Colonia Dignidad

Renate Künast, born in Recklinghausen in 1955, is a politician, lawyer and social worker. From 2000 to 2001 she was the Federal Chair of Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and from 2001 to 2005 Federal Minister for Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture; from 2005 to 2013 Chair of her party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag and from 2014 to 2017 Chair of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection. She is a member of the German Bundestag and lives in Berlin. In the current 20th legislative period, Renate Künast is a member of the Committee on Food and Agriculture and a member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection. Furthermore, she was a member of the Joint Commission of the Bundestag and the Federal Government for the Victims of the “Colonia Dignidad” during the last legislative period.

Dr Tobias Lindner has been Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office since 8 December 2021. His regional responsibilities include transatlantic relations, relations with Belarus, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and Latin America. Thematically, Tobias Lindner works primarily on security policy issues and advocates for the further development of the rules-based international order, the strengthening of the United Nations and a feminist foreign policy. He promotes a strong role for Germany in civil crisis prevention, humanitarian aid and peace mediation. Tobias Lindner also works on structural issues such as digitalisation, gender equality, diversity and budgetary issues.

Esther Müller came to Colonia Dignidad with her family when she was five years old. She married in 2000 and went to Germany with her husband after the sect was opened in 2005. In the book “Let’s Talk. Frauenprotokolle aus der Colonia Dignidad” (Let’s Talk: Women’s Protocols from Colonia Dignidad), she and other women from the settlement made their story public. Today, together with the publisher, she promotes education and remembrance work on Colonia Dignidad through readings.

Elizabeth Lira is a clinical psychologist and researcher at the Faculty of Psychology and the Memory and Human Rights Research Programme at Universidad Alberto Hurtado. In 1983, she received the Colegio de Psicólogos Award in Chile; in 2002, the International Humanitarian Award of the American Psychological Association; and in 2017, the National Humanities and Social Sciences Award in Chile. She was a member of the Chilean government’s Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture and has been a member of the Ethics Committee of Chile’s Constituent Assembly since 2021.

Evelyn Hevia Jordán is a psychologist and has a Master’s degree in history. She is writing her doctoral thesis on the history of the former Colonia Dignidad hospital at the Latin America Institute of the Free University of Berlin with an ANID-DAAD scholarship. In her academic and professional career, she has worked on the human rights violations committed during the dictatorship in Chile. Since 2014 she has been working with the different groups of victims of Colonia Dignidad in the process of dialogue for the establishment of a place of remembrance and since 2019 she has been working as an interviewer and consultant for the CDOH project.

Jo Siemon studied Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Münster. She worked for many years in memorial and museum education at the Villa ten Hompel Memorial (Münster) and the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Santiago de Chile). Most recently, she worked as a freelancer in various projects on education and historical reappraisal, including at the German School Santiago, at the Heidelberg Center and currently in the project “Colonia Dignidad. A Chilean-German Oral History Archive”.

Stefan Rinke is head of the project “Colonial Dignidad. A Chilean-German Oral History Archive”. Since 2005, he has been a professor of Latin American history at the Institute for Latin American Studies and the Friedrich Meinecke Institute at Freie Universität Berlin. Rinke was spokesperson of the first German-Latin American Research Training Group “Entre Espacios” (2009-2018) and has been spokesperson of the successor group “Temporalidades del Futuro” since 2019. His research focuses include the history of Chile and Latin American history in a global context.

Dorothee Wein is a political scientist and ethnologist specialising in Latin America. She has been working in the field of digital interview collections at the Central Library of Freie Universität Berlin since 2008, where she makes narrative oral history sources on National Socialism accessible for science and education. Since 2019, she has been a research assistant in the project “Colonia Dignidad. A Chilean-German Oral History Archive”.

Philipp Kandler received a Bachelor of Arts in History with minors in Political Science and Latin American Studies and a Master of Arts in Global History from the Free University of Berlin. He received his PhD in History in Berlin in 2019 with a thesis on the history of human rights and the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile. Since the beginning of 2019, Philipp Kandler has been a research assistant in the project “Colonia Dignidad. A Chilean-German Oral History Archive”.