An auction of items and documents from Holocaust victims was canceled on Sunday, a day before it was scheduled to take place in Neuss, a city near Düsseldorf in western Germany.
The head of the auction house confirmed the auction was called off to Nathanael Liminski, a senior official in the regional government of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, a spokesman for Liminski said, the dpa news agency reported.
Before the cancellation, the International Auschwitz Committee (IAC) had urged the Felzmann auction house not to hold the event.
IAC Executive Vice President Christoph Heubner called the auction “cynical and shameless.”
Heubner said in a statement that the history of Holocaust survivors was “being exploited for commercial gain.”
“Documents relating to persecution and the Holocaust belong to the families of those who were persecuted,” he said. “They should be displayed in museums or in exhibitions at memorial sites and not be degraded to objects of trade.”
Politicians welcome auction’s cancellation
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski also called the auction “offensive.” In a post on X, he wrote he and German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul “agreed that such a scandal must be prevented” and later said he was pleased to hear it had been called off.
Wadephul had also criticized the planned sale.
“Something like this is simply unacceptable, and it must be clear that we have an ethical obligation to the victims to prevent such things,” he said.
Welcoming the cancellation, German State Minister for Culture Wolfram Weimer told dpa he expected steps to be taken to prevent such auctions in the future.
“Documents or expert reports by Nazi perpetrators that were offered at the auction are not for private collections,” he said. “These historical documents of suffering and crime belong in memorials, museums and research institutions.”
What was to be auctioned?
In a listing that has been removed from its website, Felzmann had described a trove of documents in its auction titled “System of Terror Vol II,” with items dating from 1933 to 1945.
Among the various items were Nazi documents on a forced sterilization carried out at the Dachau concentration camp.
The auction would have included records of companies forcefully sold to Nazis, as well as identification documents and passports of Jews who managed to flee persecution to Chile and Argentina. It featured “life saving documents” like a release form for a prisoner who was able to leave the Mauthausen concentration camp.
In one of the most personal items, the auction house was preparing for bidding on three journal notebooks of an anonymous Polish Jew who survived the war in Poland.
Controversially, the auction also nearly included worn Stars of David from the Buchenwald concentration camp and also a Star of David armband.
Edited by: Sean Sinico
