A German auction house is selling personal letters of Jews from the Holocaust, along with Nazi documents proving forced sterilizations and arrest records of Hitler’s opponents, the German newspaper Bild reported on Friday.
Some 623 testimonies from witnesses of the Holocaust are being sold by the Neuss auction house in Germany.
The documents will be sold unreacted, meaning that the photos, names, and addresses of the persecuted will be released.
"Here, business is being made with Nazi persecution and the Holocaust," Director of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt, Prof. Sybille Steinbacher, said.
Some of the items that are up for sale in the collection include stars of David with “signs of wear,” starting at 180 euros.
Holocaust-era documents up for auction
Another item offered is the cumulative correspondence of a Jewish family from Poland with over 80 postcards between the parents and their children, Icek, Mordka, and Hana, for 12,000 euros.
The auction house’s catalog describes the postcards as “rare” because “by 1943, few Jews were alive.”
A medical report by a concentration camp doctor about the forced sterilization of a man from Regensburg is listed for bidding starting at 400 euros. The report includes the prisoner's name, his parents' names, and the number of children he had.
The collection also features the arrest record for Ernst von Harnack, who was involved in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.
“The auction is morally highly questionable due to the lack of respect for the persecuted and their survivors,” said Fritz Bauer Institute Archivist Johannes Beermann-Schön.
“Furthermore, there is the risk that historically significant documents will be lost forever.”
However, management from Neuss pushed back on this assertion.
“Our task is to preserve and document historical evidence to enable a deeper understanding of the events of that time,” said Managing Director Dr. Reinhard Fischer.
“The complete removal of these materials from the market would mean pushing a part of the tangible evidence of that time out of public awareness again.”