From the morning we reported on Onet that the Felzmann auction house in Neuss planned to put up for sale several hundred documents and items related to the Holocaust, including those belonging to Holocaust victims. The “System of Terror, Volume II 1933–1945” auction was scheduled to take place on Monday.
Why was the Holocaust auction canceled?
Who intervened in the auction?
What artifacts were to be auctioned?
What did Radosław Sikorski say about this matter?
The auction caused widespread outrage from the media and politicians. The president appealed about the matter, and the government, headed by Deputy Prime Minister Radosław Sikorski, took a decisive response.
“I talked to German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul regarding the planned auction of items from the time of German terror during World War II in Neuss. We agreed that such scandal should be prevented,” wrote the head of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in subsequent entries. “The memory of the victims of the Holocaust is not a commodity and cannot be the subject of commercial trade. Polish diplomacy appeals for the return of artifacts to the Auschwitz Museum,” he added.
As after On the 13th, the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced, all artifacts had disappeared from the auction. The bidding actually disappeared from the auction house's website.
“Ambassador Jan Tombiński, who has been intervening with the Westphalian authorities in this matter for several days, informed me that all artifacts have already disappeared from the website of the scandalous auction,” Sikorski wrote on the X website, adding #WeDoNotTalt.
More information soon.
