An auction home is facing a backlash for selling off lots of of vital Nazi records and artefacts.
Greater than 600 letters and files documenting crimes committed throughout the Holocaust are to be sold at ‘The System of Terror’ auction on Monday.
Holocaust survivors have called for the ‘cynical and shameless’ event on the Felzmann auction house in Neuss, Germany, to be cancelled.
The dealer, which relies just outside Dusseldorf and specialises in postcards, advertised 627 items, including Gestapo files and letters to family members by prisoners of concentration camps.
Lots on the market on Monday include a Gestapo card detailing the execution of a Jewish resident of the Mackheim ghetto, predicted to fetch 350 euros, and an eight-page pamphlet of a 1940 anti-Jewish propaganda film, for which bids start at €120.
Other items include a letter sent by a Polish prisoner of Auschwitz from 1940, with a starting price of €180.
Meanwhile a letter describing the death of a ‘euthanised’ patient on the Hadamar State Hospital, used as a killing facility during World War II, was expected to fetch no less than €350.
One file, which documents a person forcibly sterilised on the Dachau concentration camp in 1937, on account of being deemed ‘racially unclean’.
In accordance with the Fritz Bauer Institute, the auction house used cynical tactics, including justifying higher starting prices for items with accompanying pictures.
The research centre of Nazi crimes said: ‘The written and audiovisual interpretation of the NS crimes and their afterstory must urgently be entrusted to the general public archives and memorials.
‘Only listed here are the documents expertly preserved, recorded, preserved for the long run and made available taking into consideration their provenance, all copyright and personality rights in addition to the protective interest of the affected people or their descendants of historical research and to an interested public.’
Christoph Heubner, an executive of the International Auschwitz Committee, said that families of Holocaust survivors were left ‘outraged and speechless’ by the event.
He said the items belonged to victims and their families and must be kept in museums or memorial exhibitions.
He said: ‘Their history and the suffering of all those persecuted and murdered by the Nazis is being exploited for industrial gain.
‘We urge those responsible on the Felzmann auction house to point out some basic decency and cancel the auction.’
The auction listing was faraway from the Felzmann website by Sunday afternoon.
Metro has contacted the auction house for comment.
Get in contact with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: Growing up near Sarajevo, I saw the ‘human safaris’ first hand
MORE: Greater than 50 cruise ship passengers left floating at sea after boat sinks within the Caribbean
MORE: British Airways just axed 4 popular short-haul routes from the UK