Secret Story Time Bonus Episode - "Santa is Dead": The Story of Paul Schäfer - Nazi, Child Rapist, and Christian Cult Leader

[00:00:00] Hello all you spooky nerds, creepy geniuses, kindred spirits, and delightful freeloaders who are not yet paying supporters of the show but may eventually see the light. It's December, month of a thousand holidays, dwindling bank accounts, family blowouts,

[00:00:23] and if you do it right anyway, food binges you only marginally regret. It's been a little while since you heard from Human Fckery because we firmly believe that breaks are essential parts of churning out original content which doesn't suck.

[00:00:42] Seriously, the expectation that we should all just be producing all the time is fckery and not sustainable. There's no better time of year for a little break than our darkest and shortest days. So Kimberly, Gary the Ghoul, and myself have been spending the two hours of daylight we

[00:01:03] all still enjoy researching future episodes, touching grass, and staring into the abyss silently while shivering. We hope you've all been taking some time to do the same. It's necessary for our collective survival.

[00:01:18] That said, we couldn't leave you with nothing to listen to as you commute home for the holidays. Some of you have very long drives and miserable airport journeys to endure, and you deserve batshit history in your earholes as a distraction.

[00:01:36] So we've put together this special holiday-adjacent episode of Secret Story Time and made it freely accessible for everyone. We hope it gives you at least one narrowly unhinged piece of Human Fckery to share around

[00:01:55] the dinner table with your own tribe as you celebrate these last days of the year however you see fit. A quick but very special thank you to Viking Tim, Pterodactyl, Shannon Daisies, Katie Griffin, Big Mama Banano, John, Flora,

[00:02:13] Jaune, Denise Etdal, Susan, Jillian, Ciara, The Pirate Ben, Christopher Bradford, The Black Belt Anti-Fascist, J. Sitariano, Jimbo, Brooksy, Amber Clark, Tim Coggins, Sweet Anxious Lori, The One and Only Lefty Librarian, Cynthia, and Autumn Town.

[00:02:35] These are the generous, gracious, and community-minded listeners who decided to put some money into making sure this show stays alive by joining our Patreon during 2022. This episode would not exist without them. If you want to make Kimberly, Gary, and my holidays a little bit sweeter, you can join

[00:02:57] these subscribers at either the $3, $7, or $17 level over at patreon.com slash humanfckery or at the link in the show notes. Not only will your generous contribution give Gary the jolliest joy erection any ghoul can experience, but it will unlock literal hours of content for your holiday commute.

[00:03:24] It's better than a gift card to Starbucks and significantly fewer empty calories. Okay, that's enough shilling. Gary, stop eating the decorative pine cones and get Kimberly in here. Also put a trigger warning on this episode. It's got a pedophile Nazi in it.

[00:03:59] Paul turned his gaze upstream and locked eyes with Santa Claus. A little svelter than the picture books had suggested, Kris Kringle stood upright on a wide, even wooden raft, the kind used for floating supplies down one section of the river to the other.

[00:04:16] A long staff for pushing off rocks in his gloved hand. Even from a distance, there was no mistaking who the raft's passenger was. A long white beard obscured much of his face, almost glowing in the bright midday sunshine.

[00:04:32] Deep red saturated his figure from head to toe, furry white trim separating top half from bottom. The children recognized him as well. Paul had gathered them, a few dozen lith, bright-eyed boys and girls ranging from preschool to teenage along the banks of the river specifically for this moment.

[00:04:52] Their parents were there too, scattered in clustered groups or sitting on carefully laid out quilts in the grass, watching the wholesome moment of holiday cheer unfold. They chattered to each other easily in German. One woman read the Bible wordlessly. The book nestled primly on her clean apron.

[00:05:10] Paul felt an intense wave of something ugly, like a shot glass of bitters overturning in the center of his tongue as the youngest attendees shrieked in excitement, pointing up the water at the spot of crimson floating in their direction.

[00:05:26] The others ran to the riverbank, smiling and waving, calling out to St. Nicholas. Santa waved back in return. Paul ran his finger across the smooth metal in his pocket, noticing its warmth on the side which had been flush with his hip.

