Nazi Farm Part 1

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And I promise we won't spam you. And after the episode, we hope you'll stick around because we've got more to the story. A little bonus content, a little conversation, some bloodthirsty stuff right after the episode. It took a decade, but they caught him, the man known as Permanent Uncle. On paper, the leader of a religious group, mostly farmers, peacefully minding their own business, on a massive bucolic spread in the heart of Chile.

That's how it looked to the outside world. But the truth of the place was much darker. And the man they called Permanent Uncle was not the kindly old patriarch he pretended to be. Argentine authorities say that Paul Schaefer, 83, a former Luftwaffe medic, was captured Thursday in a gated community outside Buenos Aires.

He was convicted in absentia by a Chilean court late last year of committing sodomy and pedophilia with 26 children. He also faces accusations of human rights abuses and numerous charges of kidnapping, forced labor, fraud and tax evasion in Chile. Paul Schaefer was arrested on Thursday, March 10th, 2005. That's just 20 years ago.

You were probably alive 20 years ago, bopping along to the number one song in America, Mariah Carey's We Belong Together, blissfully unaware that a tightly guarded Nazi paramilitary compound masquerading as a religious commune was your neighbor to the south. They called it Colonia Dignidad, Settlement of Dignity, an unlikely name for a place of But once you know the real story, it all sounds just about right.

Paul Schaefer was born in Germany in 1921. He was very enamored with an American Pentecostal minister, doomsday prophet and white supremacist named William Branham, a native son of Jeffersonville, Indiana. Branham's name might not ring any bells, but I promise that you know his work. Branham was the leader of an extremist religious cult called The Message, which began as an offshoot of the Pentecostal Baptist Church of God group, which was founded by a man named Roy E. Davis, who was recruiting for the Ku Klux Klan.

Branham called Davis his mentor, but not long after baptizing Branham, Davis found himself in handcuffs. The governor of Indiana approved an extradition request for Roy E. Davis that was made by the state of Arkansas. Davis was wanted in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on charges of grand theft and accessory to murder, which left the pulpit at Davis's church vacant.

Branham took it over in 1936 and renamed it the Billy Branham Pentecostal Tabernacle. And by 1944, Branham teamed up with a former congressman named William D. Upshaw to run an orphanage in San Bernardino, California, except the two men didn't give a damn about orphan children. The whole operation was one big swindle.

A year later, Branham launched his new career as a faith healer. And once again, William Upshaw was there to lend a hand. This time, the very able bodied former politician posed as a wheelchair bound man suddenly and miraculously healed by the blessed touch of Reverend Branham, who made no secret of the fact that he considered himself to be both the Elijah the prophet of his day and the returned Jesus Christ.

I was born in eastern Kentucky in a little log cabin near Burksville, Kentucky. The morning of my birth, I'm told of my parents that there was a light came into the room and hung over me. My people was not a religious people. They did not go to any church. Of course, this caused quite a stir among them. It's followed me all the days of my life.

Recently, they took a picture of it in the scientific world as shown here. You're probably familiar with this picture. It was proven by science that it was the only supernatural being that was ever scientifically photographed. To my opinion, it's the same angel of God that followed the children of Israel. Hey, if you can't believe in your own divinity, who will?

Branham's so-called gift for healing was fake, but he did have at least one very real gift. He knew how to exploit fear and turn it to his advantage. The Red Scare of the 1950s was ripe for a guy like Branham. Fear and paranoia of communist infiltration of American government and social institutions gave Branham a whole new audience, just as his faith-healing followers were draining away.

Branham preached a message of atomic annihilation during those years, railing on and on about how mass death by atomic or hydrogen bomb was imminent. Because the whole world is quivering, every nation's quivering. Don't you think that Russia isn't quivering too? In the United States, the islands are quivering. Who's going to throw that first atomic bomb?

When it does, it may throw the whole thing out of cater and not be a cobalt bomb. What's the deal? Them's that losing. There won't be even a flowered insect on the face of the earth left. It's right now in the hands of wicked, sinful, hell-bound man. And your destination of this earth's journey, I said earth's journey, is left to the hands of wicked and sinful man.

You better watch where your soul's destination is. That's far. If it isn't pledged towards heaven and towards God, turn tonight with all your heart. I mean, the man was almost as obsessive about atomic warfare as he was about white supremacy. How we thank thee that in this great hour, that when all hopes of mortal life has finished, atomic bombs are laying in hangars, hydrogen bombs, sickness and diseases, germ warfare, oh God, and everything the way it is, knowing that the Bible said that man would actually rot in their flesh, but that angel was given commission.

Don't you touch any of those. Don't you come near those who has the wine and the oil. Don't touch those who has the seal of God upon their forehead. And we realize that the baptism of the Holy Ghost is the seal of God. For it is written in Ephesians 4.30, Breathe not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby you're sealed until the day of your redemption.

Lord God, seal this church tonight. Those who are wanting the seal of the Holy Spirit, kiss away every fear, Lord, and seal them with the seal of the Spirit in their hearts, that they'll come forth as newborn babes crying, Have I Father, granted Lord, I commit them to thee in the name of Jesus. And this is where Branham's career crosses paths with your reality.

Branham played a huge role in the explosive growth of the ministry of one Jim Jones. As in, the People's Temple. As in, drinking the poison Kool-Aid. Jones found at the People's Temple in Indianapolis in 1955. And from 1956 through 1957, Branham and his team worked closely with Jones, and even with members of People's Temple.

Jim Jones was deeply influenced by Branham's interpretation of a doctrine called The Manifest Sons of God. In a nutshell, this is an elite squadron of believers that shows up at the end times to usher in the return of Jesus Christ. But in a fun twist, these believers themselves get to become literal incarnations of Christ right here on earth, complete with new immortal bodies that are not only invincible, but capable of all sorts of cool things, including teleportation.

Plus, they could also work miracles and stuff. Crazy town banana pants, as the kids say, but funny only in a tragic way, considering that some of these folks hold positions of power. Anywho, Branham's message both inspired and empowered Jim Jones. Welcome, welcome on you Glad you are with us Shake hands, noddy-doody-do Welcome to you Welcome, welcome on you Glad you are with us Shake hands, noddy-doody-do Welcome to you That's the People's Temple Choir welcoming you to Jonestown, the new home of the People's Temple in the South American country of Guyana.

Catchy little song, beautiful voices, and almost all would soon be among the 900-plus lying dead on the ground, more than 200 of them children, poisoned by a fruit drink laced with cyanide. And so, just as William Branham hooked a small-time Indiana preacher named Jim Jones on the message, he hooked a disgraced child welfare worker in Germany named Paul Schaeffer.

