Born in Switzerland, Werner Sylten was the son of a chemist. After studying theology, he entered social work and began running a home for girls in Thuringia in 1925. Sylten was close to the Religious Socialists and joined the Confessional Church. Classed as a “Mischling” (“half-breed”) by the Nuremberg race laws, he became a target of anti-Semitic attacks. He was dismissed in 1936.
Sylten then ran the Thuringian office of the Confessional Church, until it was closed down by the Gestapo in 1938 and he had to leave Thuringia. Pastor Heinrich Grüber recruited him to work in the Church Aid Office for Protestant Non-Aryans in Berlin. There, Sylten provided pastoral support for racially persecuted people and helped them to emigrate. After Pastor Grüber’s arrest, Sylten took over the aid office’s management until he had to close it. He himself was arrested at the end of February 1941 and transferred to Dachau concentration camp after three months in pretrial detention. When he fell severely ill in the camp, Werner Sylten was taken to the Schloss Hartheim “euthanasia” institution near Linz in an “invalid transport” in August 1942 and murdered there.