Vanished in The Wilderness Pt 2: The Cult
Why did Boris Weisfeiler disappear in 1985. And did the cult hiding out deep in the Chilean wilderness have anything to do with it? Today, we're exploring the Colonia Dignidad.
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SOURCES
https://foia.state.gov/documents/PCIA3/00009282.pdf
https://foia.state.gov/documents/StateChile3/00007520.pdf
https://foia.state.gov/documents/StateChile3/000076E5.pdf
https://www.newspapers.com/image/121501390/?terms=colonia%20dignidad&match=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgXmSaRdQOc
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-torture-colony/
TRANSCRIPT
Listener discretion is advised
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Today’s episode is going to be a continuation, so if you haven’t listened to the episode before this one, I highly encourage you do to so. In last week's episode I told the story of Boris Weisfeiler, a russian-born american mathematics professor, who disappeared in 1985 while on a solo backpacking trip in Chile. At one point during the investigation into his disappearance, his sister, Olga, learned that he was potentially on the property of a community called the Colonia Dignidad, though there wasn’t much information available at the time about what the colonia was.
At the end of the episode, Olga had been delivered a box full of declassified documents pertaining to her brother's disappearance. The first piece she read was a report that came from the Chilean human rights committee. It explained that in 1987, two years after her brother disappeared, an anonymous Chilean army official who went by Daniel, claimed he knew Boris had been picked up by the Colonia Dignidad and was being held there at the time of the report being written.
Olga was reading these documents 15 years after her brother had gone missing, when thousands of documents about the Colonia had just been declassified. This was because Chile’s dictator, Augusto Pinochet, had been arrested in the UK for crimes against humanity he committed in Chile.
And as she’s reading the declassified documents, Much more information had become widely available about the Colonia, so Olga got to researching. What was this secretive society living in the wilderness? Was Boris being held there? And Why had they picked him up in the first place? To figure that out, I need to first take you down the rabbit hole that Olga went down on the history of the Colonia Dignidad.
Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
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Alright, let’s dive back in
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If you were to travel to the Colonia Dignidad in 1985, you would first need to travel down a long, winding dirt path through the thick woods of the Chilean Wilderness, about 4 hours south of Santiago. On this path, you’d eventually pass rolling fields of wheat, corn, and soybeans buried deep in the forest, until you’d come to the community's entrance.
Before you’d be allowed in, you’d notice that the community is cut off from the world by a heavily guarded metal gate. It’s a strange contrast to the rustic and scenic drive you just had, but you’ve heard this community keeps to themselves, so you don’t think much about it. Once you are approved by the guards for entry, you’re let onto the grounds where you’re transported into an entirely different world.
The first odd thing is that the people don’t seem Chilean, everyone here looks European, most of them white and blonde. And none of them speak Spanish to each other. If you listen closely you’ll notice that the language of this community is German.
And As you look around, you see that everything around you, except for the looming Andes mountains in the distance, looks like Germany. Bavarian style cottages line more dirt paths, and the smell of Strudel and other german baked goods fills the air. Little blond children feed ducks in a pond, others pet animals at the community's petting zoo. A group of women in white skirts and colored blouses practice orchestral instruments in the community center. You can’t help but pick up on the fact that everyone's clothes and hairstyles look particularly dated. Instead of the wild aesthetic of the 80’s, the long hair and unshaven beards, here the mens hair is cropped, the women’s hair is all pulled back, and everyone's clothing is modest. It looks much more like the 40s here.
Despite the peculiarities, It’s beautiful, idyllic. Almost Utopian, which was the exact intention founder Paul Schaefer had when he built the Colonia Dignidad
But then you remember the guards at the gate, and a chill comes over you. When you look back to see if they’re still there, you see there’s barbed wire on the fences enclosing the area. And behind you, there’s a tower with a guard sitting up in it, an assault weapon strapped to him. It’s like they're worried someone will try to get in, but the guard isn’t looking out into the unknown of the forest, he’s looking back into the community. It seems more like they’re worried someone will try to get out.
You may be asking yourself, why would someone want to create a fake, 1940’s style German town in the middle of nowhere Chile. Some of you with good memories of high school history may already know the answer.
The fact of the matter is, like many other German expatriates living in south america after WWII, the founder of the Colonia Dignidad, Paul Schaefer was a Nazi. He had fled to South America after the war, as so many other Nazi’s did. But for Paul it was not just his affiliation with the Nazi’s that he had to flee.