Welcome to you Welcome! As William Branham was building his evangelical empire and warning the faithful of the impending atomic holocaust, Paul Schaeffer was struggling just to make his way. A bizarre mishap in childhood left him with only one eye. And, I'm sorry, but this is just too weird to skip over, so here goes.

At age six, Schaeffer was using a fork to try and unravel a knot in his shoelaces when he accidentally stabbed himself in the right eye with that fork. He ended up with a prosthetic eye and the cruel nickname, Glass Eye, which, on top of his parents' divorce, his father vanished from his life, never to be seen again. His mother's remarriage and his own poor academic abilities led to a couple of repeated grades and, eventually, his quitting school altogether at age 14.

Schaeffer knocked around working for a time as an apprentice at a munitions factory. In the fall of 1940, he was drafted into something called the Reich Labor Service. This was a paramilitary organization in Nazi Germany that had a handful of objectives. Manage the impact of unemployment on the German economy. Indoctrinate the workers in Nazi ideology.

And, what the heck, why not? Militarize the German workforce. Then, early in 1941, Schaeffer was drafted into military service as a paramedic. He spent his war years ferrying stretchers carrying the wounded at a field hospital in occupied France. Schaeffer later claimed that a war wound had taken his right eye, not a fork, which is a much better backstory for a cult leader.

And, while it was rumored that Schaeffer was complicit in German war crimes at forced labor camps, including a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp, no records have yet been found to confirm that. Still, a Nazi is a Nazi, and Paul Schaeffer was most definitely a Nazi. A Nazi who, after the war, returned home to live with his mom and stepfather.

He picked up some work as a carny and eventually as the leader of a youth group called Lloyd Belfing. Schaeffer had a real knack for theater and Lloyd Belfing soon had an expanded choir and a real reputation. Within a year, Schaeffer was moving on up and living on the grounds of an evangelical Bible school in the town of Benroth.

When he became notorious for inviting boys to his quarters for private prayer sessions, he was invited to move on. His next posting was short-lived. Hired on as a youth leader at the St. George Church in Benroth, he was soon fired for his negative influence on the youth. It was the father of a 13-year-old boy who blew the whistle there.

One too many all-night prayer sessions in the forest had left his son underweight, hollow-eyed, and haunted. Clearly, something was amiss. One of the boys, who was a regular for these forest prayer meetings, reported that Schaeffer said, We serve the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus is me. The boys also declared that Schaeffer demanded absolute loyalty and enforced his rules with physical punishment.

The older boys were made to beat the disloyal until Schaeffer was satisfied. If you're thinking, Oh, that's not so bad. Spare the rod and spoil the child, as the saying goes. But those beatings could be brutal. Schaeffer also enjoyed lecturing the boys on the evils of women. Women have nothing to say and ought to keep silent.

A relationship with a woman is nothing but carnal lust and the devil's stuff. It was right around this time that Schaeffer began talking about encountering Jesus himself in the woods. Schaeffer did some guest preaching here and there, but left the area in the summer of 1952. He spent the next few years working as a youth leader and being fired from those positions, allegedly for his style of teaching.

That was the official story. The less official version was that Schaeffer was a sexual predator whose preferred prey was children. And yet, seemingly, no one was willing to go to the police. You know, when conditions are just right, we sometimes see how strands of destiny and history can get braided together. In this case, braided into a noose.

Because in 1955, American huckster evangelist William Branham paid a visit to Germany. Schaeffer was already fascinated by the man. Schaeffer saw past the razzle-dazzle of faith healings and speaking in tongues to the real machinery behind Branham's religious empire. A kind of misogynistic totalitarianism fueled by stoking fear of the apocalypse.

This, Schaeffer saw, was a recipe for control. A spell for brainwashing. And Schaeffer soon adopted Branham's fiery insistence that illness and sin were nothing more than demons in possession of the body. This is one of those echoes of history, isn't it? Because there are a lot of folks on the internet right now hollering about demons, everything old really is new again, and all that.

In 1953, Schaeffer founded a children's home mostly serving refugees from Soviet-occupied East Prussia. Six years later, a warrant was issued for his arrest by the local German police. The charges? Sexual abuse of two young boys. It looked like Schaeffer would finally be held accountable for his crimes against children.

But before justice could be served, Schaeffer and a band of his followers fled the country. He was in the Middle East plotting his next move when a chance meeting with the Chilean ambassador to Germany opened the door to a whole new world of opportunity. Come to Chile, the ambassador said. The man was blissfully ignorant of the outstanding warrant for Schaeffer.

The ugly charges against him. And so, in January 1961, Schaeffer appeared in South America. With the blessing of Chilean President Jorge Alessandri, Schaeffer bought an abandoned ranch a few hundred miles south of the city of Santiago. With 4,400 acres of land and 10 followers, Schaeffer set about creating a place he called the Dignidad Beneficent Society.

By 1963, 230 of the faithful joined him in Chile. Another handful of families arrived in 1966 and then a few more in 1973. Those first colonists were all German though eventually the community expanded through the adoption of impoverished local children. Schaeffer was now calling their new home Colonia Dignidad. It was an odd place right from the start.

Schaeffer didn't allow children to live with their parents, for example. In fact, children born at Colonia Dignidad spent their first year of life in the hospital, cared for by nurses. Schaeffer insisted on control over what the children were taught and by whom. The problems in child education Hmm. Very similar to the Nazi position on childhood.

The Nazis were big on obedience and groupthink. And the sooner you start on that, the better. The Nazi agenda was focused on de-intellectualizing education because people thinking for themselves was something the Nazis very much wanted. As their leader Adolf Hitler so famously said, To be fair, the parents of those children also weren't even allowed to live with each other.

Members of Colonia Dignidad were housed in dormitory style buildings with six people and often more to a single room. They had almost no possessions, just some work clothing, pajamas, a week's worth of underwear. Even their shoes were taken and locked away. Privacy was non-existent. Schaeffer made that clear. Even private conversations were verboten.

Schaeffer made that a rule, one he spelled out very clearly. If two are gathered, they are under the devil. If three are gathered, they are under Jesus. Any violation of this private conversation rule or any of Schaeffer's rules was met with swift punishment. In fact, even the perception of a violation was enough to trigger harsh consequences. Members didn't even have a say in the clothing they wore.

The men were required to dress in the traditional attire of a German farmer circa 1930. Woollen pants, suspenders, heavy linen or cotton shirts. The women were made to wear long, nearly shapeless gowns and bonnets. All members were forbidden to leave the compound. It was, Schaeffer said, a life lived in pure service to God.

