Schafer ran a strict compound that even fired shots at a journalist who approached its gates one day. Nobody was allowed to leave. Schafer ran the compound under the guise of being a humanitarian society called Dignidad Beneficent society which claimed to help young children. In reality, children were held captive at the compound, divided by age and sex, and used for forced labor, illegal experiments, and sexual abuse. One local Chilean boy was used to test what the human body could survive. He was thrown off a building and then allowed to heal before being lit on fire and then being nursed back to health again. This process repeated for years until the young boy made his escape.
 
That is just one example of the horrific abuses the former Nazi inflicted on children within his own private Nazi cult within an isolated pocket of German descendants in Chile. Victims of Schafer's sexual abuse were mostly boys, but some girls also had cattle prods inserted in their vaginas and electrocuted until they were sterilized. Every now and then a victim would escape the compound and run to local authorities, but they were paid off by Schafer and immediately brought back to him. The local Chilean secret police also used Schafer's compound to torture and extract information from political opponents.
 
It wasn't until 1997 that 26 children came forward at once to report that they had been sexually abused at the compound ran by Schafer. He quickly disappeared and fled from the Chilean government who sought to finally prosecute him under a newly elected leader. Schafer was tried in his absence and found guilty in late 2004. Colonia Dignidad still exists today with the descendants of Nazi war criminals still living there. Even in 2018, these many Nazi descendants only speak German despite living in Chile. Schafer finally resurfaced in 2006 and was sentenced to 33 years in jail for sexually abusing 25 children. He was found guilty of 20 counts of dishonest abuses and five counts of child rape, and those are just for crimes he committed between 1993 and 1997. Schafer died in 2010 of heart failure at the Santiago de Chile's Ex-Penitentiary's Hospital.