Just as the idyllic community had a dark, haunting undertone, Paul Schaffer too had a darkness to him, one that expanded as deep and as treacherous as the Chilean Wilderness he hid out in.
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Paul Schaefer was born in 1921 near the dutch border of Germany. And from a young age, it was a dream of his to become a Nazi.
When world war two broke out, he tried desperately to join the Nazi SS corp, but an injury prevented him from doing so. He only had one eye, which he would tell people was a result of the war, but in reality, was from a childhood accident. Once he was trying to untie his shoelace with the help of a fork, when his hand slipped and gouged out his eye.
Instead, he became a medic for the Nazis in a German Hospital in France. The only job he could get was loading injured Nazi soldiers on to stretchers and transporting them to the hospitals. It wasn’t the most glamourous Job, but he was proud to do what he could to help Germany win the war.
But of course, the war didnt turn out as Schafer had hoped, and After the Nazi’s lost WWII, he put his efforts towards organizing reunions for Nazi’s and other anti-communist Germans. It was around this same time that he also became a youth leader at the Evangelical Free Church, but Schafer wouldn’t hold this position for long.
In the early 50’s, he was hastily removed from the Evangelical Free Church. The reason?
“sexual deviancy and maintaining homosexual relations with young boys under his care”
This phrasing should make you mad. It’s a sanitized way to say that Paul Schaefer was a predator of the worst kind. This phrasing is also a way to protect predators, by making their crimes appear to be mutual or consensual in nature. And that protection is probably why Paul was able to continue his abuse.
After a short stint being a traveling preacher, Schafer decided he wanted to focus on helping young at-risk boys. So he started what he called the Private Social Mission.
This sect he created was for adults and children, but the emphasis was on giving direction and mentorship to young boys. By 1960 it had grown to over 150 followers and had even opened an orphanage. Though outwardly the organization seemed to be doing great things, Schafer saw his followers as an experiment. He used this as a chance to create his own utopian society, maybe one he felt he lost out on when Germany los the war. And so he inflicted strict rules on the sect.
He believed that people should live biblically, not just from an ethical standpoint, but as in, live how people lived 2000 years ago. So his followers were not allowed to own private property, instead they lived on his compound where he had strict separation between the sexes. Boys and girls were not allowed to mingle at all, and the marriages of his followers were dissolved.
Schafer was also obsessed with the idea of confession. He thought radical transparency was necessary and would constantly question his followers until they’d confess to the made up criminal behavior he was accusing them of. Then, he would turn around and use this information to blackmail them.
His social experiment worked at first, but then in 1961, he was hit with the same accusations as 10 years prior. Two mothers of young boys living in his orphanage came forward and accused Shafer of molesting their children. a warrant was out for his arrest. Before an arrest could be made, he disappeared, just like he did after the first accusations.
And same as before, schafer laid low and looked elsewhere to take his community. A lot of his members stayed with him after these accusations. They were either unbothered that their leader was a pedophile, or they didn’t believe it was true. He resurfaced in the Middle East for a bit but couldn’t find a place that felt right. That is until he met the an ambassador to Chile, who was in the dark about schafer’s accusations.
He invited Schafer to live in Chile with the 56 men, 86 women, and 83 children who were set on following him wherever he went.
So, Schafer sold the orphanage, and with that money he bought about 7500 acres of land in Chile. This was the place he was going to build a bigger version of the society he tried building in Germany. He had a vision for the perfect community, and here, where no one could tell him what to do, he was going to execute it.
He and his followers got to work building little cottages and planting the rolling fields. They built community centers, bakeries, a petting zoo. And that brings us to where we were earlier, standing in the center of the society, noticing the idyllic little town in the woods that had a painfully dark undertone.
And while Schafer tried to make it look perfect on the surface, we know that he had been subjecting his followers to strict rules. And now, miles deep in the Chilean wilderness, far away from their loved ones, he was able to institute even crueler requirements for the people in the community.
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He continued the tradition of dissolving his followers' marriages, but now, men and women weren’t allowed to interact at all. They were kept in completely separate areas of the Colonia, and had little chance to mingle. Schafer told his followers they were allowed to marry after the age of 38, but by that point, many of the couples realized it was too late for them to have children. For some who had grown up in the community with little access to the outside world, they didn’t even know how children were made.
There was also the near constant threat of torture for banal things. A female follower recalled how the women were forced to sleep next to each other in one large bed. They had to keep their arms by their sides, lie perfectly still on their back and could only keep the covers up to their rib cage. The lights were also kept on the entire night they slept. If they were caught moving at all, the woman in charge of watching them all night would pull them from the bed by their hair and beat them in the bathroom.
