Part One: The Nazi Pedophile Cult Leader who Murdered Santa (With Paul F. Tompkins)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Wow, that is quite a story. And the FBI is
still looking for you. Huh yeah, it's like you are
right there right now. Oh good time. Oh my goodness.
I didn't notice you all come in. I was just
chatting with my friend. Paul left Tompkins. Paul get carried away.

(00:21):
The audience is here. What oh hi guys, how are
you all doing. I hope UM treated you well. This
is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people
in all of history and today, Paul, I thought I
might have you on along with all of our friends
here to talk about. How do you let me? Let

(00:43):
me start with the simple question, Paul, how do you
feel about Nazis? I gotta say, and I hope this
is not uncool. But not a fan, not a fan,
not a fan of Nazis. Okay, now, answillary question, Paul.
Do you diss like either chocolate or peanut butter but
like Reese's peanut buttercups. I'm gonna say I like them

(01:07):
both individually and in the coke. Okay. Interesting? Is there
anything that in combination you like but alone you don't like? Um? Yeah,
there are certain tastes like um orange or tomato. I
like them in different forms, but I don't like them
as their own thing. That's okay, So this is kind

(01:27):
of like that. Maybe maybe because we've got a Nazi, right,
don't like Nazis. But he's also a cult leader and
a torturer for the Chilean government and a pedophile. I
don't actually think you're gonna like all those things in combination.
Now that now that I read it out, let me
tell you something. If a pedophile was turning a corner
and ran into a torturer for the Chilean government and

(01:49):
they became the same thing, I wouldn't think it was
a great taste that that tastes that tasted better together
that mash up. If it's the If it's the pedophile
truck hitting the Chilean torturer truck hitting the SI truck,
that doesn't make a good mix. I would like to
see those trucks hit each other, though. I would be
fun to see those trucks hit each other. Yeah, I
actually think I would enjoy seeing them collide, but not

(02:11):
not merge their skills. Anyway, this has been a tortured
way of introducing the tale of a guy named Paul Schaefer.
Have you ever heard of Paul Shaffer. I mean I've
heard of not not the Letterman guy. I have to say,
the Letterman guy. This might be the most unfortunate person

(02:32):
other than Hitler to share in name with a spelled
completely different. It's such an unfortunate thing when that happens. Yeah,
it's it's really not great. Um speaking as a Robert
Evans Uh, but by Robert Evans just made godfather. Um,
I mean probably had a couple of people tortured, right,
it was Hollywood and like the seventies. Emotionally for sure,

(02:54):
emotionally for certain. Yeah, I mean, didn't you work with Kubrick? Right? Like? Um? So.
On January four, and American mathematics professor named Boris wisse
Feiler was hiking in the Indian Foothills in Chile. Boris
was the son of a Jewish scientist who had been
forced to flee Nazi Germany in the nineteen thirties in

(03:15):
order to you know, not get murdered. His sister still
lived in the Soviet Union. Boris was an American citizen, though,
and that his disappearance that night would mark him out.
Is the only U. S citizen who was disappeared by
the regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet. So Boris wise Feiler. Now,
as best we can tell, a local that wise Feiler
met uh noticed that he was wearing an old backpack

(03:38):
that he'd taken with him from Russia that had cyrillic
letters on it, and he was dressed in khaki pants
and under Pinochet Communism not a not good, not not
big fans of communism. So this local sees he's got
cyrillic writing on his backpack, turns him into the state authorities,
who turned him over not to a government agency, but
to a group of German Nationals who lived in a

(04:00):
nearby cult compound and specialized in torture for the Pinochet
regime as well as making broad worst. Um Boris was
tortured horribly for an unknown period of time before being
shot in the head and dumped into a mass grave.
I shouldn't have had that right after the broad worst line.
Um broad worst is part of life, it is especially

(04:22):
for these guys. Exactly now, While Boris's father had succeeded
in escaping the Nazis, Boris was not so lucky because
the German Nationals who carried out his torture and execution
were led by a charismatic Nazi apocalypse preacher named Paul Shaffer.
It is entirely possible that when the time came, Paul
himself pulled the trigger. And that's that's our little introduction

(04:44):
to what we're talking about today. Are you Are you pumped? Paul?
My appetite has been quitted. It's like the mention of
Broadworst has done. I could go for the broad worst.
One thing that's fun about this week, Paul, is we're
talking about a bastard who shares your first name. And
the episode I'm writing this week is a bastard who
shares my first name. We're talking about. I'm writing an

(05:04):
episode about Robert Baden Powell of the Boy Scouts. Um.
You know, the Boy Scouts have been up to some
fucked up ship when in the middle of a discussion
of Nazi pedophile tortures you mentioned them and go, Yeah,
what a monster match for this Halloween season. Yeah tis

(05:27):
the season. Paul Paul Schaefer Schneider was born in the
town of Siegeberg on December four, nineteen one, or he
was born in Bonn. It's also possible he was born
in the small town of Troy Dorf near the Dutch
German border. I think all these towns are kind of
near each other, as you might get from the fact
that credible sources have all provided me with three different
birthplaces for the man. Um there's some mixed up facts

(05:49):
about his early life. You know, some some stuff happened
in Germany about twenty years after he was born that
made record keeping less than ideal in parts of the
country due to sale shall we say, spontaneous fires. Um So, yeah,
he was born somewhere near that Dutch German border area.

(06:11):
We don't know a tremendous amount about his early life.
He seems to have been a very poor student and
quite clumsy. The reason we know this is because we
have one clear story from his childhood, and it's that
while he was a preteen, he was attempting to untie
his shoelaces with a fork. He's screwed up and he
gouged out his own right eye. I mean, the physics

(06:32):
of it, I know, right you're working through it in
your head right now, trying to figure out how you
do it. But if this was a sketch, how do
you even fake that Daddy had a rib removed? Usually
for another purpose. I mean that is wow, that's that's
an I'm I'm not a coordinated man, but that is

(06:53):
a fascinating act of discordination. It's it's the antithesis of Parkoo.
So when he was twelve, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany,
and since Paul was the sort of young man who
was dumb enough to gouge out his own eye while
untying his shoe, he really liked the Nazis. Big big

(07:13):
Hitler fan from an early age, probably tied to the
fact that he was not competent to untie his own
shoe without serious injury. In nineteen thirty nine, on the
eve of World War Two, Paul tried to join the
elite should Stuffle or s S. They rejected him because
he was missing an eye. Yeah, buddy, you're too dumb

(07:34):
for the s S. You can't. I mean, look, if
you're if you're talking about an elite force of the
master race, you can't have a one eyed guy in there. No, no,
unless he lost it in a cool way exactly. But
somebody's gonna ask. Eventually, somebody's gonna ask, and you're gonna say, well,
so you know how your shoes get really tight, you

(07:57):
know forks, those tricky bastards. Really, they're the Jews of
the silverware world. Oh, Nazis. So Paul was enthusiastic about
Nazism still, and he joined either the army or the
Air Force. I've heard different explanations of this too. I

(08:19):
think it's most likely he joined the Wehrmacht. Um because
he is so. He worked as a nurse. Some sources
will say medic I think they were kind of the
same basic gig at that time, in a field hospital
and occupied France throughout the war, which is one of
the better jobs you could have in the German army, right.
The nightmare is being sent east. Being stationed in France
is like, that's that's really where you want to be. Um.

(08:43):
He ended World War Two as a corporal without a
particularly exciting war experience. Corporals also the same rank Adolph
Hitler attained in World War One, which may have brought
Paul some comfort as he prepared to endure several horrible
years if everyone around him pretending they had not been
Nazis for a while, and awkward parties that must you know,

(09:05):
what did you get up to? Yeah, people are trying
to pin down times and day locations. Yeah, I was
at school, I think, yeah, yeah, because working on my degree,
I've been rebuilding a classic car. I've hot air balloon
trying to break a record around Seveld in sirteen years

(09:28):
or so, so Paul had not. Again, when the war ends,
we try to punish some of the Nazis. Paul's a
corporal who worked in a field hospital. Nobody's after this guy, right,
You'll hear people be like he was hiding from the Allies.
I don't think the Allies were looking for corporals who
worked in field hospitals like and I've never heard any
allegations he was involved in any war crimes, which I'm

(09:50):
not saying obviously to defend him. He would have absolutely
done a war crime if he could have. I don't
think the Nazis thought he was competent enough to do
war crimes. We gotta keep this guy away from the war.
Christ we got it working just so, whatever you do,
don't in here. This ship is a well oiled machine.