Arbeit ist Gottesdienst. Werk is divine service. That divine service translated to 12-hour days for the colonists and sometimes even longer. Though they did get a brief break for lunch, they didn't get paid, not a nickel. This was labor, Schaeffer declared, that was donated with joy to serve the Lord. Which was the reason these pilgrims had journeyed from Germany to Chile in the first place.

They were deeply attached to Schaeffer as a spiritual leader and believed themselves to be part of a deeply faithful community. Are you wondering how these adults were able and willing to essentially surrender both their children and their freedom so easily? The first part of the answer is religious zealotry and the second is uglier, physical coercion.

It was the older members of the colony who were tasked with educating the youngest and nothing was off the table when it came to getting that job done. From beatings, to isolation, to psychopharmacology, to electroshock, whatever it took. But remember, children were separated from their families. Married couples were separated from each other.

Parents didn't know their own kids and those kids didn't know their own siblings. Family bonds were broken down and replaced with endless busy work, discipline, and obedience. And with time, there was less and less resistance as these pilgrims adapted to Schaeffer's brand of religious utopia. One of Schaeffer's favorite methods of control involved confession.

Members were encouraged to spy on each other, to betray each other, to sell each other out for the smallest of treats or privileges. Twice each day, at lunch and dinner, the colonists were expected to write the names of anyone they deemed to be a sinner on a large blackboard at the entrance to the compound's cafeteria.

Schaeffer would enter, taking his seat alone at a table facing his flock. There was a microphone on that table. And as the colonists ate, Schaeffer would announce the name of each sinner on the board. That person was required to stand and make a full confession. And listen, it was better to just make something up on the spot than deny the accusation.

Because the punishment for denial was worse than the punishment for the sin. The women in the colony had it extra rough. Schaeffer taught that women were filthy temptresses whose animal sexuality would drive men wild and lead them astray from God. Which is why the colony rules not only kept men and women apart, but worked women so hard and so long that it was Schaeffer's hope that even their satanic libidos would be exhausted.

Schaeffer's hatred of women ran so deep that he didn't even want them bearing children. Because despite the forced separations, the hideous baggy dresses, and the long exhausting days spent laboring, men and women did manage to find each other a colonia dignidad. If a couple dared to seek Schaeffer's permission to marry, that was a dangerous game.

Schaeffer might say yes on the condition that he be the one to choose the man's bride. Typically, his choice was a woman who'd aged out of childbearing years. That's weird, right? Yes, definitely. And God helped the woman who somehow managed to get pregnant outside of Schaeffer's rules. She would be isolated from the rest of the community, her baby taken at birth and given to the nurses at the hospital to be cared for.

Schaeffer loathed the idea of procreation. And no one seems to know why. But the basic facts tell the story. In the 30 years that Schaeffer held power at colonia dignidad, only 60 babies were born. In 30 years. Toward the end, between 1975 and 1989, there were no children born at all at colonia dignidad. Fourteen years with not a single crying baby.

Not one chattering toddler. How strange it must have been to live in a community with no children. None. If Schaeffer was concerned with his legacy, keeping the colony populated didn't seem to be a factor. What troubled Schaeffer and his pilgrims was the threat of international communism, which, given how they were living, was ironic. I mean, Schaeffer addressed his people as comrades and insisted they call him general or permanent uncle. But these nuances appeared to be lost on the faithful.

These were Germans who fled to Chile in the wake of the Russian assault on their country. Many had lost everything, were grieving and fearful and traumatized. Didn't help that Schaeffer effectively cut them off from the outside world. What little news they got was manipulated by Schaeffer. Old footage edited together to tell a story of worldwide chaos, war and famine and death. It was control at a magnitude designed to fracture the colonists' hold on reality.

And it worked. Surprisingly, given all of this strangeness, Colonia Dignidad was a financial success. I mean, nothing beats free labor for generating profits. In the interest of fairness, I'll tell you that Schaeffer did build a charity hospital with some of his proceeds and with the help of some Chilean state subsidies.

It was a good hospital, complete with two operating rooms and a maternity ward. Roughly 26,000 people received care there. The colony would even send buses to isolate in the remote villages, ferrying people who needed medical attention to the hospital. Thousands of babies were born there and benefited from the colony providing over four pounds of powdered milk every month for the first six years of life.

There's no denying the considerable good that was done at that hospital, even as atrocities were being committed elsewhere on the property, which was surrounded by eight foot tall fences tarped with barbed wire. Patrols armed with guns and trained attack dogs prowled the perimeter 24-7. There were guard towers, including one positioned at the highest peak in the region, overlooking the entire valley where the colony was located. Literal miles of copper wire were buried underground, part of a vast silent alarm system, just in case an intruder somehow sneaked past the fences, the guards and the dogs.

Beneath this seemingly bucolic village lay an underground network of tunnels and bunkers with the kind of sophisticated communication and security apparatus that you'd expect to find at a military installation. Just maybe not so much at an agrarian religious commune. With the help, unwitting or not, of the Chilean government, Paul Schaeffer managed to turn Colonia Dignidad into its own state within a state, with all of the machinery and apparatus needed to defend its borders and exercise its own particular flavor of justice.

But what's a paramilitary force to do when it has no external enemies to fight? Right? It turns on its own. Schaeffer's culture of confession and consequences evolved from paranoia and punishment to imprisonment and torture. A colonist could find him or herself facing what amounted to a life sentence based on nothing more than suspicion.

This is what happened to a man named Franz Bear. Bear was a Chilean national just 10 years old when he was adopted into Colonia Dignidad. One of many local children adopted, often illegally, by the colonists. Bear was a teenager assigned to work in the carpentry shop. He was confronted there one day by a group of men who accused him of stealing keys to one of the compound's dormitories. Bear denied taking the keys, but nothing he said made any difference. The men beat him savagely, using thick electrical cables to whip him until his skull was fractured and he lost consciousness. When Franz Bear finally awakened, it was in a bed at the colony hospital. He was lucky just to be alive, but that was where his luck ended. Schaeffer kept Bear prisoner in that hospital for the next 31 years.

Three decades of confinement, each day beginning with medication injected into his IV and a saucer of more than a dozen pills, which he was made to swallow under the watchful eye of the nurses. He was woozy, thick-headed, and clumsy as a result, but was still helped into his clothes and escorted by the guards to the carpentry shop, where he worked the same long shifts as before. Meals were given, but he wasn't permitted to see or speak to his fellow colonists. The days were a foggy blur, the routine interrupted only by the blood and pain of the electric saw biting into his flesh.

