Germany cancels Holocaust artifacts auction after intense backlash: Exploited for commercial gain

A scheduled auction in Germany set to feature hundreds of artifacts from the Holocaust — including chilling letters written by prisoners in concentration camps — was canceled on Sunday after intense backlash.The auction by Auktionhaus Felzmann, dubbed “The System of Terror,” consisted of more than 600 lots with vestiges from the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, including slews of documentation like Gestapo index cards and letters penned by prisoners in German concentration camps to their loved ones back home.The addition of the letters stoked a fiery rage across Europe, particularly in Poland, which was annexed by Nazi Germany and used as grounds for a majority of its concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

Radoslaw Sikorski, the deputy prime minister of Poland, announced that the “offensive” auction was canceled after conversations with German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, who “agreed that such a scandal must be prevented.” Before Sikorski’s intervention, a Holocaust survivors group also called on the German auction house Felzmann to nix the auction, scheduled for Monday, in part because the documents they were seeking to sell identified many people by name.Christoph Heubner, an executive vice president of The International Auschwitz Committee, implored the auctioneers to either return the documents to the respective surviving families or display them in museums or Holocaust memorials.

“For victims of Nazi persecution and Holocaust survivors, this auction is a cynical and shameless undertaking that leaves them outraged and speechless,” Heubner wrote in a statement on Saturday.“Their history and suffering of all those persecuted and murdered by the Nazis is being exploited for commercial gain,” he added.“We urge those responsible at the Felzmann auction house to show some basic decency and cancel the auction.” The listing was scrubbed from the Auktionhaus Felzmann website as of Sunday afternoon.In 2019, an auction house in Munich a...