Sylten Werner

Sylten, Werner Werner Sylten was born in 1893, in Hergiswyl, Switzerland, the eldest son of a chemist from Königsberg, East Prussia (today Kaliningrad in Russia). Following a four-year military stint in World War I, he completed his theological studies at the University of Marburg in 1920. After his ordination, he became, in 1925, director of the Protestant girls’ school at Bad Köstritz in Thuringia. In the first period after Hitler’s rise to power, Sylten aligned himself with the dissenting stance of the Confessing Church against the Nazification of the Protestant Church. His classification as Mischling in accordance with the racial laws (his father was a converted Jew) made his position highly precarious. Following the publication of a vicious attack on Sylten in the Völkische Beobachter of September 20, 1935, the Thuringian minister of the Interior dismissed him from his job and later expelled him from Thuringia. In the autumn of 1938, Sylten, who had been out of a job and office for more than two years, accepted Pastor Heinrich Grüber’s* call to assist him with the unofficial Protestant relief and rescue effort on behalf of the victims of Nazi racial persecution. He quickly became Grüber’s right-hand-man and his chief assistant at the head office – Büro Grüber – in Berlin. With Grüber’s arrest on December 9, 1940, Sylten took over the operations and continued to direct the informal relief and rescue organization. Less than three months later, on February 25, 1941, he was arrested and deported to the Dachau concentration camp. He did not survive for long. Confined to the “Invalidenbaracke” (camp for the disabled), the Jewish “Pfaffe” (cleric) – as the SS doctor contemptuously referred to him – was disposed of by gassing on August 26, 1942. On October 16, 1979, Yad Vashem recognized Werner Sylten as Righteous Among the Nations.