Accidents like that have to be expected when the person running the machine is so drugged. Bandaged and scarred, Bear would be returned at the end of each day to his upstairs room at the hospital, tucked away in a wing that the local patients and visitors were forbidden to enter. There were two more rooms at that hospital that were also kept secret and off-limits, rooms 9 and 14. That's where the electroshock treatments were performed. The doctor in charge of that was a woman, Dr. Gisele Seewald. Bear later said that she seemed to enjoy watching him suffer. The doctor would watch impassively as the patient was strapped with thick leather bands to a gurney, a crown bristling with wires attached to that person's head.

What are you feeling? She demanded to know. She adjusted the dials, increasing or decreasing the amount of current. How about now? Do you feel something? Her head cocked to one side, her eyes as bright and curious as a bird's. But of course, as the voltage coursed through her patient's bodies, arching their spines and locking their jaws, they were unable to respond. Awful as it was to find yourself on Schaefer's bad side, it wasn't much better to be chosen as a favorite. The favorites were known as Sprinters, a group of boys selected by Schaefer to be his personal assistants, called Sprinters because Schaefer would send them running across the compound on one errand or another. What with all that zipping around, Schaefer declared that wearing pants with a zipper was so inconvenient. His Sprinters were assigned uniforms, baggy gym shorts with elastic waistbands, which was so much more convenient for Schaefer. He enjoyed picking a favorite Sprinter or two for the very special privilege of sleeping in his room with him, in a special child-sized bed, snuggled up right next to his own. Eventually, the truth came out, as it always does. Schaefer would slip sedatives into the boys' food and drinks. Sponge baths were common, followed by sexual abuse and assault. No child of Colonia Dignidad was safe from Schaefer. He insisted they give him not just their complete obedience, but also their worship of him and him alone. He couldn't bear to be eclipsed in their imagination by anything or anyone.

Survivors of the colony tell the story of something that happened one late December in the mid-1970s. Schaefer announced a little outing to the colony's children, a field trip, an adventure. He loaded the children onto a bus and drove them to a nearby river. Santa Claus is coming, he said. Santa Claus is coming for a visit. The kids, so excited, lined up along the riverbank, nearly vibrating. And suddenly, look, look, it's a raft floating toward them, piloted by a white-bearded man in a red suit.

Santa Claus! Santa Claus had come to Colonia Dignidad. The boys and girls cheered and shouted, it's Santa! It's Santa! And then, Paul Schaefer pulled a handgun from his belt and fired. Santa Claus fell from his raft, struggling and thrashing before disappearing beneath the water's surface. The children were mostly silent from shock, though some were beginning to wail. Santa Claus is dead! Now, return to the bus. After that, there was only one holiday ever celebrated at Colonia Dignidad. Paul Schaefer's birthday, December 4th. Oh, did that shock you? I thought you knew.

There's no such thing as a good Nazi. They're all monsters. That's the very thing that makes them Nazis. Their complete contempt for humanity. Didn't you learn that from Indiana Jones? The History Channel? No? Okay, it's actually pretty simple. All Nazis are all bad. All of them, with no exceptions, ever. And don't forget that Paul Schaefer was a card-carrying Nazi from the old country.

Not that he really shot Santa Claus. That was a big charade. The man really did love theater, but the emotional and psychological wounds inflicted on those children? That was all real. By this point, Colonia Dignidad had expanded far beyond its original 4,400 acres. Now the compound controlled more than 32,000 acres, and not all of that land was acquired peacefully. One particularly vile case involved a small chapel and convent that was located not far from the compound's main entrance. Schaefer wanted that land, but the church refused to sell. So, Schaefer just declared that the property was his. The nuns living in that convent refused to leave their home.

Nuns can be seriously badass, and these sisters were. Schaefer didn't care. Under his orders, the colonists cut off the water supply to the convent. They stole the few farm animals the sisters kept. They ringed the grounds and barbed wire, and at night shone bright lights into the convent windows. Still, the sisters held firm. And then the beatings began. But not the nuns. The beatings were for the children they taught. The sisters watched in horror as kids making their way to the convent for catechism lessons were yanked off the path and brutalized. Then came the videos. Schaefer's people circulated crude fakes of orgies, the sisters fornicating with priests. And their grand finale? Setting fire to the convent with the nuns inside. The women fled. What choice was left? The smoking ruins of their convent, chapel, and home now belonged to Colonia Dignidad.

These days, the Internet just loves quoting the French philosopher, Voltaire. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire was dead for centuries before Paul Schaefer turned Colonia Dignidad into a prison and enslaved his followers. But when he said those now immortal words, he predicted almost exactly what would come to pass at Schaefer's utopia.

You believe things that are incomprehensible, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them. Go then and do what is unjust because we commanded. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. If the God-given understanding of your mind does not resist the demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist the demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world.

Schaefer systematically dismantled the family and social bonds of his followers, replacing them with blind obedience to only one person, himself. He systematically undermined their trust in each other, turning them into spies and informants loyal to only one person, himself. Schaefer systematically groomed and raped their sons and was accountable to only one person, himself.

Schaefer didn't need an army of thugs or goons to keep his people in line. He created an army out of the people himself. Schaefer had a favorite saying, Every man has his price. And Schaefer had a particular gift for finding that price. Chile was a poor country and Schaefer used bribes and gifts and favors to make certain that the authorities remained a friend to Colonia Dignidad. The kind of friend, you know, willing to look the other way when, say, a chapel and convent burns to the ground. Accidents happen. The kind of friend who sees the colonists being slowly starved as a punishment, nor hears the screams as another is beaten.

The kind of friend who marvels at the generosity of the colony's hospital, but never once asks why some corridors and some rooms are off limits. And, of course, Schaefer also had a gift for manipulation, clearly. And now that his followers had been so desensitized to their own suffering, so desensitized to committing violence at their leader's command, well, they were ready for the big time. Which brings us to the military coup that brought Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to power. More than 40,000 people were imprisoned, tortured, or killed during Pinochet's 17-year reign.

That's a whole lot of bodies. But Nazi sympathizer Pinochet had a friend with a heavily guarded compound and a sprawling network of underground bunkers and tunnels, so handy for making the undesirable disappear. Did a group of devoutly religious German farmers really help the Chilean dictator commit some of the worst human rights abuses in modern history? Were the members of Colonia Dignidad accomplices to murder?

Next time on True Weird Stuff, it's part two. How pedophile Nazi cult leader Paul Schaefer turned his religious farming commune into a mass torture and killing operation. And why some people believe that Schaefer was actually the lowest ranking Nazi to walk the grounds of Colonia Dignidad. Don't miss part two of this story on the next True Weird Stuff.

Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Erin Cox, Kary "Doc" Bowser, and Don Morgan. Sherry, horrifying. Doesn't even begin to describe what we found out in this episode. And I'm guessing in part two we're not going to have much of a happy ending, I'm supposing. The Santa Claus story really is the worst. It reminded me of an old joke, if you don't mind that I tell it. We were so poor that my father went up to the roof, shot off a shotgun, came down and told us, sorry kids, Santa committed suicide. You know the thing about this, some of these things are so horrific they might not want to even put it in a horror movie that was passing for fiction. Because it's not believable.

Nobody could be evil enough. I always think that there's a special place in hell for people who play so heavily on people's fears and pervert religion in this kind of way. Because they've had faith, they've had faith, ultimately they have faith in God but they believe that somehow you have a special connection to God and they believe in you and you know better and you still lead them on. This guy was particularly surprising to me as a charismatic guru because he wasn't particularly charismatic at all and I think he benefited from timing. So hear me out on that. Oh Max, I knew you would enjoy the fork in the eye story. I had to include that just for you. So hard to know where to begin with all the details in this one.

Here was a guy who on paper it should have all added up to not much success, a bit of a drifter, a bit of a loser. Eventually he gets caught for being the child predator that he is, right? But at the time that all of that was happening, people were loath to report child sex abuse. They still are today. They viewed him as, even though he had no formal seminary training, he just declared himself a youth pastor one day and fuss it was so, right? But he was clergy in the minds of these people and they were hesitant to make that accusation and so they kept kicking the can. One town to the next, one church to the next, one job to the next. And all of this happening against the backdrop of post-World War II Germany when the country was just in ruins. And so you had a lot of people that were, absolutely had lost everything.

These are German citizens who first had to deal with the Third Reich destroying their entire way of life. And then you know the Russian army, the Soviet army marched on Germany and eviscerated these people. And so they were lost and desperate. And here was someone who promised them a better life. And you can honestly see how that was attractive.

And it wasn't because people kept kicking the can and because it wasn't until he fled the country of Germany because of the warrant that was out for him, it was very easy to not know what he First of all, I didn't know that there were people who left Germany during and after World War II who went to South America who weren't Nazi leaders.

Do you know what I mean? I never knew that there were people who with a general population who would say, hey we've got to get out of here. And that's you know that's where they ended up. I know that I've talked about this before but I was in a play called Judgment at Nuremberg and I played the judge. And there's a great speech that the judge has in this play. And he says something along the lines of, and this is talking about the people who are complicit with this guy, okay, because there's nobody who was a leader that didn't have lieutenants. You know what I mean? And the speech talks about the fact that these people who are like the lieutenants, they themselves were not the monsters. They just fell in line with the monster. But if the monster had never appeared we never would have known that these people were indeed capable of doing monstrous things under the guidance of a true monster. Do you see what I mean? Completely. And this by the way, this by the way falls under the category of but I was just following orders. Right. Which at the Nuremberg trials post-World War II was not deemed an adequate defense. So if you're listening to this right now and you're going against your heart, soul, your values, and your morals because you're following orders, just know that that won't, that won't save you in this world or the next.

Sherry, can we talk about this poor guy Frantz Bohrer? Am I saying his name Bohrer? Franz Baar, yeah. Does this not sound like, every part of this could be its own horror movie. So this guy was put away in a hospital and drugged up for 31 years. And tortured. And tortured. Can you imagine? That's a murder where the victim is still alive, if you think about it. That is just, there's really not many ways to characterize that. Better to have murdered the person. Yeah, what they did to that boy. And to the thing that you said just a few minutes ago, tens of thousands of ordinary Germans emigrated after World War II. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and other places too, not just South America, many United States. Now the reason that we think that only not high-ranking Nazi officers went to South America is because that's a pop culture conspiracy theory that, you know, Joseph Mengele and Hitler didn't, you know, they changed their identities and had cosmetic surgery and lived to be, Hitler lived to be an old man in South America. So one of the rumors about colonia dignidad was that Mengele was on site there for some period of time. No one's been able to substantiate that. And a lot of people have tried. But the one thing that Schaeffer was very good at, he, it turns out that he was born to run a death camp because he was extremely adept at hierarchy, at compelling secrecy and loyalty, and at sketchy record-keeping.

So it's, you know, it's long been suspected that high-ranking Nazis were at colonia dignidad. Yeah. But that, you know, we haven't proved it. And anytime you think about like, wow, there, were there a lot of Germans in South America? Are we familiar with the supermodel Gisele Bündchen? Yeah. She's from Brazil. She's a Brazilian citizen, she's a Brazilian person with German ancestry.

Not every German. Yeah, you never thought about it, right? You know what? I knew she was from Brazil, but I'd never given thought to the fact that she has like a German name. I had never thought about that before. Yeah. Just because a person has a German last name with German ancestry post-World War II does not mean they were in any way, shape, or form connected to the Third Reich or that they were Nazis themselves. Many, many, many German citizens were cowed and terrorized during that. And many others were collaborators with the regime who were quote-unquote either just following orders or honestly, and this is really appalling, well, you know, the the SS just came and took the Jewish neighbors. Let's pop over and see what's left behind that we can keep. That happened a lot, too.

Yeah. Because people are, as we often point out on this show, pretty terrible a lot of the time. So that's to answer your question about how many how many Germans really were in South America and the United States, and that's a lot. Franz Baar, they, so Schaefer could not abide the thought of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. That man was more scared of a vagina than I am of a cockroach. I mean, he just could not abide the thought. Freud would have a field day with Paul Schaefer, and his repulsion for sexual intercourse between men and women for pregnancy and childbirth is clearly reflected in the low birth rate for the colonists at Colonia Dignidade. But we sure do need free labor, and we need an endless pool of free labor, which is why very, very, very, very many local children were snatched up and adopted into the colony. Sometimes legally, meaning the, you know, the parent or parents surrendered the child for adoption, and sometimes not so much. Sometimes the kids were just taken because we had to have somebody work in those fields. And if we weren't going to have women having babies, then we were going to have to steal those babies from somewhere. But this is a theme that's come up in a few episodes of True Weird Stuff, hasn't it? The woman that was going in and kidnapping children to put them up for adoption.

