Germany ends probe into doctor from Chile-based Nazi sect

BERLIN — German prosecutors say Tuesday they have dropped their probe against a former doctor in the “Colonia Dignidad” Nazi pedophile sect that was based in a remote compound in Chile.

Hartmut Hopp, 74, was a physician in the notorious group that abused members — adults and children — and was used to torture and “disappear” regime critics during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Prosecutors in the city of Krefeld say that “after exhausting all promising investigative leads, it was not possible to substantiate a sufficient suspicion under any legal aspect necessary for an indictment.”

Hopp was the right-hand man of the late convicted pedophile Paul Schaefer, a former Wehrmacht soldier and lay preacher who in 1961 founded the commune that indoctrinated residents and kept them as virtual slaves.

The scale of the atrocities committed at the fenced-in 13,000-hectare (32,000-acre) mountain commune some 350 kilometers (215 miles) south of Santiago came to light only after the end of Pinochet’s regime.

— AFP

This file photo taken on August 12, 1997, in Chile shows Hartmut Hopp, a German doctor and deputy leader of Chile’s secretive “Colonia Dignidad” enclave, after being arrested by Chilean police on charges of complicity in the rape of young boys in the Andean colony. (AFP Photo/Stringer)