Poland’s foreign minister announced on Sunday that an auction of Holocaust artifacts has been cancelled in Germany, citing information from his German counterpart, following backlash from Holocaust survivors and many others. Radoslaw Sikorski made the announcement on social media, writing that he and German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul had “agreed that such a scandal must be prevented.”
The Polish foreign minister thanked Wadephul for relaying the message that the “offensive” auction had been called off.
The move follows a previous demand by a Holocaust survivors group for the German auction house Felzmann to cancel Monday’s sale of hundreds of Holocaust items, including letters written by prisoners and other documents that identify individuals by name, according to The Associated Press.
Information about the sale on the Auktionshaus Felzmann website was reportedly removed by Sunday afternoon. The auction house has not commented on the matter, despite multiple requests for comment from the media.
The auction was reportedly set to have a collection of letters written by concentration camp prisoners to loved ones, Gestapo index cards and other Nazi documents. The event was called “The System of Terror.”
Backlash from Holocaust victim advocates
Critics quickly condemned what they saw as a distasteful auction.
“For the victims of Nazi persecution and Holocaust survivors, this auction is a cynical and shameless undertaking that leaves them outraged and speechless,” Christoph Heubner, executive vice president of The International Auschwitz Committee, said in a statement on Saturday.
“Their history and the suffering of all those persecuted and murdered by the Nazis is being exploited for commercial gain,” he continued. “They should be displayed in museums or memorial exhibitions and not degraded to mere commodities.”
He called on the “auction house to show some basic decency” and to call off the sale.
Other controversial sales in Germany and beyond
This isn’t the first time an auction house has been embroiled in controversy for selling material related to the Holocaust. In 2019, a Munich auction was criticized over the sale of Adolph Hitler’s memorabilia, including one of his top hats and a copy of his manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” per The New York Post.
Despite widespread condemnation, the auction proceeded as planned, and customers reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of euros on the items.
In 2021, an auction house in Jerusalem attempted to sell stamps used to tattoo prisoners at Auschwitz. Israel’s Holocaust memorial described the auction as “morally unacceptable,” and a court suspended the sale, according to The New York Post.
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