(10:10):
Don't let sport Gray do it. The gomer pile of
the third rite. So um yeah, he uh. He becomes
a Lutheran pastor, after the war and he's hired to
be a young people's leader at the Evangelical Free Church,
where he preached the gospel and told boys how good

(10:31):
it was to be abstinate. Now that's a red flag
to me. Some people are fine with that. I think
if you're an adult and you decide to make it
your job to tell teenage boys how bad sex is,
there might be something questionable about you. Yeah. I mean
it's like girl having grown up in religion. That's just
par for the course. It's like a part of everything.

(10:53):
But if you say I want to focus on that,
I think that you have to be a little concerned. Yeah,
there's there's probably something something up there, and there was
with Paul because not lock it and long into his gig,
people at the church started to suspect that he had
mistreated some of the boys in his care. And you
don't get more details on than that. In this instance,
we can guess what he was doing because of the

(11:14):
stuff that came out later, although just knowing the way, again,
this guy's a pedophile on an industrial scale. I don't
actually know if he'd started fully molesting them. It may
have been because people often take time to like build up.
He may have just been kind of like a little
bit like inappropriate touching and stuff. He may have like
not built up to that. At this point, we really
don't know. I mean, he's actually like if if like

(11:36):
they'll say something specific, if they can say a specific thing,
but it's too grim. That's when the the the euphemisms
come out. Yeah, exactly. Um, So we don't know how
bad it was at this stage, but the rumors about
him were vague enough that there were no criminal charges filed.
Although he was forced out of the Free Church. Now,
he had a lot of fans even at this point.
He's a very charismatic guy. Um, and so there were

(11:59):
a lot of adult that the Free Church who are
like really surprised that he gets fired and still really
liked him. One woman who knew him at the time
later told a documentarian quote after Schaefer was fired, he
lived for a while in the forest. He said he
had a direct encounter with Jesus there and that Jesus
had chosen him for a mission founding something like a
community of true Christians. So already, I mean, we've had

(12:22):
a few red flag being a Nazi red flag number one. Um,
I feel like, let's say I'm on the forest and
Jesus appears to me and says he's got a mission
for me. Let's say that back. I have to think
back on all the people who have said similar things
and how successful were those missions? Yeah? How good? How
how often do those missions not in this nightmares? Yeah? Yeah,

(12:44):
yeah yeah. Also, Jesus like had his mission mission accomplished. Yeah,
and then he was like, I'll come back when I'm ready,
when I'm done. He never said anything about and here
and there, we're gonna give you his assignments. I mean,
to be honest, what I respect about Jesus is the
same thing that I respected out the Amicus brothers, where
you do one great thing and you're like, you know what,
I don't need to do any more of these, Like

(13:05):
we I don't need to come back, we don't need
to reboot back to the future. We're good. We're good.
Like I don't need we don't need a second coming.
I got it right. Um, that's why we call Jesus
the Marty McFly of religion. Yes, if people were wondering,
If people were wondering. Um, So he goes into the woods.
God tells him to create a community of true Christian believers,

(13:27):
and so he becomes a roving Lutheran pastor, and he
spends the next several years traveling the countryside dressed in Liederhosen,
playing acoustic guitar and singing songs to kids about how
awesome abstinence is. A couple of flags there. I mean,
even back then, when a priest brings out the guitar,

(13:48):
this is such a drag. I don't know. I was
a kid. I didn't like the guitar mass. I like
the really old stuff. I like the old hymns. There's
gravity og yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, tar mass is like
what do you I can get this somewhere else. What
do you here doing this for? Yeah? I don't need.
The only guitar based religious music I want is that

(14:09):
one Peter Paul and Mary Christmas Concert. Great album. Although,
speaking of people with troubling histories involving children, I was
not aware, but it was either Peter or Paul. Yeah, anyway, whatever,
we're really racking them up today. Yeah. So, I mean,
you've got a Nazi who gets kicked out of his

(14:30):
first church job from his treating boys and then decides
to form a community of true believers by wandering the
woods and playing acoustic guitar for children about how good
it is not to have sex already, also wearing tight
leather pants the whole time. More red flags than the
Communist Party rally at this point, like just just a
lot of them. Um. That said, this is also the

(14:51):
forties and fifties, people are not as suspicious about such
things like there's I think probably most people don't even
really understand that that's possible, that like a man could
do that to child, which is why a lot of
this is you know, able to happen. Um. Paul develops
a following, and at prayer meetings he would encourage his
listeners to come up and confess their sins. Over years
on the road, he honed his craft and he became

(15:12):
an exceptional public speaker. Skill augmented his natural charisma. And
it's hard to him as it is to imagine he
must have had natural charisma. There's a good documentary, it's
a German language documentary, but it's on Netflix called Colonia
that's about Paul Shaffer and everything we're talking about today.
There's some audio of him from this period. He sounds
like Hitler and I'm not saying that because like, oh,
all German men sound like he. I don't speak German.

(15:36):
I have listened to a lot of Hitler speeches with
the subtitles on the cadence of his voice is Hitlarian
and other Germans will say he spoke and I don't
even know if it was conscious. This is a kid
who grows up during Hitler's rise to power. That may
just have been how he internalized this is how you
speak to a crowd, you know. But he has that
kind of speaking skill and it has an effect on people.

(15:57):
He draws together hundreds of rededicated followers over the course
of a couple of years. Um. One follower who first
met him at a prayer meeting in nineteen fifty two
said that he was so charming that charisma radiated out
of his body like beams of light, and um, this
is what I But it's the same thing with like

(16:18):
any time I hear this about somebody, somebody who's who's
a leader of some kind of cult, whether it's a
religious called or Hitler or whatever, there's always this thing
where people say, like he just transfixed people. He was
just couldn't look away. And then you see this person,
You're like this dude, this guy, people, this motherfucker. Whenever
I see like, I can understand. I guess on some

(16:40):
level that like Hitler got people all worked up. He
tapped into the defeated aspect of the German people and
it was like, guess what, You're not defeated. We're the
greatest in the world. And I can see how he
could cast a spell on someone. But the it's the
charisma thing that always throws me. They never ever seem

(17:00):
charismatic when I see them. I think part of it
is because charisma is so dependent upon the audience right
there are. It's like with um, there's people who absolutely
love Beyonce. Obviously she's huge, a massive, massive, massive star.
Millions of people are are drawn to her. I don't.
I don't care one way or the other about her,

(17:22):
Like I'm not. That's not an insult. I just like
whatever charisma she has, it doesn't like do the thing
for me. Um. I am magnetically attracted to Pedro Pascal,
and I assume there are people in the world who
are not, although I can't get inside of that head.
Who would dare? Who would dare? The funniest thing about
about his charisma, Paul, The absolute funniest thing about his

(17:44):
charisma is that if you look at it again Colonia Dignidad,
this this documentary on on Netflix, if you look at
the early footage of him from like the fifties, when
he's still a youngish guy. Did you ever watch Star
Trek the Next Generate? Of course you watched Dart. He
looks like Barkley. He looks like Reginald Barkley's It's very

(18:07):
weird because again, hundreds of people followed this man into
an unthinkable situation and he looks like Barkley. What a world.
It just goes to show. It's just like it's it's
like Trump. There are people who find that man irresistible
and he looks like Donald Trump, like depictions of him.

(18:27):
It's like, yeah, as this, as this, like great Superman
are are always So It's it's chilling in a way
because it's like you are we looking at the same dude,
what is happening here? And it's that they have a
whole however many years they've been alive of life that
has built them into a person who finds this person charismatic.
That's the way you know that It's like I say,

(18:48):
I think there is a cult who could ensnare everyone.
I don't think anybody is impossible to be brought in
by a cult. I don't think it's unless maybe you've
already been in a cult and like you get that
kind of like PTSD. But I think every bloody could
at some point in their life be reached by some
coult out there. Um, it just depends. It's like a drug.
Anybody could become an addict to something. You know. Well,

(19:10):
I accept your cult challenge and we'll see about that,
all right, Paul. Are we having a cult off? Yeah? Okay,
you know meetings, this is this is what l Ron
Hubbard and Frank or Um, Robert Heinland did. Yeah, and
we got both the Church of Scientology and the Libertarian

(19:31):
Party art of it. So I think this could go
really well. We'll do it good though. We'll do it
good though. We'll do it good. Yeah, I mean, we'll
do will be nice. Cults. I'm still gonna I'm still
gonna have twenty year olds build the navy for me
and search for gold in the Caribbeans. That's not negable.
That is non negotiable. A lot of teenagers searching for

