Jewish organizations and Holocaust remembrance groups expressed outrage Sunday over a planned auction in Germany offering hundreds of Holocaust-era artifacts for sale, including yellow badges, personal documents and forced sterilization records.
The auction, scheduled for Monday by the German house Felzmann, features items such as original yellow Star of David patches with a starting price of €180, a collection of 85 postcards between a Jewish family in Poland and their children for €12,000, medical documents detailing forced sterilizations for €400 and an arrest file of a participant in the failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, starting at €600.
Among the most controversial items are personal documents containing names, addresses, photos and family details of Holocaust victims — materials described by critics as “human remnants now being marketed as shelf products.”
Revital Yakin Krakovsky, CEO of March of the Living Israel, condemned the sale and called for the items to be preserved in museums. “It is deeply troubling that evidence of Nazi crimes is being sold to the highest bidder,” she said. “Faced with the choice of purchasing these items to preserve them in museums or allowing them to fall into private hands, I believe we must act to safeguard them.
Revital Yakin Krakovsky “Each photograph sold into a drawer is a family story erased. Each badge sold as merchandise is another tear in the fabric of memory. In an age of rising antisemitism, growing Holocaust denial and efforts to rewrite history, these artifacts are the final line of defense for the truth. They must be preserved like Torah scrolls in the Ark; this is not a metaphor, it is a moral imperative.”
The International Auschwitz Committee (IAC) also called on Felzmann to cancel the auction. IAC Executive Vice President Christoph Heubner denounced the sale as “cynical and shameless,” warning that Holocaust survivors’ histories were being “exploited for commercial gain.”
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A Holocaust-era correspondence between members of a Jewish family up for auction
(Photo: Felzmann)
“Documents relating to persecution and the Holocaust belong to the families of those who were persecuted,” Heubner said in a statement to German media. “They should be displayed in museums or in exhibitions at memorial sites and not be degraded to objects of trade.”