[00:05:41] He took his eyes off the visitor only long enough to mentally note his flock. Watching which boys were vibrating with joy and which were hanging back, uncertain. Within minutes, Santa had drifted past Paul entirely, the quickly flowing water moving him front and center.

[00:06:00] It was a modest but still powerful river, wide enough to genuinely require a raft or similar craft for safe passage. Santa was squarely in the front of the riverbank now. Every child's adoring eye was on him.

[00:06:14] Paul Schaefer raised his arm, exhaled, made sure Mr. Claus was squarely in his sights, then pulled the trigger. The raft skidded across the water's surface as Santa staggered back, clutching his chest. He teetered ominously for a moment, then toppled over into the dark water below.

[00:06:36] Some of the children screamed, others froze in their spots. One of all ages watched as a red suit and mass of white hairs bobbed in the current, moving but motionless. Santa was face down, dark water beginning to swirl over his head, erasing his shoulders, swallowing his body.

[00:06:58] He did not lift his face or hands or kick his legs in an effort to remain afloat. The crowd saw Santa Claus slip beneath the surface, reappear a few yards downstream, then disappear again. Santa is dead, Paul announced authoritatively to his gathered audience.

[00:07:19] No twinkle in his eye or touch of humor in his thin lips. Then he cancelled Christmas forever. It's hard to know where to begin when telling the story of Colonia Dignidad and its disgusting fuckwit founder, Paul Schaefer.

[00:07:38] In addition to being a guy who murdered Santa Claus out of jealousy, he was also a Nazi, a child-grooming pedophile preacher, a massive religious hypocrite, and a total sociopath who ended up working for one of the bigger fascist dickheads in human history.

[00:07:55] We've started his tale with the Santa killing because every good story needs an opening vignette and there's not much more compelling on a chilly December eve than that time some guy bodied Father Christmas. But staging the assassination of Kris Kringle is actually one of Paul Schaefer's least

[00:08:14] problematic acts ever. His resume of human fuckery stretched across seven decades and multiple continents, connecting him to American evangelicals and right-wing military coup leaders alike. He is a titan of shittery, someone who we truly hope Krampus and the Belsnickle take

[00:08:34] turns finger-cuffing without lube in some frigidly cold circle of hell every Christmas for his crimes against humanity and the holidays. So perhaps it's just best to start at the beginning. Paul Schaefer Schneider was born December 4th, 1921, just outside Bonn, Germany, to a pair

[00:08:56] of not particularly wealthy Lutherans named Anna and Jacob. He was unremarkable in basically every way, showing no real affinity for anything except clumsiness. His biggest accomplishment as a boy was permanently blinding himself by accidentally jamming a dinner fork in one eye while tying his shoes.

[00:09:19] How exactly does one gouge out their own eyeball with a kitchen utensil while tying shoes? We don't know. Again, the best primary sources can say about this event is, little Paul was clumsy.

[00:09:33] But it's possible that having to wear a glass eye due to ineptitude was a very good thing for Paul and Germany at large, since his partial blindness meant a teenage Schaefer was turned away by Hitler's SS once the dictator rose to power in the 1930s.

[00:09:49] Paul adored Hitler, worshipped him, loved his politics. He studied his percussive, militant speaking style and mimicked it himself whenever given the opportunity to address a crowd. Schaefer was wrecked by the news he couldn't do Adolf's bidding as part of the notoriously psychotic SS.

[00:10:10] He ended up accepting a wartime job as a Nazi medic instead, carrying stretchers in active combat zones and tending wounded soldiers. Given the things you're going to hear in the rest of this episode, you'll understand why it's best he wasn't given an SS uniform and a gun.

[00:10:28] Once the Nazis had been effectively humiliated on a global stage, and the great country of Germany reduced to a bomb-scarred landscape of traumatized survivors, Paul Schaefer, then 24 years old, joined up as a youth group leader with the Evangelical Free Church, an offshoot

[00:10:46] of the Evangelical Protestant movement sweeping across Sweden, Norway, and parts of the United States. Paul loved being put in charge, especially over groups of children. This wasn't because he had any great wisdom to share with the world, but because Paul was sexually attracted to little boys.

