A German auction house in Neuss, North Rhine-Westphalia, has scheduled an auction for Monday during which items belonging to victims of the Second World War will be sold. These include, for example, letters from concentration camps and Gestapo records. The International Auschwitz Committee has already lodged a protest. Despite this, the auction house has not responded in any way to the wave of criticism.
German auction house plans to trade belongings of Holocaust victims
On Monday, the Felzmann auction house in Neuss will begin an auction titled “System of Terror, Volume II 1933–1945.”Items put up for sale include: a notebook of a Polish prisoner forced into labor in a concentration camp, armbands with the Jewish star, documents issued to prisoners, and unsent letters from mothers to children imprisoned in camps. One of the most valuable lots, estimated at 12,000 euros, is a collection of letters exchanged by a Jewish family from Wierzchów. Many of these artifacts contain complete personal data and surnames.
The auction will also include an antisemitic propaganda poster and a Star of David badge from the Buchenwald concentration camp. The auction house has not commented on the criticism.
Cezary Gmyz, a journalist from TV Republika, pointed out that one of the “souvenirs” being sold is a letter with a watercolor painting by Bronisław Czech, the legendary Polish Olympian who perished in the camp. Also going under the hammer is a copy of Der Stürmer, the infamous Nazi propaganda newspaper published from 1923 to 1945.
Other items to be sold include:
• a release certificate from the Esterwegen camp belonging to Otto Thätner, imprisoned from April 1934 to February 1936;
• medical documents pertaining to one of the Dachau prisoners;
• an anti-Jewish propaganda poster titled “Judas’s Dream”, depicting a bleeding globe and a cap with a Star of David above it;
• a large poster with an ordinance by municipal commissioner Dr. Hein on the weekly meat rations: “250 g per head for Aryans, and 50 g for Jews”;
• a work permit issued by the ghetto administration (Arbeitsamt-Ghetto Legitimations-Ausweis);
• a notice from the SS and Police Commander in the Kraków district listing 112 Polish hostages and announcing that the first 33 names on the list would be executed as punishment for partisan attacks.
In light of what it called scandalous plans, the International Auschwitz Committee has issued an appeal to the auction house in Neuss to cancel the event.
“Holocaust survivors and their families consider the announced auction of personal documents belonging to victims of Nazism a cynical and shameless undertaking. We appeal to those responsible to show elementary decency and call off the auction,” said the organization’s executive vice president, Christoph Heubner.
A question for the German ambassador
In the face of this enormous scandal, PiS MEP Bogdan Rzońca publicly addressed a question to Germany’s ambassador to Poland, Miguel Berger.
“Mr. Ambassador, is it normal that in your country — in Germany — one can trade in letters, personal data, and mementos of victims who during the war lost their dignity, property, and lives at the hands of Germans?” he wrote.
“Curious if they’re also selling wedding rings and gold teeth. I feel like vomiting,” wrote attorney Bartosz Lewandowski.
German crimes in Poland
Between 1939 and 1945, the Germans carried out mass murders of civilians in Poland from the very first days of the war, often executing entire communities. As part of the occupation terror, Polish elites were systematically destroyed: teachers, priests, officials, and social activists were arrested and killed.
Across the occupied territories, numerous concentration and extermination camps were established, where millions of Jews and hundreds of thousands of Poles were murdered. Brutal expulsions, the Germanization of children, and widespread plunder of property occurred. People were forced into slave labor, often in inhumane conditions. The German occupation caused enormous human and material losses and left lasting scars on Polish society. Germany has to this day not paid Poland the reparations owed.