(19:53):
gold for me. So after several years in the proverbial
and also sometimes literal wilderness, because I think he did
live in the woods sometimes, Paul Schaefer had gathered enough
followers and money because you know, again, part of the
whole cult thing is you get a bunch of people together,
you have them pool their money so you can buy things.
They buy a compound um which they intend to turn
into an orphanage outside of a town called troy d

(20:15):
Orf for war widows and orphaned children. Now again, this
is the early fifties, mid fifties in Germany, a plot
of desperate ass people. Um So like as my family,
my grandpa was stationed in Germany like immediately after the war,
along with a bunch of his brothers. Um Our family
heirlooms are like we have a bunch of hundred and

(20:36):
fifty year old antique, precious grandfather clocks that he bought
for like pennies because everybody was starving in Germany. And
it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, you know,
that's that was the situation. There was nothing. So Paul
is opening the center is like, Okay, there's all these
these women whose whose entire families are gone. It's just
them and and kids, sometimes not even their kids, just

(20:58):
children they took from their destroy town or from this
apartment building that collapsed. They need a place to stay.
And that's on the surface, a very good thing to do, right, um.
And a lot of these people are also refugees from
from the East, people who when the Soviets occupy there's
this Again, never to equate Soviet with Nazi war crimes,
because there's no equating, but a couple of million German

(21:20):
women get raped during the occupation of of of Germany. Um,
it's a fucking nightmare. Um. So a lot of of
these women who like have kids as a result of
this and have no resources. And again, on the surface,
creating a place to take care of these people, to
educate their kids, to give them food, a leg up,
one of the best things you could possibly do. But

(21:41):
also if you're a predator, anyone who's going to need
that facility is going to be someone with almost no
recourse to to deal with the fact that you're praying
on their children. Like it's both, you could say, one
of the best things you could do, and also, as
a pedophile, the best kind of situation you could create
for your your self, and that's what Paul is doing. Um,

(22:03):
it's pretty bad, Paul. That's pretty bad. Um. And also
this has never really talked about any of the coverage.
I've seemed it has to have affected it. When you
think about the women in that situation and what they
had lived through during the war, I'm going to guess
they're able to tolerate a lot more fucked up shipped
from Paul, just because it's like, well, I lived through

(22:25):
World War Two, Mike, your your your barometer for what
is an unacceptable situation is just completely off forever. I
think that's a big factor in this whole story. Um.
So Paul offers these women and their families food security
and stability, um. And the people who are not. So
there's a mix of He's got these people who are
living in the orphanage because they have nothing, and all

(22:48):
of these people who live in the area around who
are like middle class and they're funding all of this
because the tithed ten percent of their income to Paul. Um.
That's one of the requirements for being in his cult.
The others that you have to confess your sins day
ideally to him. I think it's always to him at
this stage. Yeah, they have these big meetings where everybody
talks about all the bad stuff they've done, which we

(23:08):
talked about synanon last time. Paul. This is happening at
the same time, late fifties, early sixties. All of these
different cults are doing scientology happening at the same time.
Huge emphasis is kind of confessed. They don't call it
confessing your sins, but that's the idea. It's fascinating to me.
It's the collateral thing. Yeah, I mean, it's like it
makes sense, Like I get why having having a bunch

(23:31):
of ship on people that they have admitted to you
of their own free will, um, could be very handy um.
Later on. There's that. Here's the other thing I find interesting, Paul.
All of the cults that do this all start late fifties,
early sixties, and all of the people who become cult
members are like the children and the people who came

(23:52):
out the other side of World War two. For whatever reason,
this idea of like the center of our cult is
going to be the confessing of sins is huge. Maybe
because there's no therapy and every but a lot of
people in need of therapy because they have what. I
think there's something there. I've never really seen it dealt
with enough, but it's such a common through line in
all of these cults, like the confession of sins that

(24:14):
start up in this period of time. Um, like the
group confession of like things you've done that's bad. I
don't know. I think there might be there's something. There's
gotta be something there in Germans, in lot of sins
to confess, as as a population speaking of sins to confess,
it's time for an adverb you know who never confesses

(24:36):
their sins advertisers, that is for sure. Yeah, or just
capitalism and broad um. Actually, capitalism makes it very profitable
to confess and discuss the sins of capitalism, which is
one of the great geniuses of the of the system. Anyway,

(24:57):
I think about that while you listen to the ads,
we're back so um for a while. Things are good,
at least on the surface. You know, he's taken all
these women, these families in, He's got his flock. People
are tithing, confessing their sins. Um. Obviously, the reality is

(25:21):
that Paul is a pedophile and again a grand scale,
which is why he established an orphanage in the first place,
So he is molesting an unknown number but not certainly
on an insignificant number of these kids. In nineteen fifty nine,
one of the widows at his orphanage came forward to
the police and reported Paul for molesting her kids. A
warrant was issued for his arrest, and Schaefer fled to

(25:44):
the Middle East with two trusted assistants. So he is
now a wanted man in Germany and will be for
the rest of his life. So he gets the funk
out of Germany never comes back. UM. It is important
to note that a lot of I don't have any
I don't know what percentage of his flock stays with,
but hundreds of them do. UM. A couple of hundred people,
maybe three four hundred people. UM continue to believe that

(26:06):
he's a legitimate holy man, and that the allegations against
him were I think part of a communist conspiracy. Is
kind of the way it was generally like justified. UM.
We don't know exactly how Schaefer talked to his flock
about all this stuff, but we have some hints and
how he explained this to them, And the fact that
by the late nineteen fifties, Paul had become a follower

(26:27):
of an American evangelical preacher named William Branham. Now this
is gonna be a digression, Paul, but it's a it's
a necessary one. In the US digression. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. You said only one digression per episode and
threatened me with your cattle proud, but I appreciate your
your openness. I'm feeling generous to digressions today, thank you

(26:50):
so um. In the US, in the late forties and fifties,
there's this huge resurgence of evangelical Christianity again right after
World War Two. This is all tied to the in
and on in the Confession. When all of this is
tied together, specifically, what what has a big surge is
the kind of charismatic evangelism that would have eventually evolve
into the moral majority and the religious right. This is

(27:11):
known historically as the post World War two Healing Revival.
Since it occurred right at the same time the Cold
War kicked off, you won't be surprised to hear that
it was profoundly anti communist. And again it's not until
the seventies, like seventy three, seventy four something like that,
that it starts to become political in the traditional sense,
like a right wing movement, and you know, anti abortion

(27:31):
gets tacked on, and it becomes eventually like a part
of the Republican Party. That hasn't happened yet, but it evolves.
For that evolves from this Jerry fallwell, and stuff all
comes out of this post World War two healing revival,
which is from the beginning rooted in anti communism because
of the Cold War. So all of this is a
lot of stuff going on, is what I'm saying now, Brandom,
this preacher who Paul Shaffer comes to follow is a

(27:54):
preacher in Indiana. He's an evangelical preacher in Indiana, and
Indiana in the late nineteen forties was still from the
Second ku Klux Klan. The KKK national office had been
located there, and even though the clan had faded in
size and influenced by the fifties, Indiana still had a
lot of clansmen. William Branham had been brought into the
Pentecostal faith by an official clan spokesman named Roy Davis.

(28:18):
So the guy who brings Brannaman is a klansman. And
as you might expect. Branham is rather hard right in
his own beliefs, telling his tens of thousands of followers
that they must strictly follow the Bible, reject communism, and
ensure that women obey their husbands no matter what. Um not,
not great stuff coming in here. Brandham later inducted a
charismatic young preacher. So Brandham gets brought in by this clansman,

(28:41):
and he brings in a charismatic young preacher to the
evangelical faith and guy you might have heard of named
Jim Jones. Boy, we had our real best stuff coming
for you today, Like The Avengers of Evil, Yeah, the
Adventures of Weird sixties cult Leaders. Yeah. Um God, And

(29:03):
you know the guy who played what's the name of
the dude in The Avengers, the suit guy who gets
killed in the first movie and then gets his own
TV Yeah. Click. Great. Honestly, wouldn't make a bad Paul
Schaeffer good actor. Doesn't look wildly different from him. Um,
if you're doing an Avengers of Evangelical cult Leaders, which
is a terrible idea, I mean it's it's a terrible

(29:26):
idea to do in life, but for a movie, I
mean I would I'd go to a matinee, you know
what I mean? It would be fun if if that
movie was just like Paul Shaffer, Jim Jones and Aunt
Man played by Paul red Man. What are you doing here?
Why do you have hundreds of people in the jungle?

