close to the red
bishop FRENZ (a Lutheran who was kicked out of the congregation,
divorced from his wife who got bored with him because he was a
socialist fanatic). This FRENZ was in Concepción for many years and
the Germans from the ROMETSCH group made his life miserable until
he left here. He is at Amnesty International and always maintains his
good relations with ECKHARD." Frenz was Helmuth Frenz, the
archrival Lutheran bishop of the colony, who confronted them in Chile
and in Germany, where he was director of Amnesty International.
Very impressed with their ability to speak languages, the life of

Otakar Graf, better known as "Otto", was detailed, who was the
manager of the traditional Hotel Ritz, located in Barros Arana with
Aníbal Pinto, where today a horrible department store is located.
According to his file, in 1942 Graf was a captain in the Czech Army
and later would have been an assistant to General De Gaulle. He
spoke Czech, German, French, English, Spanish, and some Russian,
Polish, Arabic, among other languages. The writer of the document asserted
that "he was for six years in the secret service in Damascus."
Unlike most of the negative judgments they made about almost
everyone, Graf was said to be “very kind and thoughtful. He has a
great facility for remembering people.
The doctor Gunther Ivanschitz Poulsen also had a file, who was
indicated as "DC. Medical. Concepcion Regional Hospital. Another
doctor who seemed to interest them in a special way was Dr. Sergio
Lagos Olave, father of the journalist and singer of the same name.
Lagos Olave, a man recognized for his charisma and who was a
member of the Socialist Party, was, according to the file, a
"revolutionary leader ex UP", who was said to have been exonerated
by the dictatorship from his chair at the University of Concepción ,
after which he had entered the Lota Hospital, where he took charge of
the alcoholic rehabilitation program. The author of the file considered
that, since this position meant having contact with the community, it
was "highly dangerous", since they considered that it would "become
an esteemed, respected staff and by that means be (sic) a continuator
of Marxist ideas -extremists».
A file that reveals the way in which they spied on their visitors, even
those who admired them, is the one related to Professor Leon
Balabanoff, an academic who settled in Chile after World War II and
who left them a handwritten greeting on the Bulnes casino. He is
described as "professor, Faculty of Chemical Sciences, University of
Concepción, Chemical Engineer, Mendeleyev Institute, Moscow,
1938." It is also indicated that he visited the family Casino in 1986 and
that "he had another new card among his documents", information
that is attributed to "Klops", a badge with which Ricardo Alvear was
identified, one of the most unconditional Chileans to the colony, who
worked in the restaurant.
Three other files on Professor Balabanoff show an ID photo of him
and his wife and a fourth, written in German, reports that he was a
descendant of nobles and that his wife came from a family of
Cossacks, for which they had suffered great hardships. in the war and
before, since the thirties, when the Soviet secret services interrogated
him in two
times for his political thinking, leaving him jobless afterward.
Another of the peculiar characters that appears on the cards was

an ex-Nazi who was several times in the colony, apparently working
on scientific issues. According to the two Colonia Dignidad records in
the name of Richard Röehling Vostarek, he would have been Werner
von Braun's assistant and would have built "the steering warhead of
the V-2 rocket (Von Braun was the creator of the Nazi rocket system
and, later, the father of the North American space race).
One of his files details that “after the end of World War II, Röehling
wanted to emigrate to Australia. One day before his ship left, he was
arrested for violating curfew and the American military police did not
release him. He took him to the US, but he didn't like life there very
much and then he emigrated to Chile.
Based in Temuco, “he has a small electrical workshop. Southern
industries and universities send for him whenever there are difficult
jobs to do."
Despite this, the file highlighted that “ROEHLING is not a
businessman. You are happy to be successful in your job (but) you
are not able to demand adequate remuneration for what you do. His
hobby is building helicopters. He is currently working on a project for
a VW-powered helicopter for one person. Due to his poor financial
situation, his work on building helicopters is progressing only slowly.
All his profits he uses in his experiments.
Chapter 16
GURMIR
«Gu», «Gurmir», «Don Pedro», Hausmann and several others were

the badges with which the settlers of Dignidad knew Fernando Gómez
Segovia, the first head of the DINA in Parral, as already indicated,
where the base of operations for the entire center-south sector of the
country, which demonstrates the importance that the German enclave
had for its director, the all-powerful Colonel Manuel Contreras.
According to his resume, Gómez Segovia was assigned to DINA on

July 31, 1974, specifically to what is mentioned as the Southern
Regional Intelligence Brigade or BIRS. The same document contains
various congratulations for his work there.
One of them, dated March 20, 1976, stated that “his performance as
commander of the Regional Intelligence Brigade has been outstanding.
He has shown a great capacity for analysis, work, resolution and
initiative.
Forty-five days later, his qualifying officer, DINA's second man,
Pedro Espinoza, wrote about him that "his works stand out for their
depth." After the end of this intelligence service in 1977, he continued
working in its successor, the National Information Center, CNI, for a
couple of years. Later, every time a judge or police officer tried to get
something out of him regarding the events in which he participated,
he responded with some commonplaces and indicated that he did not
know anything about what they asked him. He always denied any
knowledge of criminal acts and limited himself to saying that only he
and a few other people worked there, non-commissioned officers from
different branches of the armed forces, who did a little analysis. Of
course, he was never unaware that the DINA headquarters in Parral
operated in a
house that belonged to Dignidad, which had been ceded to the organization
free of charge.
However, in April 2013, something happened. We do not know what,
but at that moment, summoned by Judge Alejandro Madrid in the case that
he was investigating for the death of former President Eduardo Frei —
labelled as homicide by the magistrate, an accusation that was later
dismissed by the Santiago Appeals Court—, Gómez decided tell many
things that he had never revealed. The summons to Gómez was produced
because in the investigation into the death of the ex-president, in 1982,
many antecedents appeared about the manufacture and use of biological
and chemical weapons by the DINA, the Army and also the Parralina sect.
In that judicial instance, Gómez explained that another soldier working with
him in Parral, Gerardo Huber Olivares, was assassinated in 1991 in Cajón
del Maipo with an accurate shot fired a couple of kilometers away, when
he was deputy director of the Factories and Maestranzas of the Army
(Famae) and was preparing to testify before the judge that he was
investigating an illegal export of arms from Croatia.
Huber's military resume, however, places him at the same time in the
BIA Austral (Southern Area Intelligence Brigade) and notes that it carried
out "successful operations in Osorno." Its qualifying officer was Fernando
Gómez Segovia. Consequently, he was his direct superior.
Meanwhile, records corresponding to the period between August 1975

and July 1976 identify him as "Commander of the Longaví Brigade
Intelligence Group" (the DINA was divided into brigades and these, in turn,
into groups).
Gómez's file in the sect's files has his photo and, as already indicated,
there is a curious succession of numbers and letters that seem to indicate
an encryption key by means of a biliteral alphabet or something similar:
97531
zabcde
xfghij
uklmno
spqrst
quvxyz
In this document, in addition, the hours in which he was at home were

detailed and notes were recorded up to 1986, almost ten years after he left
Parral. Most of the data came from the same source, "Alh", a badge with
which they also identified Alberto Schreiber, known within the sect as
"Alharaco".
In another court statement, Gómez admitted that on some occasions he

went with his children to the colony, visits in which they were under the care
of a nurse named Ruth. Schäfer handed him reports every day based on
rumors about supposedly communist peasants, after which he became very
angry when the DINA chief told him that he could not do anything against
them. He also pointed out that on one occasion he took him to the entrance
of the property "and there he showed me a building that from the outside
looked like a stable, but when I entered it was impressive, since they had
practically reproduced the office that I used in Parral, with all the comforts ,
telling me that this was my office, which I reproached, since our work was
reserved.
Schäfer was upset and then offered it to Guy Neckelmann, who succeeds
me in office», but the Mamo did not want it.78 Gómez Segovia's successor
in the BIRS, officer Eduardo Guy Neckelmann Schutz, used Adolfo
Spinne's badge Lobos and was posted there in 1977.79 Neckelmann was
considerably more detailed in court than Gómez. According to him, the
name of the unit was the Michimalonco Brigade and he assures that it
was in charge of about fifty people, including military, police and civilians,
and was responsible for everything that happened between Rancagua and
Los Angeles.
According to his account, when he arrived in Parral, he asked Gómez

Segovia to contact him with Schäfer, not only to access the media and
information that he handled, but as a descendant of Germans, he

also wanted his children to attend the school in the town. He became
friends with the hierarchs and began to go with his wife to stay on
weekends, but he assures that he soon began to see strange things.
On his second stay at the compound, in the company of his wife,

he says he was convinced that there were microphones in the room
where they stayed, inserted in furniture and lamps. It is worth
mentioning that in his file Seewald wrote, indeed, that Neckelmann
"reports that in Dignidad there are microphones everywhere." In
another, the cover of a fashion encyclopedia that the newspaper La
Tercera published in installments was attached, where the model
was Neckelmann's daughter, then nineteen years old. The DINA
official also assured on one occasion that the Germans had put
"pichoga" (a plant that causes serious problems in the digestive
system) in his wife's juice, causing fever, diarrhea and vomiting with
the purpose of admitting her to the hospital. hospital. However, "my
wife put up with it and did not ask for help."
The most serious thing, however, was what he began to see
regarding his children, whom they could not greet with a kiss. But
what obviously alarmed him the most was the insistence with which
"they were trying to convince me to leave my children in the colony",80
something to which he finally agreed, judging by his own words. He
did clarify that “later learning of the pedophile activity of their leader
Paul Schäfer is that my loyalty to them ended, because I considered
that it was exposing my children to Schäfer's deviation. My children
were hospitalized in the colony for about seven months," he said.
But there were also other things that Neckelmann says seemed
very strange to him, such as the mention that Schäfer made to him in
order that he could assemble Leopard tanks or that the farm track
had been lengthened in Parral (they had another in Bulnes) in order
to to allow the takeoff of the Hawker Hunter that the Chilean Air Force
had in those years. «Many years later I learned that the Germans
made contact with a
foreign arms dealer and from that I estimated that it was very probable
that they could arm the tanks that they offered me”, he said, referring
to Gerhard Mertins, one of the protagonists of the fifth part of this book.
Among the many enigmas that still surround the colony and the DINA,
one of the most pressing, perhaps, is the one related to the location of
the archives of the latter organization.
In addition to the safe with documentation that Contreras managed in
his office at the DINA Belgrano barracks, the former militant of the
Socialist Party and later an agent of Pinochet's secret police, Luz Arce,
recounts in her book El Infierno that there was a file called " LIDES",
an acronym for "List of the Disappeared". He adds that the person who
managed the LIDES for Contreras was a non-commissioned officer of
his absolute confidence, Manuel Lucero Lobos. However, it is impossible
to know anything more about it, because in a statement made in 2004
Arce stated that Lucero "died mysteriously", the same thing that
happened to several members of DINA.
In any case, it should be noted that in 1978, when the dictatorship

was under strong pressure from the United States to extradite those
implicated in the crime against Orlando Letelier in Washington, it was
learned that Manuel Contreras had dispatched a series of packages by
sea to Germany.
Indeed, the journalist Manuel Salazar specifies in his book Contreras,
the story of an untouchable who on April 20, 1978 had set sail from
Punta Arenas the German ship Badenstein, carrying twenty-three
suitcases with DINA documents, shipped by General Manuel Contreras,
all of which were destined for the port of Hamburg.81 By the way, at
that time the second man in DINA, Pedro Espinoza, was stationed in
that city. Given Contreras's close connections with the Germans, there
are many researchers who are convinced that these documents were
stored in that country with the help of the colony and, in fact, among the
colonists themselves there is a conviction that the valuable documents
of Contreras—that
have never been found—arrived at least initially at the MSP

headquarters in Sieburg.
Chapter 17
foreign agents
In addition to the above, there was another detail that drew the
attention of those detained in Colonia Dignidad: along with the brutal
Chilean and German interrogators, several detainees noticed the
presence of an interrogator with a Portuguese accent, probably a
Brazilian.
Precisely around those years, in the Concepción area, a strange
story took place that had a Brazilian as its protagonist, whose
mysterious trail began to be lost after a long passage through Dignidad.
Erna Cerpa, who in 1975 was a simple young woman from the city
of Coronel, remembers that one night in July she was walking back
home in the company of some classmates, after classes at the evening
high school, when a car stopped next to her. . The vehicle was driven
by the Brazilian Carlos Galeao Camacho Matos, an imposing man
over six feet tall and elegantly dressed. «He got out of a luxurious car
and opened the door for us to get in. Little did I understand what he
was talking about, because his accent was Brazilian. He left us in our
town and continued on his way. The next day I saw him again when
leaving high school and he dropped me off near my house, until a few
days later he appeared again, in a Carabineros van, "said Erna Cerpa,
now deceased. Subsequently, a short relationship began between the
two, during which she was entertained like a queen and invited to the
most elegant restaurants in Concepción. “It was like a dream, a fairy
tale. I had at my feet many jewels, fur coats and jewels, like I never
thought I could have. It was another Erna, although I always felt self-
conscious to see him so big, so gentleman and so sure of himself».
They flirted for just twenty-three days, after which they were married
on July 30, 1975. After the marriage they
They went to live in Santiago, in the Providencia commune, after which

they rented a large residence in Las Condes. He ran a food company and
everything seemed fine, but in 1974 he was allegedly arrested, a version
that would be true according to the book Olderock, the woman with the
dogs, by Nancy Guzmán, which indicates that someone with the name of
the Brazilian was detained. in the DINA headquarters known as "La venda
sexy", from which he left in December of that year.
Despite this, when he returned he told his wife that he had been in
Colonia Dignidad, that he had to leave the country and that he would soon
re-establish contact with his family (a son had just been born).
Camacho had been in Chile for a long time. In fact, there are people who
remember him as a militant of the MIR and a sociology student at the
University of Concepción before the coup. However, after this it was evident
that he was doing very well and that he had relations with the government
of the time.
Erna Cerpa pointed out that in her house she had photographs in which
he appeared dressed in the uniform of a (Brazilian) Army officer, but she
never knew exactly what he did.
Three months after escaping from Chile, Camacho sent money to his
wife instructing her to travel to Lisbon, the city where they met. Despite the
fact that they were together again, he left her installed in the Excelsior Hotel
and began to travel constantly.
On some of these trips she accompanied him, thanks to which he got to
know France, Spain and Mozambique. After two years and three months,
Erna begged him to return to Chile, but he said he couldn't, so he advised
him to do it alone, assuring him that he would travel later, which he never
did.
Camacho began to disappear permanently from the life of his wife, to
whom for some time the policemen of the Coronel Civil Commission were
going to leave money that they said her husband had sent. Around 1980
no help ever arrived, more or less around the same date that according to
the book Almirante Aragao, by Anderson da Silva Almeida, a certain
Carlos Camacho Matos, who had lived in Portugal and had been an Army
sergeant
Brazilian, tried to infiltrate the circles of Portuguese exiles in Brazil.
In 1992, some of Erna's neighbors on Balmaceda street in Coronel,

where she ran a cabaret, ran to tell her that her husband was being
interviewed by Channel 13 journalist Pablo Honorato. In disbelief, she
recognized her husband in the interview. He was in a small town
located one hundred kilometers from Rio de Janeiro and appeared as
the person who had located and handed over to the police the dark
torturer Osvaldo Romo Mena, "El guatón Romo", a former member of
Usopo, Popular Socialist Union, that on September 11 he appeared
dressed in uniform and that he later joined the DINA, where he became
known as one of its cruelest torturers, having also passed through
Colonia Dignidad. Camacho had an outstanding debt with Romo, as
he claimed that he had tortured his brother to death, precisely in
Dignidad.
After the interview, Carlos Camacho Jr. managed to travel to Brazil

and locate his father, who at that time turned out to be a very important
leader of the Green Party, and who, upon seeing him, disclaimed any
responsibility, assuring that he had nothing to do with it. in his history
and that he was not his progenitor. He told him that he was very sorry
for everything that had happened, but that he could only help him with
some money.
Both Erick Zott and Luis Peebles remembered in detail one of the
colony's torturers as a subject who spoke Spanish, but with a strong
Portuguese (or Brazilian) accent, very strong, and who directed many
of the sessions.
Luis Peebles could see it. He was in his forties, white, but so
sunburned he might have been brown. He had a very hard expression
and prominent muscular features, all of which fit the description of
Camacho, who died a few years ago in Sao Paulo, reverted to an
influential evangelical pastor.
He was also seen and recognized by political prisoner María Isabel

Romero, although she (who also suffered torture in Colonia Dignidad)
was flogged by that individual in Villa Grimaldi, where —according to her
testimony—the foreigner was the one who directed the torture sessions and
instructed the Chileans.
However, the most relevant of all the information contained in the files is
the one related to the disappeared detainees and those who were tortured
and interrogated inside the colony. In addition to keeping records of all
those who were made to disappear in the middle of "Operation Colombo",
the Dignidad archives contain transcripts of numerous interrogations carried
out inside the enclave and in DINA premises.
An example of this is what happened to Mile Mavrosky, an undertaker

from San Carlos, now deceased, who was arrested in December 1973,
accused of leading a plan called "Black Easter", through which the MIR
supposedly he was going to assassinate all the notorious characters of said
commune; that is, a kind of local "Plan Zeta".
Accused of this attempt, Mavrosky was held prisoner for eleven months
in a place he always believed to be the colony. He remained all that time in
a kind of dungeon, alone, subjected to almost daily torture, deprived of food
and water, stretched out on a kind of cot, shackled with his hands and feet
and blindfolded. He was questioned daily by men who spoke Spanish, but
in the background he heard the constant murmur of people conversing in
German.
Although when interviewing him he replied that "he thought he had been
in the colony, but he was not sure", in the files are the details of the
interrogations to which he was subjected, the suspicions they had regarding
him being a dangerous Marxist and several other things, all of which was
finally distorted, to the point that he was released after being returned to
the Chillán regiment, "only" with a fracture in his left wrist.
By the way, any intelligence organization needs to prepare its personnel

and the colony literally gave a lecture on that, since they were the ones who
trained the DINA, together with the CIA. Indeed, Pedro Espinoza asserted
that after the coup the US Intelligence Center trained Chilean agents in the
Intelligence School that DINA set up in "Casa de Piedra", the former

Andean mansion of the legendary Darío Sainte-Marie, better known as
Volpone, a personal friend of Salvador Allende and owner of the Clarín
newspaper. However, at the same time that the CIA officers were
training their new Chilean friends, there were also Germans from the
colony there.
Espinoza specified that in May 1974 he was working as head of
security for the Military Junta when Pinochet called him and told him that
he needed his help, along with that of Manuel Contreras, to organize an
intelligence school that would function in a house in the Cajon del Maipo
sector. A couple of months later, as he asserted, "there were CIA
personnel who took instruction courses at the San José de Maipo
Intelligence School."82
Former Army Corporal Carlos Labarca Sanhueza83 recounted that at
the end of 1974 he went to "Casa de Piedra", at that point already
converted into the Intelligence School, under the command of then-major
Pedro Espinoza Bravo and Lieutenant Armando Fernández Larios, also
from the DYNE. He confided that "in the implementation of the
aforementioned school, settlers from the so-called Colonia Dignidad had
an outstanding participation, who installed a transmission antenna and
high-frequency radio equipment, very advanced for the time, since they
communicated directly and without problems to Parral and other cities.
This equipment was operated from Santiago by Fernández Larios and
Pedro Espinoza, who communicated, in code, daily with the settlers.
When the settlers came to Santiago, they went to “Casa de Piedra” and
they tested the equipment and contacted Parral or the house they had
near the National Stadium»84, alluding to the mansion that the Germans
owned in Ñuñoa.
Labarca said that he had seen Paul Schäfer and Mücke there, whom
they called Mauk, and also confessed to having participated in Parral in
an intelligence course offered to DINA by them. In this regard, he told
the court that "he does not remember the date on which, from the Casa
de Piedra group, some six to seven people visited Colonia Dignidad, in
groups of two or three, for a period of a week,
approximately, accompanied by Fernández Larios. In the place he

participated in a course on notions of explosives taught by Mauk
(Gerhard Mücke), along with other younger settlers. They were shown
films, photos and documents related to the Second World War, where
you could see the destruction of tanks, bridges, etc., in addition to the
actions of the German intelligence services.
The ruling says that the military “was too surprised, like his
colleagues, by the level of progress of Colonia Dignidad at that time.
They had technology that they didn't know about, powerful
communication equipment, intercoms in every room, camera and
video equipment, and fully automated doors that opened and closed
on their own. I had the impression that they were constantly watched,
as they were always in the rooms they had been assigned.' He also
added that “Armando Fernández Larios was the one who had the
most contacts with these people, he went to Parral for a long time,
staying in the neighborhood, and he called us on the radio to find out
what was new. On his return he brought us sweets and other food
that they sent us from the colony.
The existence of this course mentioned by Labarca within the

colony is completely proven, since a complete transcript of it was
found in the raids of 2005, which was dictated by a German who had
extensive knowledge of intelligence and personal defense, and that
inside the fundo was known by the nickname of Lindes.
According to Franz Bäar and his wife Ingrid Szurgelies, "Lindes"

was former Nazi Gestapo officer Walter Rauff, who was a DINA
adviser. According to him, the nickname was due to the fact that in
the opinion of the settlers Lindes resembled one of them, with the last
name Lindemann, although Franz clarifies that "I knew his name was
Walter Rauff".
Rauff was the creator of the famous "mobile gas chambers", and
later head of the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied northern Italy. According
to Bäar, he was a "weapons specialist", who also
he taught a special type of karate, mixed with judo, to those in charge

of the security of the colony.
These antecedents allow us to presume that Rauff could have been
one of the rapporteurs for the intelligence course for the DINA inside
the colony in December 1974. The presenter was a German-speaking
man who had fought in World War II, who explained —among other
things — that 'POWs often didn't know who they were with, because
the SS was so much like paratroopers.
They spoke out of pure fear. They thought they were going to kill them."
In the same way, he recounted that "in 1929 there were more Nazi
women than men" and that "in Russia the first women's division of
Ukraine attacked us, 12,000 infant women, in total there were more
than 30,000 women."
Consistent with what was indicated by Bäar, in order that Rauff
taught karate, the DINA course instructor pointed out to them, always
speaking of women, that "in karate they kick as fast as lightning, one
doesn't even realize where kick comes There were four agents in the
Army, excellent at karate.
They handled their legs with a speed that one did not know where the
kicks came from. And because the sole of the foot is smaller, the kick
goes deeper. I once received a kick from a woman in the cardiac region,
I almost vomited. They are incredibly fast, like cat. By the way, before
joining the SS, Rauff had been an officer in the Kriegsmarine, the
German Navy. The course instructor also had thorough knowledge of
torture techniques, such as those used by the Gestapo: «The detainee
should not be beaten to a pulp, nor should excessive current be applied.
Nor little current, in this case inhale, receive the current and then
exhale, “says the document.
That of Bäar is not the only testimony that places Rauff within the
colony. Klaus, the son of Kurt Schnellenkamp, said in an interview with
the newspaper La Nación that he saw him inside the colony and that
everyone should sing when he or other Nazis attended.85 However,
Judge Zepeda reached a different conclusion: what
Lindes was Krieg, as Gerd Seewald assured him.

