today's episode is sponsored by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people explore new skills like drawing or music develop existing interests and get lost in creativity whether you're looking to fend off boredom focus on self-care through creativity or join a similarly creative community skillshare is the place to keep you learning from my experience i really enjoyed the class by don lupacy aka the visual don he's a motion designer that has worked on music videos and concert graphics this course called create an ocean loop in cinema
4d in after effects is very beginner friendly it'll teach you how to create everything from scratch from how he comes up with the ideas how he plans it all out he then helps you to build your very own scene from the very start all the way to the end where you'll have a gorgeous animated loop i highly recommend his class and it's available only on skillshare to help you explore your creativity today the first thousand people to use the link in my description will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership and after that it's
only around ten dollars a month thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring today's video [Music] back when i was a student i used to work as a bartender in a nightclub here in liverpool most places kicked out at about 2 a.m but we stayed until about 6 a.m and just mopped up all the business that came spilling out of the other trendier places this meant that we got some absolute messes propping up our bar on a nightly basis and you could roughly divide the idiots that patronized us into four categories 1. happy drunks occasionally annoying but
generally favorable 2. sad drunks frequently annoying tend not to tip 3. sleepy drunks usually have to rouse these buggers out from the warmer comfier corners of the end of the night and last but not least the rare and mystical blackout drunks totally unpredictable avoid at all costs removed from premises as soon as possible when i say blackout drunk i don't necessarily mean people who just got too drunk to stand up and end up passing out no blacking out when drinking is an actual medical thing don't quote me on the ins and outs but from what
i understand some people have a very particular reaction to alcohol not all the time just some of the time and it causes a complete mental break people can do outrageous things and have no memory of it whatsoever they have zero inhibitions zero social cues the car is driving there's just no one at the wheel now you see how dangerous that can be and why i added the whole remove from premises type thing so the stage is set for my scariest post-work encounter ever it's been a quiet night people are coming and going and dribs and
drabs and we get this one guy who comes in dressed in what look like work gear he seems a bit worse for the wear but more like he just had a rough day so my colleague gives him the benefit of the doubt and gives him one last pint of lager for the road maybe an hour after he's leaning up against the bar staring into space with this glassy watery look in his eyes classic blackout case not falling down drunk still semi-lucid but there's just no one behind the eyes we're close to closing anyway so i
prompt the door staff to come over and ask him to leave he seems a bit confused at first but soon complies and he's out the door no drama we close do a really quick clean down and we're all out the doors about 45 minutes later i usually walk all the way home since it's only a fairly short distance and the area tends to be completely deserted at the time of morning only on this occasion our blackout drunk friend is sitting on a wall on the opposite side of the street just staring into space like they
always end up doing but as i'm looking at him with a bit of concern wondering how he's going to get himself home he looks up at notices me and then immediately starts crossing the road towards me he doesn't engage though he just stays behind me on the pavement following at a steady pace i'm getting increasingly frightened and i'm trying to keep my cool but i can actually hear his footsteps getting louder and louder on the pavement behind me so i pulled out my phone and fake a call with my boyfriend i was single at the
time saying i was about to catch the bus home but uh what's that you want to come and give me a lift you'll be here any second because you're already in the area okay thanks babe you're the best then heart pounding i'll walk about 50 meters to the nearest bus stop and plonk my butt down on the bench blackout guy hangs around for a bit not looking like he's doing anything in particular but i know what he's hanging around for her and it's scaring the bajeebies out of me but thankfully with a bluff of my
boyfriend coming to pick me up having apparently worked he starts shuffling off along the road and eventually out of sight only trouble was he walked the same way i needed to get home but it was no massive issue i could just hop the first bus it was due in like 15 minutes and take the l for the bus fare but i definitely get home safe and sound bus comes i get on take a seat happy days next bus stop comes along bus stops only one passenger shuffles onto the bus and drops a handful of change
into the little coin tray i look up guess who it is it's blackout guy who without looking at me walks past and takes a seat just behind me i'm just absolutely bricking it by this point and i've completely run out of ideas i know the guy's going to get off at the same stop as me follow me home and then what i lived alone at the time i'd have been buggered out of pure nervousness i remember checking my watch and that's when i got the idea that saved me right by my flat immediately as you
get off the bus there's a tesco metro and since it was just past 7 am it would have just opened that tesco would have been rocking a security guard and possibly an office i could ask him to hide me in it wasn't the best idea but it was definitely worth a shot and it turned out it was the best idea i could possibly have had like clockwork the guy got off the bus with me and followed me to the tesco i was a bit shaky when i approached the security guy but as soon as i
