Adolf Hitler’s watch sold in contentious auction for almost £1million
At a US auction, a watch thought to have belonged to Adolf Hitler was sold to an unknown buyer for $1.1 million (£900,000).
The Huber watch, which dates to the 1930s, has a swastika and the letters AH engraved on it.
In contrast, an open letter signed by 34 Jewish leaders condemned the auction as “abhorrent.”
“Whether intentionally or not, this auction serves two purposes: it supports people who idealize what the Nazi party stood for. Two: Giving customers the opportunity to titillate a visitor or a loved one with a souvenir from a genocidal killer and his supporters, according to Rabbi Menachem Margolin, head of the European Jewish Association (EJA) based in Brussels.
However, a Maryland firm Alexander Historical Auctions claimed that its goal is to preserve history.
The majority of their collectors, they said, either preserved the items in their personal collections or gave them to Holocaust memorials all across the world.
Mindy Greenstein, senior vice president at Alexander Historical Auctions, warned that if you obliterate history, there will be no record of what actually transpired.
“History, whether good or evil, must be preserved,” Mindy Greenstein stated.
The watch was reportedly given to the Nazi leader as a birthday gift in 1933, the year he was appointed chancellor of Germany, according to the watch’s catalog description.
According to the report, about 30 French soldiers assaulted Hitler’s Berghof retreat in the Bavarian Alps and took the watch as “spoils of war.”
Then it was sold again and passed down through the ages.
Wehrmacht toilet paper, silverware, and champagne glasses belonged to top Nazi officials were among the other artifacts up for auction.