The files on Krieg explain that ex-Nazi Cornelius Elmar Krieg
Marbeck lived in Quinta Alday, in Chiguayante, a commune near
Concepción, and would have been in charge of a paramilitary group
that operated in this city after September 11, 1973.
He would have worked in Asmar and also in Forestal Arauco and it

is stated that “he comes from a family of rangers from Upper Bavaria.
Father: Catholic; mother: Lutheran. K. did his high school at the San
Blas monastery and later was with Admiral Canaris”, the mythical
head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service.
However, Franz Bäar is strict in this regard and asserts that

Seewald directly lied to the judge and that Rauffera Lindes. In line
with the foregoing, a Penquista professional who knew Krieg well and
who asked for his identity to be kept asserted that "Elmar", as he
called him, did know about weapons, but "in no case did he know
about intelligence", since in the Army German had worked as a
mechanic.
There is also no record that shows that he has served in the Navy.
In any case, it is a recognized fact that Rauff had close contact with
DINA and there are even those who saw him at the Belgrano barracks,
the organization's headquarters. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that
he did not have contact with the colony, given the overlap between it
and Pinochet's secret police.
Chapter 18
communist paranoia
Without a doubt, Gerd Seewald was one of the most peculiar criminals in the
town. As he explained to Judge Jorge Zepeda, at the age of sixteen, he
considered himself a "total pagan", until a friend invited him to a Baptist Church
retreat and voilà: he came out a Christian fanatic.
After that, together with a friend he began to preach in the vicinity of

Hamburg, at the same time that he entered the university where, after a
degree, he obtained the degree of Doctor of Theology with a thesis entitled
«Mary's complaint in Middle Latin literature and the Germanic literatures of the
Middle Ages».
In 1954 he stayed for a year in a Baptist seminary in Zurich and on his

return to Germany he was offered a job at the German Biblical Archive. In 1957
a publisher proposed to write a Bible dictionary.
With a hint of drama, he explained that the latest corrections to said work
were delivered to the publisher on July 25, 1961, and that "I left Germany the
same night on a flight to Chile . " possible university chair, which would have
been the following.
At that point, he had been under the aegis of Paul Schäfer for several years.
According to him, he was "lost" the moment he recognized this as a spiritually
"superior" being.
Trying to avoid all the crimes in which he participated, he told the judge that
because of this "I was unavoidably and guilty intertwined with everything unfair
and cruel that happened in Villa Baviera."
According to him, it was not until September 2002 that "I learned from reliable
witnesses that (Schäfer) was a criminal pedophile," an absurd version
considering his functions as a true operational chief of
intelligence, which not only knew what was happening inside the
property, but also received all the newspapers, listened to the radio,
watched television, gave talks on current affairs to the other settlers,
and censored letters and books.
It is important to note that, as Heinz Kuhn pointed out, although
Paul Schäfer was the one who gave the orders, "only those closest
to him could have knowledge of his actions".87 In other words, it is
impossible that Seewald did not know what was happening. there,
like the other hierarchs, especially when the children of several of
them were sexually abused by the subject whom they followed blindly.
In the same way, he tried to justify the enormous weapons and

intelligence apparatus, asserting that “during the time of the UP we
had armed ourselves to be able to resist an eventual takeover or
guerrilla assault. We were aware of having to protect our women and
children. The coup d'état, in his opinion, “brought us liberation from
any danger. We are forever grateful to the soldiers who had saved
our lives." By virtue of this, the messiah “invited the DINA to carry out
his activities on the property. This is how political detainees arrived at
Villa Baviera and were interrogated by the military. Although I had the
task of keeping the political archive, Paul Schäfer always kept me
well distanced from his military conversations and, above all, from the
cruel reality of the detainees. This, of course, is not credible either;
and in another appearance he admitted not only that he knew about
the political prisoners, but in relation to those he described as "Lota's
detainees" —apparently he was referring to the cases of Pedro Merino
and Adán Valdebenito— Schäfer told him Sie dürfen nicht
überleben : «They must not survive».
According to Seewald, it was during his time at the university where

he learned to make cards, but the documents found in the colony are
far from being academic cards. On the contrary, they are professional
intelligence files, made up, according to him, because "Schäfer
wanted to be well informed and have a large file on everyone on the
left... the inclusion of people who were not from
left was because Schäfer had a relationship with them and wanted to
keep their information. Of course, that's not true either. The archives
contain hundreds of national and international artists, as well as
Chilean and foreign politicians, scientists or show business people
with whom they never had any contact. In the same way, it is not true
that this task began in 1974, as he pointed out, since there are
records from the sixties.
What he did admit is that information was reaching them from
everywhere and that many of the detainees that DINA transferred
there already came with a written file, which in turn was transferred to
their files.
Seewald also revealed the internal structure of the sect, where
everyone was divided into defense groups: the Herren (knights), the
Comalos, the Grosse Knappen (the great squires), the Mittlere
Knappen (the medium squires), the Moritze or Heirlsarmee.
(Salvation Army), the Kleine Jungen (little children), the Omas
(grandmothers), the Frauen (women), the Dragoner (women of
arms), the Schranzen (sycophants or servile), the Halalis (halali is a
type of German rose), the Feldmäuse (field mice), the Wasserflöhe
(water fleas) and the Kleine Mädchen (little girls).
The division was not whimsical, but was carried out based on a
very complex «Alarm Plan», found along with the files.88 It is a
document of about ten pages, from approximately 1974, where some
truly incredible things are detailed, such as that all the groups were
obligated to fulfill some function if the fundo were invaded by the
communists or any other enemy force. To do this, everyone had to
"have the sweatshirt next to the bed" during the nights, in order to
have a uniform that distinguished them from each other. One of the
cars, an Opel, had to always be with a trailer full of weapons, near
the place where the Herren slept or were. This trailer carried pistols,
carbines, rifles and machine guns. For the first there were twenty-five
shots, fifty for the second, for the rifles, one hundred and fifty and
three hundred for the machine guns.
In addition, the alarm plan established immovable rules, typical of

any military unit: "Every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon the full
magazine is emptied and a new one is loaded," was the order, in order
to avoid mold, dust or Any other element that would damage the
ammunition.
For each activity there were people in charge, identified with their
nicknames. The plan also detailed the security installations that the
Parral facility had at the time it was drawn up, in the early 1970s: two
light barriers, an external listening microphone, a listening microphone
in the office, two photographic installations, a listening microphone on
a tree, a listening microphone on the Giebelposten (front stall), a
recording system in the shed bedroom. In addition to counting, of
course, with telephones, intercoms and radio equipment.
Then, as we already know from the purchases they made thanks to

Mr. Krefeld, they acquired motion sensors, particularly what they
called "the trip wire"; that is to say, a wire that ran through the central
part of the villa and that, if activated at night, activated a silent alarm.
If this happened, those who were on duty had to immediately notify
the surveillance center "by means of a ray of light from the lamp,
directed upwards."
Likewise, there were loudspeakers everywhere, as if they lived in a

regiment, and these had to be always activated, especially "in the
gentlemen's bedrooms and other places where they move." There
were also specific instructions on how to deal with unplanned visits:
"Any unknown person is spoken to through the intercom" installed at
the main entrance to the villa, and "if strangers look suspicious,
immediate notification must be given." -alarm: ring the bell four times
briefly. Erna is to inform Milda in German about the content of the
conversation via the intercom, so that it can also be heard in the
hallway of the Zippel house.'
And like in any bad spy movie, like the ones that Paul Schäfer
secretly liked to watch so much —because only he and the
hierarchs could freely watch whatever they wanted, on VHS tapes—,

could not miss a series of absurd code words that had to be learned
to transmit about the suspects and that, of course, nobody ever
managed to retain: five suspicious people with or without a vehicle
they were "hornets"; up to ten suspects with or without a vehicle were
"bumblebees"; more than ten were "bees"; a truckload of suspects
was a "swarm of bees," as were, oddly enough, several truckloads of
suspects. But that was not all. If you got the impression that the
suspects "are armed, ready to strike" there was also a super-secret,
impossible-to-crack code: "they are ready to bite."
Part IV
Chenco's ghosts
Chapter 19
A corpse in Florida
Despite the fact that it was already October and the day was clear, at
about eleven o'clock in the morning of October 23, 1977, the two
detectives from the Homicide Squad (BH) who were checking the body
were numb with cold, probably due to the proximity with the mountain range
Together with the first carabineros who arrived at the scene of the
event, at about nine in the morning, the policemen recorded what they
found among the belongings of the male body that they were checking
and that he already had signs of cyanosis, since he was wearing several
hours deceased. In his pockets was a flyer for the "Polla gol" game of
chance, a plastic comb, a pair of optical glasses with broken lenses, an
identity card cut in three, the product of the stab wounds that the victim
had received on the chest. , a key chain with three keys, a nail clipper
and three pesos and fifty cents.
The identity document stated that the victim was Juan René Muñoz
Alarcón, thirty-two years old. His body was lying on the weeds of an
empty site located at 1160 Enrique Olivares Street, in La Florida.
Although Vicuña Mackenna avenue is only a couple of blocks from there
and today the entire sector is populated, at that time it was a secluded,
dark, semi-rural place: the perfect place to murder someone and buy
yourself forty-five years of impunity, which They are the ones who have
supported Muñoz's murderers to date.
In the body, according to the skills carried out later, there were no
major signs of resistance. However, the violence exercised against him
had been extreme. They had struck him in the skull with some blunt
object and only in the thorax he had nine stab wounds. A tenth stab,
perhaps the deadliest, had severed his jugular vein.
Some neighbors commented to the BH that "cogoteos" (robbers

with intimidation) were frequent in that sector and that perhaps it was
just that. However, another resident, who lived in a plot located on the
same street, although several blocks from there, reported that the
night before, around three in the morning, he woke up to hear three
men arguing. When he looked out, he saw a car parked outside his
house, inside which were the protagonists of the dispute. As he
thought that perhaps it was animal thieves, he went to the stable to
verify that one of his horses had not been stolen, at which time the
car began its march.
The information about the car with the three occupants made sense
as soon as the victim's relatives began to be interviewed, particularly
the mother of his cohabitant, Dominga Salinas Mallea, in whose house
in Puente Alto Muñoz lived.
According to her mother-in-law, Berta Mallea, on the morning of
October 21 she was sweeping the sidewalk when she saw an Austin
Mini car, manned by two men, one of whom got out asking for Muñoz.
His daughter-in-law Luisa, who was also there, entered the house and
went to the bedroom where his sister and her partner were sleeping,
warned them of the presence of the strangers and left.
"Old lady, apparently I have problems" was all Juan said to Dominga
as she hurriedly dressed, after which she got out, got into the car with
the strangers, and it headed east.
They only heard from him again on the morning of the 23rd, when the
police went to tell him that he had been the victim of a homicide and
that the relatives should go to identify the body.
What nobody was very clear about until then is that this brutal
homicide was not the result of a simple assault, but that the victim
was a real human computer full of data and, therefore, his head had a
price.
Shortly after the coup d'état and when the National Stadium was
already the most massive detention center in the country, some of the
most macabre moments that took place there were carried out by a
hooded man who the military took to tour the stands, who watched
attentively to the crowd and from time to time
when he raised his hand indicating important leftists who were in the
midst of the tide of arrests. These were immediately taken to other
detention centers, tortured and executed, in many cases. As is to be
expected, all the detainees feared him and had no doubts that he was
someone who knew many people and who had surely belonged to
the Socialist Party, given that most of those who betrayed were from
that group.
Almost four years after those events, an ordinary-looking man

appeared at the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the human rights
organization that provided assistance to victims of the military
dictatorship created by Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez and which It
was directed by the priest Cristián Precht, currently convicted of
sexual abuse. It was June 1977 and the then vicar sat down to listen
to the words that emerged from the mouth of his interlocutor, inside
one of the offices of the organization located in front of the Plaza de
Armas in Santiago.
"I am the hooded man from the National Stadium," Muñoz said in
a slow and firm voice before an audio recorder. In his statement, he
identified himself as a former leader of the Socialist Party, from which
he declared that he had resigned four or five months before the coup,
which according to him meant being "persecuted by people from the
party, cornered, they burned my house down."89 Front In response
to this persecution, he stated that only right-wing people had helped
and protected him. And in a "spirit of revenge", as he acknowledged,
he voluntarily attended the National Stadium to identify people,
assuring that "the security services hooded me and took me through
the different sections where the detainees were."
According to his version, he was detained anyway, but "later I was
released on the condition that I cooperate, they took me to Colonia
Dignidad", a place about which he stated "there is a national
intelligence training center run by Germans , but nationalized
Chileans”. According to his testimony, "they have a real regiment in
Colonia Dignidad,
where there is a hospital that has all the advances that any of the
hospitals in Santiago would like, where there are ambulance planes,
mail planes and underground prisons. There I was trained to interrogate
people and to do counterintelligence tasks. Let me explain: I was
asked to rejoin the party clandestinely to pretend to be one of them.
However, that was not possible. By his own admission, he was

already "burned out." Consequently, he explained with all crudeness
and cynicism, "I have engaged in tasks of hunting people, interrogating
them, torturing and killing." Immediately afterwards, he explained that
“I have participated in the disappearance of some people who are in
Colonia Dignidad; There are one hundred and twelve people at the
moment in Colonia Dignidad, former leaders of the different parties of
the Popular Unity”. He also added that he did not expect much, since
"I am dead on both sides, that is very clear to me."
A few weeks later, he would say something similar to his brother-in-law
Domingo, whom he enigmatically assured that any day they would
pick him up and he would never return, just as it happened.
In his 1977 statement on the Parral sect, he stated that it was "the
central receiver of all the information from the external apparatus of
DINA," among other things because it had a radio antenna that allowed
it to connect with any part of the world.
Speaking of "Operation Condor," but without explicitly referring to it,

he said that within Chile, the Brazilian, Argentine, and Uruguayan
intelligence services acted indiscriminately. As has been confirmed
over the years, “the job of these services is to hunt down the man
abroad and bring him here and it ends here; prisoners are exchanged.
Perhaps the most dramatic part of his testimony is the one in which
he stated that "I want to record, swear if necessary, that part of the
prisoners are alive, in poor physical condition, many of them on the
verge of madness due to the treatment they received." They have
been through, very hard. I am referring to Carlos Lorca, to Ponce,
head of the Internal Front of the Socialist Party and general secretary
at the time of his arrest. They are in Colonia Dignidad, they are in the pavilion
2”, he assured, handing over a list that contained eighty-one names of

political prisoners who, according to him, were alive on that date inside
the colony. It included, among others, Bautista Van Schouwen, one of
the main leaders of the MIR, the communist leaders José Weibel and
Carlos Contreras Maluje and the socialist Exequiel Ponce, in addition
to Lorca.
His testimony could not be fully verified, but time has proved him
right. Of the forty-six thousand files recovered (remember that there
were many more and that only those that survived the burning have
been found), there are fifty-four that refer to people who were or were
interrogated in the colony, some of them made vanish.
And there is more background that confirms his story. His wife, Olivia
Guajardo Barahona, from whom he was de facto separated at the time
of his murder, admitted to the police that weeks after the coup Muñoz
appeared unexpectedly at his house, the home he had left two years
earlier, when he started living with Dominga Salinas. . That day,
however, "Juan came to my house with a German gentleman and a
midwife named Ingrid."90 Without giving him any further details, he
asked her if she wanted to go with him to Colonia Dignidad. She
thought about it and finally said yes.
Five days later he returned with the same Germans and took the five
eldest children of the marriage. Three days later they returned to look
for her in a station wagon, in which they took her and her youngest son
to the colony.
Once they were installed there, she asked her husband who "Miss
Ingrid and the German gentleman" were, an answer that Muñoz
evaded, making him see that he shouldn't worry about anything,
because he would be fine there, safe and with everything that she and
the children will need. However, suspicions began to assail her,
because every night the same German would come to look for her
husband in the room and he would return at dawn, without her knowing
what steps he was taking, although, of course, she supposed that he was not at all.
Because of these apprehensions, he asked him to return to Santiago
and "Juan and Mr. Albert came to leave me with my children."
Thanks to that statement we know the name of the German who

accompanied Muñoz.
However, as soon as Olivia returned to the capital, a new marriage
broke up and her husband returned to Dominga's side, with whom she
began to live at her mother's house, in Puente Alto.
Several years passed without seeing each other, until in mid-1977

when she sued him for alimony. On October 20 of that year, that is,
one day before the subjects of the Austin Mini arrived looking for him,
there was a hearing in the Juvenile Court of Puente Alto.
There, the hooded man from the National Stadium told the judge that
he "did not work, since he belonged to the Military Intelligence Service
ad honorem, at the cost of his own life", in order to justify the breach
of his obligations.
According to his partner at the time of his assassination, a few
weeks earlier, in September 1977, Muñoz had arrived with a safe-
conduct that allowed him to travel anywhere at any time, a privilege
that very few had in a country under a state of siege. . Along with this,
he was carrying seven thousand pesos in cash, a small fortune for the
time, and he was wearing a new suit, a new watch, and a wig. It was
only at that moment that he confessed that he was working for an
intelligence service that he did not identify.
More or less on the same date, his partner's brother, Rafael Salinas,
invited him to the Colo Colo branch in Puente Alto. When he took out
his wallet, he noticed that Muñoz was carrying an identity card
belonging to another person. When asked, he told him that he had
three other IDs and that this was because he worked for an intelligence
agency.
Muñoz's brother, Ernesto, for his part, explained to the police that
at the end of 1973 a car stopped next to him while he was walking
down the street. Inside the vehicle were Juan and a man dressed in
an olive green uniform. His brother got out, greeted him, and the other
occupant of the mobile did the same, when he was able to see that
the jacket said "Armada de Chile." His last meeting with him had been
at the beginning of 1977, when the
Juan showed him the wig and the new suit, and told him that he
worked "in various intelligence services, adding that there was an
aviation officer who did not want him to work with them and he limited
me by saying that wherever this gentleman is, I do not I can be".
It was during the second half of September when they began to go