explained what the deal was he ushered me off into a security office where they normally detain shoplifters and all that police were called and the blackout guy actually hanged around the tesco waiting for me to reappear so he was an easy caller i'm not sure if they charged him with anything or just gave him a bed for the night i don't care though to be honest he was out of my hair i was safe and that's all i was asked about i don't know if he saw through my fake phone call or something but him
working out that i was on that bus was honestly one of the worst moments of my life like this proper oh no moment that i've never repeated before or since i just feel bad for girls who don't have anyone to run to when something like that happens girls who aren't as lucky as me who don't get to go home sometimes ever again back when i was 22 in late october of 1996 i went for a few quiet drinks with some mates down in chingford which is a small town about half an hour's drive from london
as usual a few quiet drinks turned into an all-night pub crawl that ended in a visit to a local off license we stumbled back to a maid's flat where we carried on drinking until about two in the morning when i decided i'd best be heading off i didn't have money for a taxi but that was fine i just walk home it was only a two hour walk and single digit temperatures while i'm trash with nothing but a thin shirt on by the time i realized how up the creek i was it was way too late
to turn back and crash on my mate's couch i was so drunk i'm not even sure i'd have been able to find my way back it was either carry on up towards bell common where i was living at the time or wander around until i got picked up by the police i must have lost my bearings around lawton because as drunk as i was i remember the distinct moment of realizing i wasn't quite where i thought it was and it was going to take me even longer to get home i was knackered starving and freezing
my bollocks off so as daft as it seems looking back on it i decided to gamble on a shortcut all i'd have to do was walk through debt and green then cut through the top end of epping forest and bob's your uncle i'd be home again for baked beans on toast and a cup of tea it seemed easy on paper but actually managing it was going to be a different kettle of fish eventually i hit a road with some signage saying coppice row so i know for a fact that if i just cross the road
and keep walking roughly through the woods i'll be back in bell common within about half an hour but walking through the woods meant it was even darker there was no ambient light from distant street lights to guide me and the cloud cover meant that there wasn't even any moonlight to see by i started to worry that i was going to actually get myself lost again which would have been frankly embarrassing given how close to home i was but when i see some light through the trees in the distance i breathe a sigh of relief now
this is the point where what happened becomes something of a morality play the moral being that when it comes to alcohol you need to be able to know when enough is enough because i was so sloshed i saw those lights and immediately just thought i'll walk towards them not those don't look like street lights or they seem a little bit too close to be from a road nope i just walked straight towards them like an actual pillock and ended up changing my life forever turns out the flickering lights in the woods that look like open
flames were exactly that then right as i realized what i'm looking at which was a bunch of hooded people holding flaming torches they start doing something that makes me freeze my tracks they actually started chanting not like a loud chanting either not like a football chant or whatever it was all low voices just barely above a whisper like they didn't want anyone to hear but because there was about 10 or 12 of them all doing it at once it had this horrible echo-y creepiness to it that i can remember it like it was yesterday i'm
this horrible mix of drunk confused and extremely creeped out hoping all i'm looking at is a bunch of hackney hippies celebrating the winter solstice or something but at the same time i had this gut feeling telling me that it was something entirely more sinister i couldn't tell what language they were chanting in but it definitely wasn't english and as i stood there dead still trying to work out what in god's name was going on i saw two of the hooded figures with things dangling from the robes leading someone into the middle of the little circle
they were stood in it was a young girl maybe 15 or 16 dressed in like grubby off-white clothing nothing like the dark-colored hoods everyone else had on and in her arms is a baby i'm just scrambling for rational explanations by that point it had to be a film shoot or something a small budget horror film yeah that's what i told myself or some group of west end wiccans doing some kind of moody but otherwise harmless baptism drunk logic is telling me just ask them what they're doing give a smile get a smile and all that
but i couldn't bring myself to i'm just tensed up barely breathing trying not to make a sound pure survival instincts kicking in as i start to get legitimately frightened by what i'm looking at i suppressed the urge to leg it they'd have heard me take off in the state i was in they'd probably catch up to me pretty fast and that's if i didn't knock myself out first by running into a tree so nice and slowly i just start backing up away from the scene trying my very best not to make one iota of a
