Let’s say you are in a chilean villagethat you are with your friends or your family enjoying a few days of rest in what seems like a tourist venue that is passed off as a mini-simulation of the German Oktoberfest. But, suddenly, your suspicions are activated when you realize that this space is not exactly the resort of tranquility that you had been promised, but rather the gloomy place where very harsh events have taken place, crimes against humanity whose trail goes beyond the town or Chile itself.
That’s what could have happened to any of the attendees. Villa Bavariaformerly known as Colonia Dignidad (the name changed in 2005 at the suggestion of arms dealer Gerhard Mertins) and the nerve center of one of the black spots in the history of South America that welcomed the Nazis after the Second World War. Since 2012, an activities program and the hotel have offered enjoyable experiences for “anyone” who wants to visit the town, thus trying to renew the public’s vision of this ancient community.
Founded by Germans mobilized there at the end of the 50s, among the historical landmarks of Colonia Dignidadnow Villa Baviera, have germinated a sectarian organization from which it was very difficult to escape, having in its history reports of forced labor for both children and adults, having a leader (Paul Schäfer) accused of having raped dozens of children and having served as a detention and torture center for the DINA during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
From the shadiest cult to a renewed holiday paradise
From Villa Baviera’s own website They don’t hide it. They know that sooner or later people will discover the center’s past: “we lived through painful moments that to this day cannot be forgotten. As a way of looking to the future, we opened ourselves to the community and currently anyone is welcome to share our lifestyle.”
They defend themselves, establishing themselves, whether willingly or not, as one of the most twisted places to practice the so-called dark tourism. From an area populated by faithful to their cult, restricted and harassed by the leader of the colony Paul Schäfernow a dream place of everything that represents the folkloric supremacy of the Aryan race.
Thus, between Chileans and former Germans who lived that dark past and who are now adultsthis tourist spot is organized, in which deluxe rooms have been added and jacuzzis but the wire fences that once protected the camp from possible escapes have not been removed. In these streets where they now drink mugs of beer and eat bratwurst Josef Mengele would have walkedand under the subsoil they found on more than one occasion what the local police of the Maule Region defined as the “largest private arsenal” ever found in Chile.
Semi-automatics, rocket launchers, grenades, explosive material, chemical elements, camouflaged weapons and a tank. All this was in Colonia Dignidad. In 2005.
And everything that revolves around Villa Baviera is just one of the multiple traces that the national-socialist regime left in Latin America from the 40smoment by which they would organize the ratlines (escape networks for the Nazis, who could settle with new identities, money and property in various countries) and would provide them with either new jobs alongside dictatorial regimes or an indefinite retirement from work.
We have seen that Schäfer supported Pinochet from this location, but there is more than a pedophile paramedic in the ranks of infamous German soldiers who later hid on the other side of the pond. According to the Wiesenthal Center, about 300 war criminals and thousands of collaborators from the Third Reich arrived in Argentina at the end of the Second World War. According to the Commission to Clarify the Activities of Nazism in Argentina (Ceana), the list is closer to 200.
Philippe Aziz writes in the book War Criminalsthe following:
“Argentina was the most inviolable refuge of the Nazis. Recent and serious documents have formally established that Martin Bormann had extremely important funds (gold, foreign currencies, stock securities and company shares) transferred by plane, from November (1944) to March (1945). CIA agents even managed to identify in (1953), the names of the aviators who carried out these flights, the banks and the numbers of these “Unfortunately, the US government has until today opposed the publicity of these investigations that could provide interesting revelations about the famous Nazi treasure.”
The Nazi Latin America dreamed of by Martin Bormann
And yes, that was Bormann, Head of the Chancellery and Director of the NSDAP since almost its beginning, intimate of Adolf Hitler from his position as Private Secretary to the Führer. Bormann was one of the main defenders of the persecution of Christian churches and favored the poor treatment and enslavement of Jews and Slavs in the areas conquered by Germany during World War II. One of the greatest theorists of the regime and those responsible for crimes against humanity, no matter how much he tried to negotiate peace with the British in ’41.
Most likely is that he died in the vicinity of the Führerbunker shortly after Hitler’s suicide, where remains resembling Bornmann’s body were found. But several Nazi hunters have believed they saw him in different American locations, among them, Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguaywhere, as we have seen, he had sent funds. Bormann could have been the first of the beneficiaries of ODESSA, that secret institution intended to find refuge to prominent Nazi leaders.