looking for him in a car, which was parked outside the house at
around three in the afternoon. He would go out, go with them and
come back at dawn.
In November 1977, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad asked the Supreme
Court to appoint a visiting minister, so that a higher-level judge would
exclusively address the case. To do this, Precht accompanied a
transcription of the recording.
After analyzing the background, the court agreed and appointed
Minister Juan Osvaldo Faúndez Vallejos, who decided to go to
Colonia Dignidad, in order to check on the ground the veracity of the
murdered man's statements. The same magistrate recorded in the
file that the farm was established at 10:40 a.m. on December 20,
1977 and that it was received by "Mr. Herman Schmidt Georgi,
farmer, from the same address, and witnesses Albert Schreiber
Rauschenger, employee, and Ingrid Pölchen Wittchen, a seamstress,
both also residing in the same colony".91 Despite the fact that only
eight days earlier the magistrate had received the report from the
Homicide Squad indicating that two Germans named "Albert" and
"Ingrid" were Those who had taken Muñoz, his wife, and their children
to the neighborhood, in the record that the magistrate left regarding
their visit, there is not a single statement from them, nor whether they
had been in Puente Alto recently, whether they knew Muñoz , his wife
or his children, if they had any suspicion of who had murdered him.
Nothing at all.
Mr. Faúndez left the sect's premises very enthusiastic.
Regarding the settlers, he wrote that they live "perfectly organized
and subject to work plans that allow them to be completely self-
sufficient" and that "after visiting all the existing facilities and
dependencies, nothing was noticed in them
abnormal. It could be seen that all the people gladly carry out the
tasks that have been assigned to them”.
In the same way, it recorded that "Mr. Schmidt told the court that
the colony, as its name indicates, is a charitable and educational
society, which is financed only with the product of the work of the
colonists and whose purpose is provide all kinds of help to people
who are indigent or who lack enough to pay what they need, especially
in regard to the care and education of minors. And of course, the
judge made sure to verify that none of the people who, according to
Muñoz, were still alive in the neighborhood were actually there. As it
did? Reviewing the records of the hospital patients, where it was
stated that none of the political prisoners mentioned by the hooded
man had passed through the hospital, from which he concluded that
they had not been there.
After that, the judge tried to turn the case over to the military courts,
but they refused, arguing that, except for Muñoz's statements to the
Vicaría, there was no record in the file indicating the participation of
uniformed officers in the homicide.
Finally, the Supreme Court ruled that Faúndez continue in charge
of the investigation. He decided, then, to carry out one last errand.
The file does not explain how he came to that name, but the fact is
that he took a statement from one of the fiercest members of the Joint
Command —the repressive body created by FACH, which competed
with DINA—, reserve lieutenant Roberto Fuentes Morrison, better
known as "Wally".
True to his habit of constituting himself in places, Minister Faúndez
was kind enough to go to interrogate Wally at the offices of the FACH
Intelligence Directorate, on Juan Antonio Ríos street, almost in front
of the National Library. Perhaps he did so because of the mention of
the victim's brother regarding the problems he was having with a
FACH officer or because the list of people incarcerated in the colony
included the former PC councilor for Concepción Carlos Contreras
Maluje. , who had been kidnapped in Santiago in 1976, in a Joint
Command operation.
However, in Wally's concise statement, there is no mention of

Muñoz. In less than half a page, he dedicates himself to pointing out
that he is only aware of Contreras through the press and that "from
other references I know that he is an activist and that he would have
been arrested", to add that "to my knowledge, this person has not
been arrested for the service in which I carry out my work”.
After this "arduous" interrogation, the minister decided to close the
cause, no culprit.
Fuentes Morrison was assassinated in 1989 by the Manuel
Rodríguez Patriotic Front. The previous year, Faúndez had been
appointed to the Supreme Court.
Chapter 20
"One"
Muñoz was not the only agent of Pinochet's security services linked to
the colony to be assassinated. In fact, the first was the DINA agent
Miguel Ángel Becerra, known by the nickname "One", because he was
always alone.
A former militant of the Patria y Libertad movement, in January 1974
he went with his thirteen-year-old son to live inside the enclave, where
he carried out tasks as a DINA agent. In July 1975, Miguel Ángel
Becerra saw his brother Arístides, who was a police officer, for the last
time. He told her that he wanted to get out of the colony, but he knew
it was dangerous.
At the end of that month, on the 29th, Petty Officer Becerra was
informed that his brother had suffered "an accident." In Linares, two
individuals who were apparently DINA members told him that Uno had
been assassinated by the communists in revenge for his work for the
dictatorship. However, this did not match the cause of death listed in
the autopsy protocol: possible asphyxiation by inhalation of carbon
monoxide, although the doctor who signed the document commented
that he was not entirely sure of that.
The cause of death, however, was compatible with another version

that he was told about his brother's death: that he had fallen asleep
inside the truck in which he was found, although, if that was the case,
the exhaust pipe it would be connected to the cabin, which would imply
suicide.
Arístides Becerra began to find out and ended up going to the
neighborhood, where he spoke with Schäfer himself, who was
introduced as "the doctor." He told him a story that was even more
difficult to swallow: that in his brother's room they found the remains of
an apple, which they analyzed and it was poisoned. In
In short, he told him that his brother had been the victim of a homicide, as
indeed happened, but he invented an absurd cause of death.
On a second visit to the compound, despite the opposition of the

settlers, he managed to speak with his nephew, who was still hospitalized
there. Very seriously, the boy told him that he had been told that his father
had died in a traffic accident. Of course, it was all a lie.
If Becerra had indeed eaten an apple, they would have found remains
of the fruit in her stomach during the autopsy, and there were none. Many
years later, already in democracy and when justice began to act as it
should, the new examinations of the case determined that the DINA agent
had died due to the action of organophosphate chemical elements, the
same ones that are in many pesticides, but also on sarin gas, which is the
most likely cause of death in this case.
One of the most peculiar aspects of the Becerra murder are the
statements of the journalist and former adviser to the military junta
Federico Willoughby, who had known the neighborhood since 1961.
Ten years later, according to his autobiography, and while fully
participating in the ultranationalist group Patria y Libertad, he was taken
from Santiago to the sect in a Mercedes Benz ambulance. There he was
shocked by what the person who ran the place showed him, who was
introduced to him as Secretary Schneider.
«Its new dependencies amazed us because of the technology,
communications and surveillance cameras. Shooting range, antennas
disguised as vegetation, underground alarms and a workshop, where a
modern white Mercedes Benz, with a diplomatic patent, was repaired. The
secretary accompanied us, who reported our location on the radio in
German and commented that we looked astonished. I don't speak German,
but I can understand it and also read it. The same voice asked for a
description of us, how each of us was dressed, and other details.”92 De
Schäfer says that everyone obeyed the snap of his fingers.
The German boasted of knowing Jaime Guzmán and other people from
PyL and of having military contacts. In addition, he told her that they were
willing to work against Allende and the "communist pigs."

As he was a radio amateur, they agreed to communicate by radio and
for this they exchanged code words, something that we have seen
before in the practices of the colony.
On that occasion, Willoughby stated in a judicial statement, Schäfer
told him that he was interested —as had happened almost three years
before— in doing whatever was necessary to destabilize Allende,
indicating that the sect had everything necessary to bring elements
from abroad, obviously referring to the imports of arms and ammunition
that they had carried out in 1970, in which Mr.
Krefeld.
After that, Willougbhy recounts in his biography about a plane trip to
the colony, whose pilot was the chief of operations of Patria y Libertad,
Roberto Tieme,93 and in which a recently discharged Army general
was also traveling, Alfredo Canales, better known as "el Macho
Canales". Once they landed on the farm, they covered the plane with
camouflage cloth, after which a young German gave them marzipan.
It was Hartmut Hopp, who from that moment on became his

interlocutor in Santiago. It was Hopp who Willoughby asked to implement
a shielding and defense system for the offices of Radio Agricultura,
from which the transmissions would be coordinated when the 1973
coup took place, which they did between September 9 and early
morning. from the 11th
Willougbhy assures that it was he who put the settlers in contact with
those who would later be the architects of the DINA, through Colonel
Pedro Espinoza. As he correctly estimated, "Contreras planned to use
the colony's import facilities to clandestinely equip himself."94 After the
coup, and perhaps even more surprisingly, the colony sent a security
team of three Germans to protect him (although according to his
version was only two or three days with them). A year later, they
contacted him from Dignidad in the form
urgent. Over the radio, the person on the other end—he can't
remember if it was Hartmut Hopp or Albert Schreiber, the friendly
witness who welcomed Faúndez when he became a sect—informed
him that they had a serious problem: a visitor to the farm had dead
choked on a piece of apple. When he asked where the body was, the
answer was worthy of a Tarantino movie: they had put it in a freezer.
Later, according to Kurt Schnellenkamp, he traveled to Melipilla

with Paul Schäfer, who would have met an hour alone with Pinochet's
adviser, a version that was denied by Willoughby, who maintained
that this had never happened. Anyway, what did happen is that one
night they took out the victim's body (which remained in a freezer at
Neukra; that is, the hospital annex) and left it inside the truck that he
usually drove. Next, they put the vehicle on a truck and immediately
afterwards Schnellenkamp and Rudolf Cöllen drove to Longaví.
On a side road they lowered the truck and left it there, with Becerra's
body inside.
For many years, the victim's son remained inside the colony,
without contact with his mother or siblings, convinced that they had
abandoned him. Only once Schäfer stopped reigning within the sect
was he able to meet with his family and find out that, contrary to what
he was told for so long, his relatives had made multiple attempts to
see him, but this was always denied by the group leaders.
In fact, Willoughby affirmed that at some point a letter addressed

to Pinochet came into his hands, in which he asked for help to recover
a child who was inside Dignidad. It was the son of Uno. According to
his version, he sent the request to the dictator's cabinet, but "to my
surprise, months later, the one-page memorandum that he had
already sent to the president was returned with a five-page letter
signed by Pinochet's aide-de-camp, Enrique Morel Donoso, head of
the Military House, where in summary he said that the matter of my
petition was related to State security, so I should stay out of it, that
this was going to be resolved by the corresponding channels.
I was so surprised by the tone of that communication that I went to

talk to the aide-de-camp, who I asked what motivated that reaction
and he replied that it was a matter of the Mamo (director of DINA)
and, literally, that I should not get involved in the horses' legs".95
Despite the warning, he always agreed with his version, and while
Schäfer was in Santiago, he spoke with him and made him aware of
the government's supposed concern for the
case.
The "permanent uncle"'s response chilled him: "These kids have
seen a lot, so it wouldn't be good for the government to try to get the
kids out of there."
Chapter 21
The captain's death
In 2002, former political prisoner Erick Zott stealthily approached the

Chilean consulate in Vienna, the city where he resides. What he said
that day before Consul Juan Luis Bianchi would mean the reopening
of a case that had been closed for many years and that directly
implicated DINA and Colonia Dignidad in another crime against an
intelligence agent, but this time it was about an army officer.
Zott, who had been a MIR militant in his youth and was detained,
among other places, in Colonia Dignidad, explained to Bianchi that in
that capacity he was one of the witnesses who testified in the trial that
began at the end of the 1970s. Colonia Dignidad against Stern
magazine and the NGO Amnesty International in Bonn, which it
accused of defamation, a process that lasted eleven years.
In this context, every time the then General Secretary of Amnesty

International in Germany, Walter Rövenkamp, was faced with some
important event in the colony, he called him at his home in Vienna, so
that he could accompany him, he recalls.
In 1985 Zott spent several hours on a Sunday afternoon in
Rövenkamp's small apartment in Bonn, where a third guest, Hugo
Bäar, was present.
Let us remember that he escaped from the sect at the end of 1984
and began to testify against it, also participating in the same process.
In the conversation, Zott said, Bäar explained that in the mid-1970s

he was in charge of the colony's armory "and thus learned that, in the
winter of 1975, two members of the Colonia Dignidad, whom identified
and whose name I do not remember, participated in an attack against
an officer of the
Chilean army in Talca. Hugo Bäar received the weapon back and
these two members of the colony temporarily hid in southern Chile.
The only Army officer killed in Talca at that time is Captain Osvaldo
Heyder Goycolea, head of the Military Intelligence Service of that city's
regiment, and to understand his death it is necessary to go back six
months.
In January of that year, Heyder held the same position —head of
the SIM—, but in the Maipo regiment, located in Valparaíso, when in
the middle of that month a Puma helicopter arrived at the compound
with DINA agents, who were planning a operation against men and
women belonging to the MIR who were taking refuge in the area. Said
operation resulted in the murder of one of the most important leaders
of the MIR in the Valparaíso Region and the capture of about twenty
militants, all of whom were detained and tortured by the DINA in the
basement of the Maipo regiment.
On Heyder's resume, congratulations were stamped for his

performance in the joint work between these two intelligence agencies
that repelled each other so much. Despite the acknowledgment,
Heyder was sickened by DINA's brutality. It's more. When at the end
of January the officers and non-commissioned officers of this entity
returned to Santiago and the prisoners were left in their charge,
Heyder adopted a series of radical decisions. The first of these was to
appear before the detainees dressed in uniform, to later identify
himself with his name and position. Then he asked them how they
were, ordered one of the prisoners, who was about to give birth, to be
taken to the regiment's infirmary, where she gave birth to twin girls,
and got food for everyone.
At first they didn't believe him very much. They thought he was
simply playing "good cop" with them, but as time went on they realized
that he was indeed located a long way from the DINA, to the point that
—always according to Zott's testimony— he even offered them
information. that would allow them to get around the DINA interrogations
in a better way. For
true, Heyder was not a communist, a sympathizer of the MIR or

anything like that. He was completely in favor of the Miristas being
tried, but he believed that this had nothing to do with torturing them.96
When the DINA tried to remove the prisoners from the Maipo, Heyder
asked Zott what he could do. He advised her to prevent some of
the women from being taken away. After that, the captain had a very
harsh verbal confrontation with the DINA official in charge of the
transfer, Lieutenant Fernando Laureani, better known as "Lieutenant
Pablito", who finally had to give in to the demands of the SIM official,
due to to his superior hierarchy.
Even so, several of the prisoners were transferred, among whom

was Zott. However, eight of them remain missing to this day: María
Isabel Gutiérrez, Fabián Ibarra, Sonia Ríos, Horacio Carabantes,
Abel Vilches, Alfredo García, Carlos Rioseco and Elías Villar.
The former Mirista turned DINA agent, Marcia Merino, in her court
statements, would affirm that "in the days after DINA returned to
Santiago, after the operations carried out in Valparaíso, I found out
that Fernando Laureani had had problems with a important officer of
the Maipo regiment, who did not agree with the methods used by the
person in charge of the operations; that is to say, with the application
of torture in the interrogations”. Regarding this, he would say years
later to justice that he remembered all of this very well, since it was
the first time he had heard of someone who opposed the DINA
methods and, furthermore, confronted them.
In March 1975, the Court of Appeals of Valparaíso received an

appeal for protection, in which information about the disappeared was
requested from the Armed Forces and Carabineros. That was the
usual procedure at that time throughout the country: the court received
an amparo, sent the request for information to the security agencies
and they invariably returned the document with a
brief answer in which any knowledge of the person or persons for

whom the question was asked was denied.
However, that particular amparo ended in a different way. The
Maipo regiment sent a letter to the appellate court containing the
names of all the people who had been detained there in January and
the list of those who had been taken by the National Intelligence
Directorate. Until then, the existence of the DINA was an open secret.
Everyone knew that it had existed since the coup, although under a
different name: National Secretariat for Detainees, Sendet. However,
this had never been officially recognized and now a document from a
regiment confirmed that it existed, forcing the Pinochet government
to recognize it, and not only that: for the first time, Manuel Contreras
was summoned to court, so that he explain the whereabouts of those
people.
Less than three months later, Heyder was transferred to Talca,

along with his wife and three young daughters. At the beginning of
June he disappeared and later his car was found on the side of La
Virgen hill, with the officer inside, shot to the temple.
Many things were said to justify his death. The first version was
that some terrorists had murdered him. Augusto Pinochet, looking into
their eyes, confirmed it to his relatives in Concepción. The second
version indicated that he had committed suicide after stealing money
from the troops. A third version raised the same thing, but attributed
the death to "trouble of skirts."
In any case, Laureani and his direct boss, Marcelo Moren Brito,
better known as "el Ronco", would admit years later that their presence
in Talca just on those days, as established by the courts, was due to
the fact that they had been sent to "investigate" the Heider's death.
What a coincidence.
From Vienna, where he continues to reside, Zott points out that "I
cannot speak about what Heyder did before, but those days when he
was with us he showed that he did everything possible to protect us
from Laureani's antics."
After going through various detention facilities in Santiago,
Concepción and Talcahuano, Zott ended up being transferred to

Colonia Dignidad, along with Marcia Merino and Luis Peebles. Unlike
what happened in the other DINA facilities where he had been, “they
put cotton pads with water in our ears and covered our eyes with a
kind of leather cap. We passed two checkpoints before arriving at the
farm and, when parking in reverse, we went up a kind of ramp, being
received by an officer I recognized as Pedro Espinoza," he explained
years later, referring to the man who became DINA's second in
command. and was frequently within the estate, where he was known
as Schlosser (locksmith) and was one of Seewald's main sources of
information.
Another DINA regular in the place was its boss, Manuel Contreras.
Today there are multiple testimonies that account not only for his
constant presence in the sect (and his participation in the death of
the child Hartmut Münch), but also that his wife Maruja was a frequent
guest, to such an extent that an interior bridge was baptized as
Maruja bridge. Also attending the colony was their son, Manuel
Contreras Valdebenito, who officiated as a karate instructor for the
colonists.
The DINA hypnotist, Osvaldo Pincetti, known as "Doctor Tormento",
also operated in the place, asserting that he interrogated through
hypnosis and that there he met Commander Gómez Segovia, of
whom he said that "he was well connected with Colonel Manuel
Contreras, who spent the summer in the colony».97
In the same way, he asserted that "Mr. Paul Schäfer was present
during the interrogations, as well as Dr. Hopp and Gerhard Mücke."98
Another of the DINA officials who spent a good part of his time there
was Laureani, who delivered an unpublished statement in the
judicial investigation related to the disappearance of Pedro Merino, a
young man from Coronel murdered and made to disappear inside the
neighborhood. In said testimony, dated September 2007 in the special
prison of Punta Peuco, the former officer said that he had only spent
eleven months in the DINA, assuring that he had never
participated in crimes. Later, however, he pointed out that after he was named
in the TVN program Enigma as a participant in the case of eight disappeared
detainees that he took from the Maipo regiment —crimes for which he was
convicted of qualified kidnapping—, he decided to tell his story. "real" participation
in the events, ordered to do so by Manuel Contreras.
According to him, the objective of the operation in the Valparaíso Region was
to find information related to a small armament with weapons that the MIR
supposedly possessed in Concepción. For this reason, he assured, it was also
necessary to question Luis Peebles, the supposed regional manager of the MIR
in Concepción and who, however, was detained at the Talcahuano Naval Base.
After taking Peebles from there, Laureani had to find a place to interrogate
him and for this the closest DINA unit was Parral, assuring that there "they
referred me to Villa Baviera for the purposes that were required, a place that I I
was unaware of”.99 There, as he acknowledges in the letter, Peebles did not
speak “freely and spontaneously”, which is why “he must have done so under
physical duress”.
According to his reasoning, this constituted a crime, but then he argued, in

clear contradiction to the foregoing, according to the institutional regulations of
the time, that "this interrogation activity was absolutely lawful, regulated,
necessary and obligatory under the aforementioned circumstances." Trying to
minimize the torment to which he was subjected, according to him Peebles was
not applied "disproportionate physical duress." Since the prisoner was still
uncooperative, the Germans reportedly told him that they were "going to make
him talk." At that time, he would have decided to defend him, asserting that there
was no real torture of the detainee.
In truth, it is difficult to imagine any worse torture than the one he experienced
Peebles, as he declared in 1978 in Bonn, according to what was reported in a
declassified US document:
“They tied me to a metal bunk, but this time they put a helmet on my head.
The helmet had movable ear muffs, which allowed them to deliver electrical
current to my ears, and elastics for
the jaw. This was so that when I was kicked or punched my jaw would
not drop out of place. Small wires were glued to my wrists, buttocks,
glands, chest, and neck, and current was applied to different parts of
me. There was also an officer who used a small rubber object that
electrocuted me every time I was hit with it. They had something that
they used on my eyes, mouth, teeth, under my tongue, and sometimes
when I was yelling, they would put it on the back of my roof. I had
another one in my anus, at the base of the urethra and another one
under my fingernails... this went on for hours and hours... the pain
was such that I writhed and raised the bed several times. I even
folded the iron litter and broke the moorings by the force of despair.
The brutality of the treatment made me think that I was being
subjected to an experiment to find out how much I could last physically
and mentally. I was the guinea pig and they were there to learn," he
explained.
For her part, Marcia Merino, who was transferred to the colony
along with Zott and Peebles, recalled that when she arrived at the
basement where she was introduced, she was received by Pedro
Espinoza, who "gave me a square white tablet, written in German,
telling me to take it because it would give me energy. I was in that
place for a week or more, I suppose, and I only remember specific
events, without any connection or temporal-spatial relationship, which
allows me to assert that I was being drugged.”100 The alliance
between DINA and the colony became evident in many cases.
Gerd Seewald himself would specify that at the beginning of 1974 a
number of detainees arrived at the Parral property that he said he did
not remember, those who were left in the potato warehouse and in
other facilities set up as detention and interrogation centers.
As he explained, the detainees were arriving there until mid-1975.
A little later, he assured, "a total change was made, in order not to
arouse suspicions that a prisoner camp existed in that place,"101
referring to the instruction that Schäfer gave in the sense of destroying
any evidence, which proves that, despite what those who defend him
today argue that he was not in his right mind,
he was perfectly aware of what he was doing. It must be remembered