(29:48):
So um, Paul Rudd could absolutely pull that off by
the very charismatic so brandam. Later, So Brandon brings Jim
Jones into the faith, and Brandon and Jim Jones do
preaching revival meetings to together in the late nineteen fifties
and early sixties. And I'm gonna quote from a write
up by John Collins from San Diego University here and
this is He's too. Collins is writing about how this

(30:09):
healing revival in the United States Branham and Jones, how
this influences Paul Shaffer. The Healing Revival itself coincided with
the Second Red Scare of nineteen forty seven to nineteen
fifty seven, and some revivalists of that era claimed to
have prophetic insight into what they considered to be the
impending destruction of the United States. The state of Indiana
heavily impacted by the propaganda of the Ku Klux Klan

(30:31):
and its anti communist speeches in literature held crowds of
people eager to hear any extraordinary insight into the turmoil ahead.
Two years prior to the Jones Brandon revival, at the
Cattle Tabernacle, William Brannam began proclaiming the first of several
of his doomsday predictions, claiming that nineteen fifty four was
the year of destruction. Only two months prior to their revival,
Brandam updated his prediction to nineteen fifty six as the

(30:53):
final year for America to accept his vision of the gospel.
This prediction came with emphasis on his claim of a
prophetic vis describing communist Russia's bombing northern Kentucky and southern Indiana.
His doomsday predictions appeared to have finally made an influence
on Jim Jones. By nineteen sixty one, Jones himself began
claiming prophetic vision of the same bombing. In November of
nineteen sixty one, Brandham claimed that great men around the

(31:16):
world were predicting that the first bomb from Russia would
drop in drop in Louisville, Kentucky, a mile from the
Indiana border. Around the same time, in the fall of
nineteen sixty one, Jim Jones began claiming to have had
a prophetic vision of Indianapolis being consumed in nuclear holocaust.
So this is fascinating. This Jim Jones connection is fascinating
because he and Paul Schaeffer both huge fans of Brandham

(31:38):
and both do the same basic thing, which is take
a group of people from their home country to a
foreign country to create a cult that then does a
tremendous amount of violence. Um. One of the things that
I'm sorry what you are we talking about where Jim
Jones gets involved fifty nine Paul Shaffer flees sixty one
is when Jim Jones, I think when he leaves. Actually,

(32:00):
so Jim Jones hits the ground running in ens of
like well though Jones starts creating with Brandham in the fifties. Yeah,
so Jim Jones will do a hole of Jim Jones episode.
It's fascinating. But one of the things that's interesting to
me is that he and Paul Schaeffer have the same
kind of mentor guy, the same basic journey, absolutely opposite politics.

(32:22):
Paul Schaeffer is a fucking Nazi, right like literally literally
a Nazi Jim Jones is a lifelong anti racist activist.
He spoke regularly about the need for socialism. Most of
his followers were black, um, and a huge part of
what he was doing with why he took people out
of the United States was this nation is so lost
to fascism and racism that we can't survive here. We
have to flee to someone where we couldn't create an ethical,

(32:45):
multiracial society. Um. Whereas Paul Schaeffer is a Nazi. And
it's fascinating that they have the same religious uh inspiration
behind what they're doing, and they do the same things
for exactly opposite politics, and they do it at the
same fucking time. Um, because nineteen sixty one is when

(33:06):
both guys leave to start their cults in foreign countries. Yeah,
it's amazing. Um. It's like the common denominator could be
the problem, could could be what could be the problem?
Could be the problem? Yeah, maybe we should look at
what the common denominators, maybe the Pentecostal faith is. Yeah,
I've just thrown it out there. Yeah. Yeah, I don't
want to get too much into that. I don't want

(33:27):
to be canceling the snake handlers. Well, let me just
take a little sip of Strict nine here. Yeah, oh yeah,
do some psychic surgery. We'll talk more again. Jim Jones
deserves a couple of episodes on his own fascinating story.
But um so it's hard for me to say whether

(33:50):
or not Paul Schaffer was a real believer in Brandom's
message of illuming apocalypse or if he was an opportunist
who was like, oh, this guy is preaching. Because Schaffer
is not just pre ching that, he's uh that the
US is going to get nuked in nineteen sixty one,
actually the same year that Brandam and Jim Jones preach
in Indianapolis. Later that year, Brandham goes to Germany and
he preaches that Germany is gonna get nuked too, And

(34:12):
Paul Schaeffer is a follower of this guy, goes to
his followers and says, hey, Germany is not safe anymore.
And it just is coincidental that also he can't be
in Germany anymore because he's wanted for the police for
molesting kids. It works, people, I will give people of
that era in this it was very easy to believe
that anywhere was going to be nuked. Yeah, that that
is not unreasonable, Like it barely didn't happen, Like we

(34:40):
were right on the edge for a while there. Um.
Thankfully we solved that problem, and nuclear apocalypse is no
longer a looming threat entirely in the hands of a
single person and a given point in time. What a relief,
What a relief. Um. So. In nineteen sixty one, Paul
Shaffer takes the first ten of his followers overseas to Chile.

(35:01):
He had apparently decided that Chile in particular was a
good place to move after a chance meeting with the
Chilean ambassador when he's in the Middle East, and the
ambassador didn't know this guy's an accused pedophile. It was like,
you're looking for a place to move your flock of
religious followers. We got a shipload of Chile. I mean
so much Chile to be handed out. Come and get
your Chile. Um. The very best information in English about

(35:26):
Schaefer's cult comes from an article in The American Scholar
by Bruce Falconer, which is an incredible name for a journalist. Um.
He writes, quote Faden is a Falconer named Bruce journalist.
Bruce journalist. No, no, I'm in the falconry the other
guys the journalist um quote. A faded black and white

(35:49):
photograph shows Schaefer stepping off the plane in Santiago in
January nineteen sixty one and a long black winter coat
and matching fedora, smiling faintly. Within a year, using funds
collected from his congregation back in Germany, Schaefer bought an
abandoned forty four hundred acre ranch several hundred miles south
of Santiago, which he and some ten original settlers from
Germany began to rebuild. By the end of nineteen sixty three,

(36:12):
an initial group of approximately two hundred and thirty Germans,
the bulk of Schaefer's congregation, had immigrated from Europe to
the newly named Colonia Dignidad Dignity Colony. Two more waves
of German pilgrims followed in nineteen sixty six and seventy three,
most belonging to the fifteen families that formed the core
of Schaefer's following. So this is the way this works,

(36:32):
and it's there's footage of that documentary. It's a lot
of like wild wild country stuff where you've got these
groups of white people in in the middle of the wilderness,
who are like putting together building you know, these massive
barracks is and barns and whatnot from kind of unhewn
wild land. Um. And one of the things about this
is that there's not enough space to host everybody at first.

(36:53):
So he says, at first, Hey, we're just gonna build
one big barracks to host everybody, and everyone's gonna live
communally instead of in family groups and houses. But that's temporary.
Don't worry. Eventually every family is going to get their
own house. It's just right now, that's not practical. So
keep that in mind that Chile, there's a lot. But
you can't make a house in a night, Paul. You

(37:14):
can if you're Jimmy Carter and you're motivated by the
ghosts of all the war corrects you had to do
as president. So but Jimmy Carter's president, well, not quite president,
but not far from it at this point. So Schaefer's
passage into Chile was eased by the fact that the
elected government at the time was led by President George Alessandri,
a conservative, who gave him personal permission to create his

(37:37):
Dignity Colony. The land he bought was a former farm
outside of a town called Parol, dead in the middle
of Chile. Nestled amongst the Indian foothills. It was a
fairly isolated place, and this allowed Paul to exert something
like total control over his followers. In Germany, most of
his congregation had not lived with him. He did have
his orphanage and a corps of single mothers and children

(37:57):
who had no choice but to stay with him, but
much of his congregation had lived in their own private homes.
People giving him money all had houses and stuff nearby.
Now that they were all in Chile, though, everybody effectively
lived with Schaefer and thus under his rule at all times,
and he quickly took total control. Step one was to
forbid anyone from engaging in private conversations. So you cannot

(38:19):
talk if there's just two of you, as he tells
his flock quote, if two are gathered, they are under
the devil. If three are gathered, they are under Jesus.
So because the Sophie were under the devil right now, Paul, thanks, wait,
now we're under Jesus because of Sophie. Never mind, who

(38:40):
was just you and I would be at It's hard
to keep there's a lot going on here to keep
track of. But it's like it's actually it's I'm a
little messed up. Yeah, no, there's there's a lot going
on here, going on a lot of people because Jesus
of being the devil to Robert. That's right, that's right,
and you know what, maybe he was. We don't know.