Men were forced to work grueling hours in the fields and were subjected to hours of confession with Schafer. He would ask them deeply personal questions about their sexual thoughts and if they ever acted on them. If he felt they were interested in the women in the community, he would send them to be beaten by another follower.
Adults had it rough, the strict rules and threats of abuse were taking a large toll on their mental health, but I can understand if you have little sympathy for them at this time. It’s true that a lot of them were Nazi sympathizers who followed Schafer of their own accord. As bad as the adults had it though, It was truly the children, the ones who did not come willingly, who fared the worst at the Colonia Dignidad.
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Willie Melissa was just 8 years old when he was dropped off at Schafers first orphanage in Germany. His family wasn’t left with anything after the war, and Schafer convinced his mother Willie would have a better life at the orphanage, where he would be fed and have a roof over his head. He was eventually moved to Chile without his mother and remembers how grueling the transition was.
He remembered how all of the children of the followers were taken from their parents and given to one woman they called Auntie Anna. Children were not allowed to know who their real parents were, and they were all raised together by one woman instead.
Willie once saw one of the mothers waiting by a field, watching her daughter play. The twohad not been allowed to speak since they arrived, but the mother wanted to speak to her daughter for just a moment. She beckoned her over, and for just a few minutes they spoke behind a barn, the mother looking so happy she could cry. They quickly said their goodbyes, and the young girl ran back to the group of children.
Later that day, the little girl was pulled aside. The other adults had heard what happened and she was going to be punished. Willie watched as she was dragged from the dining hall to an unmarked room in one of the dorms. A woman carrying a large wooden stick went in after her. When the children saw her bruises after the encounter, none of them dared talk to their parents again.
There was also the abuse that came directly from Schafer himself. His tendencies to prey on young boys got worse once he had no threat of the law.
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One night, when they were about 12 years old Willie’s friend approached him. He seemed anxious, and he pulled Willie aside. His friend confessed that Schafer had abused him and he was worried it would happen again. Willie told him that it had happened to him as well, and that the abuse was a well known secret amongst some of the boys. His friend told him he was going to escape. “How?” Willie asked, “there’s nowhere to go and miles of forest around us, you’ll get lost and die!
But his friend didn’t care, and willie watched as he got a few things together, stole a horse from a stable, wrapped it’s hooved in rags so it wouldnt make noise, and took off into the night. Part of him was jealous and impressed, but that soon faded into horror. Just a few hours after the boys departure, some adults noticed he was missing, and they ran out into the woods with their german shepherds to track him down.
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Within a few days, his friend was back. Willie didn’t even have time to speak with him, as he was immediately brought into the torture room where he was kept for days. Rumors had followed the boy back to the colony, and Willie learned that his friend had actually made it out of the woods to the German embassy, where he frantically told people what was happening. But the colonia had a bounty on his head and the boy was eventually returned in exchange for the money.
However, what the boy said to the authorities did not go unheard, and now schafer was being investigated for sexual abuse. Willie watched as Chilean authorities would hang around the compound, asking questions that he and the other boys were specifically instructed to lie about.
Schafer was working overtime to win back his image, and soon, a fully functioning hospital was up and running on the grounds. His plan was to build a community hospital that would offer free check ups and services to people in need in the community. in hopes that would re establish him as a good samaritan. And it worked. The police left him alone and he was hailed as a local hero.
But Willie knew the real reason for the hospital's existence. So maybe he wasn’t surprised when eventually, mothers in the community came to the hospital doors asking where their sons were. They had dropped them off for minor injuries but the nurses kept telling them that their sons needed to rest for a few days. But this pattern continued, seemingly unending.
Because in reality, this was just a farm system for Schafer’s cruelty. He had lawyers on staff who were drafting up adoption paperwork that he could sign, secretly moving young Chilean boys from surrounding communities into the Colonia Dignidad.
As Olga is learning about all of this, she’s shocked, but she can’t help but wonder what the cult would want with Boris. It was devastating but it still didn’t explain why he had maybe been taken by the community.
The truth is everything she had read up until this point had happened years before Boris would have accidentally arrived on the property of the cult.