noise when i think i'm at a safe enough distance i start turning back around so i can better slink away through the trees only right as i do the chanting starts back up and the baby starts crying hearing that baby crying in the pitch black woods even if it was just a small piece of parkland like epping forest sent this icicle of fear ramming its way through my stomach i'm not joking i've never had an actual physical visceral reaction to a sound before but hearing that baby cry makes my guts tense up like i was
going to spew i stopped and did like a half away turn hearing the baby's cry getting louder and louder but i'm not exactly sure what happened but i just saw this rush of movement from two of the hooded figures before the baby's cries grew unnaturally high pitched and then suddenly stopped i couldn't stop myself i let out this terrified scream and then just legged off through the trees i was risking a broken nose and teeth legging it through epping forest in the dark like that but at the time it seemed like a favorable alternative to
staying put i called the police as soon as i could i didn't even wait to get back to my flat as soon as i saw a phone box i just called from there i'd long forgotten about being cold or tired i was surging with adrenaline and any shivering i had going on was from sheer fight or flight the dispatcher i spoke to took down my name and address then said officers would call by as soon as they could i'm sober by this point and finally i'm able to get my bearings and walk back home i
make myself a cup of tea and try to calm myself down a bit before the police arrive it takes about an hour before anyone rings the door on my flat and by that time i'm starting to come down from the adrenaline so i'm doubly as tired as i was before the whole woods incident i look rougher than a bear's bottom i'm slurring my words still a little bit and i realized that as much as i've sobered up by now i still smell a little like a brewery in short after i gave the policeman a full
and detailed account of what i saw i could just tell he didn't believe me i offered to take them back to where i thought that i had saw those hooded torch bearing figures but they declined saying they'd have a look on their way back and there was no need for me to accompany them but i could just tell they had no intentions of following up my complaint even the people close to me didn't believe a word of it my mom told me to stop telling fibs my mates all said that i was just blattered and
seeing things it got to the point where it was actually a bit humiliating so in the end i just stopped talking about it but that doesn't mean i didn't stop thinking about it it took almost 20 years before i could even attempt to get answers for what happened that night which leads me to an obligatory back in my day moment basically the only informational sources we had when i was growing up were public libraries where if you were lucky enough to have one at home an encyclopedia 99 of the books relating to cults and witchcraft
in my local library were just pulpy nonsense so i quickly gave up but then almost two decades after i have google i now have something infinitely more powerful than a library and i have it on the pc in my living room so when i suddenly get the urge to start googling about cults in the greater london area i don't get back a load of fanciful bollocks i get back information so pertinent and familiar that it actually terrified me in 2014 the met police here in london interviewed two kids called alyssa and gabriel who both claimed
to be victims of satanic ritual abuse these interviews were the culmination of five years worth of tireless work from the kid's mother who had filed a legal injunction against their father a man court documents only referred to as mr d way back in 2009 she had been keeping her children away from this mr d character who was actually her husband at the time and as much as the evidence she presented to a judge was worrying it was still flimsy this judge then ruled that the dad would be legally permitted to have unsupervised contact with the
children every saturday from 10 am to 6 pm according to the mother whose name i'm still not sure of the ruling was just a legal sham with mr d still controlling practically every aspect of their lives this is in spite of him having lived in a rented apartment away from his wife and kids then 2010 elissa starts attending christ church school in hampstead with gabriel joining a year later both kids say that while they were at christ church students were regularly groomed and abused by not only their teachers but their own father too who told
them to keep quiet about it under pain of death both kids kept their mouths shut for four long years until the summer holidays of 2014 when they spilled their guts to the mother about what was going on at that school i read that in the months building up to everything coming out the kids behavior got really weird and disturbing the mom said gabriel sometimes had this kind of glaze come over his eyes as if he was switching off from reality or something not long after a friend of alyssa's named milly came over to their home
after school to play the mum was horrified when millie openly talked about the abuse to christ church almost like it was perfectly normal the level of abuse that the children say they endured as horrendous with gabriel even saying that those that screamed too much were given medicine so they'd be kept quiet when a specialist police officer trained in talking to children about sensitive issues asked where the nurse had given the children the medicine gabriel pointed to his arm after watching hours of those interviews i saw a part with alyssa saying that on wednesdays people they
didn't recognize would visit the school and look at all the children before selecting one to go off to a secret place that night presumably to be abused she added that sometimes the selected children had to make a hospital visit after the day they were picked and were absent from school for some time afterward i just had this penny drop moment when she said wednesday the same night of the week that i went out with my mates down in chingford i had this horrible feeling i was onto something and i had no idea how right i'd
