Not everyone understands collecting anti-Semitic artifacts
Howard Cohen does not talk much about his collection of thousands of anti-Semitic Holocaust artifacts. They aren’t on display anywhere on the first floor of his home in Pittsburgh’s south suburbs.
And when he does pull out the concentration camp outfit he bought from the Austrian woman who wore it, or the folder full of German passports stamped with pink J’s to indicate the holder was a Jew, or the horrific ashtray with a caricature of a Jew in the center that he recently bought for $2,000, mainly to show to close family members, they don’t understand.
“My cousin said to me last time he was here: ‘Why do you want that stuff?” said Mr. Cohen, 68, who is Jewish. “And I told him, as I always do: ‘Because it’s history; it’s our history.’”
That question — Why would you collect this? — is one collectors like Mr. Cohen, a retired optometrist, hear all the time. It’s a question even more relevant with the rise in antiSemitic threats and attacks in recent years that culminated Oct. 27 with the murders of 11 Jewish people at the Tree of Life synagogue.
While some people might have been stunned by the attack and the reported, virulent, anti-Semitic motives of the alleged shooter, Robert Bowers, Mr. Cohen was not.
Because of his deep understanding of anti-Semitic history through his work on his collection over the last 30 years, “It wasn’t a shock because I know how deep the vein [of anti-Semitism] is,” Mr. Cohen said.
The issue of collecting, and buying or selling anti-Semitic or Nazi material can be seen as an ethical or moral dilemma that private collectors like Mr. Cohen — one of the biggest collectors of anti-Semitic material in the country — and museums alike deal with.
“I do think there’s a problem, and it’s a dilemma we all face, including people in [the museum] business,” said Judith Cohen, chief acquisitions curator for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. “You don’t want to create a market for it, but you also don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”
“I know for us the trick is not only to collect it, but to contextualize it,” said Ms. Cohen, who grew up in Squirrel Hill not far from the Tree of Life synagogue and is not related to Mr. Cohen, the collector. “It shouldn’t be collected merely as curiosities; it should be for a higher value.”
The private collectors’ argument
But Bill Combs, business manager for the Ohio Valley Military Society — or OVMS — which runs military collectors shows in Kentucky, Ohio and Monroeville that sell a large amount of Nazi military material, said that ideal should not exclude private collectors.
“That’s the argument we get a lot, that [military items] should be in a museum, and it shouldn’t be in private hands,” said Mr. Combs, who has been involved in his organization since 1971 when he was a 15-year-old member. “But all the museums in the world don’t have enough space for all the historic military items out there. And all honest museum directors will admit to you that they rely heavily on private collectors because those are the people with the passion and the interest and the knowledge to preserve that history.”
Ms. Cohen said that her museum does not have a large acquisition fund, and just last year it acquired a large collection of historic anti-Semitic material stretching back 500 years — the Katz Erhenthal Collection — after a museum donor paid the collector’s family for the items.
Even at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, which has a small area in its storefront location in Greenfield for the display of a few historic anti-Semitic items, its items came from a private collector who donated them, said center director Lauren Bairnsfather.
The center is not intended to be a museum, although it keeps a collection of historic documents for reference, including some photographs.
But Ms. Bairnsfather said she does not object to private collectors like Mr. Cohen and others building their own collections.
“I’d rather he have all of them rather than someone who would do harm, someone who is anti-Semitic,” she said.
Nazi memorabilia the ‘lion’s share’
Michael Caplan, 39, a friend of Mr. Cohen’s from Columbus, Ohio, and a major collector himself for the last eight years, said there are relatively few big-time collectors of anti-Semitic material, maybe 25, “and they’re all Jewish.”
There are obviously many more than that, particularly given the prices that have been paid for items such as the $2,000 ashtray Mr. Cohen recently bought.
By comparison, the field for Nazi military items is huge. For example, there are no anti-Semitica expositions or shows as there are for military collectors. At the OVMS’s largest show in Louisville, there are typically about 2,000 tables offering items for sale. Its military show in September in Monroeville will have about 1,000 tables.
What drives that interest for military items?
“The collecting of original, Third Reich memorabilia is the largest portion of the military collecting hobby,” Mr. Combs said. “It’s the lion’s share of what’s sold.”
The reasons for that are not that people agree with the Nazi philosophy, said Brian Coats, OVMS president, but supply.
“There’s just so much more of this [Nazi military memorabilia] around. A lot of baby boomers’ grandfathers brought this back from the war with them,” he said.
There is also the issue of that striking Nazi look, Mr. Combs said.
“I think it was something to do with — for better or worse — that people find Third Reich memorabilia aesthetically pleasing,” he said. “It’s like one lady told me when she was asked what’s the difference between the Nazis and the communists, and she said: ‘Cool clothes.’ And I can guarantee you she was not a white supremacist.”
Neither Mr. Combs nor Mr. Coats believes there are many people who buy original Nazi memorabilia who are white supremacists or anti-Semitic, if only because of the economics.
With an original Nazi uniform from World War II running in the thousands of dollars, “I can’t see a white supremacist spending a ton of money to buy an authentic uniform,” Mr. Coats said. “They’d probably rather spend much less to buy a replica.”