[00:11:07] Not men, to be clear. Paul Schaefer was not, as some disingenuous bro-historians have attempted to claim in the past, a homosexual. He was repulsed by sex between adults, despised human intimacy, and never showed any documented sexual interest in anyone of any gender once they reached sexual maturity.

[00:11:29] No, Paul Schaefer, enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, fanboy of Adolf Hitler, and militantly devout conservative Christian, was obsessed with little boys and with being the center of their attention. Just the kind of guy you want leading your youth program at the local church.

[00:11:49] It will surprise no one to learn that Paul lost his first non-Nazi job within two years because of rumors he acted inappropriately with the kids. The Evangelical Free Church dismissed him rather than pursue legal action, because that's how the church handles child rapists.

[00:12:06] And for a time, Schaefer lived in the woods on the outskirts of town, landing somewhere between social pariah and religious hermit. It is here, in the dark forest of Bonn, Germany, that Paul claims he first met Jesus Christ

[00:12:22] himself, receiving instructions to round up and build a community of true believers. Around the same time, across the Atlantic Ocean, the post-war healing revival movement was taking America by storm. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hello all you spooky nerds.

[00:12:45] There's also normal people with, I don't know, social skills? An air fryer? Whatever it is that makes normal people normal. We accept all kinds here. And we also accept all kinds over on our Patreon. Nice, segue. We get it. Everyone's broke.

[00:13:00] Everyone's got a Patreon and no one wants to fill out yet another online payment form. But if you're listening to this show, then you'll actually love our Patreon. It's got all the best parts of the podcast. Weird stories from history's colon, underscoring and silly sound effects, dark psychology.

[00:13:19] And less of the other leftover stuff. Us, specifically. Less of us yammering. Every month, subscribers get either one or two, you get to pick, slickly produced, guest-free and banter-free episodes of Secret Story Time, our series covering wild stories and case studies ripped from the anals of human history.

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[00:14:22] Just pick a tier, enjoy the dozens of already released episodes of Secret Story Time, and wait till you see what we drop next month because yeah, it's some entertaining fuckery. Let's get to it. Led by charismatic grifters like William Branham, tent revivals, faith healings, and massive

[00:14:43] gatherings of evangelical worship were packing churches and fields across the nation, offering solace to those who had lost loved ones in the war, and safe haven to bigots, whack jobs, and money-hungry maniacs eager to leverage the Bible for personal gain.

[00:15:01] Branham, one of the founders of televangelism and a self-proclaimed prophet from Kentucky, spoke passionately about the coming apocalypse, the need for strict adherence to the Bible, women being the property of men, all illness being caused by demons, and of course, racial purity.

[00:15:23] Because racial purity has been part of the American evangelical movement since it began. Just like Hitler some 15 years before, Paul became obsessed with Branham, attending any public speaking engagement the American preacher did in Germany, and even working as part of Branham's private security detail during his 1955 European tour.

[00:15:46] For context, Branham was the guy who inspired and mentored cult leader Jim Jones. Of the Jonestown Massacre. He was maybe not a great influence? But he influenced Paul deeply nonetheless, to the point Schaeffer began using his preachings,

[00:16:04] combined with Hitler's rabble-rousing speaking style, to start a small but devoted congregation of his own. Keep in mind that at this time in history, much of Germany was in shambles. War widows and orphans were part of every community, and the damage to the country's

[00:16:22] infrastructure and economy nowhere close to repaired. It was an excellent time to be a confident, native-born white man who claimed to have answers for everyone's feelings of hopelessness, heartbrokenness, and disillusionment. Schaeffer even told people that his glass eye was from an injury sustained in glorious,

[00:16:42] noble World War II battle rather than self-inflicted idiocy. And people believed him. By the late 1950s, Schaeffer had collected enough followers, and importantly, enough of their money, to start the Private Social Mission, a charitable organization he claimed would provide housing, schooling, and moral support to orphans.