turn out to be following these interviews instead of going back to live with their mother and being removed from the school they were being abused at both alyssa and gabriel were taken into custody and continued to attend christchurch not only that but they quickly retracted the allegations against their abusers apparently after being told it was the only way to being reunited with their mother i dug up a statement from melissa and gabriel's mom and trust me this wasn't easy to find almost every mainstream media outlet seems to have just buried the story and she goes
on to say i believe that most of the information my children have revealed is true there is no way a child could create a story like that with so many intricate details it is out of the question that anyone would coach the children to say things like that although we know that they have retracted their statements the children still even now keep coming back to the same story in the details while in foster care to the degree that it became unbearable for their caretaker carol to look after them and she no longer wants to do
this from where i'm standing the only people who have coached the kids into saying anything are the people who initially took them into custody who somehow managed to get them to say oh we made it all up for five minutes only to have them repeat the same old stories afterward and trust me the details these kids come out with are beyond shocking are hours upon hours of interview footage available to the public online and i think all in all i've watched about two and a half hours worth of them at first because it's a nine
year old kid telling the story the details are fuzzy the descriptors to an adult it generally does sound made up but then she starts coming out with things that a kid really shouldn't know a lot of deeply disturbing things that really make you think she's not making this up either alyssa has at some point been able to access some pretty questionable online material there is absolutely no way she could know about some of the things she talks about in her interview unless they actually happened she's telling the truth but i know she's telling the truth
and it's not her compelling story or the obvious corruption the local government that clued me into it it's a tiny little detail that the mother wrote in the blog piece i found and when i heard it it was like the final piece of the jigsaw just slotted into place i won't quote much of what the mom wrote in her blog as most of the details torture and cannibalism that occurred at some of the cult's rituals but one repeatable section i found seriously disturbing was the fact that her kids were always pretending to be sick on
wednesdays and only when she found out that wednesdays were selection days did she finally understand why but the mom also mentions that during the rituals the higher up members of the cult used to wear children's skulls on special costumes and once i read that i finally realized what i'd seen dangling from the robes of the two cultists who flanked their girl and her baby skulls it was children's skulls and that's when i realized that little alyssa was telling gospel truth what i just wrote is just a small example of what i'd learned i spent the
past six years researching what appears to be a network of satanic ritual abuse operating behind the scenes of several north london primary schools and i think i'm just about ready to put everything together that i've got into a book or maybe i'll even do a podcast but what i have to say on the subject has some very far-reaching political and cultural consequences the likes of jimmy savile and cyril smith are just the tip of the iceberg i know it seems a little silly of me to give the game away this early and the people i'm
writing about might very well read or hear this and then know that i'm on to them but let's just say this is like a post-mortal security system if i end up with three bullets in the back of my head and declare that i took my own life trust me it's not the people that stand to lose from what i've learned are some very powerful people who will do anything to keep their secret from getting out they've killed some very high profile british public figures in the past they'll have absolutely no problem taking me out if
they feel threatened and they will feel threatened because what i have to say is nothing short of explosive and after it's out there nothing will ever be the same [Music] boris vice velar was an exceptionally gifted mathematician born to a jewish family living in the soviet union boris showed a great deal of academic potential from a young age in 1970 he received his phd from the prestigious stecklove institute in leningrad but due to rampant soviet anti-semitism his career stagnated and he migrated to america in 1975 becoming a penn state professor the following year one of
the reasons boris was excited to move to the united states was that he hated the cold back in russia he vacationed on the caspian coast to avoid the slavic snows and since pennsylvania became a winter wonderland all of its own in december and january morris decided to spend christmas and new year of 1984 in southeastern chile on a backpacking vacation he was intensely passionate about hiking having previously taken solo trips in peru alaska china and siberia and wasn't remotely fazed by the remoteness of his journey or the difficult mountainous terrain of his proposed route on
christmas eve of 1984 boris flew to the chilean capital santiago landing there at approximately 10 pm from santiago boris boarded a bus headed to southern town of san fabian and it's here that he began his trek to the andes mountain range from that point the exact details of boris's journey aren't completely clear as he was hiking through remote forests and sparsely populated hillsides either living off the land or by the generosity of the villages he visited however we do know for certain that on january 3rd of 1985 boris was crossing the nebulae river located about
