MUNICH, GERMANY ¨C Nazi memorabilia including Hitler¡¯s top hat and a cocktail dress worn by his companion Eva Braun is going under the hammer at a German auction house, drawing calls from the Jewish community to stop a sale it deems immoral.
The collection features items such as the cigar case of Nazi air force commander Hermann Goering, Nazi military accolades, banners and knives, and a silver cased copy of Hitler¡¯s political treatise ¡°Mein Kampf.
The collection is expected to fetch hundreds of thousands of euros. The asking price for Hitler¡¯s hat alone is €50,000 ($55,325) and the price tag for the deluxe copy of ¡°Mein Kampf¡± that belonged to Goering is €130,000.
Bernhard Pacher, managing director of Hermann Historica, said the auction house had been flooded with emails from individuals condemning the online sale that started on Wednesday.
¡°We have had one friendly e-mail saying they see it the way we do, meaning these are historical objects,¡± said Pacher, whose auctions cover a range of objects, not just Nazi items.
¡°But 99 percent of the emails we received included very bad insults where history is reduced to claiming we are just greedy neo-Nazis.¡±
Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association, urged Pacher in a letter this month to withdraw the auction, saying the artifacts would be bought by individuals seeking to glorify Nazism.
¡°This is not a legal appeal to you, but very much a moral one,¡± wrote Margolin. ¡°What you are doing is not illegal, but it is wrong.¡±
Pacher said most buyers from the auction house were usually museums, especially in Asia and the United States where cultural institutions have deep pockets.
¡°The remaining 20 percent of customers are private collectors or authors of historical books who need the objects for their books,¡± he said. ¡°The fate of each good collection in the long-run is to end up in a museum.¡±
Three years ago, trousers with leather pockets worn by Hitler and a brass container that held the cyanide used by a top deputy to commit suicide were among a trove of Nazi memorabilia sold by Hermann Historica.
The owner or owners of the collection for sale from Wednesday was not revealed under German privacy rules.
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