These are some of the other great Nazi criminals in history who, following what Bormann designed, ended up in South America:
Erich Priebke
Erich Priebke He murdered, along with Herbert Kappler, 335 Italians and 75 Jews in ’44. But for him, this execution is nothing more than the product of a war in which they found themselves, a reprisal that would give a lesson to the GAP partisans who in the Rome area murdered 31 Nazi police days before. The person responsible for the Ardentine Graves Massacre He went to Argentina and lived in Bariloche, a city much loved by the national socialists in that period and location where it would acquire a notoriety that even led to the people of the community defended him in a public campaign after he was arrested in 1994.
Klaus Barbie
If they called him the butcher of Lyonyou can imagine what the thing was about. He is solely responsible for deporting 7,500 Jews to concentration camps, for having given the order to murder 4,400 people and for having promoted the detention and torture of another 14,000. for a ratline fled to Boliviawhere he would begin living as the head of a sawmill, protected as it was by the United States (he was employed because of his interest in counterespionage against the communists) until he established contact with other Nazi refugees and established a drug trafficking network while advising military regimes on torture and assassination techniques.
A good part of his crimes had expired in 1987, when he was extradited to France after 12 years in which the Bolivian government, until then presided over by a dictatorial regime, did not release him, but his deportations earned him a life sentence.
Alois Brunner
Also an official of death, Eichmann’s “best man” In the preparation of the Final Solution, he was directly blamed for ordering the extermination of approximately 128,000 Jews. He was only in Brazil, or so it is suspected, in the last years of his life, but of the rest of the days, the most significant thing perhaps was his work as an advisor to the Syrian government, where helped the government of Hafez al-Assad and previous leaders to learn everything the Nazis had developed about torture and repression tactics.
Adolf Eichmann
Didn’t get his hands dirtywas nothing more than a gray bureaucrat, but it was he who caused the death of millions of people. The SS Lieutenant who developed logistical scripts for the Final Solution, the representative of what Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evilsaid at his 1960 trial in Jerusalem that he was “just following orders.” He died by hanging, but before that he also used the Nazis’ hidden extradition network to move to Argentina, where he lived a very peaceful life for more than a decade.
Josef R. Mengele
Probably, the most famous of the Nazi doctorsnot because of the amount of his murders, but because of the sadistic nature of his actions, from join newborn babies by sewing their veins to the extraction of bone marrow from people with dwarfism. The Angel of Death changed addresses in Argentina to Paraguay and Brazil, fleeing each time from increasing pressure from various international secret services to capture him, but despite the efforts, he lived a comfortable life during his years of imprisonment in Latin America. Before the Mossad was on his trail, he even obtained a West German passport with his real name with which he traveled to Europe, to Switzerland, to take a vacation in the snow along with his nephew and sister-in-law.
Gerhard Bohne
Not as well known as Mengele, but also just as ruthless. Among this doctor’s plans was the forced euthanasia of the handicapped, the mentally ill and other victims of different physical defects. He was one of the representatives of that other facet of the cleansing of the Aryan race, and 62,000 people died under his rule in gas chambers and incinerators.
After working as a doctor normally in Germany after the war, the public’s knowledge of his actions increased the need to flee, and Perón’s government helped him take refuge in Argentina. But in 1963 he was arrested and tried in Germany, where he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and a heart condition that made him unable to stand trial. 20 years later, Germany did not exterminate a weak physicistbut even freed him from facing his crimes. He did not die until 1981.
Villa Baviera, the past and the lesson applicable to almost all exotic tourism
The list is longer, and the Argentine, Bolivian, Chilean, Brazilian and even American past is full of other fateful episodes of collaboration with certain criminals like the ones we have seen here, but perhaps the best reflection on all this was given to us by Barbie himself (or rather, his lawyer Jacques Vergès) at his trial in Lyon for the extermination of thousands of people.
Your thesis? That their actions were no more terrible than those of any colonialist anywhere else in the world, including the French, who were never persecuted. History is written by the victors, and if we followed the trail of the inhuman acts in which people from different regions have participated, it is likely that there would not be too many corners free of a dark past.
On the other hand, the Villa Baviera thing is simply too much.
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