that Schäfer ordered the removal of all evidence within the framework
of "Operation Retirement of Televisions", as described below. In other
words, if Seewald only got the year wrong, it means that Muñoz's
sayings were true.
Chapter 22
Fertig
Perhaps the best-known case of leftist militants murdered within the sect is that
of the Mirista known as "Loro Matías", Álvaro Vallejos Villagrán, who was arrested
in May 1974 in Maipú and transferred at the end of July of that same year to
Colonia Dignidad, according to the testimony of the then DINA soldier Samuel
Fuenzalida Devia, who was in a place where he did not want to be and, as was
the case with the colonists, spent a good part of his day planning how to escape.
One day in July, while he was serving in the detention camp known as Villa
Grimaldi, in La Reina, one of his superiors called him: "You are going to
accompany a captain on a mission," was all he said to him, after which he
introduced to Fernando Gómez Segovia.
They took a C-10 truck and with it they set out on the road to the center of
Santiago. On San Diego street, Gómez got off at what appeared to be his parents'
house and after a while he returned. From there they continued on to the Cuatro
Álamos detention center in San Joaquín. On the way, Gómez asked Fuenzalida
what weapons he was carrying.
"A Steyr," replied the conscript, referring to the prosecutor's pistol assigned to
him. "Always carry it loaded and with a dead bullet," he replied, warning him that
they would pick up a most dangerous prisoner. "Shall I ask for your belongings?"
he asked.
Fuenzalida to the captain when they arrived at the detention center, but he said
no, an unequivocal sign that the victim's fate was cast and that, therefore, he was
not going to need them anymore.
Finally the detainee was handed over to them, they put him in the middle of the
front seat with instructions not to make a sound, and they headed south.
Despite the order not to issue a word, Vallejos allowed himself to say
something as soon as the trip began: "I presume that they are going to take
me to the same place where I already was."
After several hours of driving, they reached the intersection between Parral
and Catillo, where a military patrol was waiting for them. When leaving the
capital, Gómez had given a password to another patrol located at the height
of San Bernardo. The officer got out to complete the procedure and at that
moment Vallejos spoke again, this time addressing Fuenzalida directly: "If you
are a Catholic, pray for me."
They entered the road to Catillo and some thirty kilometers from there they
finally reached the entrance to the town, where a light blue car was waiting for
them that Fuenzalida already knew well, since he had seen it several times at
the DINA headquarters, on Belgrano street. It was Schäfer's Mercedes.
Vallejos was taken up there and Fuenzalida was able to distinguish two
Germans: one, whom he would later know as "the Professor", was Schäfer;
the other, Gerhard Mücke. As the celestial vehicle moved away, he and the
officer were invited to the reception house, where they were awaited with a
traditional German meal.
They were having dinner when Schäfer appeared again. He put the index
finger of his right hand to his neck and, passing it from left to right, said fertig
(ready), thereby indicating that the victim had already been killed.
"We stayed there for a long time. They spoke emotionally, because on
August 20 Pinochet was going to Chillán for the birthday of O'Higgins and
then he would go to the colony. They were happy. Schäfer insisted to Gómez
Segovia that he should go see him with his entire family.
Finally we went to Parral, to the captain's house. The next morning I woke up
early and returned to Santiago," explained Fuenzalida.
About his impressions about the sect, he states: «I thought it was a

regiment. They were in uniform and Mücke wore cockades on his shoulders.
At the entrance of the villa I saw a
.30 machine gun and a Rheinmetall, plus other heavy weapons. Inside,
moreover, they were all armed.
His impression was not based only on what he saw that night, but on
another event that occurred around February of that same year, 1974,
when he, along with five other soldiers, was sent to the Arturo Merino
Benítez airport, in Pudahuel, to provide support in something that was
not it was specified to them. They arrived at the Group 10 loading zone
and an officer told them that they had to help load boxes onto some
trucks. «They were the classic wooden boxes of weapons, very heavy.
They opened one and a Walter PPK pistol came out. We filled about
two trucks and the entire maneuver was supervised by some Germans
who were on the slab. Later they ordered us to escort the trucks to San
Bernardo.
After those first two encounters with the Germans the
I would see several more times in the Belgrano barracks.
Shortly after, Samuel Fuenzalida finally achieved his goal and fled
from DINA and Chile. In 1978, in Germany, he began to testify about
everything he saw and since then his statements have been essential
to solving crimes such as that of Álvaro Vallejos and other cases.
Chapter 23
The missing
One of the darkest episodes in the colony is related to the Cerro Gallo
operation, a kind of thorough raid against supposed guerrillas who had
been detected on the hill of said name, located very close to the
colony, and who It meant an immense mobilization of the military to
that area. For years this operation was denied, but with the release of
the colony's intelligence files it became clear that it was carried out
between March 15 and 16, 1974, that Schäfer and his followers acted,
and that military units from Talca participated. , Linares, Chillán and
Concepción, supported by helicopters.
However, it has never been possible to verify if they found the

suspected guerrillas and, if so, what happened to them.
According to the files, the operation in Cerro Gallo was led by a
group of commandos from Concepción headed by Lieutenant Colonel
Dante Iturriaga Marchese, although the DINA officer Juan Morales
Salgado, who would later direct the extermination center, also appears
as a participant in the deployment. Simon Bolivar.
There are two individualized military helicopter pilots in them—a
certain Carmona and another identified as Luis Contreras Prieto—as
well as the head of the Linares SIM, Eduardo Díaz Darrigrandi. Another
participant in the event was a major from Chillán, Donato López, whom
in their files they blame for having carried out "an operation without
prior preparation" and, of course, they call him a "communist."
The content of these files suggests that four hundred men
participated in the events, that the military units from Talca and Chillán
arrived at six and eight in the morning, respectively, and that the entire
operation lasted two hours and fifteen minutes.
To date, there is no concrete information regarding

of the discovery of the presumed extremists that they were going to look
for. However, in file 4 of those relating to López, it was recorded that
"the success of the capture of extremists or possible infiltrators in the
surroundings of Cerro Gallo is due solely and exclusively to the fact that
they participated with disguised colony personnel, even with the doctor
in disguise».
"I saw a tremendous group of 300 or 400, I don't know how many
were the soldiers who searched the other side of Cerro Gallo," specifies
Franz Bäar,102 who asserts that, as he learned, the operation had
been organized based on a call radio intercepted by the Germans, from
which they would have located an alleged group of communist guerrillas
"in position" on the hill.
However, they did not find them there, but Bäar assures that they did
find a group of people who were in the El Durazno sector, next to Cerro
Gallo. In fact, he is certain that the people who would have resided in
that sector were eliminated.
And he adds another piece of information: that the colony used one of
its planes, a Cessna bought in the United States, to throw the bodies of
detained-disappeared into the sea.
Two other disappeared detainees whose trail began to be lost forever
in the neighborhood were Pedro Merino and Adán Valdebenito. Merino,
twenty-one years old, was a leader of the Juventudes Comunistas de
Coronel and was arrested on September 14, 1974 by members of
DINA's "Team 600," as a command of twelve agents operating in
Concepción was called, but who They were under the orders of Gómez
Segovia, from Parral.
Merino was taken to the colony and his stay there was recorded in
an intelligence file, in one of whose corners they wrote the letter "D" for
"Disappeared."
Valdebenito, in turn, was kidnapped by DINA on September 25, 1974,
ten days after Merino. His fate was the same, although —after passing
through the colony— his trail was lost in the Cuatro Álamos prison
camp, according to the sentence issued by Minister Carlos Aldana, of
the Court of
Conception Appeals. However, his stay in the colony was carefully

stamped on the file that they made for him, thanks to which it can be
established that he was there between September 27 and 29.
Seewald pointed out in this regard that “I remember a group of people

from Coronel who were there. I saw in Schäfer's possession a paper
with 5 or 6 names, there must have been about 10 detainees from that
town; I remember the last name of the first person that appeared on
that list, it was Santibáñez. Schäfer made a comment about this group
of people, something along the lines of “they should not survive”».103
Chapter 24
The maino case
During the last twenty years, most of the investigations that various
judges have carried out regarding the mysteries of DINA and its links
with Colonia Dignidad were carried out based on a particular case,
the kidnapping of MAPU militants Juan Maino Canales, Elizabeth
Rekas (four months pregnant at the time of her disappearance) and
her husband Antonio Elizondo, all of whom were kidnapped in
Santiago in May 1976 by DINA agents.
This investigation, labeled with the number 2182-98, was what

allowed the courts to tighten the siege around Colonia Dignidad and
separate multiple episodes from it, culminating in a conviction against
the entire DINA leadership and two leaders of Colonia Dignidad,
Gerhard Mücke, former bodyguard of Paul Schäfer, and Johan Van
Den Berg.
According to the sentence, after the three kidnapped were taken to
Villa Grimaldi, from there they were transferred to the Parral property,
which in DINA jargon was designated as "Puerto Montt", where they
disappeared along with two citronetas ( Citroen brand cars) that
were stolen from them at the time of their arrest. In the case of Maino,
there is a well-founded presumption that the last place he was held
prisoner was the colony's potato warehouse, where he would have
been guarded by Van Den Berg.
The existence of several graves in which the cars stolen from the
disappeared detainees were hidden was known more than twenty
years ago, after the escape of ex-settler Georg Packmor and the
journalist Mónica González made it known in the magazine Análisis.
After multiple procedures inside the property,
found physical evidence by recovering the engines of two buried cars.
In this regard, one of the settlers declared that in the mid-1970s,

eight vehicles appeared inside the colony, including two or three
citronetas, a red Renault, an Austin Mini, and a dark-colored
American car, probably a Dodge brand. as well as a yellow Chevrolet
pickup used by Schäfer. What's more: Kurt Schnellenkamp would
confess in court that in 1974 he sent him in a truck to a regiment in
Santiago, where a second lieutenant told him that, since Schäfer had
given Pinochet a Mercedes Benz 600, "this is a gift for you." »,
indicating three vehicles (a Renault, a pickup truck and another
unidentified one) that got into the truck and took Parral away.
Before his escape to Germany, Hopp testified before Judge Zepeda

and acknowledged knowing of the existence of the cars, one of which
was the one he was occupying. His half-brother, Ulrich Schmidtke
Miottel, testified in 2005 that twenty-five or thirty years earlier Schäfer
called him, Willi Malessa, Artur Gerlach and apparently Van Den Berg
telling them that "the military government had given them a task",
which consisted of in repairing and painting those vehicles (among
which he said there were two or three citronetas), to later sell them
and with the money obtained buy new filming equipment. According
to said testimony, those in charge of painting and reconditioning the
cars were Gerhard Mücke and Karl Stricker, while Schdmitke admitted
having erased the engine serial number of a Dodge pickup, which
passed into the hands of Schäfer.104 The story, however, It did not
end there, because some years later —a period that no one has
been able to specify exactly—, Malessa told him that it was now
necessary to dismantle all those vehicles and bury them. The
disarmament, he explained, “consisted of removing engines, axles
and larger parts. Once the vehicles had been disassembled, we would
upload the parts, cabins, to a Magiruz Deutz truck, and it is very likely
that the engines would have been separated, for later burial elsewhere.
These vehicles were buried in a part of the valley inside the colony
(where the
police found some pieces of these). For these purposes, Willi chose
the places and proceeded to make a hole with a Caterpillar brand
backhoe loader, with a caterpillar». As detailed, the Austin Mini was
thrown into one of the holes made by the machine and after spraying
it with benzine they set it on fire. Since it was made of fiberglass, it
was completely destroyed. In the case of the other cars, Malessa
crushed them with the shovel. The engines, meanwhile, were buried
in other places, using a smaller backhoe.
Finally, he explained that "the Chevrolet truck was not disassembled,

since Schäfer had suffered an accident in it and some minors had
had an accident, for which reason it had been decided to sell it in the
state it was in, to make it disappear."
In March 2005, out of ten georeferenced points that the PDI

detected as probable vehicle burial areas, in one of them, point 7, it
was possible to find the engines of two Renault brand cars, which
were buried a little less than one meter and a half off the ground,
approximately. Both had their serial numbers filed down.105
Chapter 25
TV Retirement
However, those pits were not the first to be dug.

Not at all. These were the ones carried out with a backhoe in the
Chenco sector (about six kilometers from the town), where they buried
(and later exhumed) the bodies of between eighteen and thirty political
prisoners, depending on the version.
To date, it is known of various entries of prisoners to that
extermination camp, the first wave of which occurred at the end of
1973 or the beginning of 1974. Then came a second entry of political
prisoners who were always transferred at night and also executed in
field. Subsequently, as Franz Bäar indicates, some of the bodies
would have been thrown into the sea to make them disappear.
Likewise, sources that requested that their identities be kept state

that it is an open secret that at some point in the colony there was a
gas chamber, like those in some Nazi concentration camps: a metallic
enclosure, provided with a single door and with ventilation grills
through which some type of toxic gas entered. It could have been
carbon monoxide, sarin, insecticide or any other poisonous product,
a way to kill people quickly and "cleanly", unlike what happened with
firing squads, which generated adverse psychological effects among
the soldiers.
Indeed, despite the fact that the first victims were killed some
distance from the village, the countryside is silent, therefore the echo
of the machine gun bursts was heard by many people. Four years
later, when the operation "Withdrawal of televisions" was carried out
by order of the regime; that is, the removal of the bodies of all the
disappeared detainees, to hinder the investigations that had been
initiated as a result of the
discovery of those executed by Paine in the ovens of Lonquén, many

of them, who were buried in a clandestine grave located on the Parral
property, were sprayed with chemical phosphorus and the remains
thrown into the Perquilauquén river.
However, there are presumptions that this was not the only
exhumation of bodies in the colony. It is believed that in the year 2000
there was a removal of bodies, weapons and chemical products, and
sources close to the investigation estimate that towards the beginning
of 2005, before the discovery of the arsenals on which the fifth part of
this book deals, there may have been existed another.
Regarding what happened at the end of 1973 or 1974, Erich Fege
Oelke would declare that shortly after the coup Schäfer called him
aside one day and told him that they needed to do some tests with
explosives. To do this, he argued, he had to take the backhoe shovel
he was driving to the Chenco sector, about six kilometers from the
town, near an irrigation canal, and dig trenches two meters deep by
two and a half meters long and wide. of the blade, approx. As he
himself indicated, each grave would not have fit more than one body.
Access to the place is complex, even today, since it is a sector at

height and whose path is terrible. In fact, you can only get to one point
by car and then you have to continue on foot, always uphill.
Fege said that, given these conditions, with luck he was able to dig
one hole a day, since the machine he used was slow and heavy and
it took several hours to get there. By the time he did, it was usually
dark and other people were showing up. One of them was Gerhard
Mücke, who confessed to being in charge of leading the military or
police commandos that arrived with people who were going to be
executed down that terrible road, an action that was repeated for more
than a month.
“These people were taken in vans, three or four, I suppose that the
detainees were also in them. I went with them up to a certain point, I
was about two hundred meters away, later clearly hearing shots", he
declared before the court,106 specifying that
Those detainees are not related to those who later arrived at the
colony and who were kept in the potato warehouse.
«On more than one occasion Paul Schäfer ordered me that once I
made the hole in question I should get away from the place and wait
for the sector, since that same day I had to cover it. I remember that
on the occasions that I had to wait, I did so with the engine running
and on more than one occasion I stopped the engine and heard some
shots at night, Gerhard Mücke later arriving on foot next to me, who
told me "now you can close the hole.”107 Chenco, however, was
used again the following year. Wilhelm Wagner said that in 1975
Schäfer ordered him and Reinhard Döering —another of the fugitives
from justice, currently hiding in Germany— to escort two vans that
were at the access to the villa, at the house known as Freihauss , to
that area. .
"I got into one of the vehicles and Reinhard into the other,
accompanying the driver, who was a Chilean in civilian clothes, who
had people in the back."
Upon arriving at Chenco, according to his version, "we heard the
noise of the engine of a backhoe loader, of the Fuchs 301 brand,
existing at the time, a machine that was only managed by Erich Fege.
When the noise of the backhoe's engine stopped, we felt a strong
gust, to then resume work with the backhoe.
About half an hour later the two trucks returned and took us back.”108
Another of the key sectors for the effect of disappearances in the

colony is the unfortunate kartoffelkeller, the potato warehouse:
«From the unit where the detainee we were caring for remained, you
could hear murmurs that came from other units, apparently from the
sector of the underground. As the sound was so low, I couldn't tell if
these murmurs were in German or Spanish”,109 recalls Johan Spatz,
who was sent as a custodian to the place.
For his part, Rudolph Cöllen assured that in the warehouse “I was
able to observe that detainees and blindfolded people were taken to
that place. On many occasions Schäfer ordered me to guard
or monitor where the detainees were. I fulfilled this function for more
than a month and had to stay eight hours a day. I remember that
Johann Spatz always replaced me in that “service” and I think Karl
Van Den Berg also participated”.110 He recounts that he heard the
screams and groans of the victims while they were being tortured,
sessions in which Schäfer was always present, sometimes Manuel
Contreras and also the soldier he identified as Hausmann (Gómez
Segovia).
"I can say that when they entered, the noise of a generator was
heard, so I presume that they put power on the detainees." As he
explained, he remembered perfectly well that several times he saw
how Schäfer together with DINA personnel took detainees to an
unknown destination.
However, Cöllen himself also recounted what had been the final
destination of those victims. He said that around 1980 (the year is
actually 1978), Schäfer ordered him to go with Mücke to Chenco,
"since he had to burn the bodies of Chileans, since it was very
dangerous and delicate for them to discover these corpses inside
Colonia Dignidad." According to his account, when he arrived at the
place, he saw a Magirus truck loaded with human bodies, thirty according to his ca
Then they went down with the truck to the banks of the Perquilauquén
river, where some huge grills had been arranged, to which they
applied a special powder and began to burn the bodies, a task that,
depending on the version, lasted between three days and a week. .
After this, "with Mücke, we proceeded to collect all the ashes from the
bones, for which we used rakes and shovels and deposited them in
the Magirus truck, a vehicle that I myself drove to the Perquilauquén
river, where I proceeded to lift the hopper and deposit the skeletal
remains into the river.
Mücke, for his part, stated that "Schäfer told me that the land had
to be cleaned" and for this they worked several days in a row with
other people. At first, according to him, Willi Malessa was there, but
he fell ill and Cöllen replaced him. What follows is a chilling story:
«This work lasted about two or three weeks. It fell to me, along with
Collen, to deposit the remains in bags.
These remains were decomposed, they still had soft parts. We touch
them as little as possible, almost without touching them with our
hands, we use a small excavator to dig. The bodies were approximately
two meters deep, I counted about four or five graves and there were
between eighteen and twenty-one bodies,” he declared, decreasing
the number of victims with respect to Cöllen's account.111 However,
he did agree with this in order to that a substance was applied to the
corpses, which apparently was chemical phosphorus, although other
versions indicate that it was lime. «I have no idea precisely what
substance it was, in any case it was something that burned strongly
and all the bodies were burned. Collen told me one day that he
wanted to talk to someone to find out if there were any missing
people, apparently three. These events occurred shortly before or
shortly after the year 1978, I do not remember exactly.
Manfred Lindemann was part of the forest fire brigade that was
inside the villa at that time. According to his account, one day in the
summer of 1978 he was at the foot of Mount Doradilla when he saw
smoke, for which he and other members of that group went to inform
Paul Schäfer. But strangely, he told them not to put out the fire. About
three days later, and because the flames were still visible, they
insisted. Finally, Schäfer authorized them to go, although he gave
them a curious instruction: "Get in the truck and do not look to the
right or to the left."
It was a fire that had originated in a vine and had risen towards the
hill. Lindemann recounted that when traveling in that direction, on
foot, he saw a deep ditch, which was about four meters long, and
Reinhard Döring and Willi Malessa in the sector operating the backhoe
loader.112
Chapter 26
A state within another state
Perhaps the worst of all this is that much of the suffering of so many
Chileans and Germans could have been avoided if only the political
authorities had carefully read the report of the mayor of Linares Héctor
Taricco, when he was constitutionally accused by the colony's
lawyers. , after it became a public road that had been closed by the
Germans and ordered that it be reopened, in 1968.
In his defense before the Senate —a futile defense, since he was

