Germany cancels auction of Holocaust artifacts after backlash | World News
A Star of David stands at the Dachau concentration camp memorial in Germany, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. (AP Photo)
Poland’s foreign miner said Sunday that an “offensive” auction of Holocaust artefacts has been cancelled in Germany, relaying information from his German counterpart, following complaints from Holocaust survivors. Radoslaw Sikorski made the comments on the X platform, saying he and German Foreign Miner Johann Wadephul “agreed that such a scandal must be prevented.”
The top Polish diplomat thanked Wadephul for the information that the auction was cancelled.
Story continues below this ad
Earlier, a Holocaust survivors’ group called on the German auction house Felzmann to cancel Monday’s sale of hundreds of Holocaust artefacts, including letters written prisoners and other documents that identify many people name.
A ling of information about the auction on the Auktionhaus Felzmann website on Sunday morning was no longer on the site mid-afternoon. The house did not immediately respond to calls, an email and a text message on Sunday.
The collection of over 600 lots at auction in western Neuss, near Düsseldorf, included letters written prisoners from German concentration camps to loved ones at home, Gestapo index cards and other perpetrator documents, the German news agency dpa reported. The auction was titled “The System of Terror.”
“For victims of Nazi persecution and Holocaust survivors, this auction is a cynical and shameless undertaking that leaves them outraged and speechless,” Chroph Heubner, an executive vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee, a Berlin-based group of survivors, said in a statement on Saturday.
“Their hory and the suffering of all those persecuted and murdered the Nazis is being exploited for commercial gain,” he added. The committee said the names of individuals were identifiable in many of the documents.
Heubner said such documents of persecution and the Holocaust “belong to the families of the victims. They should be displayed in museums or memorial exhibitions and not degraded to mere commodities.”
“We urge those responsible at the Felzmann auction house to show some basic decency and cancel the auction,” he added.