[00:17:04] And he did indeed set this program up, employing war widows as receptionists and caretakers, and collecting a vulnerable stable of disenfranchised little boys he could molest. In 1959, two of those little boys bravely told the truth about what Paul was doing

[00:17:21] to them, and a warrant was issued for Schaeffer's arrest by German police. Unfortunately, Schaeffer managed to flee the country, escaping to the Middle East under the guise of quote, religious persecution. His compelling claims of being an upstanding, moral war veteran unfairly targeted by godless

[00:17:41] monsters moved the many people who he met in exile, especially the Chilean ambassador to Germany. Which is how Schaeffer and around a dozen followers ended up on an undeveloped piece of land in Chile in 1960.

[00:17:58] The land, a rocky expanse of woods and stony dirt with a river flowing through it, was a 4,400 acre ranch purchased by Schaeffer and his congregation with permission from the Chilean government. The plan was to set up a farm, church, and eventual religious colony where all residents

[00:18:18] could follow the teachings of Schaeffer. In exchange for the freedom to build and live here, the Chilean government would call upon the colony for favors as needed. And thus, Colonia Dignidad, also known as Little or Villa Bavaria, was born.

[00:18:35] It's no understatement to say that Schaeffer and the initial tiny group who arrived in Chile had their work cut out for them. There was nothing, not a lean-to, not a toilet hole, nothing on the land when they got there.

[00:18:49] The first year on the property was exclusively hard labor and tent living, with 14-hour work days cutting down trees to build sleeping barracks and later a church and cafeteria from scratch. One teenage boy present for this period, who was indeed being sexually assaulted by Schaeffer

[00:19:08] when they weren't breaking their backs to build housing, called it hell on earth. But of course, because they were German, they made the land flourish, one Chilean native who lived nearby told a British documentary crew decades later, and they did.

[00:19:23] Stereotypes about Germans being hard-working and industrial people played out. And within 24 months, crops were growing, housing structures had been built, and machinery for rock processing as a source of income secured. By 1963, 230 members of Schaeffer's European congregation had crossed the ocean and moved onto the colony.

[00:19:46] Over a dozen additional families, hearing tale of the religious freedom and idyllic setting of Colonia Dignidad, would follow before the decade closed. It didn't hurt that both William Branham and Schaeffer were preaching heavily that God had foretold nuclear war in Europe, causing terrified followers, still traumatized by

[00:20:05] World War II, to flee any potential new carnage. What none of these congregation members were told was that once they reached Little Bavaria, any hope of maintaining or having a traditional family was over. Schaeffer separated husbands from their wives, putting members into gendered barracks to

[00:20:24] prevent quote, sins of the flesh, from distracting them from God. He also separated children from their parents, saying that parents love and hyper-focus on their children was a form of idolatry, and yet another distraction from God.

[00:20:40] Children were put into their own mixed-gender dormitory, where Schaeffer had a massive master bedroom and was the lone adult resident. Once these kids hit the sexual maturity of their teens, they were sent to either the women or men's dorms because they were no longer interesting to Paul.

[00:21:00] On the infrequent occasion that married couples did become pregnant, and only 60 children were born to the colony across a 30-year period, Schaeffer mandated that these new children call him father and be raised communally by their many adult aunties and uncles, even

[00:21:18] when those aunties and uncles were their biological parents. If any parent violated these rules, they were flogged, drugged, and given hours of manual labor until they stopped loving their kids as their own. One colonia dignidad survivor, a child victim of Schaeffer's name Wolfgang, called the

[00:21:37] colony a pedophile paradise. To be clear, the adults imported from Germany didn't just blindly consent to all of this. Colonists were intentionally not made aware of the rules before arriving. Once they showed up and discovered they'd be parted from their spouses and children,

[00:21:56] it was explained the arrangement was only temporary. The colony was brand new, you see, and didn't have the financial resources yet to build individual houses for each and every family. Rather than unfairly force some people to live communally while others got homes, the

[00:22:14] reasonable solution was gendered dorms and a children's house, with the godly and trustworthy prophet Paul behind it all, guarding the children's morality himself. If the colonists just waited, worked hard enough, and made God happy enough, the Lord

[00:22:31] would surely bless everyone with the money, lumber, and manpower necessary to build each family their own home. Schaeffer preached that God rewarded patience, using biblical fables to back up his claims. Additionally, those who immigrated to colonia dignidad didn't have anywhere else to go

[00:22:48] if they didn't like the deal. Most had put all of their money into the church and international move. Many had their government documents collected by Schaeffer for safekeeping upon arrival. The colony itself was isolated, miles from the nearest city, and any nearby villages

[00:23:05] were populated by Spanish-speaking Chileans skeptical of European imports. There were also armed security details, complete with German shepherds, patrolling the ranch specifically to keep members from leaving, though they were framed as benevolent security protecting the colony from outsiders.