outlawed, after which he resigned—, in addition to the above, Taricco
explained much of what we already know: that in Colonia Dignidad no
orphan from the Valdivia earthquake had ever been cared for , that
the labor laws did not apply, that there were no salaries and that the
“president of the company, who at the same time is the co-owner of
the property, distributes to each one what they need: he gives them
room, clothing, food, etc. The Egyptian pyramids and the Chinese wall
were built with the same system”, he commented sarcastically.
He also mentioned the financial obscurity of the colony, which by

that date already accumulated five thousand hectares of land, that
there were no differences in work between men, children and women,
that they had release from customs duties, that they did not pay
contributions No building rights. "What Chilean farmer or businessman
would perhaps not achieve better results if they could enjoy similar
privileges?" he wondered. Or is it enough to associate through a
philanthropic or esoteric religious community to evade the rules of the
Labor Code and the legislation that governs the world, not only labor
relations, but the most fundamental human relations?
Tarrico also explained that Schäfer was in the country illegally and
that there was no freedom "not even to love" on the farm. In the same
way, already in 1968 the mayor knew, and he explained it to the
country's highest authorities, “that the residents of the El Lavadero
farm were prisoners guarded by sentinels and mastiffs; that everything
was recorded, that visitors were surreptitiously photographed" and
that inside the farm "there are photoelectric devices that detect any
noise or movement that occurs in the field." He added that the attitude
of the settlers had caused many problems and inconvenience to the
residents of the sector, including the case of one of them, who had
been tortured by the Germans in 1966.
In retrospect, Schäfer's fear that the farm would be taken over by

force after 1970 was perhaps not only due to his anti-communist
paranoia, but also to the fear of receiving a return from the hands of
the peasants, due to the aggressiveness and arrogance with which
the sect had taken over the area, evicting properties and entire
families, even closing public roads if that suited them, no matter who
it might harm.
Many of the peasants also owned plots or small pieces of land, so

removing them was not so simple. Hence, at the end of the 1960s,
the beatings and threats against them multiplied. And despite
everything one might think, in the height of Allende's time the Dignidad
attacks directed at the locals continued.
As José Tomás Castillo, one of the many harmed by the presence

of the sect, points out, “the settlers always wanted to take over our
land and would not let us cultivate anything.
When they had the opportunity, the first thing they did was strip us of
these lands.
That opportunity came with the 1973 coup, after which the Germans
and other landowners in the area, allied with the head of the
Carabineros de Catillo checkpoint, non-commissioned officer Diogenes
Toledo, and Army Captain Hugo Cardemil, Governor of
Parral, launched a raid against tenants and small
farmers. The objective was the forced displacement of those they

perceived as their enemies —as they would do years later with the
nuns of San Manuel—, but said violation of the fundamental rights of
their neighbors was also accompanied by murders.
In this context, as of September 13, arrests and assemblies began

to take place against people falsely accused of being communists.
German settlers, Chilean individuals, police officers, and the military
often acted jointly in these actions, the result of which was the
disappearance of about thirty people throughout the Parral area, five
of them in Catillo. Their names: Miguel Rojas Rojas, his son Gilberto
Antonio Rojas Vásquez, Ruperto Oriol Torres Aravena, Ramiro
Antonio Romero González and Alfredo Ricardo Durán Durán.113
José Tomás Castillo lived on a property in the El Peumo sector,

where his and his parents' houses and his brother Baltazar's were.
According to his account, the original owners of the field sold it to the
Germans during the UP era. A few days after the overthrow of
Allende, non-commissioned officer Toledo appeared there along with
several Germans wearing military uniforms, among them someone
he identified as "Smith", a certain "Walter", "Gerhard" and "Alberto",
in addition to Schäfer, who was limited to giving instructions from a
car.
The police officers and their companions detained those who were
in the houses and took them to the checkpoint, with the few things
they managed to take from the houses, which were later destroyed
by the settlers.
Baltazar Castillo recalled before the PDI that the treatment of the
Germans towards their neighbors has always been very violent.
According to him, the first post-coup victims were two brothers, René
and José Gómez González, who were beaten and detained because,
according to the settlers, the Toledo police officer had given them
authorization to do so.
Covered by this, he pointed out, is that "the Germans proceeded to
dispossess all the people who lived inside the farm and who
they did not belong to their colony”,114 after which they were going to leave them
to the Carabineros tied with ties around their necks.
His house, like the others, was demolished. And not only that: «They took the
animals from us, without allowing me to go looking for them. They violently
appropriate all the assets we had on our lands. To this day, we have never been
able to recover what was stolen by the German colonists."
Regarding the arrest he suffered along with his brother, he assured that they
were interrogated and beaten by Toledo, “who always told us that he was following
orders from the neighborhood. In addition, he adds that Hopp and a certain Ursula
were also among the captors.
René Gómez, who was only fourteen in 1973, was arrested a couple of days
after the coup by members of the sect.
They carried machine guns and took him to an office where they savagely beat
him. After that, they took him to the Catillo checkpoint, where he was tortured by
Toledo, according to his testimony, who insisted that he should leave the area. Of
course, once he was released he never went near the colony again for fear of
being killed.
On September 16, 1973, Ruperto Torres and his son Gustavo were detained by
Carabineros in the Bajo Las Torres sector.
Along with the policemen were Cardemil and a "civilian named Guillermo Marín."115
While Gustavo was taken to Parral, his father stayed in Catillo, where they accused
him of being a member of the Communist Party, which was false. They were finally
released on September 29; The day before they had been taken to the Parral
Investigations headquarters, where Gustavo was interrogated and tortured by two
plainclothes police officers.
On October 13, a person from the Remulcao sector informed Ruperto that there
was a radio message for him at the Catillo checkpoint, so he went to see what it
was about, after which his whereabouts were never heard from again.
The same thing happened with Miguel Ángel Rojas and his son Gilberto, who
lived in Santiago and was visiting the area. Rojas Sr. was a waiter in the field of
former parliamentarian Ignacio Urrutia of the
Sotta, near the neighborhood, and according to police officer Luis Palma,
he participated in the arrests of both.
Their testimony indicates that “after the arrest of these people, Toledo
ordered us to take them to the house of the owner of the Palomar farm,
Mr. Urrutia de la Sotta. I have the idea that the arrest of Miguel and
Gilberto Rojas was at the request of Urrutia, perhaps with the sole
intention of removing them from the farm, where they lived.
After that, Toledo ordered the transfer of both to the Catillo checkpoint,
from where they were taken out along with Torres, losing track of the
three forever.
When the relatives of the victims began to ask for explanations, Toledo
found nothing better than to cover up the crimes with a false witness,
Juan Gómez Chandía, who thirty years later would confess to two PDI
officers that the policeman "demanded that I lend myself to declaring
false facts against some peasants in the area, one of them named Miguel
Rojas, whom he clearly located by sight. Toledo asked me to testify
before a police major that he was going to the area with the purpose of
investigating a specific incident, for which he asked me to say that Rojas
and other detainees, whose names I do not remember, were communists,
who were walking armed and that he would have detained them, but then
he had “let go” of them and that he pointed out that perhaps they had
gone to Argentina».116
According to him, he agreed to testify because Toledo had

threatened to make him disappear if he didn't cooperate.
By October 1973, and with most of the annoying tenants out of the
property, the Army decided to send one hundred and twenty Special
Forces soldiers to the interior of the sect, with the supposed purpose of
searching for extremists in the neighboring fields.
According to one of the soldiers, Iván Norambuena Arenas, they slept
for about a week “in some sort of barn that was on the farm and the
settlers themselves served us food in their dining rooms.
During the day we went out to reconnoitre the land, since the Germans
had (better) weapons than us to protect their farm. Because of the above,
I was never convinced
that the objective of our presence in the German enclave was to look for
extremists, but that it was something else».117
Subsequently, as we already know, other operations came, such as the
one in Cerro Gallo, and the presence of state security forces around the
neighborhood lasted until the end of the 1980s.
Óscar Cerda, an Investigation officer, recounted that a few days after

the coup he saw Gerhard Mücke and Gerd Seewald arrive at the civil
police headquarters in that city carrying three young detainees, who were
handed over to the group of interrogators operating there. .
The great mystery that remains from all this is what happened to the
bodies of the people who were detained in Catillo and Parral.
For the vast majority of their relatives, it is most likely that their loved ones
have been murdered and buried at some point in the neighborhood or in
one of the neighboring fields, which is based on various testimonies in this
regard.
The first of these is that of José Tomás Castillo, who observed several
people detained in Plot 20 —located outside the German farm—, who
were blindfolded “and were guarded by soldiers and armed Germans,
remaining without food and very ill-treatment, according to people who
later managed to be released."118 This was confirmed by his brother
Baltazar, who pointed out that "in a plot located at the entrance of the
property, I noticed on many occasions detainees, since these they were
guarded by soldiers and settlers; then Army trucks would arrive, in which
they would load the prisoners and take them to an unknown destination.”119
Another precedent is the one Gustavo Torres received in 2006. In May

of that year he was celebrating his birthday and several friends went to
see him at his house in Niquén. One of them arrived with a third, José
Seguel Arriagada, whom Torres did not know and who, in the middle of
the conversation, told him that he was working repairing roads when "the
Catillo massacre" took place, and that he had seen how
They left the bodies of those executed in a thorny sector of the

Lloymávida farm, near the colony.
According to the complaint that Torres made, Seguel assured him
that “I was lighting the vehicle in which they loaded the people who
were taking them out of the checkpoint, around twenty-three hours.
Among them I distinguished the little boy from Bajo Las Torres”,120
he told her. His father, Ruperto, was known as "the Torres boy."121
It took the police several months to get Seguel to speak, but when
he did, they took care to make it clear that he was not, in fact, an
eyewitness to the events. , as he had boasted at Gustavo's house.
According to his version, in 1986 he worked in Catillo for about six
months and there people he could not identify told him the story
about how they had been executed.122
Part V
Jeremiah 33.3
Chapter 27
the arms factory
Augusto Pinochet had not yet been in command of the country for a
year, after the 1973 coup d'état, when Paul Schäfer exultantly
announced to the assembly that in a few weeks the captain general,
the man who —he said— had saved them from Marxist hell, he would
visit Colonia Dignidad, something that the then conscript Samuel
Fuenzalida Devia even heard at the time, when weeks before he
traveled with Fernando Gómez Segovia to the colony taking Álvaro
Vallejos Villagrán.
As Schäfer explained to his followers, on August 20 of that year
(1974), the president would take advantage of a visit to Chillán to
attend the ceremony celebrating the birth of Bernardo O'Higgins.
The idea was, once the parade was over, to head north and reach the
sect's facilities.
There are several testimonies about this visit, but the most illustrative
of all is the one given by Federico Willoughby, who was part of the
extensive caravan of vehicles that reached the German enclave.
According to his account, after the usual greetings, Schäfer offered a
tour of the facilities, which ended in a large room furnished with a table
of considerable size. On it there were not, as expected, kuchenes or
heart-shaped cookies, but weapons, many weapons, as well as all
kinds of defense elements, including night vision devices.
Willougbhy would state in this regard that the Germans were very
interested in showing Pinochet a particular weapon, a Sterling
submachine gun, one of the most reliable 9mm caliber weapons used
by the world's military forces at that time.
"This is from the Chilean Army," answered an unidentified DINA

officer, when the dictator asked about the
provenance of the weapon, which was in excellent condition.
Next to it was another one just like it, but it seemed newer, because the
metal still burnished.
"Is that ours too?" asked Pinochet, but the answer was negative.
"That was made here, General," he answered.123

Immediately afterwards, other soldiers, who Willoughby believed were
from Famae (State Factories and Maestranzas) carried out a firing test,
comparing the cadence, power and sound of the original submachine
gun. made in Dagenham, England, and its copy made in the workshops
of the sect in Parral. There were no differences. Immediately, and despite
the discomfort that Willougbhy says his presence caused Paul Schäfer
and Manuel Contreras, a SIG rifle, of Swiss origin, was also exhibited,
which years later would be manufactured by Famae, under license, but
which is understood to be a replica made in the colony.
Pinochet did not seem surprised, as anyone would suppose he should

be if they were shown weapons produced inside a field in central Chile,
identical to those made in developed countries. In fact, it seems that he
was fully aware of all this and the scene, for anyone connected with the
defense sector, is unequivocal: it was an arms offer. They were showing
him the quality of what they produced.
In the midst of all this, Willoughby remembered something that "el

Macho" Canales had told him years before, who assured him "that the
colonists could take Los Angeles if they wanted, since they had enough
personnel, weapons and artillery."124 In effect, we already saw in the first
part of this book how in 1970 weapons of all kinds, gases, visors and
security elements began to arrive from Germany and the United States,
thanks to Mr. Krefeld, with the excuse of "defending" against the red tide
that according to Schäfer Allende would lead against them.
However, that supposed danger was already averted by

those dates. Despite this, the colony continued to be fully dedicated

to weapons, producing, importing, and selling them illegally.
The members of The Message, as well as those of Te Park, Jim

Jones and many other sect leaders (such as the infamous David
Koresh, or the Japanese Shoko Asahara), loved guns, it is a fact. In
addition, many of them considered that they were necessary to defend
themselves perhaps from what plagues in the imminent apocalypse.
But Schäfer far exceeds all this. It's not just that he was—as he was—
obsessed with guns: this was one of the big deals in the colony.
So far we know that the sect acquired them for different reasons.
tracks, most of which ran parallel.
The main one was the importation of weapons and defense materials
from Europe through the customs franchises enjoyed by the colony,
given its alleged character as a charitable organization, usually hidden
in oxygen tubes, medical supplies, or humanitarian aid.
The arms traffic, many of them purchased in Germany and Belgium,

not only consisted of disarmed rifles, but also of specific pieces, which
were, in turn, assembled in the colony's turnery workshop, directed by
Karl Van Den Berg, who declared before magistrate Zepeda that "I
am a turner and I received a sample of a machine gun, manufacturing
most of the parts of that weapon, except the barrels. I don't know
where the cannons came from, because they appeared one day in
the workshop and the weapons were assembled. Paul Schäfer gave
the order to put them together and handed me the sample book. Willi
Malessa was my apprentice and Edwin Fege, who was an electrician,
helped with this work”.125 “I helped make weapons”, Ingrid Szurgelies
told me a few years ago, detailing that every day she had to help
sand some tubes (barrels ) that were worked in the workshop, although
she did not know what it was about, until a certain day when she saw
how they collected
the tubes (which she says came from Sao Paulo) with other pieces of
metal that were worked there.
According to Rudiger Schmidtke's version, "before the military
pronouncement, along with other workers at the Colonia Dignidad
workshop, I had to participate in the manufacture of submachine guns
(approximately 100 units), just as we manufactured grenades
(approximately 500 units), that they were going to be used against
the enemies of Villa Baviera, who corresponded to people from the
Popular Unity».126 Erika Heimann, who spent many years in the
German branch of the MSP, would specify that she participated in
sending the famous tubes of oxygen. They were eleven-liter cylinders,
which they cut and filled with disassembled Rheinmetall machine
guns, "to then weld and seal them as cargo with the symbology of the
Red Cross (for the Colonia Dignidad hospital), adding that these
weapons were the property of the German citizen named Gerhard
Mertins»,127 name of which we will deal later.
Meanwhile, Johann Spatz specified that, since at the time of

Popular Unity there were multiple seizures of farms, “we were told
that ours was also going to be taken. It was also said that there were
Russian fishing boats in the Concepción area. Since we had very bad
experiences with the Russians in Germany, we were afraid of them,
particularly for our family. They told us that we had to defend
ourselves. He asserted that it was common for huge wooden boxes
to arrive in the colony, sealed (like the ones seen in Pudahuel by
Samuel Fuenzalida), similar to containers. When that happened, the
loudspeakers ordered everyone to go to the sheds to help open and
unload them. The first thing that came out of them was clothes,
because on paper they were donations of second-hand clothes sent
from Germany by boat to Talcahuano and from there they were
transported in trucks to the colony. However, "on one occasion, after
unloading all the clothing that the container brought, I was able to
see several carbines and pistols on the floor, I don't know the
brands."128
Indeed, as Kurt Schnellenkamp pointed out, "these weapons

entered clandestinely by ship." In the same testimony, he asserted
that he bought all the handguns that the military offered him, basically
because of Schäfer's obsession with their possession, to the point that
"almost all of us had pencils, the ones that fired .22 caliber bullets,
and others with flare light. These were used for personal defense.
The matter of the pistol pencils, several of which were found in the
"Jeremias 33.3" operation, as the PDI operation to locate the colony's
arsenal in 2005 was called, deserves a brief stoppage to explain that
on June 28, In 2000, OS-7 of the Carabineros de Concepción detained
drug trafficker Manuel Hernández Salgado, better known as "Mañungo",
basically because a protected witness in the case related to the
disappearance of university student Jorge Matute Johns129 had
pointed him out as the person responsible for that crime. crime. This
witness was known as Susana and was, in reality, Manungo's lover,
with whom she lived in a motel in the Coronel commune.
Although it was later found that the accusation regarding Hernández's

responsibility in the disappearance of the young man was false, what
pertains to the neighborhood has to do with what the uniformed police
seized from him, among other things a Subarú car
Legacy year 1996 very peculiar, because it did not have patents, but
it did have beacons and a siren similar to those used by the
Carabineros patrols.
For several months this was Manungo's favorite car. They frequently
saw him on board running at full speed through the narrow streets of
downtown Coronel, but no one said anything, among other things
because many people thought it was a police vehicle. However, the
car was in the name of Abratec SA, one of the companies in the
neighborhood, dedicated to crushing stones on the banks of the Itata
River. Manungo also had in his possession a pencil that fired 22-
caliber bullets, but the relationship between that weapon and those
found in Bulnes and Parral was only confirmed.
it came five years later, when the colony's arsenals were discovered.
Before that, in the year 2000, I interviewed Susana on several

occasions. In one of them I asked him why Manungo had in his
possession a car that was, on paper, owned by Abratec, and the
answer was immediate: “Ah, very simple. Manungo is a close friend
of Schäfer', he replied, almost candidly.
I asked him to specify more details about that friendship: «I went
with him several times to the colony. They came to pick us up in
Concepción in a small plane that was waiting for us in Carriel Sur and
from there they took us to the village. After landing, they left me eating
pastries in the dining room and Schäfer and Manungo went off to do
business. After a while they returned, we got on the plane and they
came to leave us.
—Manungo is a drug trafficker, Susana. what business
you are talking? -asked.
"Draw your own conclusions," he replied, playing mystery,
something he loved to do.
Chapter 28
Chemicals and explosives
In addition to the above, the settlers also bought weapons and

explosives, or parts of them, in the internal market, as explained by
another of the hierarchs, Kurt Schnellenkamp, who only in 2005
recognized that "indeed within Colonia Dignidad weapons of fire, as
well as grenades”,130 together with assuring that Hugo Bäar sent
machine guns of Israeli origin, fifty carbines and three Rheinmetall
machine guns. It also asserted that "in Germany, during the 1970s,
different chemical products were purchased to produce gases of a
different nature, in addition to fertilizers, as well as one (illegible)
called "Pepper fox" (pepper injection), used to spray and disinfect”,131
referring to the item mentioned in the letters where Mr. Krefeld was
mentioned, without it being entirely clear what he meant. According
to him, these elements were sent to Chile in glass containers and
metal cylinders (oxygen tubes) through Lufthansa. In addition, he
explained that they bought electronic security elements and weapons
"only to defend ourselves."
However, the manufacture of flamethrowers, as he himself

acknowledged, seems to exceed the supposed need for protection.
According to his testimony, about ten were made and they emitted
flames generated by a mixture of gasoline and detergents, propelled
by compressed air. By the way, when you talk about a mixture of
gasoline and detergents, what you are doing is lowering the profile of
what they were really shooting through those devices: Napalm.
Regarding other weapons, he pointed out that “I estimate that some
forty to fifty machine guns and the same number of grenades were
manufactured. The weapons were kept in a small cellar
adapted for this purpose", a figure that is not in the least consistent
with what was found in 2005.
But it was not the only thing he was involved in, as he also worked
on the armor applied to a Caterpillar bulldozer, without specifying for
what purpose. He also specialized in the purchase of weapons and
military elements in different parts of the country, for which he was in
contact with Army NCOs from Santiago, Concepción, Los Angeles
and Temuco, from whom he received parts of Rheinmetall and also
explosives. "The way of operating was that the non-commissioned
officers realized that the ammunition had exploded and they handed
it over to me," he assured the court.
At the company Hiveles de Concepción, he bought explosive scrap
and a significant part of the explosives that were used to fill ammunition
and bombs. He says he learned "by hoods" that these were made by
Hopp, although he was not the only one who dedicated himself to it.
So did Francisco Lichlowsky, of Slovak origin, who participated in the
mixture of the explosive in the villa. He was a very capable and
enthusiastic chemist and worked at the Tec Hartaim explosives
company in the Renca commune alongside Hans Jürgen Blank,
Schnellenkamp said.
Van Den Berg, in turn, acknowledged that in Concepción “cylinders
of different diameters were bought, which corresponded to waste
from grenades or ship ammunition, inside which they had thread;
casings that were filled, among other components, with a powder
called nitrin, which is highly explosive and could detonate without the
need for an initiator or fuse.
For his part, Gerd Schäffrik would confess that during the Allende
period he was ordered to manufacture trinitrophenol-type explosives
(picric acid), which is very powerful, but also very unstable.
"I don't remember who taught me how to make this explosive. I know
that Hopp worked with these explosives before me, but I did it better
than him and they liked it”,132 he recounted, stating that once the
material was made, they filled large projectiles, like ships, which were
later sealed.
However, the production of weapons did not stop after the violent
end of the Allende government. According to Eugen Bockler, already

in the dictatorship, Schäfer ordered him to appear in the workshop
and put him to work under the orders of Van Den Berg, who taught
him how to make parts for machine guns, submachine guns and
grenades, one of which caused him severe injuries in the right hand,
when it exploded when they were carrying out explosion tests.
Erwin Fege Fabian would say in this regard that around 1980 all
the security of the property was strengthened, with the aim that “no
strangers entered the farm. The decision had been made in a general
assembly of all the settlers, led by Schäfer, to create a fence around
the entire town, but at that time it was never said that it was to prevent
us from leaving.”133 The perimeter fence measured fifteen kilometers
and its construction took almost two years.
Later they began to buy new litters of sheepdogs and changed the
previous wire system that warned of entering or leaving the farm for
an electronic system acquired in Germany, which even allowed them
to detect if a puma had entered their land in the foothills. This
consisted of infrared sensors, covert microphones, security cameras
simulated as stones —bought by Hopp in the United States— and
other devices, all managed from the center known as flipps, which
we already talked about in the second part of this book.
Michael Müller Altevogt,134 meanwhile, pointed out that around

