An auction house is facing a backlash for selling off hundreds of important Nazi records and artefacts.
More than 600 letters and files documenting crimes committed during the Holocaust are to be sold at ‘The System of Terror’ auction on Monday.
Holocaust survivors have called for the ‘cynical and shameless’ event at the Felzmann auction house in Neuss, Germany, to be cancelled.
The dealer, which is based just outside Dusseldorf and specialises in postcards, advertised 627 items, including Gestapo files and letters to loved ones by prisoners of concentration camps.
Lots for sale on Monday include a Gestapo card detailing the execution of a Jewish resident of the Mackheim ghetto, predicted to fetch 350 euros, and an eight-page pamphlet of a 1940 anti-Jewish propaganda film, for which bids start at €120.
Other items include a letter sent by a Polish prisoner of Auschwitz from 1940, with a starting price of €180.
Meanwhile a letter describing the death of a ‘euthanised’ patient at the Hadamar State Hospital, used as a killing facility during World War II, was expected to fetch at least €350.
One file, which documents a man forcibly sterilised at the Dachau concentration camp in 1937, due to being deemed ‘racially unclean’.
According to the Fritz Bauer Institute, the auction house used cynical tactics, including justifying higher starting prices for items with accompanying pictures.
The research centre of Nazi crimes said: ‘The written and audiovisual interpretation of the NS crimes and their afterstory must urgently be entrusted to the public archives and memorials.
‘Only here are the documents expertly preserved, recorded, preserved for the future and made available taking into account their provenance, all copyright and personality rights as well as the protective interest of the affected people or their descendants of historical research and to an interested public.’
Christoph Heubner, an executive of the International Auschwitz Committee, said that families of Holocaust survivors were left ‘outraged and speechless’ by the event.
He said the items belonged to victims and their families and should be kept in museums or memorial exhibitions.
He said: ‘Their history and the suffering of all those persecuted and murdered by the Nazis is being exploited for commercial gain.
‘We urge those responsible at the Felzmann auction house to show some basic decency and cancel the auction.’
The auction listing was removed from the Felzmann website by Sunday afternoon.
Metro has contacted the auction house for comment.
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