Even then, he said: “We’d just as soon [white supremacists] not come” to our shows.
Mr. Combs added: “We are a military collectors organization. We preserve the memories of our veterans’ victory with the items they brought home with them. We are not here to promote an ideology.”
Rise in white supremacy leads to changes
At the OVMS’s September 2017 show in Monroeville — annually dubbed “The MAX Show” for Military Antiques Extravaganza — Mr. Caplan invited his friend, Mr. Cohen, to join him and buy a table to see if they could sell some of their anti-Semitic material.
“I set up [a table] because when I went to these shows I could never find people who sell or collect what I collect,” said Mr. Caplan, who is Jewish and a salesman for a pharmaceutical benefits manager.
Mr. Caplan brought the document items he collects, including copies of Der Stürmer, an anti-Semitic newspaper the Nazis put out, postcards and leaflets. Mr. Cohen also brought copies of Der Stürmer and small figurines depicting some of the same grotesque caricatures of Jews that have been seen for centuries.
But about three hours into the first day, an OVMS board member approached them and objected to what he saw on their table.
According to Mr. Cohen, the board member told them: “You can’t sell these here. They’re discriminatory. You have to take this stuff out of here.”
“Is it more discriminatory than the swastika behind you?” Mr. Cohen said he replied, referring to the symbol being displayed on a sign for sale at another table.
Mr. Combs would not identify the board member but passed along to him a message to call the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for this story. The board member never returned the message.
The men had a heated conversation, but Mr. Caplan and Mr. Cohen agreed to leave after other members, including Mr. Combs and Mr. Coats, explained their policy that anti-Semitic items could not be displayed there unless they were put in historic context. Their table fee was refunded, and the OVMS bought them dinner, too.
“It was an unfortunate event,” said Mr. Combs, who noted that Mr. Caplan returned to last year’s show with a disclaimer he puts out about why he collects such items.
“There was a time when antiSemitism wasn’t taken all that seriously and was not seen as a problem like it is now,” Mr. Combs said. “We’ve taken steps to ensure that as an organization we aren’t inadvertently promoting that philosophy.”
Mr. Combs noted that the show in September 2017 came about a month after the riots in Charlottesville, Va., that resulted in the death of a woman who was run over by a car driven by a man who has espoused neo-Nazi and white supremacist beliefs.
“It was the Charlottesville incident that caused us to revisit the rules on this,” Mr. Combs said.
The OVMS has long banned people from walking through their shows in military uniforms that had arm bands, like swastikas, or to hang flags aloft. It also has long banned the sale of KKK or any white supremacist items at their shows, seeing a distinct difference between the sale of, say, a Nazi SS cap and a KKK robe.
“I understand that a swastika is offensive,” Mr. Coats said. “But we are a military history organization.”
This year, they have tried to tighten their restrictions even more, banning for the first time the sale of any reproduced German World War II items such as uniforms, flags or guns in the hope that those white supremacists who want to buy a cheap Nazi flag don’t bother to come because now they’d have to shell out thousands for a 74year-old Nazi flag. They also banned attendees from wearing any German World War II uniform, real or reproduced.
“We’ve gotten questions about this as it’s become a social issue the last year or two,” Mr. Coats said. “We understood it would eventually get to us. And we struggled with how far do we push the rules. We think we’ve done a reasonable job trying to make it effective.”
‘It made it feel closer to me’
Mr. Cohen said his hope is that people, or organizations like the OVMS, do what they can to prevent the lessons of the Holocaust from being forgotten.
Remembering what happened during the Holocaust “is what got me into this,” he said.
He had been interested in World War II history since he was a boy. But even as a Jewish kid growing up in Beaver Falls in the 1950s and 1960s, the Holocaust was not part of the discussion.
“It was a taboo subject,” he said. “I noticed one day that my Hebrew teacher in Beaver Falls, Mrs. Penn, had a tattoo [from her time spent in a concentration camp] on her arm. I came home and told my mother, and she said, ‘Don’t you ever talk about that again. Don’t you ever ask her about it.’ My parents never talked about the Holocaust.”
But a few years after he married his wife, Luisa, her father, Emanuel Bucaresky, opened up to him about how he lost nearly his entire family during the Holocaust in Romania after his family sent him — as the oldest child — to live in the United States in 1940 when he was 27.
“It made [the Holocaust] feel closer to me,” Mr. Cohen said of his father-in-law’s story.
His interest in the Holocaust grew, and he began collecting items that showed the horrific, everyday nature of the oppression and attempted extermination of Europe’s Jews.
Mr. Cohen had been an avid collector before, buying autographs of ex-U.S. presidents, including George Washington, and famous historic Americans, like Orville Wright, a collection he later sold to pay for the couple’s twins’ college education.
But collecting the granular pieces of the Holocaust’s horror took Mr. Cohen’s interest to another level, said his wife.
“He’s obsessed,” she said smiling. “He’s probably upset to be talking to you right now because he’s missing out on some auction he’s interested in.”
But, she said, she supported his interest: “It’s a subject that can’t be forgotten.”