[00:23:25] Villa Bavaria was, in many ways, a perfect trap from which it was nearly impossible to escape. There are decades of horror stories, ranging from forced imprisonment to child rape to slave labor to murder, from colonia dignidad. But for the sake of time, we're going to highlight just two.

[00:23:45] Number one, the building of a children's hospital exclusively so Paul could steal more children to sexually abuse. Number two, Paul's being hired by fascist dictator General Augusto Pinochet as a torturer for Chilean political dissidents. Fuck! Human Rights Nightmare number one began in 1966 when teen cult member Wolfgang Muller,

[00:24:10] the one who called the colonia a pedophile paradise, escaped the settlement, connected with a German ambassador, was placed in what was essentially a witness protection program and went public with journalists about the years of sexual assault, druggings, and beatings he endured under Schaeffer.

[00:24:27] With newspapers and locals finally scrutinizing colonia dignidad more carefully, Schaeffer went on a public relations tear, denying Wolfgang's allegations and announcing the colony was building a state-of-the-art children's hospital which would provide free pediatric care to hundreds of poverty-ridden Chilean children living in proximity to the settlement.

[00:24:51] The hospital was built. One of the only free ambulance and medevac programs in the area was set up, driving and airlifting perilously sick Chilean children to the facility for life-saving care. Poor families nearby rejoiced because lack of medical care had been killing their kids for years.

[00:25:09] And eventually, Wolfgang's accusations were buried under fawning magazine articles and the accounts of parents whose parents had been saved by colonia dignidad's hospital. Unfortunately, none of the testimonials or profiles mention that there was a secret private

[00:25:25] child abuse center built into the second floor of the hospital, complete with armed guards and more of those attack dogs to prevent escape. Here, boys who resisted Paul's sexual advances or refused to follow the settlement's many rules were drugged, forced into ice baths and electrocuted, imprisoned against their

[00:25:45] will, sexually assaulted, and then electrocuted some more just because Paul was a fucking psycho. The hospital also became a very unregulated, highly unethical adoption center for any child Schaeffer became fixated on. There are numerous accounts of children being rushed to the hospital for care, chosen by

[00:26:06] Paul for grooming, and then adopted, in quotes, by the colony on claims that the kids were only ill because their native Chilean families were too poor to care for them properly. If the families who had their young sons adopted without consent challenged colonia dignidad's

[00:26:25] kidnapping, they were threatened with catastrophic medical bills as well as phony reports from doctors accusing the parents of child abuse. Anyway, Schaeffer managed to acquire a steady stream of young boys for molestation, all hidden behind the shiny veneer of a good Christian charity hospital.

[00:26:44] At some point in the late 70s and early 80s, the facility was also used to manufacture and test weaponized sarin gas as part of the horrific Project Andrea, which you could google if you'd like to have some nightmares.

[00:27:00] Many of these stolen children were present on the day the colony's leader staged the assassination of Santa Claus. It was staged, by the way. Though he was a murderer, Schaeffer didn't actually shoot the cult member forced to dress up like St. Nicholas that terrible afternoon.

[00:27:18] The whole thing was an act of traumatizing theater developed because Paul Schaeffer was such an insecure narcissist that he very literally obsessed over the way kids loved Santa Claus more than him. He went so far as to cancel Christmas forever, making his December 4th birthday the only

[00:27:36] winter holiday which was allowed to be celebrated from that point forward. Delightful. Human rights nightmare number two was triggered on September 11th, 1973 when General Pinochet, an opportunistic little dickweed and conservative nationalist, staged a coup of Chile's democratically elected leftist government with the help of...

[00:28:00] The United States of America! I know, I know. It's totally shocking that the USA would invest millions of dollars and lots of military weapons into overthrowing a peacefully and properly elected socialist government in a foreign nation. It's almost like America isn't the noble hero of every story.

