Controversial Nazi auction sees Adolf Hitler’s top hat and Goering’s silver plated copy of Mein Kampf sell for thousands
A CONTROVERSIAL Nazi auction has seen Adolf Hiter’s top hat sell for £42k.
The sale sparked claims that auctioneers are profiteering from the Third Reich – with one politician blasting that the sale was “trivialising the crimes of the Nazis.”
Among the listed items were Adolf Hitler’s top hat, Eva Braun’s dress, and Hermann Goering’s silver-plated copy of Mein Kampf.
The items were gathered by Allied soldiers who swept across the country in the closing days of World War II.
Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein said: “It’s trivialising the crimes of the Nazis.
“They are acting as if what they are selling is no different to any other historical objects.”
Auction house boss Bernhard Pacher said: “We have had one friendly e-mail saying they see it the way we do, meaning these are historical objects.
“But 99% of the emails we received included very bad insults where history is reduced to claiming we are just greedy neo-Nazis.”
He said that most buyers were museums in Asia and the US.
He added: “The remaining 20 percent of customers are private collectors or authors of historical books who need the objects for their books.
“The fate of each good collection in the long-run is to end up in a museum.”
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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.
Chairman of the European Jewish Association Rabbi Menachem Margolin also called on “German authorities to force the sellers of such items to name the people who bought them”.
Another item for sale is a copy of a rent contract Hitler signed for a Munich flat, and a pair of sunglasses used by a Nuremberg trial defendent to avoid the glare of spotlights.