Chile confirms sentence against ex-Nazi soldier

[struggle4progress]

SANTIAGO (AFP)---The Chilean Supreme Court has confirmed a sentence of three years and one day for Paul Schaefer, a former Nazi corporal and founder of a mysterious German enclave in Chile, for torturing settlers.

According to court documents, Schaefer, 84, ordered that psychotropic medication be administered and electric shocks be applied to eight members of the enclave in order to prevent them between 1980 and 1990 from speaking out about the Colonia Dignidad enclave.

The Second Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court on Wednesday confirmed the sentence that came from a divided ruling in 2008 overseen by Judge Jorge Zepeda, who has investigated alleged crimes committed at the enclave.

Schaefer faces four other sentences he is serving since being sent to a Chilean prison after his capture in Argentina in March 2005 ...

http://www.ejpress.org/article/36536



There are more than 1,100 desaparecidos (disappeared persons) in Chile and one of them is a U.S. citizen - Boris Weisfeiler. A Russian-born mathematics professor at Pennsylvania State University, Weisfeiler vanished while on a hiking trip near the border between Chile and Argentina in the early part of January 1985. After a quick and cursory investigation, Chilean authorities concluded that Weisfeiler had drowned in the Nuble River during his trip. Declassified U.S. documents tell a different story. According to an informant, Weisfeiler was detained by Augusto Pinochet's soldiers, presumed to be a CIA, or a Russian or a Jewish spy, and taken to the mysterious German settlement Colonia Dignidad. The declassified U.S. documents show that the U.S. Embassy personnel did not do enough to ascertain the fate of Weisfeiler, the only missing U.S. citizen in Chile. As consul Jayne Kobliska stated more than a year after Weisfeiler's disappearance in a memo from April 1986, "the real danger in this case is that we will delay action until it is too late to either save Weisfeiler's life or to determine the true circumstances of his death" ... http://www.weisfeiler.com/boris/

[rabs]

1. Speaking of Nazis in Chile, let me introduce you to a real SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer

Paul Schaefer is a boy scout compared with Walther Rauff, the Nazi gas van expert.

----

Like a number of former Nazi war criminals Rauff sought refuge in South America, he eventually settled in Chile.

The late “Nazi Hunter” Simon Wiesenthal sought for years to get Rauff extradited and stand trial for his war crimes and in 1984 a warrant was issued for his arrest and extradition and was to be taken to Santiago on the 16 May 1984, but Rauff had cheated justice, as he died of heart failure and the news reached the west on the 14 May 1984. Rauff was buried in Santiago Chile.

--------------------

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/einsatz/rauff.html

A short video of his funeral in Santiago in 1984.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoT7ruKPsHw

[struggle4progress]

2. SWC APPLAUDS ARGENTINA FOR CAPTURING NAZI FUGITIVE PAUL SCHAEFER (2005)

March 15, 2005
SWC APPLAUDS ARGENTINA FOR CAPTURING NAZI FUGITIVE PAUL SCHAEFER; DEMANDS CHILE TO INVESTIGATE HIS CONNECTIONS WITH NAZI WAR CRIMINALS
The Simon Wiesenthal Center applauded Argentina’s government for the capture and deportation of former Nazi Paul Schaefer, the founder of the infamous Colonia Dignidad in Southern Chile ... The Center also requested that Schaefer be interrogated about the fate of Boris Weisfeiler, an American Jewish mathematician who disappeared without a trace in 1984, while he was on vacation in Southern Chile, near Colonia Dignidad ... http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=4442249&ct=5851147

Report on Science and Human Rights
Spring 2004 Vol XXIV, No. 1
Search for Information about Missing Math Professor Continues: New Development in the case of Boris Weisfeiler
Victoria Baxter
... In 1991, the Chilean Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, a body charged with documenting human rights violations that occurred during the Pinochet regime, issued its final report. In it, Boris Weisfeiler is listed as one of the unresolved cases of possible human rights violations. There is reason to believe that there was more information about the specifics of the case that the Commission never received from the U.S. Embassy and the Chilean military and therefore was unable to make a definitive determination about the case. In fact, in June 2000, the U.S. State Department declassified over 250 documents concerning the case of Boris Weisfeiler. The documents, which include eyewitness accounts and CIA documents and communiqués, indicate that Weisfeiler was not involved in a hiking accidental, but it is believed that Chilean soldiers detained him as a presumed spy from Russia and may have taken him to Colonia Dignidad. Why was Boris, an American citizen, taken to a Latin American torture center? Was he subjected to torture? Is he still alive and being held at Colonia Dignidad? According to the documents, an army patrol member testified at the U.S. Embassy that the army did arrest Boris and that he was brought to Colonia Dignidad. He also reported that Boris was brutally interrogated at the colony. The individual also testified that he saw Boris alive inside Colonia Dignidad over two years later, in July 1987. According to reports, he was being kept in "animal-like conditions." The declassified documents also contain evidence that points to a possible cover up. The members of the army patrol, who reported arrested Boris as well as the Carabineros (Chilean civilian police) who participated in the original search party were all transferred to other posts soon after Boris' disappearance. The local man, who originally informed the Carabineros about a stranger hiking in the area, committed suicide shortly after making his testimony. The U.S. Embassy reports his death as occurring under "mysterious circumstances"; he was found hanging on one of the posts of a cable bridge, almost in the exact location where Carabineros speculated that Boris had drowned. A declassified 1987 CIA document claimed "but could not conclusively prove" that Chilean officials misidentified Boris as a subversive and he was most likely murdered by these officials. The CIA document also states that a Chilean source told the CIA that among the officials who conducted the original search for Boris was a Chilean secret police unit responsible for "clean(ing) the area of any evidence that would indicate that Weisfeiler had been murdered." The declassified documents also revealed that the State Department refused to give the U.S. Embassy in Chile sufficient funds to continue an investigation into Weisfeiler's disappearance. In 1986, the American Mathematical Society offered to raise money to assist the investigation, but the State Department never took the society up on its offer ... http://shr.aaas.org/report/xxiv/weisfeiler.htm