It turns out that there are a few, just a few basic flavors of evil, but humans are endlessly creative about customizing their flavor of evil. You know, your murder, mayhem, torture, and so forth. So when you kind of, when you look at the big picture of what Colonia Dignidad was as a commune, you see very, very early on insane human rights abuses, brainwashing, manipulation, and extreme coercive control. And that was before Paul Schaeffer volunteered the colony's services to the Pinochet regime, which is the second part of this episode. Well, and that's, it's interesting that you mentioned him and I'm interested to see what is going to come up in the next episode about that because I had heard of Pinochet and I knew that he was a bad guy, but I never understood this connection to this guy because I had never heard about this before. I just had simply never heard about him. You would have to be, I'm guessing a lot of people listening right now, if you even were alive in the mid-1970s, you were a toddler, right?

Or a young kid, elementary, middle school age, maybe, depending. Right. So this was, you can go back and, the thing about the horrors of the Pinochet regime is they did occur in the 1970s where we had video, you know, television video cameras in full color documenting these things. I was in Chile outside of Santiago. They were choked with bodies. What, what Pinochet and his goons did to the people of Chile is a crime against humanity on a staggering scale and that's hard to do alone. You need, you need an awful lot of infrastructure to commit that kind of mass abuse, violence, and murder. And there was Paul Schaeffer ready and willing to lend a hand. Underneath Colonia Dignidad was, for the time, a state-of-the-art military complex with rooms that they had soundproofed to be interrogation rooms, medical clinics, cells for prisoners, and these tunnels ran all over beneath the compound. So, you know, you could, you could bring, you could bring political prisoners in. And what do we mean by political prisoners? Well, folks, I'm talking about social workers and teachers and newspaper reporters and folks that were against what Pinochet was doing. Those were the political prisoners. They were capturing school teachers and social workers and blindfolding them and gagging them, throwing them in the trunks of cars, heading out into the countryside. And, and by this point, Colonia Dignidad was massive. And it can, they had full control over this entire valley, like the surveillance that Schaeffer, the surveillance operation Schaeffer was able to put in place is pretty breathtaking. Cars would come onto the property and these people would disappear into these underground facilities and literally never be seen again. And I know you're thinking, well, probably mass graves. Well, let's get to next week. Because for a guy that, that pulled his own eye out with a fork and didn't get past like fourth grade, Schaeffer had no shortage of natural talent when it came to running an operation, a killing operation at this scale. And the shocking thing is, and I'll let you know this, because this is one of the more shocking aspects of this, is that if you would like, you can go on vacation to Colonia Dignidad right now on booking.com and like Expedia and TripAdvisor. You can, you can book your accommodation.

So it's there like as a, as a, as a tourist museum. They've changed the name. They've changed the name because Colonia, the name Colonia Dignidad is and will be forever associated in history with basically a death camp serving the Pinochet regime. They changed the name and it's now a tourist destination. Wow. If that doesn't give you the shiver willies, I don't know man.

That really does. That'll be in next week's episode. I can't imagine. I can't imagine. Well, where do you, where do you want to go this year? I don't want to go to the Bahamas. You want to go to Costa Rica? No. I want to go to Colonia Dignidad and see the death camp. It's amazing. It's amazing to me that the place still exists and there's a lot of it that's off limits. And the people that live there, these are the descendants of the, in many cases, most cases of the early, the first members of the commune, they are protective of the place's history because what they're protecting are their own kinfolk. It's a very strange and complicated history that the place has. And some of the children of Colonia Dignidad who today are, you know, the later children, the first wave of children of Colonia Dignidad are dead.

But if you were a child in like the 70s, you're in your 60s now, right? Yeah. And you have these, they're Chilean nationals, you know, they were born, they're second generation born Chilean citizens but with German names and German identities and German heritages because they've only lived in this extremely German-centric compound. And the stories that these people have to tell about what they experienced as children of Colonia Dignidad is hair raising. And this is modern. This happened, you guys, this was covered by like Dan Rather on the news. This, that's how recent this is.

Sherry, there are, there are differences but then again there are some similarities between this and Synanon which was the group of people that were in California and I know that I've talked about this in a previous episode but in the late 1950s around 1960, Synanon started, it was to help people who were addicted to narcotics and it ended up becoming this violent controlling cult that controlled people's sex lives and all of this other stuff that was just, it was just insane. But you can see that at the head of it, you had the person who was in charge and everybody sort of had to fall in line with whatever they wanted. And if they didn't, the violence happened to them. So it started out, that started out with a very good, you know, idea of something that they wanted to do to help people and then it became this violent cult that is very similar to this in a lot of ways when it comes to how people are manipulated and how people are controlled. Well, you know, I don't want to say all cults but many of these cults that are infamous, on paper they start out with what sounds like a pretty okay mission, you know, pretty reasonable mission statement. The thing that, the thing that makes it a cult is that the people become, the message becomes the individual who's leading it, whether that's Charles Manson or Jim Jones or Agnish Bhagwan. Yeah, or, you know, Keith Raniere, right? Paul Schaeffer.

The message becomes very much a cult of personality and the loyalty, as we said in this one, it's all to one person and that's Paul Schaeffer. Your loyalty and fidelity to Paul Schaeffer comes above everything else, including including God and this was a commune that was founded on faith and farming. Paul Schaeffer put himself above God, above the family unit, above everything and that's what you, when you really like boil down the basic recipe of what makes a cult a cult, you really have this one charismatic figure that somehow persuades or coerces people into suspending their own judgment, morality, personal desire, everything in service of that individual's. Right, and Jim Jones, Jim Jones, of course, you talked about and it's interesting, there is the Jim Jones connection to this as well because that was, I can remember when that happened and the horrific nature that 700 people died. The fact that a lot of people, you know, people discovered Jim Jones in Jonestown when, you know, at the end and you don't necessarily, like the movie with Powers Booth, right, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't spend a lot of time in Indianapolis at the very beginning of Jim Jones cult career where he was being coached and counseled by William Branham who, and I don't, here at True Weird Stuff, we do not make fun of people's religion unless we're making fun of ourselves. We do not, your faith practice is your own but there's no harm in knowing the roots of like the Branham religious movement and how closely connected it was to the Ku Klux Klan and to crime. There's no harm in knowing that. That doesn't change your relationship to God or your faith one iota. It just reminds you once again that humans are flawed and we should be very careful about how much trust and power we give to regular old human beings who tell us they have an inside track to the hereafter because that is very often your first red flag. Something bad is going to go down. I had a very wise friend of mine say something to me one time that I think is very true and that is do not idolize people too much because it diminishes you. Not because they're human and they will let you down because they are human and they are, will let you down but what it does is you have diminished yourself in the process.

