The items for sale included letters of Holocaust victims and Gestapo documents about the execution of Jews
International outcry has forced a German auction house to cancel the sale of documents and items from World War II-era concentration camps.
The Felzmann Auction House had planned to sell 623 items dating from 1933 to 1945 on Monday as part of an auction titled ‘System of Terror Vol II.’
According to the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the lots included postcards and letters from prisoners, a 1937 medical report on forced sterilizations in the Dachau concentration camp, and a Gestapo file about the execution of a Jewish man in the Mackeim ghetto in July 1942. An antisemitic propaganda poster and Star of David patches and armbands from the Buchenwald concentration camp were also listed in the catalogue.
The planned sale drew condemnation at home and abroad. Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee Christoph Huebner called it “cynical and shameless,” saying that documents related to the Holocaust “should be displayed in museums or in exhibitions at memorial sites and not be degraded to objects of trade.”
The Fritz Bauer Institute, a German research center that studies the Holocaust, said that the sale of the documents “reflects a disregard for the personal rights of the victims and the legitimate interests of their descendants.”
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said that Warsaw had been pressuring authorities in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia to call off the auction. On Sunday, he thanked his German counterpart, Johann Wadephul, “for the information that the offensive auction of Holocaust artefacts has now been cancelled.”