2 000 miles south of santiago two eyewitnesses in the form of local shepherds said they had met a lone russian hiker that evening and shared dinner with the man when they saw how few rations he had left in the wee hours of the morning when dinner was finished the shepherds offered boris a place to sleep for the night but he apparently refused one of the shepherds louise benavides said that boris insisted on pushing on towards his next destination insisting that in spite of the darkness he needed to catch up on time he had missed to
make it to the place he was about to call home for a week or two the shepherds bid boris farewell and good luck then watched him wander off into the night it should have been a jolly occasion a happy memory for all involved but as it turns out this was the last time that anyone saw boris weissfeller alive a week passed in chile before anyone noticed boris was even missing he was scheduled to arrive back in san fabian on january 12th where he had promised to check in with his sister olga to assure her of
a safe passage but boris never made that phone call and when his return flight took off for new york on january 13th there was only an empty seat where boris should have been the following day boris's sister still hadn't heard from him without fail every single time he'd return from a hiking trip he'd make contact to inform her of his safety so on the one occasion that he'd failed to do so olga knew in her gut that something was wrong she immediately contacted the local police force insisting they begin investigating his disappearance immediately yet the
police dismissed her concerns at face value telling her the most likely explanation was that boris had simply opted to extend his stay in chile and was probably just without means of contacting her however when january 19th rolled around marking the beginning of the new semester at penn state there was still no word from boris desperate and terrified olga and penn state itself commenced legal proceedings that would force the u.s state department to begin formally investigating boris's disappearance meanwhile in chile authorities had already gotten the investigatory ball rolling the very same day that olga had attempted
to file a missing persons report chilean police had managed to locate boris's backpack which contained his u.s driver's license and credit card interestingly his passport return plane ticket and money were all missing from his wallet yet such important information was only reported to the u.s embassy on january 22nd after the state department contacted the chilean government regarding boris's inexplicable disappearance it's at this point that a u.s ambassador traveled from the chilean capital to where boris's backpack was found when he arrived chilean police showed him the body of a man who bore a remarkable physical resemblance
to boris a postmortem had shown that the man had drowned in a nearby river but when the ambassador compared the man's corpse to a photograph of boris he was carrying he safely concluded that the dead body was not that of the russian immigrant and this was confirmed when the body was confirmed to be the brother of a local man who had gone missing just a few days prior however when the ambassador was given time to more thoroughly examine the body he noticed that the skin on the tips of the finger had been peeled away and
that some of the man's teeth had been extracted leaving very little in the way of clues to the man's identity it was this discovery that had us officials realizing that something much deeper and darker was going on in southern chile and the disappearance of boris weissfeller was just the tip of the iceberg yet bizarrely even after the body of the drowned man was confirmed to have belonged to a local villager chilean authorities reversed themselves and insisted that it was in fact borsa's body after all they officially declared him dead stating that the cause of death
was accidental drowning after boris had attempted to cross the nubul river the u.s state department seemed to accept this official explanation but behind the scenes american officials continued to conduct a covert investigation into boris's death a number of important questions remained unanswered for example the nubal river is very narrow with an extremely weak current so how was it that boris's body was found so far from the site of his river crossing what's more the section of the nubul river in which boris is said to have drowned is barely four feet deep boris was an experienced
trekker in great physical shape and had crossed even deeper rivers just days prior so how is it he drowned in water he could have easily stood up in it would be no easy feat to get to the bottom of such an enigma but the chilean government didn't even attempt to find the answers that boris and his relatives so richly deserved in fact from 1985 onwards the chileans went completely radio silent on the issue and for almost two decades afterwards it appeared as if boris's disappearance would remain a mystery but then in 1998 chilean dictator augusto
pinochet's luck finally ran out and he was brought up on charges of human rights violations by the united kingdom in the great tradition of the special relationship between the two countries the administration of president bill clinton began to share hundreds of state department reports with the uk all of which detailed a 10-year covert investigation to uncover the truth behind boris vice velar's vanishing years upon years of delicate and secretive operations had unearthed clues to boris's whereabouts that all pointed to the same place a remote commune known only as the colonia dignidad shockingly the colonia was
