Holocaust Survivors Condemn 'Cynical' Sale of Nazi-Era Items
A prominent Holocaust survivors organisation has issued a forceful demand for a German auction house to immediately cancel a planned sale featuring hundreds of artefacts from the Nazi era. The International Auschwitz Committee, based in Berlin, has labelled the upcoming event, titled 'System of Terror', as a 'cynical and shameless' commercial exploitation of historical suffering.
Hundreds of Personal Documents Up for Sale
The auction, scheduled for Monday by the Felzmann auction house in Neuss near Düsseldorf, comprises more than 600 individual lots. According to reports from the German news agency dpa, the collection includes deeply personal items such as letters written by concentration camp prisoners to their families, alongside official perpetrator documents like Gestapo index cards. Crucially, the committee emphasises that many of these documents contain identifiable names of individuals, making the sale a profound ethical breach.
'History Being Exploited for Commercial Gain'
Christoph Heubner, an Executive Vice-President of the International Auschwitz Committee, expressed the profound distress this event has caused. He stated that for victims of Nazi persecution and Holocaust survivors, the auction is an outrageous undertaking that leaves them speechless. "Their history and the suffering of all those persecuted and murdered by the Nazis is being exploited for commercial gain," Heubner said. He argued that such sensitive documents rightfully belong to the families of the victims or should be preserved in museums and memorial exhibitions, not degraded to mere commodities in a commercial auction. The committee's plea to the Felzmann auction house was clear: "show some basic decency and cancel the auction."
In a notable development, a listing for the auction visible on the Felzmann website on Sunday morning had been removed by mid-afternoon. The auction house has not responded to requests for comment regarding the cancellation demands or the removal of the listing.