And I think you can see that in the story of the first wave of settlers, a colonial dignidad. Right. And I think it's a fair question to go okay but why did they stay? They were separated from, husbands and wives were separated from each other, your children were taken. I need to remind you that they lived behind locked gates and barbed wire and their shoes had been taken. They didn't have a nickel to their names. It's so hard. It's so hard. When you get that far deep and down, it's so hard to get out. I can see how anybody can get swept up in a cult. It's very easy to sit on the outside and say well just do this or just do that you know because how many people do you know who have been in bad relationships and it seems like they are, they've been kidnapped into the relationship and you're waving to them going you can leave, you can leave. Any day now. Any day now. There were some people who during the Pinochet era at colonial dignidad, a couple few people did manage to escape the compound and fled and changed their names. They were terrified. They were so scared but for the most part the people that followed Paul Schaeffer to Chile, they were in it. They were in it for the long haul and of course in any group of people you will always find those who are willing to commit atrocities, right? So inside colonial dignidad, the colonists themselves, there were those who were just terrorized. They were snatched off the field where they were working, taken to the secret corridor in the hospital and tormented with electroshock therapy for the sin of whatever it was they'd been accused of, you know cutting their eyes at somebody, right? But always remember that that individual that was snatched from the field and taken for torture was led by his or her neighbors who were willing to do Paul Schaeffer's atrocity work, right? Because you'll always find people that, well, you know what? Here I am. And we see that play out in real life every single day. That you sometimes don't need like official bad guys to come get you because your neighbors are delighted to be the bad guys. Look at the Rwandan genocide. You know that that shit was broadcast over commercial radio like our day job, right?

Okay, today we're killing the neighbors in this part of town and people took up weapons and slaughtered their neighbors, their co-workers. So there's never a shortage of people willing to be terrible and Paul Schaeffer was very talented at identifying who could be turned to terrible. And so Colonia Dignidad, they long before he aligned himself with Pinochet and they began torturing and murdering political prisoners. The residents of Colonia Dignidad were already doing that to each other under his watchful eye.

And this by the way, this is all going down during, I'm trying to think what would have been happening in 1975. When did the album Hotel California come out Max, like 1977? That was a little later, yes. So 1975 was the last year the U.S. was involved in the Vietnam War to come out. So what I'm thinking is while Americans were watching Tony Orlando and Dawn maybe on TV or the Tony and Cher show. Yeah, probably somewhere around there. This was happening just to the south in Chile. And even in 1975, Nazis sounded like something that existed long ago in black and white. Like regular people just living their lives could not comprehend that there was a Nazi death commune in Chile while they were watching Sonny and Cher. And I don't blame them because it sounds surreal doesn't it? Hey Sherry, I hate to say what I'm going to say is, but something like this is going on somewhere in the world right now and we don't know about it. Something like this is going on probably not too far from where you live and we don't know about it. Because we are living in some times. Let me just tell you where folks appear to be taking the law into their own hands in very troubling ways and I'm already probably on some watch list because I say things like all Nazis are bad and there's no such thing as a good Nazi or even a medium Nazi. If you're a Nazi, you're the worst. Full stop. That's probably got me on some watch list right now in this world. The thing about Colonia Dignidad that is so shocking is how incredibly powerful Paul Schaefer became in such a short amount of time. I mean this is a man fleeing an arrest warrant for sexually assaulting children with a fourth grade, well not even a third grade education, who is operating like his own independent state within the country of Chile. That is breathtaking, is it not?

It is and the type of person that does this is a combination of evil things, being a psychopath and then also being educated with the information on how to be a good Nazi. I mean it's just, it's the worst possible combination of things. We, you know, there's just so much going on. It's hard to pay attention and ignorance of history, not understanding what has already happened, makes it impossible to recognize the signs of it happening again, right? Well we have very short memories. Assuming we have a memory at all, in order to remember something you have to know it in the first place.

Right. Like the first time you get pinkeye you're like, holy God, my eye is going to fall out, I'm dying, because you've never experienced it before. The next time you get pinkeye, you go get medication. But you have to know a thing before you can address it, heal it, fight it, resolve it. You have to know what it is and we've done a very, very, very good job of making sure that so many people don't, they can't recognize the pattern because they're unaware that it's happened before. If you could, if Paul Schaefer could get away with that in the mid-1970s in Chile, what do you think is possible today? Given the technology and given, given the how cheap certain things have become. Like it is so cheap right now to own your own full-scale media network operating out of your basement. At Colonia Dignidad in the 70s, they were hand-splicing newsreel film together with scotch tape and showing those falsified things to their residents to keep them in a state of perpetual terror about the state of the world. You could do that on your phone now. Yeah. Think about how easy, in fact you can get a middle school-aged kid to do that editing for you on your phone.

Think about like drone technology. Think about what is possible now. What could a guy like Paul Schaefer put together now if that operation was so successful then? And you know we didn't, there's no not addressing Schaefer's crimes against children. He was a monster. He was. He was an absolute monster. He was a sexual predator, a pedophile, a rapist. He was a fiend. And all of his most extreme fiendishness was aimed at young boys.

Yeah. Now he treated women like, like I mean, Paul Schaefer would rather have dinner with a dirty farmhog than with a woman. I mean he just despised and loved women. But his real sadism was for boys. And what happened to some of those boys at Colonial Dignidad is absolutely unspeakable. Yeah. And I think it's triggering and it's triggering for me.

It's upset, it's upsetting and I think you have to, you have to address that aspect of Paul Schaefer. But boy we sure don't have to hang on every word. You know what I mean? Like let's, let's call it for what it is but let's not, let's not further victimize and exploit those boys by going into loving detail. And that does exist. Some of that does exist.

I'm sure. Because a lot of those, a lot of those boys talked and many of them haven't because the shame of being victimized is something that is a load that they carry. Many of them all threw their lives into the grave. So this is a, this is like the worst. This is the worst. And it combines the worst of the worst. It's, it's everything. It's a cult.

It's Nazis. It's torture. It's imprisonment. It's every possible law being broken. It's burning a convent down with the nuns still inside and it's pretending to shoot Santa Claus. I'm telling you. Like no stone unturned. Those two things by themselves you wouldn't put in a horror movie. I mean, can you imagine? The Santa Claus thing.

Just sit with a sec, for a second, with the magnitude of the understanding that in order to turn these children entirely to you, to break their humanity completely, look what he, look what he did, look what he knew to do. Hmm. What he knew to do. They already didn't have parents. They already didn't have sibling. They had no family bonds, these kids. And now they don't have Santa Claus. They only have permanent uncle. And can we just both agree that the last nickname any man with any sense should want is permanent uncle? What is it about that, Max? I don't know. Chris, I don't have any children. I'm permanent uncle. He is permanent uncle. There's something off about that.