By the time Boris had gotten to Chile, the colonia Dignidad had switched gears. And if you thought the operations they were previously running were bad, well, it’s going to get a lot worse. After the break
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In 1973, Augusto Pinochet had taken over Chile from its marxist leader during a coup, establishing himself as the nation's dictator. Worried that his political opponents would try to take the country back, he was on a tear to kidnap and kill citizens he thought had ties to the country's former communist ideology.
One fear he had, was that opponents of his that fled to Argentina, would try to come back into Chile over their shared border. So he sent his secret police, known as DINA, to the border to make sure to capture anyone that appeared to be traveling back into Chile.
So think back to when Boris was captured. He was wearing olive colored pants that the shepherd's brother thought were military style. The shepherd’s brother had been instructed by DINA to contact authorities if it looked like anyone was sneaking back into the country, and he seemed nervous that Boris was the enemy.
But what did that have to do with the Colonia? Well, Not long after his rule started, Pinochet was made aware of the cult. Its operations seemed perfect for what Pinochet needed. The cult was remote, isolated, hard to trace, and they had torture built in to there culture. So Pinochet contacted Schafer and offered to pay him a yearly salary to torture and dispose of his political prisoners.
Willie remembered when this started happening too. There was a big cellar underneath one of the pavilions on the compound where they kept their grain. And one day, Willie was asked with some other boys to go down and clear it all out. Why? He wondered. He was told that they’d be using the room for something else now, but that’s all he was told.
Not long after, he saw busses of chileans from leftist neighborhoods arrive at the gates of the Colonia. The civilians were then lead one by one down into the cellar. Their screams kept Willie and the other boys up all night but it was worse when they weren’t screaming. Willie was sure that meant they were dead.
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The situation Boris found himself in started clicking for Olga. He was traveling within the boundaries of Pinochet’s contract killers, in what looked like military attire.
Inside the box of declassified documents, she finds more information from Daniel, and this really starts to paint a picture of what happened that day.
The files reveal that Daniel was a member of the army patrol, in charge of tracing the perimeter of the cult while Pinochet’s illegal operations were happening inside. In December and January, when Boris was in Chile, the soldiers that Patrolled the perimeter of the Colonia were instructed to heighten their security and increase the scope of their patrol. Daniel was now placed by the Los Sauces river where it crossed the Nuble. The last place Boris would be seen alive.
Security was increased in anticipation of a mysterious special guest, believed to be Walter Rauff. Rauff was a Nazi war criminal who was hiding out in Santiago, Chile. This meeting is particularly strange because according to Chilean records, Rauff had died earlier in 1984. Even more strange, was that at his funeral, his body never arrived. so perhaps this meeting was part of a getaway plan.
Daniel was out on patrol with some other guards when they found Boris at the river washing something. his backpack slung over one shoulder. The guards approached Boris and asked him if he had a permit to be in the area, which Boris did not. Daniel arrested him on the spot while the other guards rifled through is bag. That’s when one guard found his passport and was confused by it. Boris was born in Russia, but the passport was American. “You’re a spy with the CIA!” he accused. Before Boris could get a word in, he was dragged to the Colonia’s compound.
What happened next is a little foggy, as Daniel handed him over to the head of security at the cult and didn’t see Boris again after that. He claimed he knew what kind of animal-like conditions perceived enemies were kept in, and he feared the worst.
Later in 1985, Daniel assumed that Boris had been killed. And as Olga is reading more documents, others seem to confirm that theory.
In November of 1987, a few months after Daniel came forward, another anonymous source came forward claiming he “was completely convinced' but could not conclusively prove~ that Weisfieler was detained by either a Carabinero or army patrol and interrogated, fatally beaten, then thrown into the river somewhere near the confluence of the Nuble and Sauces”
But this source only thought that because he heard it from a guard who heard from another guard who was pretty drunk that he killed Boris and threw him in the river. This source also claimed that Boris’s backpack was staged by guards near the river to look like a drowning because after they realized Boris was an American tourist and not a spy, they knew they’d be in huge trouble with the US for his murder.
This account is pretty he said she said, and directly conflicts with new information that Daniel got in 1987. Daniel was out of the Colonia Dignidad’s guard by ‘87, but he ran into another guard one night. They were catching up and Daniel asked him about Weisfieler, to which the other guard admitted that he had just seen him alive on the grounds. He also said that there was recently an order given to clean out areas of the Bunkers where captives were being held, but Daniel didn’t know what that meant or if it would affect Boris.
This back and forth was confusing for Olga, was her brother killed immediately, or was he kept alive? Who was telling the truth?
