An auction of items and documents belonging to Holocaust victims was canceled on Sunday, a day before it was to be held in Neuss, a town near Düsseldorf in western Germany.
The head of the auction house confirmed the auction’s cancellation to Nathanael Liminsky, a senior official in the regional government of North Rhine-Westphalia state, 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 Huebner called the auction “scandalous and shameless”.
Huebner said in a statement that the history of Holocaust survivors “is being exploited for commercial gain.”
“The documents relating to persecution and genocide belong to the families of those who were persecuted,” he said. “They should be displayed in exhibitions in museums or at memorial sites and should not be converted into objects of trade.”
Politicians welcomed the cancellation of the auction
Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski also called the auction “disgraceful”. In a post on Twitter, he wrote that he and German Foreign Minister Johann Wadeful “agreed that this kind of scam must be stopped” and later said he was glad to hear that it had been shut down.
Wadefull also criticized the planned sale.
“Something like this is absolutely unacceptable, and it must be clear that we have a moral obligation to victims to stop things like this,” he said.
Welcoming the cancellation, German State Minister for Culture Wolfram Weimer told dpa he hoped steps would be taken to prevent such auctions in the future.
“The documents or expert reports of Nazi criminals offered at auction are not for private collections,” he said. “These historical documents of suffering and crime belong in monuments, museums and research institutes.”
Was there to be an auction?
In a listing that has been removed from his website, Felzman described a group of documents in his auction titled “System of Terror Volume II”, which contained items from 1933 to 1945.
Among the various items were Nazi documents on forced sterilizations carried out at the Dachau concentration camp.
The auction will include records of companies forcibly sold to the Nazis, as well as identity documents and passports of Jews who managed to escape persecution to Chile and Argentina. This included “life-saving documents” like a release form for a prisoner who was able to leave Mauthausen concentration camp.
In one of the most private items ever, the auction house was preparing to bid on three journal notebooks of an anonymous Polish Jew who survived the war in Poland.
Controversially, the auction also included a worn Star of David and a bracelet from the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Edited by: Shawn Sinico