Listener discretion is advised.

Today's episode is going to be a continuation, so if you haven't listened to the episode before

this one, I highly encourage you to do so. In last week's episode, I told the story of Boris

Weisfeiler, a Russian-born American mathematics professor who disappeared in 1985 while on a solo

backpacking trip in Chile. At one point during the investigation into his disappearance,

his sister, Olga, learned that he was potentially on the property of a community called the

Colonia Dignidad, though there wasn't much information available at the time about what the

Colonia was. At the end of the episode, Olga had been delivered a box full of declassified

documents pertaining to her brother's disappearance. The first piece she read was a report that came from

the Chilean Human Rights Committee. It explained that in 1987, two years after her brother

disappeared, an anonymous Chilean army official who went by Daniel, claimed he knew Boris had been

picked up by the Colonia Dignidad and was being held there at the time of the report being written.

Olga was reading these documents 15 years after her brother had gone missing, when thousands of

documents about the Colonia had just been declassified. This was because Chile's dictator, Augusto

Pinochet, had been arrested in the UK for the crimes against humanity he committed in Chile.

And as she's reading the declassified documents, much more information had become widely available

about the Colonia. So Olga got to researching. What was this secretive society living in the wilderness?

Was Boris being held there? And why had they picked him up in the first place?

To figure that out, I need to first take you down the rabbit hole that Olga went down on the history

of the Colonia Dignidad. It's that feeling when the energy and the room shifts,

when the air gets sucked out of a moment and everything starts to feel wrong.

It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's

...