Paul Schaefer, the ex-Nazi corporal who tyranically ruled a Chilean cult community, died Saturday while serving a prison sentence for abusing children and taking part in the torture and murder of political prisioners. A former Nazi military medic who led a cult of German refugees to Chile has died in a Chilean prison where he was serving a sentence on charges of child sexual abuse, murder and torture. (…) Schaefer moved with about 250 followers to Chile in 1961, founding a religious commune they first called “Colonia Dignidad.” Schaefer ruled over the settlement with an iron fist. Men and women lived separately and children were taken from their parents at age two to be raised in collective, gender-segregated nurseries.
viaEx-Nazi, tyrannical cult leader dies in Chile | World | Deutsche Welle | 24.04.2010.
siehe auch: Ex-Nazi Paul Schaefer dead in Chile age 88: prison. Paul Schaefer, a former Nazi corporal and founder of a mysterious German enclave in southern Chile, died Saturday in a prison hospital where he was serving 20 years for sexually abusing children, prison officials said. (…) He had been sentenced in May 2006 to 20 years in jail for abusing and torturing children and other settlers at the armed enclave Colonia Dignidad, or Dignity Colony. The large, self-sufficient German colony in an isolated region south of Santiago was established by Schaefer in 1961 after he fled Germany to escape child abuse charges. The 13,000-hectare (32,000-acre) mountain resort, 350 kilometers (215 miles) south of Santiago, was home to about 300 refugees from Nazi Germany and their descendants. It was equipped with a hospital and an airport, and became a “state-within-a-state.” (…) Schaefer was also charged with collaborating in human rights abuses during the regime of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s 1973-1990, including allowing Chilean military agents to use Dignity Colony to torture political prisoners. Many of the prisoners later disappeared. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, an Jewish human rights organization which helps track down Nazi war criminals, had suspected Schaefer of connections with Nazi fugitives such as Walter Rauff, who the center said escaped to Chile and was protected by Pinochet’s regime; Paul Schäfer, founder of Colonia Dignidad, dies at 88. Paul Schäfer died at 88 from cardiac-respiratory arrest on early Saturday morning in a Chilean prison hospital. Schäfer was the founder and former leader of Colonia Dignidad, an enclave used for torturing and exterminating political prisoners during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Hr was convicted for sexually abusing 26 children for years, and retained thousands of people under his own tyrannical regime, that worked as an aside territory in the country, where people spoke the German language. Jorge Zepeda, magistrate who investigated the crimes made in Colonia Dignidad, reported that Schäfer was unconscious when he died. He was to stay in prison for 33 years. Hernán Fernández, one of the lawyers against Colonia Dignidad, said that Schäfer’s death should help to accelerate the judiciary processes. Chilean President, Sebastián Piñera said, “Paul Schäfer will be judged by the divine justice.”