So yeah, the nuns, the Santa Claus incident, this episode ends where the next episode, where part two begins, with just a busload of people asking a colonist, a farmer, who doesn't even have shoes, who does not live with his wife or know his children, bringing that man in from the field, and having that man, not one of the guards, having that man drive those people to their death. Do you think that was not intentional? It was a test of loyalty and a further way to break down that colonist. No question, no question. And so there is a question you can ask, what did they know and when did they know it? All of the colonists knew so many things, but none of them knew everything. Many were just slave labor. In Nazi Germany. Yeah, it was kind of like that in Nazi Germany. Some people knew some things, but nobody knew everything. Now, at the end of next week's episode, we'll tell you how to get a room at the recently renamed Colonial Dignity. Can I tell you, I'd like to travel, but I'm going to avoid that one. If I happen to be in Chile for some reason, I can't imagine what that would be, I don't get out much, but if I happen to be in Chile and I'd like to go, it's a beautiful country. It's a beautiful country. Oh my gosh.

And you know, my nephew Danny, he's more like a son-in-law, but my nephew Danny, he was born in Ecuador, he's an American citizen now, but you know the stories he tells me of growing up as a little boy in Ecuador, he still has family there, the pictures I've seen. I mean, South America, just spectacular, gorgeous country. I'd love to go to Chile. If I were going to Santiago or somewhere in Chile for any reason, buddy, I'm going to Colonial Dignity. I'm bringing you home a t-shirt.

Okay, key chain. I can't think of very many places like that that got a new name and became tourist attractions. Can you? I think the prison where Pablo Escobar was down in Colombia, I think that is now a tourist attraction or it did become a tourist attraction. Is it like a resort where you can book a I don't know, Sherry. I don't know what the current state of it is, but I know that it did have tourist attraction because he said, okay, fine, you got me, but so I'm going to build a prison and this is where I'm going to be and you can keep me here and that's my deal. I'll turn myself in if I do that, so and then of course he escaped from there because he was killing people in there. I mean, I could see wanting to go to that. I mean, they turned Colonial Dignity into a resort, which seems weird to me, but and the people who work there are get a little salty with you if you push too much. I know that people go to Auschwitz, some of the the Nazi death camps, so I guess you could say it's a tourist attraction, but I wouldn't say that it's necessarily a resort, but I think that in a way I think that it's important that we go and see these things so we don't forget. We collectively don't forget that those that see it are affected by it and then spread the word to other people. I was 19 when I went to Dachau, which was a German, not a Nazi. I don't want to say German because the poor German people.

Was it in Poland? No, it's in Germany. Dachau is in Germany, a Nazi death camp, and it was a pivotal life experience for me because I was already like a nerdy history girl then, but to be there, to be at Dachau is to see the whole context for the death camp. It's this beautiful, lush farm country, and there are farms and houses all around it that were there at the time that Dachau was operating.

So I think that context is important because it's a powerful reminder that something awful might happen in your backyard, and how are you going to respond? Are you going to get a job there and help the awfulness happen? Are you going to close your eyes and pretend none of it's real? Because we're all called on, and if you can get through life without it, yay, you won the lottery, but we're all called on at some point or another to have our morality challenged. Who are you as a person? What are your values? And I can't even imagine living downwind of Dachau, much less clocking in and working there every day. It's absolutely horrifying, which is, you know, some of the insanity on the internet, the Holocaust denials and all. It's like, folks, tell me you're an imbecile without coming right out and saying it because you couldn't spell it anyway, probably. These things happened.

These things happened, and you don't need to feel personally attacked by things that happened in the past, but I think you should feel personally called to be a part of the solution and it not happening again, if at all possible. But there are people that are just shitty. There are terrible people. There are wonderful people that would stand in front of a for you, a complete stranger. But there are just as many absolutely god-awful people that are selfish and cold and who don't mind watching suffering because it's entertaining. And you had a lot of this at Colonia Dignidad. You had a lot of people on both sides of that eight-foot-tall barbed wire electrified fence. You had people on the inside of Colonia Dignidad that were happy to light a match and watch the world burn.

And then you had people on the other side of the Frente regime that couldn't deliver the bodies to you fast enough. There was no shortage of terrible on both sides of that fence and no shortage of victims on both sides of that fence. People that were powerless and trapped who were there against their will, unable to escape, no resources, scared out of their minds on both sides of that fence. That was also true. But all of that brings me back to what a weird-ass place for a vacation. Yeah, seriously. Yeah, so join us next week for part two and let's see what, let's see what happened when Paul Schaefer could no longer outrun the law. Did they ever bring him to justice? Did he go down in a blaze of furor in his own Chilean bunker underground? Did he cut a deal and escape to a country that gave him amnesty? What happened to Paul Schaefer? He started working for David Letterman. Did he work for David Letterman perhaps and led his band? I'm sorry, every time, every time you'd say Paul Schaefer, it's this guy that's on David Letterman. My husband had the same reaction. My husband's like, I don't know if I could have kept that name. I was like, it's okay because absolutely no, the only, when I say Paul Schaefer, you think David Letterman, nobody thinks Nazi, commune, pedophile, murderous cult leader, which is good for the David Letterman, Paul Schaefer, I guess. That's it for us. Hey, listen, appreciate your, your being here because you know, you're who we make it for and we are so grateful to all of you for being part of the True Weird family and for listening to this podcast and if you hop over to our website, trueweirdstuff.com, eventually we're going to, we're going to expand out and try to create some other fun things for you and one of the first things that Tony, our executive producer, would like to make happen is sort of a True Weird Stuff newsletter like an e-blast. We never, we don't spam and we never sell our databases or anything. If you are interested and that sounds like something cool, you can go to trueweirdstuff.com and sign up and we're pulling a bunch of people at random and sending them these really high-quality True Weird Stuff hoodies that are, I mean, they're black so, you know, the blood won't show. Yeah, the blood won't show and the dirt won't show if you're grave-robbing, but also they're formal enough that the judge wouldn't, you know, be completely disgusted with you if you wore it for your arraignment. There's a pop-up when you go to the website, there's a pop-up for that and we, what we like to think of it is, if we were in school, this would be the True Weird Table and we're inviting you to come sit at the True Weirds Table with us. Yeah, because, you know, when you're sitting here, there's nothing you can say that anybody's going to go, Ew, what? We're all going to go, Oh, what?

Do you have more? That's right. Do you have more details? So, that's it for this episode. Be back here next week for part two, Nazi Death Camp Weaponized. Thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content. Everything True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com and follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram.

True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025 Now! Media.

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