Hartmut Hopp, a former doctor of the notorious cult Colonia Dignidad in Chile
A German court said Tuesday it could not enforce a Chilean prison sentence for a German former member of a Nazi paedophile sect for complicity in child sex abuse.
It ruled that Hartmut Hopp, 74, could not be jailed because the evidence the Chilean court had provided against him fell short of that required under German judicial standards.
Hopp was a doctor in the notorious ‘Colonia Dignidad’ sect that abused members and was used as a place to torture and ‘disappear’ regime critics during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The doctor was the right-hand man of convicted paedophile Paul Schaefer, a former Wehrmacht soldier and lay preacher who in 1961 founded the commune that indoctrinated residents and kept them as virtual slaves.
Hopp was convicted in Chile of crimes including complicity in Schaefer’s rape and sexual abuse of minors but in 2011 fled to Germany before the final court ruling was imposed.
Hopp, pictured in Chile in 1997, fled to Germany in 2011 before the final court ruling was imposed
A German boy rides his bicycle in Villa Baviera or Bavaria Village, formerly known as Colonia Dignidad, Chile
Berlin declined to extradite the German citizen, but a lower court in the city of Krefeld in August 2017 upheld the Chilean court’s jail term of five years and one day, in a ruling cheered by human rights groups.
But that ruling has now been overturned by a higher court in Duesseldorf, which found that the evidence provided by the Chilean court fell short of that demanded by German justice.
The court said that it had to ascertain ‘whether the findings of fact made in the Chilean judgements are sufficient to justify criminal liability under German law’.
‘This is not the case in the view of the court,’ it said in a statement on the ruling it reached last Thursday, adding that the appeal decision was final.
It said it had found no concrete evidence in the Chilean rulings that Hopp, who ran the compound’s clinic, had actively aided and abetted the abuses committed by Schaefer, who ran its boarding school.
German Greens party politician Renate Kuenast voiced dismay at the latest ruling on Hopp, saying that ‘this decision will cause great pain for many victims of Colonia Dignidad’.
Villa Baviera or Bavaria Village, formerly known as Colonia Dignidad, a secretive former cult which was embroiled in child sex abuse scandals
The commune was tightly guarded and leaders brainwashed residents into living in effective slavery
Most of them were ‘traumatised by their time in the Colonia, which for many meant sexual violence, electric shocks and daily repression’, she said.
While many of the now elderly victims were living in poverty, Kuenast said, ‘the doctor of Colonia, who was part of the repressive system, fled the justice system for Germany’.
The scale of the atrocities committed at the fenced-in 13,000-hectare (32,000-acre) mountain commune some 350 kilometres (215 miles) south of Santiago came to light only after the end of Pinochet’s regime.
The abuses at the sect were the subject of the 2015 movie ‘The Colony’ starring Emma Watson and Daniel Bruehl.
Schaefer had in 1997 faced a series of lawsuits and fled Chile. He was arrested in Argentina in 2005 and convicted in Chile the following year for sexual abuse of children, weapons possession and human rights violations.
He died in a Chilean jail in 2010 at the age of 88 while serving a 20-year sentence.
Germany in 2016 said it was declassifying its files on the sect, and the foreign minister at the time, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, admitted that ‘from the 60s to the 80s, German diplomats looked the other way, and did too little to protect’ the German citizens living in the sect.
Hopp (pictured in 2000) has been spared jail after fleeing to Germany because a court ruled the evidence supplied in Chile was not sufficient to convict