Germany cancels Holocaust artifacts auction after intense backlash: ‘Exploited for commercial gain’

A scheduled auction in Germany set to feature hundreds of artifacts from the Holocaust — including chilling letters written by prisoners in concentration camps — was canceled on Sunday after intense backlash.

The auction by Auktionhaus Felzmann, dubbed “The System of Terror,” consisted of more than 600 lots with vestiges from the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, including slews of documentation like Gestapo index cards and letters penned by prisoners in German concentration camps to their loved ones back home.

The addition of the letters stoked a fiery rage across Europe, particularly in Poland, which was annexed by Nazi Germany and used as grounds for a majority of its concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

“For victims of Nazi persecution and Holocaust survivors, this auction is a cynical and shameless undertaking that leaves them outraged and speechless,” Christoph Heubner of The International Auschwitz Committee said. AP

Radoslaw Sikorski, the deputy prime minister of Poland, announced that the “offensive” auction was canceled after conversations with German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, who “agreed that such a scandal must be prevented.”

Before Sikorski’s intervention, a Holocaust survivors group also called on the German auction house Felzmann to nix the auction, scheduled for Monday, in part because the documents they were seeking to sell identified many people by name.

Christoph Heubner, an executive vice president of The International Auschwitz Committee, implored the auctioneers to either return the documents to the respective surviving families or display them in museums or Holocaust memorials.

“For victims of Nazi persecution and Holocaust survivors, this auction is a cynical and shameless undertaking that leaves them outraged and speechless,” Heubner wrote in a statement on Saturday.

“Their history and suffering of all those persecuted and murdered by the Nazis is being exploited for commercial gain,” he added.

“We urge those responsible at the Felzmann auction house to show some basic decency and cancel the auction.”

The listing was scrubbed from the Auktionhaus Felzmann website as of Sunday afternoon.

In 2019, an auction house in Munich also found itself in hot water over a sale of Adolf Hitler memorabilia, including one of his top hats and a silver-cased copy of “Mein Kampf,” his published manifesto that laid out his plans for mass extermination that would later be dubbed “The Final Solution.”

Despite mass condemnation, the auction went on and raked in hundreds of thousands of euros.

In 2021, a Jerusalem-based auction house planned to sell a set of stamps used to tattoo prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp.

All prisoners at the concentration camp were branded with tattoos on their wrists in numerical order of arrival. There were two series of tattoos, differentiated with the letter ‘A’ or ‘B’, and each went in a rotation from one to 20,000 or 30,000, depending on the prisoner’s gender, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Israel’s own Holocaust memorial called the sale “morally unacceptable” and a court eventually suspended the auction.

With Post wires