FRANKFURT, Nov 21 — An auction of Nazi memorabilia, including Adolf Hitler’s top hat, raked in hundreds of thousands of euros in Munich yesterday in the teeth of German and international protest.
The hammer fell on the Nazi leader’s top hat at €50,000 (RM230,672), according to the Hermann Historica auction house website, while items of clothing belonging to his partner Eva Braun each sold for thousands.
One buyer paid €130,000 for a silver-plated copy of Hitler’s antisemitic political manifesto Mein Kampf that once belonged to senior Nazi Hermann Goering, emblazoned with an eagle and the party’s swastika emblem.
Other lots of clothing and personal belongings from notorious World War II Nazi leaders like Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess also packed the catalogue pages.
“The Nazis’ crimes are being trivialised here,” the German government’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein told the Funke newspaper group.
“They’re acting as if they’re trading in perfectly normal historical art objects,” but “there is a danger that Nazi relics become cult objects” for the extreme right, he added.
Ahead of the auction, European Jewish Association chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin recalled that “it is Germany that leads Europe in the sheer volume of reported antisemitic incidents”.
“We urge the German authorities to compel auction houses to divulge the names of those who are buying,” who “should then be put on a government ‘watch’ list,” Margolin said.
Many of the items belonging to top Nazi leaders were seized by US soldiers in the final days of World War II.
The dresses belonging to Braun, Hitler’s long-term companion who was briefly his wife before their death, were found among 40 trunks seized by the US military in May 1945 in Salzburg in Austria.
Some of the more unusual lots include a copy of Hitler’s rental contract in Munich and a pair of sunglasses worn by a defendant at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg to avoid the glare of the floodlights. — AFP
