German refuse dump yields 1938 loot

Oct 28, 2008

By Rachel Nolan

KLANDORF, Germany: Almost 70 years ago, anti-Semitic rioters wreaked orchestrated nationwide havoc on their Jewish neighbors in Germany, wrecking and torching thousands of synagogues, private businesses and homes.

Michael Blumenthal, a former U.S. Treasury secretary who now heads the Jewish Museum in Berlin, was 12 then, but still has sharp memories of the night of Nov. 9, 1938. Looters destroyed his parents' store in Berlin and Blumenthal's father was among about 30,000 men between the ages of 16 and 60 rounded up and sent to concentration camps that night.

"The ninth of November is a symbol because it was the beginning of the end," Blumenthal said of Kristallnacht, a Nazi euphemism meaning "night of broken glass."

Physical evidence of the state-sponsored pogrom has always been scarce. The Jewish Museum holds numerous letters describing the night, but the only other related object in the collection is a 38-second black-and-white film of a synagogue burning in Bielefeld, a university town in Western Germany.

Last week, however, an Israeli researcher reported finding a trove of such evidence - piles of looted Jewish possessions about 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, north of Berlin. Locating the find turned out to be as simple as asking one of 180 Klandorf residents for the whereabouts of their local trash dump.

The day after Kristallnacht, trains loaded with personal and religious items arrived in the woods outside Klandorf. Political prisoners from a nearby camp unloaded the goods and threw it all in a dump here.

"It is no secret in our town that things stolen during Kristallnacht are there," said Arno Gielsdorf, 49. His family owns a section of the Klandorf refuse heap, which is roughly the size of four soccer fields. He says his father told him that the dump was extraordinarily busy right after Kristallnacht.

The story might have remained a bit of local lore but for a chance encounter last December. A retired forester named Werner Russ was out gathering mushrooms when he ran into an Israeli writer and former detective, Yaron Svoray, who was researching priceless stolen artifacts once stashed in the nearby hunting lodge of the Luftwaffe commander, Hermann Göring. Russ told Svoray what the whole town of Klandorf had always known about their local dump.

"We're away from everything here, I thought surely it would not interest anyone," said Russ, 73.

Svoray, though, was decidedly interested. He returned the following spring, bringing three friends with shovels and picks. They dug up a green bottle with a Star of David stamped into the bottom, mezuzas and burned armrests of chairs found in synagogues. Svoray also found an ornamental swastika made of a metal alloy.

Germany remains wary after hoaxes like the "Hitler Diaries," published in Stern magazine in 1983 and quickly exposed as a forgery. But no one has raised serious doubts about the authenticity of this find.

"We have confirmed that the relics are from that period," said Tanja Ronen-Loehnberg, a historian at the Ghetto Fighters' House, a Holocaust museum and research center in Israel.

For now, the refuse heap remains unmarked in an obscure forest dotted with wooden watchtowers for hunting wild boar and deer. Double lines of dead grass where the train rails used to lie, as well as broken porcelain and bottles underfoot, are the only hints of the past.

Archaeologists won't find a pristine historical record in Klandorf. Locals said looters have been combing the site for decades, looking for Meissen porcelain, silverware sets and anything of value to sell in the flea markets of Berlin and Leipzig. In 2005, Gielsdorf and four other private owners secured a court injunction against trespassers, some of whom drove tractors and bulldozers to the dump.

"Someone needs to at least guard the place so it doesn't become eBay special for skinheads," said Svoray, who travels with bodyguards in Germany, after receiving death threats.

The former police investigator is best-known for going undercover among neo-Nazis in Germany to research "In Hitler's Shadow," a book about German neo-Nazis that was made into a television movie in 1995.

Gielsdorf's daughter Angelika, 25, said neighbors drop by regularly to check for looters, "but we can't come every day."

The Ghetto Fighters' Museum hopes to set up a living history center bringing young Germans and Israelis together to sift through the contents of the dump. Such a project could give a boost to the area, one of many economically depressed regions of the former East Germany.

Distinct sections of the dump hold Berlin refuse from different eras, said the area's mayor. But many of the castoffs are mixed together, as demonstrated by the swastika buried near burned Jewish articles. Even with forensic studies it can be difficult to pinpoint exact dates.

"In the end, it doesn't matter terribly if these articles were taken on November 9th or the following March or the previous August," Blumenthal said. "The fact is that it is a relic and testament to these two terrible days and the actions of criminals."

Source: International Herald Tribune

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