The artifacts were acquired by the Yad Ezer L'Hawer foundation from Haifa, which runs the Holocaust Museum in this port city. They included religious items, clothing, letters, patches with yellow Stars of David and Nazi propaganda posters. The entire collection includes at least several dozen items.
The Israeli portal Ynet reported that the foundation's authorities had reached an agreement with the management of the auction house to suspend the sale for ten days in order to collect funds. After this time, valuable objects were purchased.
— You should not trade items that are testimony to the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people. The appropriate place for these objects is a museumand in particular the Holocaust Museum in Haifa, entry to which is free, said the head of the foundation, Shimon Sabag.
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What items ended up in Haifa?
Who protested against the auction?
What institutions were involved in this case?
What did the original list of items for auction include?
Sabag participated in a protest in front of the Felzmann Auction House in mid-November. He came from Israel to the Duesseldorf area in the hope of taking over the items from the planned auction.
The auction of the 623-artifact private collection “System of Terror, Part II 1933-1945” was to take place on November 17 at the Felzmann Auction House in Neuss. Among those who protested against this were: Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Auction of souvenirs and documents, including: after the prisoners of the German Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz and Majdanek and the victims of the Katyn massacre committed by the Soviets, was finally canceled.
The auction house issued a statement. The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage announces actions
“We are aware that we made a wrong decision when assessing the submission of items for auction and we regret that we have hurt the feelings of people affected by Nazi terror or their loved ones.” — the auction house said in a later statement. According to its version of events, the items were donated to the auction partly by the victims' descendants and partly from a private collection.
The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage informed that it would request the return of objects auctioned at a German auction house.
The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the Polish Press Agency in a statement that personal items belonging to former concentration camp prisoners should be presented in an appropriate context in museums, unless the descendants of these people raise objections.
The list of objects initially intended for sale included, among others: a letter from a prisoner from Auschwitz “with a very low number” to the addressee in Krakow. Starting price – 500 euros. A medical diagnosis from the Dachau concentration camp regarding the forced sterilization of a prisoner was valued at EUR 400. Initially, a letter with a watercolor painted by Bronisław Czech, a Polish skier and three-time Olympian, murdered in Auschwitz, was also included in the auction.