(39:01):
Oh boy, now that's another episode behind the Jesus. So
back in Germany, Schaefer's followers had been ordered to confess
their sins on a regular basis, as often as possible.
In group. This was ratcheted up though. Sins now had
to be confessed immediately, whether the sins were physical actions
or just thoughts. Now. Another key aspect of life at

(39:24):
the Dignity Colony was that children and their parents had
to be separated forever. Like you said, that seems to you, huh,
it's like that. I don't know. What's so what's amazing
to me about because this this was sent in onto
right where they separated the kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
you're right, you're right, and right around the same time. Yeah,

(39:46):
that doesn't that's not an immediate red flag is always
like that's that's how sad cults are is that you're
so sucked into this thing that there must be something
inside of you, and said, is this right that they
take my kids away from I feel like it's natural
for children to be important to parents. It's almost like
I'm having an instinct right now. Yeah, I am having

(40:08):
to fight against Yeah, this feels maybe unnatural, maybe abandoning
your children and having no contact with them through forces
like not human. But what do I know? What do
I know? He's holy? I'm not He's He's the holy
Man who can't live in Germany for unspecified reasons. Also,
I did tell him that I thought about a boob recently.

(40:30):
Oh man, I don't want that tid thing getting out.
He can tell my parents who were Nazis. So another yea,
So parents and children had to be separated. Now, Paul,
to go into this little detail, I need to note
the source here is Wikipedia, and as a rule, I

(40:51):
don't like to use Wikipedia as a source for my episodes,
not because it's not a useful it's very useful, but
because you can always trace the claims back, and that's
always ideal. But of the claims for this episode are
based on recorded conversations that Schaefer had with people, and
those were translated by somebody who was doing the wickie,
and that's where I found the translation. So we're trusting

(41:12):
them a little bit on this. Um, I don't see
a reason not to, particularly um cat caveat Emptoor. Yeah.
So this translation from Wikipedia claims that Schaefer justified his
child parents separation policy by claiming the problems in child
education aren't the children, they are always the parents, because
the parents are responsible for the sins of the children. True.

(41:35):
I mean, yeah, that's that's that's not again that's good
cult ship though, because that's the thing where it's like, okay,
well you can't argue that point. But it's also it's
irrelevant to the idea of separating children permanently from their parents,
like exact, well, yeah, generally, if a kid is doing
something fucked up, it's the parents something the parent it

(41:56):
is involved because their kids. You know. Essentially, the reasoning is,
if you're gonna do something, do it right. So if
the if the parents are responsible for the sins uh
and and and intrudes on the teaching, I just gotta
get those kids out of there. Got to get those
kids out of there, Gotta unparent them. That's the problem. Now.
The reality, of course, is that again Paul Shaffer was

(42:17):
a pedophile on an industrial scale, and as a pedophile,
your best situation, the situation he had in the orphanage
was pretty good, but obviously one of those moms was
able to go to the cops because they were still
living in society. The best situation is to drop out
of society, have your own weird, self sufficient cult where
parents and their children are forced to live separately, but
you have total run over all of the facilities and

(42:39):
couldn't go anywhere. That's that's your best case scenario as
a pedophile. Um. Yeah, and he's orchestrated this, and I
have to think I don't. It's always the question like
what do they what do they believe? How much of
it did they buy into? With any cult leader, you
have that question. With Schaefer, maybe he believed something. But
I can't help but see everything he's doing is this

(43:01):
extremely calculated, years long plan to develop the best case
scenario for a child molester. Like like that really feels
like at least a big part of what's going on here.
I mean because I don't know, I have not studied pedophilia.
I don't know, like the but what from what I
what I kind of just know from osmosis is like

(43:23):
the thing that makes pedophiles so horrible is that they
have convinced themselves that they are that this is okay
to do, and that people don't understand it. Yeah, and
so it's like the only that that's why I have
to keep it hidden is because nobody would understand ort
understand what a what a pure love this is or whatever.
So it makes sense that that you would want to

(43:49):
uh create a world literally a world what you can
just do whatever you want and you don't have to
worry about people understanding it or not. Yeah, you make
the moral rules here so you don't have to care
about what other people and you have convinced yourself that
you're right. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that you
just have to you have to explain it in a
way that people will understand because they're not going to

(44:11):
understand the purity of what you are doing. Um, so
put it in terms of these these sort of like
these less evolved people like I don't know what they mean.
I think that's how Schaper sees it, Yeah, because he
also sees we'll talk about this more. But like traditional
sex between adults as horrible and to be avoided at

(44:33):
all costs. My god, I know this is um. There's
a lot going on with Mr Paul. Yeah. So if
you're curious about the experience of little kids taken from
a relatively normal home life in Germany to this whole world,
I want to read you the story of a kid
named Werner Schmidka Um. This is from a write up

(44:53):
in Reuters Quote. He sailed to Chile in nineteen sixty two,
was a two year old, along with his mother and
nine brothers and sisters, one of whom died as a
child in Colonia Dignidad. His parents were convinced to sell
the family home and follow Schaeffer to South America by
his powerful preaching and promise of a more godly life.
Schmidka's father stayed in Germany to look after the sect's

(45:14):
business interests and joined them in Chile eight years later.
On board the ship, the children were separated from their mother,
whom Schmidka remembers as a good hearted woman, and then
were kept apart like the other families in the enclave.
In their new home. Schmika lived in the Timber kinder
House or children's house, where Schaeffer had his private apartment.
It was there that he first encountered the charismatic leader.

(45:37):
One or two boys would be taken to his room
every day, and one day I was called Schmidka told Reuters.
He sat me down on his bed and started to
stroke me and ask me questions, to talk the way
a father talks to his child. And I had no
parents anymore. I have never forgotten my first dealings with Shaeffer,
he said. I was about seven or eight. That is
when the abuse and rape started. So they're a lot

(46:00):
going on here. One of the things he's doing is
he's in order to make these kids, I think, more compliant,
you take away their parents and then you're like, I'm
the father figure for all of the kids here. And
not only does that mean the parents aren't around to complain,
but like kids, the parents, you know, um, and they
don't they're they're more they're understanding of the moral universe

(46:22):
is heavily influenced by parents. And so if this guy
who's the only father figure they're allowed, is saying, this
is just what you do, Yeah, it's just what you do.
You're eight you know, Yeah, it's pretty funked up. It's
it's it's real bad, like I don't know, it's it's
it's already monstrous enough. And then when you get into

(46:44):
the what feels like the deviousness of it all. Yeah,
it's it's heartbreaking that somebody, somebody can be this evil. Yeah,
it is evil on like an almost incomprehensible scale, because
he spent like a decade orchestrating this, like the work
that was put into it. Yeah, um, it's it's honestly,

(47:08):
is so far a pretty unique story that I've come across,
Like this is a thank God like yeah, but you
know what's not a unique story advertisements, the story of
the success of all of our fantastic advertisers. That's not

(47:28):
unique at all because there's so many wonderful products and
services that support this podcast. So we're back, and yeah,
we're talking about the fact that there's elements of this
in a number of cults, taking kids away from parents,
even like Ron Hubbard did this to some of his
followers and stuff, and it wasn't like I don't I've

(47:49):
never come across any evidence that he was a child molester.
It's also just like as a cult leader. The concept
of a family is one of your chief enemies, right like.
But yeah, so we have, Oh, I no way of
knowing how many children Schaeffer abused. It's not even entirely
clear to me. I think it was was boys, just boys,
but that I can't say that to a point of certainty.

(48:10):
All of the direct claims I've heard from victims were male.
But again, I'm sort of locked out from a lot
of the survivor accounts of this guy because I don't
read German, and a decent number of those accounts are
in German language print books that have not been digitized,
um in any way or translated. One thing that's clear
is that Paul Schaeffer absolutely hated the concept of people
having sex in a way that did not involve him

(48:31):
molesting children. There's a story that's told in that Netflix
documentary of of two of his victim well to two
people who were in the cult, one of whom, as
a young boy, was one of his victims. Um and
they're married now, and they talk about there was one
time early on in the cults history where they did
a big dance with all the men and women, and
Schaeffer saw the way they tell the story, he saw

(48:54):
a couple of like young couples, like little kids, who
were clearly like into each other, including this couple who
again lad to get married, dancing together, and it it
enraged him because he was jealous of the boys that
the girls were like. That's why he starts to separate
the sex, because he's insanely jealous that there will be
rivals for the attention of these little boys. Um, and

(49:14):
that's why he separates the genders. Uh, that's that's what
they claim. I don't know, like you know that they're
they're coming at this from one perspective. I don't know
how much that it was played ahead of time. But um.
One of the things that's interesting in that documentary, while
the husband relates the stories of the time Schaefer abused him,
his wife is sitting there next to him. It was

(49:35):
also in the cult and I think, if you want
to look at the purest expression of hatred I've ever
seen on a human face, her face in that scene is, Uh,
it's chilling. Um. Obviously completely justified, but it is quite
a thing to see. UM. So back in Germany, Schaefer

(49:55):
had obviously preached about abstinence constantly, and now that he
was in Chile, he insisted that everybody be abstinent, even
married couples. Schaefer preached that women were temptresses who would
uncontrollably drive men too sexual sin and pull them away
from God. Channeling his spiritual mentor Brandam, he argued that
this was why women needed to be tightly controlled by men.