revealed to be a religious cult-turned prison camp founded by escaped nazi war criminals in postwar chile it was also used by the pinochet regime for the torture and execution of their political opponents it operated as a kind of autonomous zone exempt from the control of the chilean government with a free pass to torture brainwash and kill as they pleased the only condition being that they disappear at pinochet's rivals when asked to do so u.s officials had long suspected that the colonia played a part of boris's disappearance as at the time he went missing pinochet was
subjecting his political opponents to some of the worst violence and oppression in the country's history not only that but the colonia was only 25 miles away from the small village in which boris had shared dinner with the two shepherds when reading through some of the declassified documents for the first time u.s officials tasked with discovering boris's fate were stunned at some of the details surrounding the colonia's founding the story begins with a local nazi and convicted offender by the name of paul schaefer in the mid 50s paul founded a small commune in western germany preaching
a message that was highly influenced by the writings of american revivalist preacher william branham it would also go on to inspire the infamous jim jones of the jonestown massacre paul was intelligent ruthless and extremely charismatic so much so that one follower said that the charisma seemed to radiate from him like beams of light as a result he quickly amassed a large and committed following of about 300 members who operated a community orphanage for war widows and their children in a building just outside of troisdorf but like many cults before and since it wasn't long until
there were accusations of child abuse being leveled at the group's leader paul shaffer responded to the accusations by fleeing the country hopping from continent to continent until he decided to settle in chile by 1962 paul had used funds raised from his most devoted followers to buy a 4 000 acre ranch in the andean foothills and when he summoned the faithful they came in droves when the commune was 240 strong paul gave a speech in which he declared that the place was to be a center for moral revival a place where they would attempt to restore
the dignity of man and with that in mind the commune was officially named la colonia dignidad meaning the dignity colony yet the kind of lifestyle that paul had instituted that colonia was far different from what he preached what was promised as a utopia turned out to be an autocratic nightmare where paul's followers were forced into a rigorous process of social and mental control colonists were forbidden from any kind of private conversation and a system of confession was in its place whereby they confessed their sins on a daily basis men and women were kept entirely separate
with romantic relationships strictly forbidden children were raised communally having been forcibly separated from the parents with paul having the final say on how they were raised those who broke any of the numerous rules and regulations were subjected to horrific public punishments in which they were whipped tortured or beaten a stark warning to the other colonists of the faith that awaited rule breakers the ideology that paul claimed to have invented was nothing more than a warped version of judea christian values coupled with an added obsession with anti-communism given that his followers were largely composed of german
war veterans and war widows who still remembered the devastating march of the red army across germany the message rang true to them communism was the pinnacle of insidious evil and years of intense hatred for leftist politics made them easy targets for paul's own brand of rhetoric when the colonia was founded chile was under socialist government something that paul constantly reminded his followers to develop a kind of siege mentality however in 1973 the chilean political landscape changed dramatically when the country's military seized control of the government suddenly the nation's leader was no longer socialist but a
violently right-wing general by the name of augusto pinochet pinochet kicked his regime off by hunting down no less than 45 000 political rivals by the time he was done chile's prisons were overflowing with prisoners pinochet had a problem but when he discovered la colonia dignidad it seemed a solution had presented itself given their far-right tendencies paul schaefer proved a natural ally to general pinochet who had long harbored an admiration for german military prowess we can't say for certain of the two ever met in person but some kind of direct communication seems inevitable given that colonia's
role in the regime's murder machine because by 1974 political prisoners were being shipped by the hundreds to a special section of the colonia where they were tortured interrogated and executed the level of violence perpetrated the colonia only grew as the years went by and it lasted a long long time too with reports of mass executions in the area as late as 1997 but why are we talking about an oppressive chilean dictatorship and their new age cultist allies when we're trying to find out what happened to an ex-soviet hiker because the fact is that when boris
entered chile in 1984 he was entering a country that was in the grip of a violent authoritarian dictatorship where new age cults were free to run torturous little fiefdoms where their leaders played god it was the very definition of a rogue state one of the most dangerous volatile places on earth it's clear that boris was aware of some of the risks associated with chilean travel but there's no way he could have known that his proposed hiking route would have taken him within spitting distance of one of the world's most notorious death camps and given the
