"Most of the people in Israel I know who went through the Holocaust, if I take this to Israel, to Yad Vashem, you'll get every visitor who is a Jew will say: 'Oh this is what was in our house 50 or 60 years ago,' " Svoray said recently at the site. Yad Vashem is the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
Svoray was hunting for a downed Nazi plane in the area's vast stretches of woods when a former forester tipped him off to the dump, used from 1935 to 1945, outside the village of Klandorf in the largely rural eastern state of Brandenburg.
After two hours of digging with his bare hands and a rusty spade he found among the refuse, Svoray had unearthed what appeared to be a beer bottle stamped with a Star of David and a plate-sized alloyed metal swastika. Several weeks later he found the bowl shard.
"I don't claim to say this is from Kristallnacht, I claim there is enough evidence here to provoke a further investigation," said Svoray, 54, an Israeli journalist who made his name infiltrating German neo-Nazi groups in the 1990s. He would like to see the dump excavated.
Nov. 9-10 will be the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Thomas Kersting, an archeologist employed by the state of Brandenburg to care for buried memorials and archeological sites, said Svoray's finds - which he has yet to examine - may give the area historical value.
"A place like this where we have objects with a Star of David directly next to a Nazi swastika, that is of course meaningful. . . . That gives it a certain quality of a memorial," Kersting said.
But Kersting played down the likelihood of an archeological dig, citing a lack of funds and arguing that such a disruption would be in direct opposition to his bureau's aim to maintain the sanctity of such sites.
Arno Gielsdorf, who owns the strip of land where the dump sits, said his father told stories about the arrival of "garbage" trains after Kristallnacht. He is convinced the dump holds valuable artifacts. "The things from Kristallnacht were buried in the deepest places," Gielsdorf said. "They are still there."
