Stop the Presses-Garbage found in local dump

A smaller version of this story appeared in my local fish wrap a couple of days ago.One of many articles relating to the holocaust that seem to be appearing with greater frequency over the last month or so.

Refuse Heap Is Archive for Night of Hatred

KLANDORF, Germany — Seventy years ago next month, rioters wreaked havoc on their Jewish neighbors, destroying and burning thousands of synagogues, businesses and homes across the nation.

W. Michael Blumenthal, the former United States treasury secretary who now is the director of 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 his father was among the 30,000 men from 16 to 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,” Mr. Blumenthal said of Kristallnacht, a Nazi euphemism meaning “night of broken glass.”

Curiously, though, physical evidence of the state-sponsored pogrom has always been extremely scarce. The Jewish Museum, for example, holds many letters describing the night. But the only other related object in its 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 — in this town 30 miles north of Berlin.

Finding it turned out to be as simple as asking one of Klandorf’s 180 residents for the whereabouts of the 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 material 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 said 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. Werner Russ, a retired forester, was gathering mushrooms when he ran into Yaron Svoray, an Israeli writer and former detective who was researching stolen artifacts once stashed in a nearby hunting lodge that belonged to Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe commander. Mr. Russ, 73, confirmed to Mr. Svoray what people of Klandorf had always known about the local dump. “We’re away from everything here,” he said. “I thought surely it would not interest anyone.”

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

Germany remains wary after hoaxes like the Hitler diaries, published in Stern magazine in 1983 and quickly exposed as forgeries. 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-Löhnberg, a historian at the Ghetto Fighters’ House, a well-known Holocaust museum and research center in Israel.

For now, the dump remains unmarked in a forest dotted with wooden watchtowers for hunting wild boar and deer. Double lines of dead grass where the train rails used to run, and broken porcelain and bottles underfoot, are the only hints of the past.

Archaeologists will not find a pristine historical record in Klandorf. Local residents said looters had 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Svoray, who travels with bodyguards in Germany, after receiving death threats. Mr. Svoray, a former police investigator, is best known for going undercover among neo-Nazis in Germany to research his book, “In Hitler’s Shadow,” which was made into an HBO movie in 1995.

Mr. Gielsdorf’s daughter Angelika, 25, said neighbors drop by regularly to check for looters, “but we can’t come every day.”

The Ghetto Fighters’ House hopes to set up a living history center that would bring young Germans and Israelis together to sift through the contents of the dump. Such a project could help the area, one of the many economically depressed parts of the former East Germany.

There promises to be plenty of chaff to sort out from the valuable kernels of history remaining in the dump. According to old maps, the area was used as a dump from the early 20th century until 1945. Distinct sections hold Berlin refuse from different eras. But many of the castoffs are mixed together, and 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 Nov. 9 or the following March or the previous August,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “The fact is that it is a relic and testament to these two terrible days and the actions of criminals.”

Mr. Svoray said he was surprised that the dump’s contents were not made public earlier.

“As far as detective work, with 10 being the most difficult and zero being nothing, this was a 2,” he said. “What always amazes me in Germany and Austria is that people assume these stories are over and done with.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/world/europe/28germany.html

  There were a couple of pictures in my local paper that arent in the on line addition of this story.They showed some of these "relics" wich consisted of what looked like a broken piece of a ceramic bowl and a small bottle with the star of David stamped on the bottom of it.

  “Someone needs to at least guard the place so it doesn’t become eBay special for skinheads,” said Mr. Svoray."

 Cant have those skinheads stealin' refuse from the dump.