area was probably one of the most dangerous places on earth it's safe to assume that the colonia had something to do with his disappearance the question is how can we know that for certain as we mentioned the last person who ever see boris alive was the shepherd he was having dinner with on the night of his disappearance the official chilean story the same one the united states department backed as late as 1998 was that the shepherds had bid boris of warm farewell in the wee small hours of the morning and hadn't thought of the meeting
again until he was visited by chilean police however declassified u.s diplomatic cables revealed that after meeting boris nearest village the shepherd had filed a report with a group of chilean soldiers who were stationed nearby this report claims that the foreign extremists was in the area but whether or not this is a direct reference to the colonia cultists isn't entirely clear but what is clear is how a chilean army officer would have reacted if he'd taken a look at boris's passport although he had earned his u.s citizenship a few years prior and thus had an american
passport under the section titled place of birth borsa's passport read moscow as we know boris had migrated to the u.s many years before and had done so as a defector he had no loyalty to the soviet union but no chilean army officer would have known that and at a time when chile was in the grip of an anti-communist witch-hunt this looked very very bad indeed it didn't help that boris had an old soviet military-issue backpack to carry his things one that was covered in cyrillic lettering another declassified document gives way to this theory and confirms
that the colonia's involvement in boris's disappearance the document contains the account of a confidential military informant known only as daniel who claims to have been one of the soldiers who captured boris alive he claims that they took off his shoes tied him up and took him into colonia dignidad where he was turned over to the chief of security daniel goes on to say that paul shaffer himself took part in boris's torture repeatedly accusing him of being a jewish spy sent by the soviet union just how paul came to learn aboris faith is unknown but we
can only imagine the delight of the former nazi when he realized he had his hands on the jew born in moscow of all places it's a scenario so horrific that it wouldn't enter a person's worst nightmares if it was a horror movie people would say it was exploitative too on the nose and bad taste but this actually happened an innocent jewish immigrant from the former soviet union goes on a blissful trek in the chilean mountains and ends up the prisoner of a nazi cult leader who's still operating a death camp forty years after the war
ended the results were worse than you can imagine boris was treated like an animal kept alive by the nazi colonists so that they could extend his torment it was everything they had ever hated american soviet jew according to daniel's account boris was kept alive and tortured almost daily for two and a half years before one day he simply couldn't handle it anymore and his body just gave out the declassified document that details this account comes with a note from a cia analyst that confirms daniel's story as mostly being true and only casts doubt on the
claim that boris was kept alive for 30 months however another piece of evidence available to the general public is the transcription of a cassette tape recorded by a man named heinz heinz had escaped from the colonia in 1968 but had remained in chile to set up an operation which aimed to help other colonists escape paul shaffer's brutal nazi-style regime on the recording heinz says that he helped a high-ranking colonist named hugo barr escaped the colony's clutches after he grew jaded with the cult's way of life barr told him that before he escaped he'd overheard a
conversation between paul and two other colonists in which paul asked them about a recent intruder to the colonia references to a jew were made along with one of the men saying don't worry the problem has been solved he's already eating potatoes underground this testimony is supported by a separate cia informant who claims that after boris was questioned by schaefer he was beaten to death and tossed in the river this source also states that the first responders to his missing persons report were the cni the chilean secret police who instead of looking for boris scrubbed all
evidence that he had ever been in the area then found a patsy with which to fake an accidental death both of these are deemed solid sources so it's most likely that boris was killed shortly after his abduction it also indicates a large-scale cover-up of the murder by chilean authorities which means that at some point they were well aware that he wasn't a russian spy but an american citizen yet by the time he'd been taken to the colonia he had already seen too much of the chilean regime's murder machine that he could be allowed to just
walk away at that point chilean authorities had every reason to immediately execute boris they had to keep their operations secretive from the united states and any immediate release could have kicked off a major diplomatic crisis leaving him alive would only have increased the chances of an escape to them morris had to die all the signs of an unlawful governmental sanctioned execution was there but u.s officials didn't quite have all the evidence they needed to file a complaint with the un so in 1986 they reached out to louise benavides the shepherd who had last seen boris
alive and the same man who had apparently reported him to the chilean army but to their surprise investigators found that luis was dead they were told that he had been found hanging on one of the cable posts of a bridge across the nuble river not far from the area that boris is said to have been murdered investigators were told that luis's death occurred on may 5th 1985 just four months after boris went missing officially his death was ruled him taking his own life but as we know from this whole tale there are plenty of official