1985 silencers were still being manufactured inside the colony, thirty
of which were sold to the Army, and that in 1994 they manufactured
day and night laser sights, which were mounted on shotguns and
hunting weapons.
Chapter 29
guinea pigs in the colony
One of the first antecedents that we know about Harmut Hopp Miottel,
who today lives a peaceful existence in Krefeld, is found in a declassified
document from the United States Department, dated February 12, 1980,
which indicates that Colonia Dignidad « It has always been a mystery."
Along with this, the US diplomatic official Irma Gundermann recounted

that around 1968 or 1969 the official leader of the sect, Hermann Schmidt,
visited her in Santiago "accompanied by a boy of about eighteen, very
German in appearance, blue eyes, blond , pinkish. This man, Schmidt,
told me that this boy was being sent to the United States to study
medicine, because he was the brightest in his school and showed an
aptitude for medicine. What struck me was that although the boy spoke
English quite well and German, of course, he did not speak Spanish. The
conversation was in German. He was sent to some university in California,
paying his way out of his own funds, and returned a few years later for
vacation. I know this because since he needed some kind of certificate to
return to the United States, I tried to have a conversation with him, asking
what he thought of the United States, etc. He was very closed-mouthed
and responded in monosyllables, so I gave up."
That child was Hopp and, although he had already shown several
signs of rebellion, Schäfer had all his faith in him and therefore decided
to grant him privileges that no one else had, except for two other young people.
One of them was Hussain Siam, whom Schäfer kidnapped in Jerusalem
with the promise to his relatives to educate him in Germany, but he
brought him back to Chile. The other was the German Günther Reuss.
They, unlike Hopp, were not fully indoctrinated and
In 1966, after Siam tried to escape from the colony, he was

unexpectedly rewarded with a breeze of freedom he never suspected:
he and Reuss were sent to live in Stockton, California, to study
medicine at the Davis headquarters of the University of California,
student house that, consulted regarding them and Hopp (who was
later sent), did not want to provide any background information.
It is curious, very curious, that they have been sent to the United
States. If they didn't want them to study in Chilean universities, why
not send them to Germany, Switzerland or Austria, where they
wouldn't have needed to learn another language? The answer is that
Gerhard Mertins, one of Schäfer's best friends, had an office nearby,
according to various sources, and was probably expected to control
them in some way. As soon as they could, however, Reuss and Siam
fled and cut all ties with the colony.
Hopp, who also wanted to escape from the villa in his teens,
however did not try. He spent a couple of years in the United States
and then returned to Chile in the early 1970s, finishing his medical
studies at the Pontificia Universidad Católica. There he had as a
companion the doctor Helmar Rosenberg Gómez, who worked at the
UC Clinical Hospital and testified in the cause of the death of former
president Eduardo Frei Montalva that "once Hopp qualified as a
doctor, he occasionally attended the department (of anatomy
pathology) to deliver biopsy samples from their patients for histological
studies.”135
The medical technologist Pía Castelli, who worked in the same

place, also witnessed these visits and pointed out that “for years I
observed Dr. Hopp and his wife arrive at the department, and
sometimes only his wife accompanied by another woman, with their
typical clothing in the old fashion, who I presume carried samples
apparently from the Hospital de Parral ».
The secretary of the department, Carmen Barahona, would admit
before the courts that, although they received and analyzed samples of
Elsewhere, they were large facilities such as the Naval and Higueras
hospitals in Talcahuano, or the regional hospitals in Concepción or Talca,
and generally corresponded to biopsies from people who had received
organ transplants. However, the constant presence of Hopp or his wife
Dorothea was "an outlier", as they usually brought many samples, for
which they did not pay, although it was common for them to arrive with
gifts such as Easter bread. "This was all very strange and mysterious to
me," he said.
The veterinarian Sergio Romero, an official of the Public Health
Institute, also met him, who declared in the framework of the same
investigation that, while he was in charge of the animal room, "in
approximately 1980 a doctor from Parral came to buy laboratory rabbits
on two occasions and years later the audiovisual press recognized him
as Dr. Hopp from Colonia Dignidad».
What was the purpose of purchasing laboratory animals?

Only Hopp knows it, although everything indicates that they were used
for experimentation.
Another thing that only he knows is related to the money of the colony.
Hopp was in charge of traveling to the island of St. Kitts to buy a "legal"
passport for Schäfer in the 1990s, after which he bought an apartment
for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which, he assured, had been
destroyed after a hurricane.
He always handled large sums of money. Wilhelm Wagner remembered

a plane trip he took from the colony to Santiago, with Maximiliano
Rudolph and Hopp. After going to the sect's house in Ñuñoa, Wagner
and the doctor left. The latter carried an old and used brown leather
briefcase, which he did not let go of at any time, which had already
caught Wagner's attention, to whom Hopp finally explained the reason
for such apprehension: «If they attack us now, we would lose all our
savings, since in this briefcase I carry three quarters of a million
dollars.”136
Hopp also managed several checking accounts in the colony.

along with other leaders such as Albert Schreiber and Alfred

Matthusen, but when questioned, he assured that he only knew of a
deposit in mutual funds abroad137 and that he had nothing to do with
it, stating that those who managed said funds were Los Angeles
businessmen José Miguel Stegmeier, Enrique Veloso and Edgardo
Neumann, a statement that he supplemented by noting that "there are
accounts on Caribbean islands" and that "the deposits were made in
the name of a company, which later transferred the money to Chile
and properties were purchased, including a field named Tierra Negra,
located in Los Angeles towards the mountains, worth a million dollars
at the time. This property would be acquired from funds found in
Canada," adding that he had been informed of this by two other
settlers, Hans Jürgen Blank and Hans Riesland.
It is worth mentioning that as a result of these statements, the first

government of Sebastián Piñera reversed the appointment of
Stegmeier as governor of the Province of Biobío at the beginning of
2010. In an interview with Nos Magazine , he denied the accusations,
stating that Hopp's statements were based on the statements of third
parties (which is true) and that "I did not launder money, I did not hide
people or travel to Buenos Aires to see Don Paul ».138
Finally, Hopp explained that, in addition to the money in the
Caribbean and Canada, there was also a remnant in Uruguay and
specified that part of those funds were used to buy the properties
where Schäfer hid in Argentina. He reported that there was an account
at the Chemical Bank of New York that was used for this.
Other accounts held by the colony—although Hopp did not mention
them—were at the Kreissparkasse and at the Dresdner Bank.
Let us return, however, to the experiments.
Another mysterious character from the colony was "the scientist
Pancho", as Franz Bäar calls him, who points out that he heard that
he worked in Famae (according to what he heard) and served in
Dignidad producing poisonous compounds and gases, such as sarin. .
Exactly the same thing that the DINA Quetropillán Brigade did in
Santiago, led by Michael Townley, in whose house-
Two scientists were working in the Lo Curro barracks: the murdered

Eugenio Berríos and Francisco Oyarzún Sjoberg, who recounted in
the investigation into the murder of Berríos that he managed to create
sarin for DINA "in an amount that he estimates at three to four hundred
milliliters, enough to produce the death of many people, theoretically
more than a thousand ».
In Michael Townley's house, as his secretary, Alejandra Damiani,
recounted, it was common to find dead guinea pigs and rabbits in the
garbage, which they used to experiment with all kinds of poisons,
gases, and bacteria. They even killed a donkey on one occasion in
order to test one of the weapons they were making.
However, Oyarzún was never questioned about whether he was in

Dignidad, although among the records of the colony there is one in
the name of Francisco José Oyarzún, made with clippings from a copy
of the Revista del Domingo, of April 15, 1984, where It recounted the
love story of the chemist's parents, Francisco José Oyarzún and the
Swedish Beritha Sjoberg, and concluded with “today the couple has
been happily married for 36 and a half years in black and white.
From the mix was born a “café au lait” son, who now lives in Los
Angeles and is striving for a Ph.D. in biomathematics.
Another important detail is that the laboratory that DINA set up in
Townley's house was armed with artifacts that he bought in England,
which were later shipped to Chile via Frankfurt, taking advantage of
the intermediation of the representative of Colonia Dignidad in
Germany, Alfred Schaak, who years later he would die in a very
suspicious way, in an event in which for many some chemical agent
such as sarin intervened.
According to Franz Bäar, Schäfer collected poisons and gases not
only to defend himself against the alleged communists who were going
to attack him, but "to eliminate some businessmen, communists and
also some of the colony's hierarchy." Regarding the latter, he affirms
that "here they eliminated people from the colony itself, sick", such as
Helmuth Schafrik, to whom - according to the version that was
entrusted to Bäar - "they gave him an injection".
In the same way, Ingrid Szurglies says she is certain that
Something similar happened to a sister of Gertrud Laube, who was

hospitalized and every day her daughter went to see her to bring her
flowers, but they told her that she was sleeping, in circumstances that
everyone knew that she had died several days ago, due to the action
of some poison.
Harald Tymm stated in this regard that "in relation to chemical
weapons, I can point out that I heard that they were experimented
with the settlers" and that "I observed nebulizers that were used to
disinfect, those that were loaded with chemical elements, I ignore
what type. Of course, they had a red dot and a blue one».139
Chapter 30
"I"
He was the best friend of Paul Schäfer. A former Nazi officer, his
personality combined extreme business skills, unbeatable contacts in
the world of intelligence, and an astonishing lack of scruples. But not
only that: until before his death in 1993, Gerhard Mertins was
considered the biggest arms dealer in the world.
Despite the fact that he belonged to the SS, where he grew up and
obtained the Knight's Cross —the highest honor of the Nazi regime
—, he was never included in any detention list and was able to
integrate comfortably into civilian life. More than comfortably, actually.
In fact, after the war he managed to get a job at Volkswagen and,
according to the journalist Ken Silverstein in his book Private
Warriors, he even had no problem heading, in the 1950s, a neo-Nazi
organization called "Los Diablos Verdes". », which functioned in
Bremen, nor to integrate around 1952 the banned Socialist Party of
the Reich, the successor to the Nazi party.
He was so well protected that he did not hesitate to start, towards

the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties, a flourishing arms
trafficking business through a company called Merex (Mercedes
Export), for which he associated with another controversial character,
former Gestapo general Reinhard Gehlen, who surrendered to the
Americans before the capitulation of Berlin, later being assigned the
responsibility of rearming the intelligence services in Federal Germany,
given the extensive networks of informants he had in the Soviet Union.
"German intelligence," wrote Silverstein, "provided Mertins with

information about which third world countries were looking for
weapons and so the company would sell them what they needed, using
false certificates if necessary. Thanks to the good offices of the BND,

Mertins began selling everything left and right.
It delivered F-86 planes to Venezuela and Pakistan, a country that
was under a NATO embargo, for which the planes were delivered
through Iran. When the Indian government, Pakistan's eternal enemy,
found out about the move, it was furious, but Mertins quickly put it
right, handing over Seahawk planes.
Mertins hired dozens of ex-Nazis from around the world as sales
agents for his company, such as his great friend and colleague Otto
Skorzeny —the leader of the group that rescued Mussolinni in Gran
Sasso, a fact of which Mertins was also a part—, who took refuge in
Spain; Hans Rüdel, who fled to Argentina, where he built planes for
Perón; Klaus Barbie, established in Bolivia, and Friedrich Schwend, in
Peru, who maintained cordial relations with Walter Rauff.
Thanks to Gehlen's contacts, Merex grew exponentially, selling

arms to third world countries, and according to Silverstein,140 in the
1970s it was already selling arms to the prevailing military regimes,
although according to the author, even before 9/11. he had already
done several businesses in Chile.
Indeed, we know of at least one of them: the one he had in 1970

with Paul Schäfer, according to the testimony of Erika Heimann, who
pointed out, it will be remembered, that the famous tubes that were
sent from Germany were "filled" with machine guns that were provided
by Mertins, who in the colony was known as "Me", "Merich" or
"Meeretich".
The trafficker's relations with Chile were effectively strengthened at
an official level once Allende was overthrown and although it was
presumable that there was a link between the former SS and the
Chilean dictatorship, the initial link at least seems to have been the
colony, according to Gerhard. Mücke in 2005, when he said that
«Mertins once asked me, as a result of my contacts with Famae, to
ask if this company could send 100,000 mortars to Iraq; I consulted a
Famae officer if that was possible,
but when they talked about prices, Mertins said no, because it was very
expensive”.141 Despite this, in 2011 the newspaper La Nación published
two letters written by Kurt Schellenkamp that point in the opposite
direction.
The first, from January 1987, indicated that "I had to organize a shipment
of 80 boxes with alleged axles for trucks destined for Iraq, but with Hans
Jürgen Blank we knew that 50 of them contained highly dangerous war
weapons", also asserting that "along with Gerhard Mertins and under the
cover of a silver mine in Mexico, I organized from the United States the
clandestine shipment to Iraq of various containers of weapons».142
However, Mertins also had business with Iran, as reported in a report

by Mónica González regarding a trip made to that country in 1976 by
Manuel Contreras and other DINA officials in the company of "Me." In fact,
there is a photo in which all of them are conversing at a reception at the
Chilean embassy in Tehran, accompanied by a general from the Brazilian
Army, who has not been identified,143 but whose presence confirms the
involvement of that country in the knot. that made up the world of the DINA
and the colony.
As far as the journalistic investigation could establish, Contreras left

Chile with a false passport, traveling to what was then Federal Germany,
where he met with Mertins, after which the two continued together towards
Iran.
González recounted that there were written records of that meeting at
the embassy in the legation's guest book, starting with Contreras's greeting
to the then ambassador Arturo Yovane and his wife, by someone who
wrote in bad Spanish and who seems to have been the Brazilian, and by
another person who only stamped two words in the book, one illegible and
the other very recognizable: "Merex."
According to the journalist, the only objective of the trip was to offer the
Shah of Iran to assassinate his ultra-archenemy: the Venezuelan terrorist
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, an offer that
was rejected.
By the way, that is not the only antecedent of the link between
Contreras and the arms dealer, as the first asserted that "I met him,
he was a very good friend of mine, since he was a direct arms supplier
to the Army, he had a huge company in Bonn and sold arms
throughout the world. I know that he visited the Colonia Dignidad on
a few occasions.”144 Mertins' business dealings with the dictatorship
were going from strength to strength. He is mentioned as the
manager of the purchase of the Bolkow Messerschmidt helicopters
that the Carabineros used for many years and also as the supplier of
military equipment for the Chilean Armed Forces.
The Mexican magazine Proceso described Mertins as a man "with

gray hair, a blue scarf around his neck, rings and a gold watch (a gift
from the King of Saudi Arabia)." When asked about his profession,
Silverstein says, he introduced himself as a "logistics merchant,"
while Proceso adds that the trafficker asserted that "my business is
not death, but the maintenance of peace."
However, as his firm was implicated in several arms trafficking
scandals, the Swiss government prohibited it from doing business in
its territory, despite the fact that its headquarters were in that country,
in Vevey.
In 1967 the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Disarmament
Subcommittee investigated the company, but a significant portion of
the hearing in which it was discussed was forever classified. What
was declassified only explains that Mertins was a sales representative
for Mercedes Benz in the Middle East, that it was a company that
operated in several countries and that in Germany it represented the
arms company Interarmco Ltd. This company belonged, by the way,
to the America's biggest arms dealer, former CIA agent Samuel
Cummings.
It is not known since when Mertins and Schäfer knew each other
or what was the original link between the two, but what is relevant is
that the former became one of the main promoters and partners of
the colony before the world. It was he who advised Schäfer—badly, it
must be said—in order for him to sue the
German magazine Stern and Amnesty International for an investigation

by the media outlet based on the NGO's reports on the colony. Much
of what the world began to know about it, such as the testimonies of
Erick Zott, Hugo Bäar or Samuel Fuenzalida, was known there.
As the documents seized in 2005 show, Mertins had a more than

prominent participation in all of this. Perhaps the most striking thing is
that (if what is indicated there is true) Mertins' relations were of a
superlative level, not only in Germany. For example, a letter sent from
Germany by Hans Jürgen Blank, at the beginning of 1981, informed
the colony that Mertins "would be invited to Reagan's inauguration of
power, on January 20, in Washington" and that later "he I would move
to the fund." In other words, he would go to accompany the Republican
Ronald Reagan on his inaugural day, as the act in which the
presidents of the United States are inaugurated is called, and from
there he would fly to visit his friends in the sect.
In addition, he was very close to two other prominent politicians

who were very accommodating of Paul Schäfer: the former Prime
Minister of Bavaria, Franz Josef Strauss, and the former German
ambassador to Chile, Erich Strätling. The first was the one who,
during a visit to the colony, suggested renaming it "Villa Baviera"
when he saw the mountains in the background, while the second was
responsible for one of the most regrettable episodes in German
diplomatic history, because in 1977, When the complaints against the
sect intensified in Europe, he was sent to verify what was happening there.
Their conclusions, contained in a declassified US report, signed by
the US ambassador to Chile at the time, David Popper, detail that the
colony had established itself in Chile because "around 1960 the group
began to fear that Europe could return to fall back into the cycle of
communist war and disorder. This, later, determined that they looked
for a place overseas to resettle.
Strätling added that “the settlement has adopted a number of local