(50:16):
But unlike Brandam, he didn't believe that husbands could be
trusted with this job. Only he could keep sexual anarchy
at bay. So he's taking this this this traditional Christian
cult leaders like, women have to be controlled because of
their uncontrollable sexuality. So you have to make sure people
women are tightly unalish until they're married, and then it's

(50:36):
there husband's responsive. Shaffer's like, even if they've got a husband,
they'll be fucking and God doesn't what. People fucking know what.
Let me take care of this. I got a better idea.
I'll be in charge of it, so you don't have
to worry about it. Isn't that great as time? Yeah,
let's work for you, because you just can't. As time

(50:57):
went on, women and men were entirely i selated from
each other at the Colonial women were dressed at all
time in baggy sackcloth dresses that were meant to hide
every hint of breasts or hips. They wore their hair
in tight buns. Both men and women engaged in constant
hard labor, sometimes for twelve hours a day to ensure
they were too tired to bone. The side effect of
this is that they made a lot of money For

(51:18):
Paul Shaffer, these are Germans, you know, they're good at
They're good at work, industrious people. Yeah. So, after he'd
arrived in Chile, his agents back in Germany has succeeded
in selling his old orphanage, which he used to buy
a German stone crushing machine in order to operate a

(51:40):
profitable quarry. His followers began to farm too, and in
a few years they were selling both wheat and quarried stone.
Gradually they build up a financial but they do start
selling like broad worst and stuff like German. They start
making and selling like raising animals, making German food products
to sell to Chile like Argentina has a sizeable German
expat community for reasons that are not right. Uh, but

(52:02):
all of this allows them to build a financial base. Uh.
And they were able to build a lot of infrastructure
on this compound, including several barracks, is for the faithful
to live in. And again it starts as like we
all have to live in the same barracks, and then
all men and have to live in one and women
have to live in the other. Because we haven't been
here long, we don't have time to make everyone a house.
And then gradually shavers like you know what, nobody's getting houses.

(52:25):
You're all living communally except for me. I have a
bedroom in the children's house. I just feel like the gymnastics,
the mental gymnastics that people are in a cult have
to go through with with all of the plans changing
all the time, like it's the same story every time,
where it's like I promise you this, but now here's
a different thing. I I told you I was immortal,

(52:46):
but guess what now now I'm this like and these
poor people have to keep it must like the the
number must do on your brain to to just be
in that kind of denial and say like, well, I mean,
he is the sort of god on earth to me,
and I just have to trust that he knows what's best,
even though he's changed this plan every single time. You

(53:09):
know what, there's an element of it that this is
like if you've ever been in a relationship that gets
really bad and you're living together and it becomes intolerable,
but you're like, ship, we gotta like figure out what
to do about the least, like I have to have
to separate our stuff, all this stuff we bought together.
We have to figure out who And you just continue
to say, stay in an intolerable situation because you think

(53:32):
about like the logistics of getting out of it. These
people don't come to Germany being like, yeah, everyone will
be separated, you'll have no family, you'll live in a
barracks with every one of the same gender in age
as you. They told like, well, you know, come over here,
we're gonna build this godly community. You know, everyone will
have their houses eventually, but we got to do this
first and this first, and this first, and then it
becomes clear that like, oh no, this has changed and
this is never going to happen. You're there and you

(53:55):
don't have to pass forward out exactly. Um, yeah, it's
it's difficult in people just accept things, you know, and
also like everybody who knows, they're like, what are you
going back to you know um that said, while most
people go along with this, there weren't folks who rebelled
from the beginning. And Bruce Falconer writes about these rebels

(54:17):
quote a rebel named Wolfgang Mueller tried to escape on
three separate occasions twice one then once in nineteen sixty
two and again in nineteen sixty four. He fled to
the home of a Chilean family in a nearby town,
and twice members of the colonial security force found him
there and brought him back. Both times, Mueller was beaten
and forcibly sedated. On his third and final escape attempt,

(54:39):
at nineteen sixty six, he made it as far as Santiago,
where he received police protection and sought refuge in a
German embassy safe house. On orders from Schaffer, fifteen members
of the colony stormed the house in an attempt to
recapture him. After a fistfight with police, they fled. Soon after,
Mueller left Chile and found safety in Germany, where despite
his repeated accusations against Schaefer, government officials took no action.

(55:03):
And there's this mix with the German government of on
the on the grand scale shameful failure to do anything
about this. On an individual scaling scale, there's some very
heroic members of the German government. This When this kid
finally escapes to Santiago, he goes to like the German
ambassador basically in Santiago and tells him what's happened, and
this guy hides him in a safe house and like

(55:24):
it's a significant danger and eventually helps him smuggle out
to the country. So there's this mix of like the
German government total failure. Individuals in the German government do
a lot of laudable work to try to help this
guy and other people escape when they when they're able
to get out. Um. It was actually the Chilean government,
which is not going to get a lot of praise
in this article, that first attempted to investigate Mueller's allegations

(55:47):
against Schaefer. In night, they sent a parliamentary delegation to
look into the claims of torture. Schaefer had his children
sing for the delegation and then applied them with a
meal of excellent food. They determined that no abuse had
occurred and that Mueller was lying, and there was like
a period where they had like an a warrant out
to try to question him and stuff. They were like
Shaffer organized protests that never actually got him. And it's

(56:09):
like he has friends in the government, you know, like
right wing friends in the government because he's this, he's
he's he's got a lot of money and stuff to
throw around, and so does the Nazi community in Chile,
which is a part of this. We'll talk about that
more later. So, the first attempt to shed light on
the crimes of Paul Schaefer and the Colonia Dignidad failed,
not for lack of trying. Mueller still lived in Germany

(56:30):
as of two thousand eight, and now he operates a
nonprofit that works to fight the abuse of children by
religious sects. So he seems to have gotten out of
that as well as you possibly could. Now, there were
several attempts by children to flee the abuse of the
colonial during the nineteen sixties. One of the first was
Helmet Hop. He was caught and punished, but he had
a chance to redeem himself and Paul Shaffer's eyes. In

(56:53):
nineteen sixty six, when another teenager succeeded in escaping, Wolfgang
Nice fled and managed to reach the German embassy. Again,
he made allegations that he had been tortured and sexually assaulted,
and he made these directly to the press. To deal
with this, Shaefer convinced Helmet Happ, who had just been
trying and trying to escape himself a few years earlier,
to go to Santiago and accused Niece of lying and

(57:16):
having sexually assaulted him. So he's like, hey, you want
to get back to my good graces, Like, I'll make
you my number one boy, but you gotta go say
number one. This guy's lying at number two. He's the
one who's doing the sexual assaults. This successfully muddies the
waters enough that Niece's allegations don't do any permanent damage
to the coult. Niece is allowed to return to Germany, thankfully,

(57:38):
and Schaefer rewards Hoped for his service by allowing him
to leave the colonia temporarily and go to medical school.
So this is like you play a ball with Shaefer,
you get you get special privileges other people don't get.
And he needs Hoped to be a doctor right because
he has a scheme that heavily involves having a doctor.
So over the mid nineteen sixties, Schaeffer had been funneling

(58:00):
the money made by his flox labor into the construction
of a sixty bed hospital. It was reportedly state of
the art, and by the time hop came back from
medical school a newly minted doctor, it was ready to go.
Paul Schaeffer was not a dumb man, and he understood
that bringing a bunch of Germans into the middle of
Chile and the doing weird cult ship was something that
could go really bad, especially if the right wing president

(58:21):
who liked him got replaced the Colonia Dignidad Hospital though,
once they get this running, they start providing free healthcare
to local Chileans who have no closer options for medical
care of this quality. The hospital had sterile operating rooms,
a high quality maternity ward where for generations most of
the local women in the area give birth to their children.
About twenty six thousand people relied on this hospital, which

(58:43):
is subsidized by government funds. You know, the government has
a vested interest in this continuing to function. It's smart. Wow,
the deviousness is yeah, it's off the charts. This guy,
Oh my godd like, I don't know, I guess it's
like for me, for me, if I try to do