explanations that are anything but truthful just like another witness to the crime who was found floating face down in a lake not far from the colonia not long after louise was discovered hanging the official explanation was that he had accidentally drowned and it seems that all these witnesses had the simultaneous run of bad luck after meeting boris something we can all agree is highly suspicious in 1998 after the declassified u.s documents were released the chilean government finally reopened the weiss feller case and built a criminal case against schaefer in the colonia a last-ditch attempt to
launder the colonia's reputation saw schaefer launch a subsidized boarding school for local children on colonial grounds it was an initial success until one 12 year old student managed to smuggle a note out to his mother it simply said take me out of here he did things to me the boy's mother took him to a doctor who in turn contacted the local police leading to a warrant being issued for shaffer's arrest police raided the colonia shortly after but couldn't find paul shaffer as he was apparently hiding from them in an underground bunker it wasn't until 2005
that justice finally caught up with him when he was discovered to be living in a wealthy gated community in the argentinian capital buenos aires yet paul's arrest didn't bring any fresh answers to the questions surrounding boris's murder paul wouldn't say a word about his leadership of the colonia and he took his secrets to the grave dying in prison in 2010 unbelievably the colonia is still in existence having rebranded itself of la villa bavira and has actually opened the taurus visitors can wander streets lined with historic bavarian style buildings enjoying traditional german holidays such as the
oktoberfest but as jolly vacationers raise steins a beer police excavate nearby mass graves digging and dating hundreds of decaying remains in the hopes of calculating the number of colonia victims in the near future it may well turn out that boris weissfeller's body is down there too buried under the hundreds of bodies of those that fell victim to the world's final nazi death [Music] camp i think i was about 19 or 20 when this happened i was walking home after a night with the homies and since i was feeling jolly or high should i say i
decided to take the long way home the long way home consisted of walking down this big old boulevard with some really nice big houses on it i think they were all built around the turn of the century and some of the ornate brick work could make you feel like you've gone back in time if it wasn't for all the latest model mercedes parked in the driveways so i'm walking kind of slow just sort of moseying down the middle section which has all of these flower beds on it like i said it's a real nice place
so nice in fact that a punk kid like me and skate shoes a beanie and a black hoodie doesn't fit in at all which is why although i can't condone what happened next i can kind of understand it so as i'm walking i'm like looking up at all the stuff carved into these strips of stone near the rooftops some got dates on them some got carvings when all of a sudden i hear this dude like hey hey you what are you looking at i looked down to see this dude sitting on the front steps of
what i assumed was this house i'm just minding my own business not doing anyone any harm so i kind of replied defensive like nothing what's it to you his response to that is to just get up off his butt and start marching towards me and only then do i see how monstrous this dude really is he's huge i must have instinctively started backing up like whoa dude chill but he just keeps coming it's right up in my face and starts growling these demands that i tell him what i was looking at i just say like
the house is dude what do you want and then for some god forsaken reason what i thought would be a totally harmless answer it turns out to send him into what i can only describe as a fit of rage i don't care how big or scary anyone is i don't have time for drama like that so i just keep backing up until i'm a safe enough distance and then start walking away but as i'm walking i hear this horrible distinctive click clack that has me stopping dead in my tracks guy tells me to turn around
and my worst fears are confirmed he has a gun pointed right at me and he's telling me not to move i've never been so scared in all my freaking life like i legitimately couldn't stop myself from shaking as the guy launches into a tirade about how his house has been targeted for burglary and blah blah blah how the cops won't help how guys like him need to take the law into their own hands i sympathized i totally did i had my bike stolen when i was 12 by a kid that lived on my block i
had to watch him ride that thing around for weeks before he trashed it one day and just tossed it into the river that guy was obviously at breaking point ready to snap the problem was he was about to snap on me and not an actual criminal thankfully he calmed down a little and after promising i'd never walk around that neighborhood at night anymore he finally sobers up lowers the gun lets me walk away people make a big deal out of bad neighborhoods and how you shouldn't walk through them at night but no one tells you
about the good neighborhoods because let me tell you they can be just as dangerous hey friends thanks for listening click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations and if you got a story be sure to submit them to my subreddit r let's read official and give and receive feedback from the community and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video and join a live stream to catch an invite to my discord and if you want to support me even more grab early access to all future narrations for just one dollar
a month on patreon and maybe even pick up some let's read merch on spreadshirt and check out the let's read podcast where you can hear all these stories in long compilation form and save huge on data located anywhere you listen to podcasts links in the bio thanks so much friends and i'll see you again soon