[00:28:19] It's so weird. Anyway, with the USA's funding and enthusiastic support, General Pinochet led a violent military takeover of Chile, then installed himself as a standalone dictator. Paul Schaeffer loved this so much, preaching to his flock about God's clear support of

[00:28:39] Pinochet and offering his colony's assistance to the new dictator in exchange for tax exemptions. Hashtag tax the fucking church always no matter what. Pinochet, savvily noting the colony's isolated location, decided Colonia Dignidad could serve him best as an unofficial detention center and torture hotspot for anyone he declared

[00:29:02] a political dissident or quote, communist. Keeping in mind that most of the communists accused of being communists weren't even communists, they were just people who didn't support a violent dictator and or worked to help their community members in ways that made Pinochet look bad.

[00:29:17] By sending political opponents, community activists and basically anyone who offended him in any way to the colony for secret war crimes, Pinochet could claim he wasn't illegally imprisoning or torturing anyone. Because Germany was, in fact, imprisoning and torturing them.

[00:29:35] Using a combination of secret bunkers under the ranch's buildings, so many car batteries and electrodes, sedatives acquired through the children's hospital and classic Nazi torture techniques, Paul illegally detained, mutilated and electrocuted an untold number

[00:29:54] of Chileans, curious journalists and at least one American hiker in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is believed at least 100 people were murdered and then disappeared by the colony over several decades at Pinochet's behest.

[00:30:11] I wish I could tell you that eventually a group of Avengers-like heroes stormed Colonia Dignidad, rescued all the stolen and tortured children, freed the abused and brainwashed adults and did painful butt stuff to Schaefer until he literally begged his god for forgiveness for his many crimes.

[00:30:30] But real life is nothing like the movies, and so no heroes came and did any of this. In the 1990s, after Pinochet was forced to step down as a homicidal maniac leader, Chile did finally cut off funding for Schaefer's creepy hospital and started auditing the colony.

[00:30:48] It wasn't until the late 1990s that the Chilean government even attempted to apprehend or prosecute Schaefer for what were by then widely recognized war crimes. By that time, Paul had already been tipped off that he was about to be arrested and slipped

[00:31:04] easily into hiding to escape multiple charges of child rape, human rights abuses and espionage. In March 2005, Paul Schaefer Snyder was finally found after eight years of cowardly lurking in the shadows in a lovely gated community in Buenos Aires, Argentina, an area long known for harboring Nazis.

[00:31:28] He was eventually extradited to Chile to stand trial. On May 24th, 2006, the conservative white nationalist evangelical Christian Nazi pedophile was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to pay $1.5 million to the families of 11 minors who'd pressed charges against him for sexual abuse.

[00:31:50] He died a few years later at age 88 of old age related complications in Santiago de Chile's penitentiary after just four years of imprisonment. In 2019, it was announced that Germany would compensate victims of Colonia Dignidad with payments of approximately $11,000 each as an apology for both Germany and Chile not

[00:32:14] doing anything about the cult's clearly illegal and abusive antics despite knowing about all of it for years. Unbelievably, Colonia Dignidad still exists today, rebranded as Villa Bavaria, framed as a sweet, old-timey German colony featuring men dancing in Lederhosen and Oompah-pah bands playing cheery music while visitors drink lager.

[00:32:39] It sells schnitzel to tourists hanging out in hot tubs. The vacation destination works hard to sanitize away the many decades it spent as a detainment camp for innocents, rape mecca for children, and vacation spot for Nazi war criminals.

[00:32:57] The barbed wire fence which once kept liberators out and victims trapped within still stands around all of it. We here at Human Fuckery hope that if you encounter any nimrods whining about the war on Christmas this holiday or calling drag queens groomers, you'll immediately send

[00:33:16] the link to this episode to whatever misguided uncle, carony auntie, or angry holiday party attendee you've been forced to sit next to. Don't even explain it. Just send them the episode. It's an utterly terrible piece of historic human fuckery, but it's our gift to you

[00:33:34] as a perfectly wrapped rebuttal to so much shit that gets said during Yuletide dinner gatherings. Happy holiday, you spooky nerds! We will see you in the new year.