(59:04):
something like this. Yeah, I would there's so many things
I would not have thought about. Yeah, hospital, then this
I wouldn't be nearly this good at a Chilean colt.
Yeah yeah, um, I mean it's uh, it's yeah, it's
it's something else. It's amazing how smart he is for
a man who once gouged his own eye out trying

(59:24):
to untie your shoe. But you know what, here's the thing.
You You must learn from mistakes. That's right, that's right.
It's like, Okay, this didn't go the way it should have.
What could I have done differently? And then apply that
lesson as you go along in life. Gouge my own
eye out once, Shame on you. Yeah. So, the Colonia

(59:49):
Dignata Hospital also pays for a network of buses that
drive to and from isolated villages in the area collect
locals who need to see a doctor in a regular basis.
The Colonial also supplies local women with four and a
half pounds of powdered milk a month for the first
six months of their child's life, so this is becomes
very quickly an integral part of the healthcare infrastructure of
this area. This is particularly a big deal because Chile

(01:00:11):
spends a lot of the sixties and seventies in a
state of political and economic turmoil, which we'll talk about
a bit more later. The thrust of the matter is
that few of the powers that be in the area,
and even the regular people who live nearby, had any
interest in looking critically at what was going on in
the colonial because it's a lifeline to the people there.
But while the hospital undoubtedly saved a lot of lives,
it was by all accounts a quality hospital. Although qualities.

(01:00:38):
Let me explain to you what this hospital doing. It's
it's it's doing a lot of birds, it's doing a
lot of surgeries. A lot of people's lives are saved
by this hospital. That is not all that it's doing.
It is an integral part of Paul Shaffer's architecture of torture.
See As the colonial aged, Paul developed tactics for more
clearly delineating and punishing the rebels. In his midst He
forced the men to wear rebel like men who had

(01:01:00):
basically committed crimes against the colony, to wear red shirts
and white pants. He forced the women to wear potato
sacks over their dresses, and he ordered the other followers
to treat them with hatred. One rebel was a young
Chilean boy, and in order to deal with the fact
that his so in the late sixties, he starts taking
local Chilean boys in. And this is to deal with
the fact that he's not letting his followers breed. Obviously,

(01:01:22):
this guy's a pedophile. He's not letting his followers breed.
So there's at some point not going to be any
more young boys for him them molest so they start
adopting local kids to provide him with a steady stream
of victims. This boy, Franz Bar, was adopted by the
German could when he was ten. Now he did not
like being forced to live in a weird Nazi sex cult,
and by the time he was a teenager, Paul had

(01:01:42):
singled him out as a rebel. I'm gonna quote from
Bruce Falconer's article in The American Scholar here quote as
Bar now remembers it, a group of men approached him
one day while he was working in the carpentry shop
and accused him of stealing the keys to one of
the dormitories. When Bar denied it, he was beaten unconscious
with electric cables, his skull broken and loaded into an ambulance.
He awoke sometime later in the hospital, where he would

(01:02:03):
remain as a prisoner for the next thirty one years.
Barr was kept in an upstairs section of the hospital,
never seen by the local Chileans who sought treatment there.
As he later described to me, his days began with
a series of intravenous injections, after which the nurses brought
him bread in a plate with twelve to fifteen different pills.
Once satisfied that he was properly medicated, nurses delivered his
clothes and shoes hidden from him to reduce the likelihood

(01:02:25):
of escape. After he dressed, a security detailed escorted him
to his job at the carpentry shop. Bar worked on
heavy machines in a cramped space. The injections and pills
slowed his movements and made him clumsy. Today, scar tissue
on his forearms maps the places where the electric saws
bit into his flesh. Barr was forced to work late
into the night, sometimes until three am. He was not
permitted to eat with the rest of the community. Instead,

(01:02:47):
his meals were delivered to him at the carpentry shop,
where he devoured them in isolation. A still worse punishment
awaited in rooms nine and fourteen of the hospital, where
Barr and other members unfortunate enough to draw the full
measure of Shaffer's fear were subjected to shock treatments. A
female physician worked the machines, her mannered attached, and clinical
patients were strapped down and fitted with crowns attached by

(01:03:09):
wires to a voltage machine. Barr told me how the
doctors seemed to enjoy watching him suffer. She kept asking
me questions, he said. I heard what she was saying
and wanted to respond, but I couldn't. She was playing
with machine and asking what do you feel? Are you
feeling something? She wanted to know what was happening to
me as she adjusted the voltage. I mean, the female physician,

(01:03:30):
was this an actual doctor, that is that is agreed to. Yeah,
I'll torture these guys for you. I think these are
people special, preferred people who he lets get medical degrees
and whatnot, because he needs doctors and because he needs
people to operate to do this torturing to help him
with that. Damn. He's also doing a lot of the torturing.
A lot of sources will note that when they were tortured,

(01:03:51):
Schaefer was there. So he's often there, particularly when children
are tortured, and he really likes to be the one
who does the torturing of the children. That not always
reasons given for punishment. Now, the bar's case was one
of the more elaborate ones, but it was not uncommon
for kids to get punished without being told why and
just beaten with rods for thirty minutes at a time. Um,

(01:04:11):
it seems likely that this was just a kink of Shafer's.
This is something that gave him sexual pleasure and that's
why he was doing it. Um, it's it's messed up, Paul, Yeah. Um. Now,
one of the people who helped him with the torturing
and punishment was a guy named Heinrich Himpel. Now himple survived.
Paul Shafer he still lived, or at least when he
did this interview, he still lived in the colonia. Because

(01:04:32):
it could pursue. It's still around a day, it exists
after Shaver. Yeah, wait, don't you hear what they're doing
with it? Now, Paul, you know what I'll tell you, Robert,
I did not I did not see that one. Yeah,
A lot of surprises in this one. So this guy,
Heinrich Himpel, who's one of the I don't think he's

(01:04:52):
doing the the elected, the hardcore torture, but he's one
of the guys who's like beating kids with a stick
when they're punished and whatnot. Um and I think probably
adults too. He gives an interview with Bruce Falconer of
The American Scholar, and Falconer writes quote Himple confides that
during World War Two, as the Soviets were pushing through
Eastern Europe, his family had been forced out of East
Prussia and thrown into a Soviet labor camp in Poland.

(01:05:14):
They spent five years there under terrible conditions. His brother
and sister froze to death in the snow. He describes
the highfenses that had surrounded the camp in Poland and
draws them in my notebook, with coils of razor wire
at their base. He tells me that after his release,
he had gone to Germany and joined a shaffer's congregation.
I asked him why he had moved to Chile. He
thinks for a minute, smiles, and says, I came here
to do five years of charity work. But then I

(01:05:36):
forgot how to leave. And that's a key and why
people are willing to accept this brutality, and why some
of these people are willing to do this brutality. You
have to think about what was their fucking childhood, Like
they were Germans in the early forties, you know, like
everything that's happening seems a little bit less fucked up
if your childhood was My family starved to death at

(01:05:58):
a prison camp after the war when I was a child, Like, yeah,
you know, it's it's yeah, a real man hands down misery,
demand situation um. Now, depending on how you measure such things.
The rebels, the people like bar who were punished, were
in some ways the lucky ones, because on the other
end of things were the young boys who Schaefer considered

(01:06:19):
the his his golden boys, the ideal representatives of proper behavior.
He called these his sprinters, and this is because of
the job that he gave them. If he wanted to
speak to a follower who was laboring in a distant
end of the colonia, he would send a sprinter to
run off and go get them. L Ron Hubberd actually
did a very similar thing. He had this network of
little kids who would be his voice to his followers.

