Image by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Adolf Hitler’s personal phone has sold at auction for a whopping $243,000.

The “weapon of mass destruction,” which the Nazi Fuhrer used to order invasions and direct the war effort, was sold on behalf the son of an American general.

“I certainly won’t miss it,” the seller Ranulf Rayner, 82, told CNN. “It’s a fairly sinister bit of kit and I’ve always lived in fear of someone trying to steal it. I’ve also been told it’ll bring me bad luck.”

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According to a report by the Associated Press, the auction houe was expecting it to fetch between $200,000 and $300,000.

The phone, a red rotary dial “with a Nazi party symbol and Hitler’s name engraved on the back,” was given to Brigadier Sir Ralph Rayner by Russian officers in Hitler’s Berlin Bunker. Rayner gave the phone to his son, who in turn put it up for auction.

Bill Panagopulos, an employee of the auction house selling the phone, told the AP that he “considers the phone a ‘weapon of mass destruction,’ noting that the orders Hitler gave over the phone took many lives.”

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