It seemed like there were hundreds of documents, and all of them said something different. None of them seemed to be from people who actually knew what was happening. Except for one. And when I read this, my heart sank.
In late 1987, the US was made aware of a conversation that happened between two Colonia officials in 1985. It happened over radio and there was a recording made by another former cult member that lived in the area. The other witness accounts were of people who HEARD about what happened to Boris, but this would have been two people who would have actually known what was happening.
In the recording, it’s hard to tell who the two men are referring to, but the man who made the recording insists it’s about Boris. There’s some code being used, so not everything is interpretable, but at one point one of the men admits that the person they are talking about is “under the potatoes”, and that’s where they’ve been for a while.
Under the potatoes. Kind of like sleeping with the fishes. The US took this to mean buried underground, and this combined with the witness statements, led them to believe Boris had been killed pretty immediately upon being brought to the Colonia. It wasn’t the answer the Olga wanted, but in the conflicting reports, this was what the US felt like was the truth.
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In 1990, Pinochet stepped down as the president of Chile, and the political climate started rapidly changing. The Colonia was no longer needed as a prison camp, and state funding was shut off for the cult’s hospital.
In 1997, Schafer went into hiding after being charged with over 20 counts of child abuse. While he was in hiding, children were able to escape the cult and make it to the German Embassy. In 2004, Schafer was tried in absence and found guilty of crimes against children, and in 2005, he was found hiding out in Argentina. He died in jail, after being allowed to torture and abuse children for over 50 years.
And it seems that many of the crimes committed by the cult have died with him too. Very little reparations have been made towards the children who were affected by the cult, and many families of missing people are left with questions. The Chilean government, probably embarrassed by Pinochet’s crimes, has not done much to aid survivors.
Olga has dedicated the rest of her life into looking for answers. Even if Boris was killed there, she wants his body, or at least for someone to take responsibility. She has made countless trips to Chile, and has gone to the Colonia with other family members of victims, hoping that one day Chile, or someone, will take some accountability.
Willie, a former cult member, was paid one hundred thousand dollars when Schaefer was imprisoned to never speak out about the cult’s cruelty, but he has anyways. He wants the bodies to be found and has pointed police to where he believes people are buried, but so far, they haven't found any remains. Most of the bodies of the disappeared had been thrown into the Nuble river. But it’s not like they haven’t found anything. Artifacts from people who disappeared have been found buried in the fields, giving hope that one day their bodies may be found as well.
The colonia still exists, but now is a visitors center run by the daughter of an imprisoned former cult member. If you ever visit the grounds, you can drink beer and eat german food in the odd replica of a Bavarian town. You’ll be able to smell the same strudel and see little blonde children frolic through the fields of south America. But in the distance, behind the cottages and rolling fields, excavators churn up the soil as they search for human remains. Family members stand at the gates with signs. Have you seen this person?
There’s the same old facade that everything is great, this is utopia. But the darkness still lingers, just like it always has.
When doing research on the Colonia, I came across a documentary called “a sinister sect: colonia dignidad” which came out in 2021. A lot of the details about the Colonia come from this documentary, and it’s where I learned about Willie’s story. Willie, by the way, was able to escape the cult with the wife he met inside after Schafer went into hiding. and he was able to take his two children. His kids actually believed that Willie was their uncle until they all fled together.
But there was one part of the documentary that really caught me by surprise. In one segment, they’re explaining the parts of the grounds that were used for torture, and they quickly cut to them. A room in the hospital, the grain cellar under the pavillion, and a potato cellar.
Wait. A potato cellar? A POTATO CELLAR. My mind just exploded at that part. What if when the two men were talking about Boris, saying he was under the potatoes didn’t mean he was buried underground. What if instead it meant he was being held in the potato cellar with the other prisoners. What if Daniel’s source was telling the truth after all?! This could change things.
It may not change the fact that Boris was killed by the colonia, but if he was killed 2 years after he disappeared, that’s a lot of time that the US could have done something to help him. He could have been saved. The blame wouldn’t fall solely on the Chilean Government. And maybe that’s why it’s been so hard for Olga to get answers.
Olga Weisfelier is in her 80’s now, and has still not given up. If you want more information, she runs the site Weisfeiller.com/Boris, where she has meticulously tracked all information that’s come out about her brother since 1985. She is an advocate, a fighter, and I hope from the bottom of my heart she gets some semblance of closure about her older brother. The Colonia Dignidad was a dark mark in human history, but it doesn’t have to continue to claim victims.
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