Demand growing for Nazi artifacts

He has auctioned the journals of Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele for US$300,000, Adolf Hitler’s telephone from the Führerbunker for US$243,000 and Hitler’s ring featuring a swastika made of 16 rubies for more than US$65,000. And just before Thanksgiving, a Hitler-inscribed propaganda photograph that shows the architect of the Holocaust hugging a German girl of Jewish heritage went for more than US$11,000.

Big money abounds in the Nazi artifact market, and Basil “Bill” Panagopulos, founder of Alexander Historical Auctions in Maryland, is an unabashed promoter. But at a time of growing antisemitism and white nationalism, the buying and selling of Hitler’s belongings and other Third Reich tchotchkes — including counterfeits — is stirring up the same kind of debate that dogged displays of Confederate flags and Civil War statues.

Which items of the past are worth keeping? Which spoils of war should be preserved? And which symbols of hatred are better off in history’s trash heap?

Online giants like Facebook and ebay, along with Christie’s and Sotheby’s, have come down hard against the sale of Nazi artifacts, curbing or banning their sale. Right after the sale of the Hitler photo in Maryland, another sale this month in Australia of some 75 Nazi artifacts kicked up a national controversy.

Still, the demand for these objects is intensifying, according to Terry Kovel, cofounder of a 51-year-old annual price guide for antiques and memorabilia.

“The market for historic Nazi memorabilia is definitely growing,” she said. “A lot of people are afraid the whole Nazi thing has been forgotten, and they want to show what was going on. More of it is coming out of hiding, too, because so much of the material came home with soldiers who are getting to the age of dying, and their families are selling it off.”

Many Jewish groups, though not all, have denounced these sales.

Haim Gertner, the archives director of Yad Vashem, Israel’s leading Holocaust memorial, said some of Hitler’s personal items are worth saving, especially if the owners of Nazi artifacts believe that the material and anti-semitic history should never be forgotten. But selling these artifacts to the highest bidder, he said, “is incorrect and even immoral.”

But Panagopulos, 60, said all his clients are serious history buffs, not skinheads or white nationalists.

“Skinheads don’t have the means for it, and, even if they did ... they would have no historical appreciation for it,” Panagopulos said.

“I’m not some knucklehead, blood-drooling neonazi. My wife is Jewish. Her mother is an orthodox Jew. Her father is a Jew. And my father’s hometown in Greece was wiped out by Germans in World War II.”