Indian children, who will apparently become full members of the
community. Due to his bad
experiences in recent years, the settlers are very careful about outside
contacts and allow very few people to visit the settlement." It also
highlighted that “the settlement retains some aspects of the religious
order. No drinking or smoking. There are no individual salaries. People
work very hard. The settlement is completely self-sufficient. The
workers are trained under the old German system.
Curiously, none of this attracted the German ambassador's attention,

but he had been impressed with the power plant, with the "excellent
barns and stables" and with a "very modern hospital with new
equipment", asserting, furthermore, that "hundreds of treatments have
been delivered to the region's Mapuche Indian children, including
many for malnutrition. The settlers maintain excellent relations with
the Indians.
According to Popper, “Colonia Dignidad obviously has good relations

with the junta. Ambassador Stratling has reason to believe that some
of the workers have made repairs to Pinochet's residence on Avenida
Presidente Errázuriz. The colonia somehow acquired a second-hand
Mercedes, which they completely overhauled and gave to Pinochet as
a gift, much to the displeasure of the Mercedes seller in Santiago.
Mrs. Pinochet crashed it, requiring a second reconstruction.
Popper detailed that, despite all this, Stratling "saw no indication that
it had become a DINA detention center."145
In the same way, a series of letters sent by Blank - who was the
one who handled the legal affairs of the colony and therefore spent
several years in Germany watching what was happening with the trial
-, in which he refers to Mertins as "Meerretich" , show that after they
considered that the first team of lawyers they hired was not good, they
took Mertins' personal lawyer, Ludwig Klassen, as their representative.
The arms dealer was not only concerned with the legal and political,
but also with the communication. Among what was found there
a telex from "Struppi", Hopp's nickname, in which he announced that

"Me" (Mertins) would meet with a certain Reinhards from the WDR
television station, in order to try to convince him not to publish a news
report "GE" (the journalist Gero Gemballa), as well as the transcript of a
telephone conversation in which it is indicated that there is an independent
journalist "interested in doing a positive report on the CD" and that "he
has the approval of Me". However, in another communication it is detailed
that he changed his mind and "prefers to send another journalist, a certain
Kauck, from Quick magazine."
Likewise, there is a letter from Mertins addressed to the Siegburger

Presse newspaper, for a report in which he was linked to the sect, and
another in which it is reported from Siegburg to Parral that "Me" has a
contact in Bunte magazine , a journalist who “wants to bring on Saturday.
We will all talk and we will bring the documentation and we want to show
you the video," he said, referring to the propaganda material they had
produced and which showed the neighborhood as a bucolic peasant
community.
There is another document sent by a certain Beatrice, who was
analyzing for Mertins a report on the colony written by the legendary
American journalist Jack Anderson, and another document in which "Me"
assures that a journalist from the ZDF chain, named Walter, wants to
travel with him to Chile to "make a film as a rectification."
Mertins was also the founder and president of the Círculo de Amigos
de Colonia Dignidad, an aid organization for Schäfer created in 1978 in
Germany, and in which various politicians linked to the right-wing SCU
party, Christian Social Union, participated, including Franz Josef Strauss.
In Germany, Mertins said that Pinochet and the members of the junta
were great patriots and about the colony he asserted that "this German
group made an excellent impression on me. A number of Germans who
have visited Colonia Dignidad with me share the opinion that injustices
should not be done to German public opinion."
In addition to weapons, Mertins was also interested in mining.
In the eighties he bought a gold mine near Durango, which he called

Villa Parral.
Gerhard Mücke confessed to the Chilean justice system that he,
along with Helmuth Seelbach, spent at least nine months in said mine,
among other things installing an antenna that allowed Mertins to
communicate directly with Schäfer from there. Likewise, according to
him, “Mertins had a farm near Bonn, in Germany. When he discarded
that estate, the belongings he had were given to us by him.
Mertins was not only interested in the mine he owned in Mexico,

but also in the gold mining in the Nahuelbuta mountain range, where
according to different testimonies he was a partner of Schäfer.
Gerd Schäffrik explained that he was responsible for working in the
summers of 1978 and 1979 in said deposits, which were several,
among them Colico and the Loncotripay river, in which the precious
metal was extracted by two procedures: through canoes or by means
of laundries. Then, “in the villa the gold was melted into bars of two
hundred grams and we cleaned it in baths with electrolytes and
chemicals. Schmidt and I were in charge of those tasks.
Eugen built the electrical apparatus for the electrolytic baths.”146
Franz Bäar was taken from the hospital in 1978 with the aim of forcing
him to work—along with about twenty other people—in slave-like
conditions at another gold mining site, located in Trovolhue, in the
commune of Tirúa. As he explained to me, in these deposits gold
"was seen in abundance", but his wife, Ingrid Szurgelies, related that
"to us, however, they told us that very little came out".
While the fruit of that work was sent to Parral, they lived in
precarious conditions, sleeping in tents, without sanitary facilities and
working all day, under the surveillance of Schäfer and his armed
guards.
Franz says that they were in Tirúa for more than a year and that "a
lot of gold was found there" and that the person in charge of everything
was Ricardo Alvear, known in the colony as "Klops". at work,
In addition to Schäfer, they received important visitors from time to time.

Bäar assures that he saw Pedro Espinoza and also Gerhard Mertins in
Tirúa.
In one of the camps, one day there was a savage beating against a
young German settler, "whom they almost killed."
The next day, Bäar was threatened with the same punishment, a matter
that decided him to elope. Taking advantage of the fact that the person
in charge of his surveillance was far away, he tried to start through the
hills, but it was impossible for him to advance much due to the density
of the vegetation and the rugged terrain, so he had to return.
In the multiple judicial proceedings initiated in the neighborhood, there
is only information about the laundries from an investigation carried out
in 1998 by the Investigative Police in the framework of an investigation
by the former Criminal Court of Parral. In this procedure, the detectives
reached the La Selva farm, in Carahue, owned by Marcelo Floody
Armstrong, who said that for business reasons, in 1978 he met some
leaders of the former Colonia Dignidad and that, due to background
information indicating that there was gold on his land, "the Germans
were interested," so he let them exploit the mineral in exchange for the
construction of some roads and a bridge.
According to Floody's testimony, the Germans settled on December

22, 1978 in the south-west sector of his property with heavy machinery.
The police report specifies that "the interviewee states that a total of
twenty-two people from Colonia Dignidad settled on his farm, including
the leaders, and in his opinion there were two Chileans among them."
Floody assured that the Germans did badly in the extractive works and
for this reason they withdrew from there on April 22, 1979. By the way,
it is not the Tirúa mine, where even today there is a sector known as «
Lagoon of the Germans”, and from where they extracted large amounts
of gold.
On January 3, 1983, the journalist Manuel Buendía, one of the most

prominent political columnists in Mexico, exposed Mertins' actions in his
country, through his influential column "Private Network", published in
the Excelsior newspaper.
With the suggestive title "Sells Arms," Buendía wrote that "one of
the main international arms traffickers—Nazi, ex-SS member—has
established offices in Mexico. From here, according to his own words,
he carries out operations in Central America to "combat communism."
Sixty-three-year-old Gerhard Georg Mertins likes to recount his
wartime exploits as a member of Hitler's select troops and now
describes himself as a "logistics merchant." Many women, men and
children have died not only in Central America, but also in Chile or
Bolivia, the Middle East or North Africa, thanks to weapons supplied
by Mertins. If you wish to write to him, his address is 4511 Carlby
Road, Alexandria, Virginia. Or maybe you want to call him at
703-7805246," he said, adding that another option was to call "25144
in Durango: Minera Romer will answer and Mr. Mertins is there."
Exactly three months later, Buendía wrote in his column the result
of his first note: Mertins had been expelled from Mexico on March 16
along with his son Georg —who currently runs Merex— and a German
geologist in charge of the mine, in which he was associated with the
Mexican Enrique Rosales.
On May 30, 1984, Buendía was attacked from behind by a man in
his forties, who fired four shots at him with an automatic pistol. The
perpetrator of the murder was never discovered. The Mexican justice
sent an extensive questionnaire to Mertins in this regard, which he
never answered. Said questionnaire, however, not only had to do
with Buendía's crime, but with the suspicion that behind it there was
much more than a couple of notes that denounced him as an arms
dealer. What was really worrying were, apparently, the investigations
that Buendía had carried out and that implicated Mertins in the Iran-
Contra scandal and marijuana trafficking.
The journalist Jesús Esquivel recounts in his book La CIA,

Camarena y Caro Quintero, la historia secreta, that he obtained
from the Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) a classified document
dated January 13, 1990, divided into forty points and prepared from
an interrogation of Victor Harrison
Lawrence, a Mexican close to the CIA, who had been questioned in

connection with the brutal killing of US drug enforcement agent
Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, who was tortured and killed in Mexico.
Harrison, according to Esquivel, had collaborated in the eighties

with the Guadalajara cartel —the criminal organization materially
responsible for Camarena's murder— and in 1990 he was already
living in Los Angeles, as a protected witness for the DEA.
According to Esquivel, Buendía had discovered that “the CIA was
smuggling weapons into Mexico through the famous German arms
dealer Gerhard Mertins, from there to send them to the Nicaraguan
contras, in addition to training guerrillas in the state of Veracruz. To
cover the costs, the small planes that Mertins sent to Central America
with the weapons returned to Mexico loaded with Colombian cocaine,
which was later sold by the Guadalajara cartel.”147 It should be
remembered that the “Iran-Contras” scandal broke out in the
mid-1980s. , when it was discovered that the United States was
secretly selling arms to Iran, that it was at war with Iraq, and that with
that money it was also financing the anti-communist guerrilla in
Nicaragua, "La Contra", a scandal in which Mertins was also found
involved, basically helping the CIA acquire weapons that had in turn
been bought by another legendary trafficker who also had several
ties to Chile, the Syrian Monzer Al Kassar.
Mertins' implication in all of this makes more sense if one takes into
account what Silverstein indicates, in order that the German started
working in the early eighties as an agent of the United States Naval
Intelligence, but was expelled from this and then the CIA.
While all this was going on, Mertins traveled to different parts of
the world, but from time to time he arrived in his native country, where
one of his main activities seems to have been to frequently visit the
Lutheran Bishop Helmuth Frenz, one of the first to
denounce the horrors of Colonia Dignidad and whom he threatened

with "consequences" if he did not stop his campaign against the sect.
They are not the only irregular episodes linked to Mertins. In 1987,
Chilean customs detained the ship Nedlloyd Manila in Antofagasta,
upon discovering that it was carrying one thousand fifty-six kilos of
ammunition divided into eighty-two boxes, destined for Colonia Dignidad,
which had been shipped from Acapulco and Manzanillo, Mexico, to to
Valparaiso.
Once again, the person behind the shipment was Mertins, who,
coincidentally, records his last authorized entries into the country that
year. Despite the fact that the bullets were not declared in the ship's
manifest, the Antofagasta Customs Court decided that the crime of
smuggling was not established, for which reason the cargo was finally
authorized to continue its journey to Valparaíso, where it was unloaded.
That same year, 1987, the now-defunct newspaper La Época

denounced that Mertins had spent long periods in the colony. Two
months later, he published a note with the lawyer Fernando Saenger,
defender of the colony until 1997, when Schäfer decided not to turn
himself in to justice. The lawyer pointed out that Mertins was indeed at
the beginning of that year for "a few hours" in the neighborhood and
asserted that he was not an arms dealer, but an "industrial friend of
people from Dignity."148 Mertins was in the doldrums. Several Merex
executives had been prosecuted in 1985 for selling combat planes to
Pakistan and India and in 1991 their company was involved in a scandal
of arms trafficking to Croatia, a country that, while at war, was also
supplied militarily by Chile and Argentina. an act for which former
Argentine President Carlos Menem was prosecuted, and whose key
man in the investigation being followed in Chile was former officer of
the DINA South Brigade Gerardo Huber, assassinated in Cajón del
Maipo shortly before testifying.
Mertins died in 1993, but a couple of years before another character

with similar characteristics was operating in the same spheres as him,
including the colony...
Chapter 31
The Master's Apprentice
He hadn't seen him for several years, but the Swiss journalist Ulrich Achermann
immediately recognized Karel (or Carlos) Honzik Hubka when he caught sight
of him looking at Swiss anti-aircraft guns at one of the first versions of the
International Air and Space Fair, Fidae, a early nineties in Santiago. The peculiar
thing is that Honzik, a subject as gray as Mertins, but with a much lower profile,
was chatting friendly with the Swiss ambassador in Chile who, upon discovering
the journalist, sped away from there.
Achermann had been trying to interview Honzik for years, but

he had never been able to do it the way he wanted.
Around 1985, according to what he told me, he was working as a
correspondent for several European media outlets in Buenos Aires, when a
small scandal broke out in Chile regarding the discovery in Switzerland of the
violation of that country's laws regarding weapons, due to a business involving
the license for the "Piraña" armored cars used by the Chilean Army, which
belonged to the Swiss company Mowag.
The representative of said company was the Czech nationalized Chilean

Karel Honzik, who lived in Santiago and was also the agent in Latin America for
other Swiss arms businesses: the SIG rifle factory, Pilatos planes, Mowag and
the Oerlikon anti-aircraft batteries. .
Achermann realized that behind this character there was surely a good article
and decided to travel to Santiago, for which he called his office from Argentina
(which was located in the heart of the capital, Moneda with Mac-Iver) and asked
for an interview. with him, which they granted him. After checking into the hotel,
she went to see him.
Honzik attended to him immediately. He was a man of medium

height, with gray hair and glasses, who did not attract attention at all.
He greeted the journalist and then told him, smiling, the date and time
he had arrived in Chile and where he had stayed, in order to impress
him, which he did. After this, he limited himself to answering the
questions about the Mowag affair with pure evasions, without giving
more space to other questions.
At that time, Achermann was beginning to investigate about the
colony. A couple of years later he was already installed in Chile and
in 1987 he published an article about her in the Cologne city
newspaper, Kölber Stad-tanzeiger. Shortly after that, cars without a
license plate began to stop outside his house and also the classic late-
night phone calls with insults and death threats. He informed the
German and Swiss embassies of what was happening and they
agreed that he would make the same complaint (which he had made
in person) by telephone. As soon as he did, the harassment stopped
and he was able to verify that his telephone line had been tapped. Of
course, this only increased his curiosity about the colony and its ties
to Pinochet's secret services (at the time, the National Information
Center, CNI). He obtained background information linking Honzik—
close to Mertins—with Schäfer, with whom he used to go hunting deer
on the hunting ground inside the colony.
Years passed and that day he found him in the Fidae, in Cerrillos,
he didn't waste a minute, after the ambassador took to his heels, and
invited Honzik to have a beer, which he willingly accepted. After a
couple of polite comments, he got down to business.
—Listen, why don't you tell me about Colonia Dignidad? I know

you are a well-connected man…” he asked. But he was not prepared
for the answer.
"Tell me your price," was the reply.
Achermann told him that he did not understand what he was referring to and his interlocutor
he specified it: how much it cost to stop asking questions.
The journalist got up offended from there and several years later,
sitting in a cafe in Santiago, he would tell me that "that's the only

asshole who tried to bribe me in thirty years of doing journalism in Latin
America."
Of course, Honzik wasn't interested in letting his ties to the colony
be known, but inside the colony it was well known who
it was.
Klaus Schnellenkamp asserted that he was known on the farm by

the name "Carlos Seibel" and that he knew this because Honzik/Seibel
was a friend of his father.149 He also noted that "he was an arms
dealer for the colony," adding that helped when its legal personality
was dissolved in 1991 (creating limited companies, in exchange) and
that it was involved in the manufacture of SIG rifles in the colony, as
well as in the Mowag issue, as well as being involved in the business
of Mexico of Mertins, to such an extent that when he was expelled from
that country "his successor was Carlos Honzik."
Honzik was also involved in the biggest arms trafficking scandals (to
Croatia and the bribes in the Mirage and Leopard cases) that have
been known in Chile in the last thirty-odd years, mainly through various
companies he managed, the main of which was Berthier, who he
founded in the British Virgin Islands together with Oscar Aitken and
Guillermo Letelier and which, according to the visiting minister in the
Riggs case, "was created for Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte."
The document adds that "in November 1995 the powers that the
company had conferred on Honzik and Letelier were settled in Aitken
Lavanchy,"150 an expert in creating companies and moving money in
tax havens, like the ones the sect used so many times.
Chapter 32
big secrets
"Call to me and I will answer you and I will teach you great secrets,"
says one of the many translations of Jeremiah 33.3, the name with
which an officer of the Investigative Police, of evangelical religion,
baptized the operation with which the PDI ended by unearth three tons
of weapons, explosives, ammunition and chemicals from the two
properties of Colonia Dignidad, in 2005, alluding to the biblical quote.
Said officer knew perfectly well, by the way, that he would end up
discovering great secrets, since at the beginning of 2005 the
investigators had already determined that around 1998 three settlers
were ordered to dispose of evidence, as they had done before with
the bodies of the missing detainees and vehicles.
Thus, the settlers unearthed a cement container that was buried

several meters away, behind the children's bedrooms. What was
inside were basically machine guns and ammunition, which they
transferred to a metallic container that they took to the interior of the
property. After that, with the help of a bulldozer, they dug up two metal
tanks full of weapons, which they also took to the area known as Los
Pastos, where they had left the first one, and proceeded to bury them
there.
Subsequently, in the sector near the potato fields, they took out
another container that contained fifteen drums of two hundred liters
each, which contained hand grenades, detonators, rifle grenades,
rockets and other war items, which they decided to load. in several
trucks and start a dangerous trip of one hundred kilometers to Bulnes,
a journey that was repeated several times. There they buried the
drums in a well
of sand, but around 2003 they decided to recover them, leaving only the
explosives and ammunition in the hole.
The first three containers were found by the PDI on June 14, 2005 in
the Los Pastos sector, all buried at a depth of five to six meters. In the
first of them, in addition to the weapons, there were eighteen wooden
boxes with the forty-six thousand intelligence files, the letters and many
other documents that we have cited in this book, some of them contained
in a black plastic bag.
By the way, it is difficult to summarize everything that was found, but

we will try: one hundred and forty-four hand grenades, seven rockets,
four rocket launchers, sixty-seven mortar bombs, thirty rifles or rifles,
ninety-seven machine guns or submachine guns, forty and five pistols,
four revolvers, five booby devices, forty-four fuzes, a camera hidden in a
box, an ashtray with a hidden microphone, and eleven pistol pencils.
The discovery in the El Litral sector, in Bulnes, occurred on August 4

of the same year. There the police found almost four thousand hand
grenades, three hundred rifle grenades, eight rockets, two rocket
launchers, five tear gas grenades and a huge amount of explosives:
1,678 kg of pentalite, 9.7 of TNT, 900 g of Idemita and 250 of T4, among
others. Likewise, there were all kinds of chemicals, several of them used
in making sarin, but also very striking things, like two flags: one of the
Communist Party and the other of the Revolutionary Left Movement.
Another fact that became evident was that most of the submachine
guns found had been manufactured in the same neighborhood, in addition
to several concealed weapons, such as pistol pencils, but also batons
adapted for shooting, which, according to a police report, "seem specially
manufactured or conditioned to hide their true nature. Moreover, they
seem to be destined to kill people selectively and through hidden or
secret operations.”151 For many, the discovery of those arsenals and the
tokens was the voice
of some superior being that finally revealed to Jeremiah everything he

wanted to know, what was hidden for so many years with the help of
so many people who did not want to see the obvious and others who,
knowing everything that was happening there, kept silent for supposed
reasons of state or political expediency.
However, all those who know in depth what happened until very
recently in the Parral sect agree to a greater or lesser degree that
several secrets still remain to be revealed.
One of them, which is perhaps the one that many ex-colonists have
the biggest dream about, is knowing where the fortune of the colony
was, obtained mainly from arms trafficking. Most bet on deposits in
tax havens and in countries like Switzerland or Liechtenstein, to which
only a privileged few would have access.
Some part of Germany under the influence of the colony would be,
meanwhile, the whereabouts of the famous packages that Manuel
Contreras sent in 1978 from Magallanes, when power began to slip
through his fingers.
However, perhaps the biggest secret is the one that lies undisturbed
somewhere in the foothills, since there are many connoisseurs of the
colony who indicate that, in addition to the facilities in the town, it had
a kind of bunker hidden on the slopes of the Andes, unknown to
practically all the inhabitants of the colony and which could only be
reached by helicopter.
Of course, it sounds like fiction, but the truth is that it is enough to
go through the previous pages of this book to verify that, in the case
of this sect, it is completely true that reality is far greater than fiction.
Thanks
This book has involved several years of research and has also been
enriched by a series of articles that, in this context, I published in
various Chilean media such as El Mostrador, Te Clinic, Qué Pasa
and Ciperchile, to which I thank for the space and the disposition
shown by my colleagues Mirko Macari, Miguel Paz, Héctor Cossio,
Jorge Molina, Francisco Aravena and Mónica González.
In the same way, I owe a debt of gratitude to Melanie Jösch and
Daniel Olave, from my publishing house Penguin Random House, for
having promoted this project, and also to many people who from
different positions helped me over time with interviews, data and
documents.
Several of them asked me to keep their identities, so I can only
thank those I can name: Libio Pérez, Mauricio Weibel, Héctor Cruzatt,
Erick Zott, Samuel Fuenzalida, Ulrich Achermann, Volker Petzold,
Margarita Maino, Adriana Heyder, Cecilia Heyder, Winfried Hempel,
Magdalena Garcés, Loreto Meza, Francisco Ugás, Hernán Fernández,
Margarita Romero, Dieter Scholz, Franz Bäar, Ingrid Szurgelies,
Claudio Concha, John Collins, Deb Daulton, Juan Sepúlveda and
Eugenio Ortega.
And, of course, Claudia.