U.S. Math Professor Believed Killed By Pinochet's Secret Police

Santiago Times/March 28, 2007
By Nathan Crooks
Olga Weisfeiler, the sister of an American citizen who disappeared in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, held an emotional press conference last Thursday morning with U.S. Ambassador Craig Kelly at the American Embassy in Santiago. In her seventh trip to Chile, Weisfeiler urged anyone with information on the fate of her brother Boris to finally come forward. She said it was now time for the truth to come out ... Schaefer was sentenced last year to seven years in jail for his involvement with a buried cache of arms found in 2005. He had previously been sentenced in absentia to 20 years in prison for the sexual crimes he committed while leading the colony (ST, August 29, 2006). But many of Schaefer's co-conspirators fled to Argentina and Germany and have yet to be brought to justice ... http://www.rickross.com/reference/schafer/schafer34.html

I suppose, if you merely want to count bodies Schaefer pales compared with Walther Rauff -- but that is not a useful approach in my view. Stories like that of Colonia Dignidad may be important, if one wants to understand what became of the Nazis in South America, and the role they played in the dictatorships there. Speaking personally, I don't think I ever knew any of Rauff's victims -- but I did meet Boris Weisfeiler

[Judi Lynn]

4. Beyond understanding they let a monster like this avoid prison, isn't it?

They all ran STRAIGHT to South America. My God.

Thank you so much for adding his name to the mix. I am glad to be able to include this information in my own files now, and I intend to pass it on whenever, wherever I can.

His own personal war history is pure evil. I doubt there are many much worse. I can see he would have had a real place in Pinochet's heart, a man who had his own Caravan of Death, much smaller scale, of course, but similarly conceived.

Appreciate the brief link. Those men looked like idiots, and I'm so glad they lived to see their number so diminished after the days of their Third Reich. They know there are so few of them throughout the world, all in all, bitter, hatefilled bigots. They're going to lose everything, in time. They will be transcended by an evolving world and civilization.

"Gas Van." That's a new one for me. How thoughtful to conceive a vehicle that eliminates the wait until they can pack people into railway cars, and instead, conveniently shows up where they are to kill them. How thoughtful of the managers to take mercy on the operators and show concern for them lest they accidently inhale fumes from their gas vans, and get sick or dead themselves while trying to execute others.

How dispassionate the author was in noting when you shut many people in an execution van without lights, they'll push toward the tiny rays of lights which seep in through the doors in the back. "We lost our moral compasses."

[Judi Lynn]

3. I remember hearing about this missing man years ago. Unbearable knowing

he was captured and delivered to this man's monstrous torture center where so many others were also murdered after being abused first.

Most Americans would never have believed this could have happened to an American in the 1980's, and especially never to a completely non-violent man from a university.

Paul Schaefer is a modern monster. He abused, tormented, harmed people of all ages. Brutality is his life.

http://www.lanacion.cl.nyud.net:8090/p4_lanacion/site/artic/20040410/imag/FOTO17120040410204536.jpg http://www.lanacion.cl.nyud.net:8090/prontus_noticias/site/artic/20050310/imag/FOTO17020050310160543.jpg

Nazi Paul Schaefer.
Any time spent researching Colonía Dignidad is useful. People really, REALLY need to know this has happened, that it has happened in modern contemporary history, well after the Second World War, using the same racist classist political fuel for motivation, and that these people's cohorts and followers still remain in South America in their own racist enclaves.

http://www.lanacion.cl.nyud.net:8090/prontus_noticias/site/artic/20060331/imag/FOTO120060331195329.jpg http://www.adeguello.net.nyud.net:8090/Fmayo05_dignidad_weisfeiler.jpg

The first one shows his sister sitting near his photo and an age-projection.
What a shame he wasn't in prison LONG before Weisfeiler went to Chile.