Poland’s foreign minister said on Sunday that an “offensive” auction of Holocaust artefacts in Germany has been cancelled, relaying information from his German counterpart, after complaints from Holocaust survivors.
Radosław Sikorski made the comments on X, saying he and German foreign minister Johann Wadephul “agreed that such a scandal must be prevented”.
The top Polish diplomat thanked Wadephul for the information that the auction was cancelled.
A Holocaust survivors group had earlier called on the German auction house Felzmann to cancel Monday’s sale of hundreds of Holocaust artefacts, including letters written by prisoners and other documents that identify many people by name.
A listing of information about the auction on the Auktionshaus Felzmann website on Sunday morning was no longer on the site by mid-afternoon. The house did not immediately respond to calls, an email and text message on Sunday.
The collection of more than 600 lots at auction in western Neuss, near Düsseldorf, included letters written by 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,” Christoph Heubner, an executive vice-president of the International Auschwitz Committee, a Berlin-based group of survivors, said on Saturday.
“Their history and the suffering of all those persecuted and murdered by 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 “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.
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