(01:06:39):
In time, these sprinters Sherlock Holmes, yeah or Fagan like
having your a little hurry of kids. Yeah. Now with
this exception that this is the problem here, he's molesting
all of them. Um, well, I mean yeah, yeah, which

(01:07:00):
Holmes rarely did. Um when he was under the influence
of the solution. Yeah. So in time, like these kids
are doing They're not just like running and getting people.
They're doing stuff like he gets so lazy that they're
like holding a phone up to his ear and ship
like real decadent could leaders ship. Sprinters were rewarded with

(01:07:22):
better treatment, with respect, and with an ability to whisper
into the profit's ear about those on the colonial they disliked.
But this came at a terrible cost, because of course
Schaefer was molesting all of them. He kept them around
him at all times. They followed him when he took
his daily tour of the grounds, wearing a uniform he
had picked out for them, loose athletic shorts with an
elastic waistband. Obviously this is their uniform for reasons that

(01:07:46):
should be unfortunately obvious, you know, for his very best sprinters,
there was a special reward. His room included a child
sized beds set up right next to his own bed.
Sometimes more than one sprinter would sleep there. Sometimes he
would drug with sedatives, washed them with a sponge, and
sexually assault them. So oh, it's not getting better. It's

(01:08:10):
not getting better. Yeah, expected, but it's a bleak one, Paul.
It's what if the rougher ones we've had to talk about.
Left wing candidate Salvador Allende was elected to be the
you know, president of Chile in nineteen seventy, and he
brought with him promises of socialism and a number of

(01:08:31):
different reforms. This terrified Paul Shaffer, who considered Allende to
be nothing more than the physical reincarnation of Joseph Stalin
mixed with one presumes the literal Christian devil. He started
marshaling his followers to prepare for an apocalyptic assault. They
smuggled weapons in from Germany. Since the Colonial was a
charitable organization, it's shipments were not stopped by customs. In

(01:08:52):
this way, they smuggled in dozens of submachine guns, which
they used as models so they could turn their machine
shop to the task of reproducing dozens of yearly identical
assault rifles. Over the years of illende short time in power,
they acquired thousands of grenades, mortars, and even a handful
of surface to air missile launchers. So now they have
an army. Great, that's when this pedophile cult really needed

(01:09:15):
to get cooking. Should have seen it come in surface
to air missile launchers when when I heard about the hospital,
I should have said, what's keeping that army? Yeah, what's
what's keeping? So given what comes later, it's very likely
that Colonia Dignidad was not just able to acquire this
arsenal because the authorities didn't check the shipping of a
charitable organization. The police and military hated Allende because he

(01:09:38):
was left wing and likely had an arrangement with Shaefer.
He may have en giving guns to right wing militant groups,
we don't entirely know. In the early nineteen seventies, though
Schaeffer starts planning a coup against Dillende. He brings in
another Nazi to help him with the planning, and it's
unclear to me if this coup attempt fed into the
coup against Diende or was just a separate plan for

(01:10:01):
a co attempt, But as we've talked about a couple
of times on the show, the CIA comes in, they
give a right wing general like backing, and Augusto Pinochet,
that right wing general, in September ninety three, takes power
by extreme violence. I end A dies of a self
inflicted gunshot wound um and for a week or so
the scattered forces of the left fought in the street,

(01:10:22):
but in very short order the country was under the
military's control. Pinochet immediately declared a state of emergency. He
suspended the constitution, he disbanded Congress, he banned political parties,
and he censored the press. Socialism was annihilated in Chile,
which Paul Shaffer hailed as a victory against international communism.
In the months that followed, Pinochet ordered at least forty

(01:10:43):
five thousand people arrested and taken to detention centers to
be interrogated and often tortured. More than fift hundred people
were killed this way in the first year of his reign.
To facilitate all this, the general ordered the creation of
the National Intelligence Directorate, where d I n A to
act as a secret police force dedicated to maintaining his
grip on power. But it's actually kind of hard to

(01:11:04):
do that. Um, I don't know if you've ever tried
to build a brutal intelligence apparatus from scratch, Paul. Not
an easy task. It's it's really we're trying to do
it now. It cools out. Media and Garrison and Chris
barely understand how to attach a nipple to a car battery.
I mean, are you terrible at it? Are you saying
I shouldn't bother? No? No, I mean you gotta, you

(01:11:24):
gotta try, Paul. You look, a journey of a thousand
steps starts with one step, right, the journey of a
thousand forty dissidents torture. You gotta start torturing, you know, Okay, okay, okay, yeah,
you know what I need. Thank you, just trying to
encourage you. I give up too easy, that's my problem. Yeah,

(01:11:46):
I mean, that's why most people never get the kind
of secret police force they deserve. So the good news
for the fascists, the bad news, it's that the you know,
the bad news for the fascists is that it's actually
hard to find a lot of people who are willing
to like torture folks to death, most folks, even most

(01:12:07):
folks who were shitty are aren't up for that, you know,
Like even among the people who are assholes, the people
that want to do it, they really want to, really
want to do it. And the great news for Pinochet
is that there's this heavily armed Nazi commune full of
psychopaths who have been torturing their own children. So they're
psyched to torture people for the dictator, right like, they

(01:12:29):
got no issue with that at all, And in very
short order, Colonia Dignidon becomes one of Pinochet's most well
used torture and execution sites. We're gonna talk more about
that in part to Paul, But that's kind of a
bummer note to end the episode on. And so in
the interest of closing things out on a more upbeat note,
I got a little story, Paul, A little story about

(01:12:52):
Santa Claus. Alright. This comes from that article in the
American Scholar, and um boy, howdy, Paul, I'm excited to
read this one to you. Okay, now, this is this
is We're ending on an up not that I would
call it a high note, all right, because it's one
of the craziest things I've heard about in my entire

(01:13:13):
fucking life. Okay. No one inspired greater love and admiration
among the children of the colonial than Santa Claus. It
is said that in the days shortly before Christmas one
year in the mid nineteen seventies, Schaffer gathered the colonials children,
loaded them onto a bus, and drove them out to
a nearby river, where he told them Santa was coming
to visit. The boys and girls stood excitedly along the

(01:13:36):
river bank while an older man in a fake beard
in a red white suit floated towards them on a raft.
Shaefer pulled a pistol from his belt and fired, seeming
to wound Santa, who tumbled into the water, where he
thrashed about before disappearing below the waves. It was a charade,
but Shaffer turned to the children assembled before him and
said that Santa was dead from the day forward. That

(01:13:57):
day forward, Shaffer's birthday was the only hall it a
celebrated inside Colonia. Dignit dot. He's so jealous of these
kids attention that he literally murders Santa Claus and rivers. Sorry,
that is that is extra I I I can't just

(01:14:26):
I mean to to to have a brain. Yeah, that
came up with that that comes up with that fucking idea, I,
in a weird way, I have to respect it. Yeah yeah, yeah.
It's like when you hear about like some of the

(01:14:47):
like l Run Hubbard infiltrating the federal government more than
the USSR ever did. It's like, God damn, it's not
only not letting kids have Santa. Yeah, they didn't know
he's dead. I gotta take this motherfucker out. I can't.
I can't have him around. Drop this son of a bitch,

(01:15:07):
this guy who doesn't exist, and it has to be
the whole story that he told. There has to be that, like,
well he flew over the colonials, so we shot him
down with one of our sam's, executed him in the river.
Jesus exactly. Yeah, they have to. They have to see
it for tan't is a thing that's just told to kids.

(01:15:30):
They believe. I have to. I can't trust that. I
have to kill him. We are at behind the bastards
kind of connoisseurs of like the extremes of the human condition.
That's one of the wildest things I've ever heard of
a human being doing. That is beyond rattlesnake assassination levels

(01:15:56):
of like wild Miles Rio a level ship here, Shaffer's
playing in the big leagues. Damn. Oh, I'm gonna say it.
That's the one to beat. That's the one to beat.
That's the one to beat. Yeah. Anybody can torture, anyone

(01:16:17):
can assassinate. This is the one. This is like gold standard. Yeah,
this is our new gold standard. Good luck, other criminally
insane bad man. Yeah, you've got you've got quite quite
a quite a thing to top here. If you're not,
if you're not arranging Santa's assassin assassination in front of children,

(01:16:39):
turn around and walk out that I had no time
for you. I don't want to hear your story. Wow, oh, Paul,
that is going to close us out for part one.
That was a journey man. That was a journey Oh
you were lying, okay, okay, from gouging his own eye
out and tying a sheet murdering Santa Clause in front

(01:17:02):
of an audience of children. What a fucking tale. We
covered some ground, my man, Yes we did well, Paul.
You got anything to plug? I will say. Um I
did a show um this past Saturday called The Uncanny Hollow.
I did a live show in um here in l
a but it's available online. We we archived it, We

(01:17:23):
filmed it and archived it, and if you'd like to
see that, you can go to Dynasty typewriter dot com.
It is a a sort of Twilight Zone ish sketch
show that I did with an awesome cast and it
was a blast. So, um yeah, go check that out
on it sounds great. Yeah, those guys are the best,
They're the best rad So check that out. Check Paul out,

(01:17:45):
and don't move to Chile with a Nazi cult leader.
I thought you were gonna say to him, Santa claud that.
I mean, look, look, look I'm a Texan. So somebody
comes into my home with asking you know, you gotta
do what you gotta do. And on that note, that's
part one. Oh boy, m hm

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Nazi Pedophile Cult Leader who Murdered Santa (With Paul F. Tompkins)