1 Case No. 2198-98-Villa Baviera (Illicit Association), Santiago Court of Appeals, Page 665.
2 Branham, William, 1955: Sermons of William Marrion Branham, Voice of

God Recording, 2010, Apple edition.
3 The example is not whimsical. That is the argument with which Marshall Applewhite and his
partner, Bonnie Nettles, convinced thirty-seven members of the Heaven's Gate sect to commit
suicide in the United States in 1997. It is one of the few cases of sects in which there have been
women at the head. Another case was, in Chile, the community directed by the Argentinean Paola
Olcese. Typically, however, these destructive groups are led by men.
4 Acts 2:1-13 states in this regard: “When the Feast of Pentecost came, they were all together,
and suddenly a noise came down from heaven as of a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the whole
house where they were sitting, and distributed tongues appeared to them, as of fire, settling on
each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other
languages." The exact term is “glosolalia”, which according to the Dictionary of the Spanish
Language Academy means “supernatural ability to speak languages”.
5 Gemballa, Gero, Colonia Dignidad, Cesoc, Santiago, 1989, p. 56.

6 The original concept is Mutual Assured Destruction. The acronym MAD, at its
time, is the word that in English designates madness or disease.
7 https://william-branham.org/site/research/people/joseph_mattsson_boze.
Revised April 5, 2022.
8 Collins, John A., Jim Jones-Te Malachi 4 Elijah prophecy, Dark Mystery
Publications, 2017, Kindle edition.
9 Branham, William, op. cit.
10Collins , John A., op. cit.
11 Guinn, Jeff, Te Road to Jonestown, Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, Simon & Schuster,
2017, Kindle edition.
12 Said temple, says John Collins, was founded by Howard Cadle.
13 Ibid.
14 Guinn, Jeff, op. cit.
15 Heller, Friedrich P., Leather pants, bows... and submachine guns. The
background of Colonia Dignidad. Editions Cesoc, Santiago, 2006.
16 Rawlings, William, The Second Coming of the Invisible Empire, Mercer
University Press, 2016, Kindle edition.
17 Ibid.
18Collins , John A., op. cit.
19 Jorgensen, Owen, Supernatural: The Life of William Branham, Book Two, The
Young Man and His Despair (1933-1946), Secret Wine, 2016, Kindle edition.
20 Nix Jackson, Gayle, Pieces of the Puzzle: An Anthology, Johnson printing, 2016, Kindle
edition.
21 Daulton Tibodeau, Deb, The Serpent's Tail, Adelaide Books, New York, 2022. 22
https://william-branham.org/site/research/people/leo_mercier#_9b caed2b-
a32b-448f-8422-f6eb8ea1fd3f_ftn15. Revised May 11, 2022.
23 California Supreme Court, “People v. Loker”, July 28, 2008.

24 The text in Spanish sent to the Ministry of the Interior says "Graham", but it is surely a
document written in German and translated that way in Chile, confusing the last name, among
other things because another very famous American preacher, and who was well known in the
country, his name was Billy Graham.
25 https://www.freie-volksmission.de/?lang=4&site=news. Reviewed on 12
March 2022.
26 Fröhling, Ulla, Unser geraubtes Leben: Die wahre Geschichte von Liebe und Hoffnung
in einer grausamen Sekte, Bastei Enterteinment, 2012, Kindle edition. 27 https://www.freie-
volksmission.de/?lang=4&site=detail. Revised April 19, 2022.
28 Ibid.
29 https://william-branham.org/site/research/topics/take_it_with_you.
30 https://www.ciperchile.cl/2009/09/03/ex-hombre-de-confianza-deschafer tre-villa
speaks-for-the-first-time-asks-for-his-part-after-millionaire-agreement-in-bavaria-
and-the-cde/. Revised March 24, 2022.
31 Lluch, Isaac, «The new messiah», The weekly of La Tercera, 20
August 2011, p. 4-7.
32 Case No. 2198-98-Villa Baviera (Illicit Association), Court of
Appeals of Santiago, Page 210 and following.
33 Case No. 2198-98, Arms Control Law, Court of Appeals of
Santiago, Page 445 et seq.
34 Ibid., Page 533.
35 Case No. 2198-98, Illicit Association, Court of Appeals of
Santiago, Page 665.
36 Stehle, Jan, Der Fall Colonia Dignidad, Transcript, Edition Politik, 2021,
Kindle edition.
37 https://www.newsday.co.zw/2014/01/gumburas-lavish-lifestyle-exposed/.
38 https://www.herald.co.zw/gumbura-plotted-to-dethrone-govt-witness/.
Revised May 5, 2022.
39 https://newsday.co.tt/2020/01/04/28m-pastor-declares-satan-trying
tomake-me-famous/. Revised May 8, 2022.
40 Mirista was the usual name to refer to those who belonged to
to the Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR.
41 Case No. 2182-98, Episode Illicit Association ex Colonia Dignidad, Court of
Appeals of Santiago, Page 2632 et seq.
42 Case Role 2182-98, Episode Juan Maino Canales, Court of
Appeals of Santiago, Page 2172.
43 Gemballa, Gero, Colonia Dignidad, Ediciones Cesoc, 1990, Santiago de
Chile. It should be noted that Gemballa died of a heart attack in 2002, although many
people linked to the investigations around the colony believe that his death may not
have been natural.
44 Case Case No. 2182-98, Episode Illicit Association ex Colonia Dignidad, Court
of Appeals of Santiago, Page 2613 et seq.
45 Heller, Paul Friedrich, Leather pants, bows... submachine guns. The
background of Colonia Dignidad, Ediciones Cesoc, Santiago, no year, p. 23.
46 Rojas, Álvaro, The secret history of Colonia Dignidad, Internet-Edition
GBR, 2000, p. 17.
47 Case Role 2198-98, Court of Appeals of Santiago, Episode Juan Maino
Canales, Page 2221.
48 Ibid., Page 606.
49 Ibid., Page 1900.
52 Ibid., Page 115. (Refers to Department V of the Police of
Investigations, which began investigations around the colony in 1996).
53 Linedecker, Clifford. The Waco Texas massacre, Editions B,
Barcelona, 1993, p. 73.
54 Wright, Lawrence, Scientology, Kindle edition.
55 Judgment Case ROL 229-2007, Oral Criminal Trial Court of Concepción.
56 Ross, Rick, Cults inside out, 2014, Kindle edition.

57 Rojas, Álvaro, The secret history of Colonia Dignidad, Internet-edition
Gbr, Society Collection, p. 30.
58 Basso, Carlos, «Wolfgang Kneese, the young man who won a game of chess
against the devil», Ciperchile, https://www.ciperchile.cl/2017/08/28/wolfgang kneese-
el-joven-que-le -I-win-a-chess-match-to-the-devil/. Revised May 25, 2022.

Canales, Page 2137.

63 Case Role 2.182-98, Episode Illicit Association, Court of Appeals of Santiago,
Page 29.
Canales, Page 1846 et seq.
65 González, Mónica, «Heinz Kuhn: “This is how I founded and escaped from
Colonia Dignidad”», Analysis magazine, August 14-20, 1989 edition. The text is
also available at https://www.ciperchile.cl/ 2021/10/19/ heinz-kuhn asi-funde-y-me-
fugue-de-colonia-dignidad/. Revised May 29, 2022.
66 In an interview with a German journalist in 1988, quoted in the book La
historia secreta de Colonia Dignidad, by Álvaro Rojas, Cohn asserted that "I
fear that it is a sect of religious fanatics led by an evil genius and insane, who is in
a position to lead his almost 300 followers to a tragic end", in obvious reference to
the tragedy of the sect headed by Jim Jones.
67 Basso, Carlos, «The chilling testimony of the guinea pig from Colonia
Dignidad (I)», El Mostrador, available at https://www.elmos trador.cl/noticias/pais/
2015/08/27/el-escalofriante -testimony-of-the-guinea-rabbit-of-colonia-dignity-i/.
Revised May 22, 2022.
69 Basso, Carlos, “The guinea pig from Colonia Dignidad (II)”, at https://
www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2015/08/31/el-conejillo-de-in-dias-de-colonia
-dignity-ii/. Revised June 3, 2022.
Canales, Page 1846 and following.
75 Ibid., Page 667 et seq.
76 The political coalition that brought Salvador Allende to power was the Popular
Unity, better known by its acronym UP. The term upeliento is a mixture between
UP and the derogatory word "peliento", which was formerly used to refer to
someone vulgar.
77 With "the affairs of General Schneider" they refer to his homicide, a crime to
which we already alluded in part 1 of the book, in relation to the data
that Paul Schäfer was handling regarding an attempted coup in October 1970.

79 According to Neckelmann, his successor as head of the DINA/CNI unit in
Parral was another officer, Máximo Peppi Onetto. However, his resume shows
that he worked with Gómez Segovia, since he was his qualifying officer in 1976.

81 Salazar, Manuel, Contreras, story of an untouchable, Uqbar Editores,
2014.
82 Judgment Case Case 2198-98-Villa Baviera (Illicit Association), Court of
83 It is only a range of names with the previously mentioned Carlos Labarca
who, according to the files, had participated in the crime against General Schneider.

85 The link to the original interview no longer exists on the web, but a
reproduction can be found she
de-colonia-dignidad/. read in
at https://piensachile.com/2008/06/23/losotros-secretos-
I know
Revised June 18, 2022.

87 Case Case No. 2198-98-Villa Baviera (Juan Maino Canales Episode),
Santiago Court of Appeals, Page 1665.
89 Cause Case No. 12.293-9, 11 Criminal Court of Santiago, Page 10 et seq.
90 Cause Case No. 12.293-4, 11 Criminal Court of Santiago, Page 63 et seq.
91 Case File 12.293-4, 11 Criminal Court of Santiago, Page 91 et seq.
92 Willoughby, Federico, The war: intimate pages of power, Uqbar

editors, Santiago, 2014, p. 121.
93 In 1973, Tieme led people to believe that he had died in a plane crash at
sea, off Tomé, in circumstances that it was an escape plan from Chile, for which
he flew to Colonia Dignidad, where they painted his plane with Argentine license
plates before crossing The Andes.
94 Willoughby, op. cit., p. 123.

96 There is a testimony (the only one) from one of the detainees, Walkiria
Jorquera, who says that she was not only tortured by DINA, but also by Maipo
officials, asserting that the interrogations were "less brutal" and that "I realize that
there was a captain who was in charge of this group of the regiment, whom I later
recognized as an officer named Heyder».
97 Case Role 2182-98, Episode Juan Maino, Court of Appeals of Santiago, Page
1415.
99 Case Roll 27.707-2004, of the Court of Appeals of Santiago, Pages 2305 to
2313.
101 Case File 2198-98-Villa Baviera (Illicit Association), Court of
102 https://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2015/09/04/el-paso-de-wal ter rauff-
y-otros-cientificos-nazis-por-colonia-dignidad/. Revised March 12, 2022.

105 As a result of this investigation, in 2021 the leaders Gerhard Mücke and
Johann Van Den Berg ended up sentenced in first instance to a sentence of five
years and one day in prison as accomplices in the qualified kidnapping of Juan
Maino, Elizabeth Rekas and Antonio Elizondo.
Manuel Contreras and former DINA agent Carlos López were sentenced to ten
years and one day as perpetrators of the same crimes, and former agent Eugenio
Fieldhouse was sentenced to five years and one day as an accomplice. However,
the Santiago Appeals Court later acquitted Mücke and Van Den Berg, which was
ratified by the Supreme Court. The Italian courts, however, sentenced fourteen
Chilean soldiers to life imprisonment for their participation in the disappearance of
Italian citizens in the framework of "Operation Condor", including the case of Juan
Maino, who possessed this nationality.
106 Case Role 2182-98, Episode Juan Maino, Court of Appeals of

Santiago, Page 1353 and following.

109 Ibid., Page 1231 et seq . 110
Ibid., Page 2140 et seq.
111 Case File 2198-98-Villa Baviera (Illicit Association), Court of
112 Ibid., Pages 2276 and 2277.
113 Ramiro Romero disappeared after being called to report to the Catillo checkpoint
on September 13. Alfredo Durán, who was a PC militant , was kidnapped from his home in
the urban sector of Catillo by Carabineros personnel, according to various testimonies.
114 Ibid., Pages 30 and 31.

115 Ibid., Pages 97 and 98. Guillermo Marín, “el Memo”, was another good friend of the
colony. It is the same one mentioned by that nickname in the file related to Raúl Monsalve,
the intelligence officer involved in the crime of Charles Horman.
116 Ibid., Page 98.

117 Ibid., Page 21.
118 Ibid., Page 26. According to a notarial document discovered in the raids on the
neighborhood, plot 20 of the former San Miguel hacienda was, in those years, owned by
Jorge Marín Correa. Said document authorized the colony to "take care, preserve and
monitor the private road that is located in the limits of the aforementioned farm and Villa
Baviera."
119 Ibid., Page 31.
121 According to Torres, the Lloymávida farm was owned by Ignacio Urrutia de la Sotta
and around 1973 only two families lived inside, and it was managed by Joaquín Tejos.
122 It is worth mentioning that the judicial process related to

twenty-seven disappearances in Parral culminated in a first
instance sentence in which Army officer Hugo Cardemil received a
sentence of seventeen years in prison for several of
the disappearances, while Carabineros commissioner Pablo
Caulier Grant was sentenced to ten years and one day and Petty
Officer Luis Hidalgo another seven years, for various cases as well.
Subsequently, the Talca Court of Appeals lowered
Cardemil's sentence to fifteen years and raised Hidalgo's to ten.
years and a day In the end, the Supreme Court left Cardemil's sentences
to five years and the
Caulier in four.
123 Judgment Case Case No. 12.293-2005 (Homicide of Miguel Ángel
Becerra), Court of Appeals of Santiago, Page 7.
124 Ibid.
125 Case Role 2182-98, Episode Illicit Association ex Colonia Dignidad, Court
of Appeals of Santiago, Pages 461 et seq.
128 Case Role 2182-98, Episode Juan Maino, Court of Appeals of Santiago,
Page 1232.
129 Jorge Matute disappeared at the end of November 1999 in Concepción
from a crowded nightclub and his search became one of the main police cases
of the time. The body was finally found in 2004, more than thirty kilometers away.
Although the commission of a homicide was proven, no one has been charged
for it to date.
130 Case Role 2182-98, Episode Illicit Association ex Colonia Dignidad,

Court of Appeals of Santiago, Page 454 et seq.
131 Case Role 2182-98, Episode Violation of the Weapons Law, Court of
133 Case Case No. 2182-98, Episode Illicit Association ex Colonia Dignidad,
Court of Appeals of Santiago, Pages 2632 and following.
135 Case No. 7,981, Illegal Association and obstruction of justice, Court of
137 Case No. 2182-98, Episode Illicit Association ex Colonia Dignidad, Court
of Appeals of Santiago, Page 30 et seq. https://www.revistanos.cl/jose-miguel-
138 stegmeier-fui-condenadosin jurio-previo/. Revised June 18, 2022.

140 Silverstein, Ken, Private warriors, Verso, N. York, 2001, page 113 and
following.
141 Case Role 2182-98, Episode Illicit Association ex Colonia Dignidad, Court of Appeals of
Santiago, Pages 454 et seq.
142 Unfortunately, with the closure of the newspaper La Nación in its traditional version, the
original links to the investigations that different journalists carried out there are no longer available
on the web. The original title of the report was "The weapons that Schäfer sold to Hussein" and its
author was Luis Narváez. 143 https://www.ciperchile.cl/2009/08/06/el-dia-en-que-manuel-contre
ras-le ofrecio-al-sha-de-iran-matar-a-“el-chacal” /. Revised May 12, 2022.
144 Case No. 2182-98, Episode Illicit Association ex Colonia Dignidad, Court of Appeals of
Santiago, Page 386.
145 The slowness, complacency and lack of protection of the German embassy in Chile
towards its citizens kidnapped in the Parral sect were officially admitted in 2016 by Germany,
which announced a series of reparations that, in the opinion of many victims, are insufficient.
147 Esquivel, Jesús, La CIA, Camarena and Caro Quintero, the secret history, Grijalbo,
2014, Mexico City, Kindle edition.
148 “The good opinion of Mertins about Colonia Dignidad”, La Época, 5
April 1987. 149
https://piensachile.com/2008/06/23/los-otros-secretos-de
coloniadignidad/, accessed on June 15, 2022.
150 Indictment in the Riggs case, Case No. 1694-2004, Court of
Santiago Appeals.
Edition in digital format: September 2022
© Carlos Basso
© 2022, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, SA
Av. Andrés Bello 2299, Office 801, Providencia, Santiago, Chile.
Cover design: "Penguin Random House /Cover Julio Valdes/

Layout Alexei Alekin/ "
It is strictly prohibited, without the written authorization of the «Copyright» holders, under
the sanctions established by law, the total or partial reproduction of this work by any means
or procedure, including reprography and computer processing, and the distribution of her
through rent or public loan.
ISBN: 978-956-6063-65-0
Conversion to digital format: www.acatia.es
www.penguinlibros.com

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Chapter 21. The death of the

Chapter 30. "Me"

What this book reveals, however, is that this cult is related to

There are several more, on different continents, and we will talk

It is mid-August 1955 and the action takes place in an improvised tent

He was pondering what to do with these supposed gifts when he

The second sect in which Branham's influence was also decisive

A third group of harmful characteristics derived from Branham's

Several of them were ex-soldiers or officers who fought in World

Despite the fact that communications in those years were not as

In the thousands of pages accumulated by the countless judicial

Winfried Hempel lived until he was twenty years old in Colonia

a spiritualist sect” had promised that together with his diabolical

Consistent with the above, he commented that he imagined her

expelled from paradise Of course, Branham also made it clear that he

Over the years, the story of the Bethesda fountain would be

Schäfer, it is necessary to emphasize, was completely fascinated

The assembly listens absorbedly to the voice of their leader, "the

This type of message was repeated habitually in the assembly of

Obviously, behind it there were superior interests that explained it.

Likewise, the colony had another very interesting "asset" for

The reason was that there “they spoke in a strange language.

However, the explanation is simpler: Winfried Hempel recalls that,

Manuel de Parral, "speaking in tongues" continued to be practiced in

Pastor Juan Sepúlveda is the president of the Board of Directors

"survivalists," moving to remote places, where they hoarded food,

It was, in fact, one of the main vehicles for propagating Branham's

Like Schäfer, Jones was an acolyte of the latter rain movement. In

The following year, while Jones was trying to establish a

at the time, he was an unknown preacher only twenty-five years old.

Jim Reiterman recounts in Raven, his biography of Jim Jones, that

Badly or badly, as social psychology knows very well, the human

As the leader of any sect knows well, an essential exercise to

At the time of his death in a traffic accident in Tucson, Arizona, in

However, at least in public, he claimed to be interested in the

interraciality, something he wanted to achieve in his flock. In this, his

So, once again, Jones thought of Brazil, but other options

just as it happened when Paul Schäfer and his lieutenants appeared

However, as in the case of Schäfer, the reasons for his escape to

As early as September 1972, the most important newspaper in San

Jones lobbied the newspaper and succeeded in not publishing other

four reports, in one of which he was accused of having appropriated the

At the end of 1974, Jones settled permanently in Guyana and began

Ryan decided to travel to Guyana accompanied by press teams and

Seven years after those tragic events, a

For many years, Colonia Dignidad denied being a neo-Nazi

However, today we have another element that points in that

Simmons argued that African-Americans could not understand democracy

In the midst of all this, he settled in a city we already know: Jeffersonville,

And of course, there was another element of union between

However, the ideology as such continued to subsist, atomized in

Collins recalls that while Branham began to criticize

Because of Kennedy's "idolatry" because of his Catholicism, Roy

entire generations. Perhaps for this reason it is not surprising that in

The leak of the confiscation gave rise to much speculation.

According to Deb Daulton Tibodeau's account in her book Te

Despite this, the confinement was psychological. After the murders,

On November 22, 1991, according to the transcript of the trial to which he

On November 24, Keith Loker robbed another location, this time in

Again, the witnesses assured that he seemed very calm and

In an attempt to find mitigations that would help mitigate the possible

Mercier, by the way, as noted in the same document, was also a