'Dictator for life' Gen. AUGUSTO PINOCHET (sitting center, with sunglasses), and his fascist military junta in 1973 -- just after taking power in Chile by kidnapping, torturing and executing the entire democratically elected cabinet of leftist President Salvador Allende. This was done with extensive covert aid from US intelligence and American transnational corporations like ITT, Pepsi, and others.

Almost immediately Schafer and his staff began cultivating connections with right-wingers among Chile's military and business community, using Colonia Dignidad's office in Santiago as a base. The German sect was embraced by the very cabal which would eventually stage the bloody 1973 overthrow of democratically elected leftist Salvador Allende. These generals, including future dictator Augusto Pinochet, were openly fascist and publicly consorted with fugitive Nazis [32].

So did Colonia Dignidad. No less than Martin Bormann once stayed there. Bormann was the highest ranking Nazi in the world after Adolf Hitler himelf, and following WWII he escaped to South America along with thousands of other war criminals. According to historian Ladislas Farago, for a time Bormann lived in quiet seclusion at Colonia Dignidad, having "sought a place where he could be at peace." [33]. It should be noted that Farago's claims are quite controversial. Most scholars believe Bormann died in Germany, as the respected author Charles Whiting describes in his 1973 book, The Hunt for Martin Bormann: The Truth. However, there are photographs of Bormann taken at various locations in South America in the mid-'50s, including the 1958 Bolivian intelligence photo at right.

Fugitive Nazi MARTIN BORMAN, shown here in Bolivia in 1958, once stayed at Colonia Dignidad. (photo: Bolivian Ministry of the Interior.)

Another fugitive Nazi to be a guest of Colonia Dignidad was Dr. Josef Mengele [34]. Mengele was the Nazi's top "medical scientist", the man who had conducted the most brutal and twisted experiments at Dachau. But his main duty had been fine-tuning interrogation and torture to an exact science.

Mengele's expertise and vision evidently had a significant impact on Colonia Dignidad; certainly its "medical community". Many of his techniques were adopted and refined by the doctors of La Calonia. Clear evidence has emerged over decades showing that such experiments have been ongoing there. By the the 1970s, the small river traversing Colonia Dignidad literally ran red with the mutilated bodies of Los Disaparecidos — "The Disappeared" [35].

Colonia Dignidad has also enjoyed what The Times of London describes as "a long, strange relationship" with the Bavarian Christian Social Union. What exactly this means remains murky, but it is known that members of the right-wing CSU have been honored guests at the Chilean compound [36]. During the late '80s, when the CSU was the governing party of Bavaria, posters of chairman Franz Josef Strauss were prominently displayed throughout the settlement [37].

The Christian Social Union was formed after the first postwar German elections, incorporating a variety of Nazi elements which had eluded the half-hearted "denazification" of Germany [39]. It's cofounder and ideological leader was Baron Frederich August Von der Heydt, who is from a powerful banking family with close ties to the Kaiser family. In the early 1930s, Eduard Von der Heydt acted as a go-between for the French Ambassador and the Nazi leadership [40].

August Von der Heydt, an active officer in the Nazi German army from 1935-1947, [41] was cut from the same cloth. Escaping imprisonment, he wrote in 1953 that "democracy is linked with collapse, defeat and foreign uniforms stalking German soil." During the mid-'80s, he was aligned with neo-fascist Lyndon LaRouche. In 1986 the New Benjamin Franklin House, a LaRouche press, translated and published the English-language version of Von der Heydt's 1972 book, Modern Irregular Warfare [42].

August Von der Heydt was also one of two Nazi German members of the US-based Advisory Committee on Foreign Affairs of the National Military-Industrial Conferences. These right-wing conferences were fronted by the notorious American Security Council, a "private sector" coalition of extremist cold warriors linking the Pentagon; US intelligence; ultra-conservative corporations like United Fruit, Wackenhut, Sears & Roebuck, and various CIA fronts such as the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the Univ. of Pennsylvania [43].