With its pristine swimming pool, manicured lawns and lush forest backdrop, Villa Baviera, a German-themed settlement of 122 people in southern Chile, looks like the perfect holiday getaway.
However, Colonia Dignidad, as it was previously known, is a byword for horror, as the former home of a brutal cult that was used for torturing and killing dissidents under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Twenty years after the cult leader, former Nazi German soldier Paul Schaefer, was jailed for the sexual abuse and torture of children at the colony, the Chilean state wants to turn it into a memorial for the victims of the country’s 1973 to 1990 dictatorship.
Photo: AFP
Chilean President Gabriel Boric in June last year ordered 116 hectares of the 4,800-hectare site, an area including the residents’ homes, a hotel, a restaurant and several food processing factories, be expropriated to make way for a center of remembrance.
Some of the inhabitants, who were separated from their families as children, subjected to forced labor, and in some cases sexually abused, say they are being victimized all over again.
Schaefer founded Colonia Dignidad in 1961 as an idyllic German family village — but instead abused, drugged and indoctrinated the few hundred residents and kept them as virtual slaves.
Photo: AFP
The boundaries between abuser and abused were blurred, with the children of Schaefer’s sidekicks counting themselves among his victims.
Anna Schnellenkamp, the 48-year-old manager of the colony’s hotel and restaurant, said she “worked completely free of charge until 2005,” the year of Schaefer’s arrest. “So much work I broke my back.”
Several years ago, Schnellenkamp, whose late father, Kurt Schnellenkamp, was jailed for five years for being an accomplice to Schaefer’s abuse, finally found happiness.
She got married, had a daughter and started to create new, happier memories in the colony, where everyone still communicates in German, despite being conversant in Spanish.
“The settlers know every detail, every building, every tree, including where they once suffered and were forced to work,” she said.
About 3,200 people were killed and more than 38,000 people tortured during Chile’s brutal dictatorship. An estimated 26 people disappeared in Colonia Dignidad, where a potato shed, now a national monument, was used to torture dozens of kidnapped regime opponents.
Schaefer was captured in 2005 on charges of sexually abusing dozens of minors over nearly half a century. He died in prison five years later while in preventive custody. His arrest, and those of 20 other accomplices, marked a turning point for the colony, which had been rebranded Villa Baviera a decade previously.
Suddenly, residents were free to marry, live with their children, send them to school and earn a paycheck. Some of the settlers returned to Germany, while others stayed and built a thriving agribusiness and resort, where tourists can sample traditional German fare, such as sauerkraut.
Some residents say that Chile, which for decades turned a blind eye to the fate of the enclave’s children, wants to make them pay for the sins of their fathers.
“One feels a kind of revenge against us,” said Markus Blanck, one of the colony’s business directors, whose father was charged as an accomplice of Schaefer’s abuse, but died before being sentenced.
The government said the expropriations are in the public interest.
“There is a national interest here in preserving our country’s historical heritage,” Chilean Minister of Justice and Human Rights Jaime Gajardo said, adding that those expropriated would be properly compensated.
While several sites of torture under the Chilean dictatorship have been turned into memorial sites, Gajardo said the memorial at Villa Baviera would be the biggest yet, similar to those created at former Nazi concentration camps in Europe.
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