An auction of items and documents from Holocaust victims was cancelled on Sunday, a day before it was scheduled to take place.
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.”
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.
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
