Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

French Jews Win Ban on Hitler Memento Auction

Following protests by two Jewish groups, a Paris auction house canceled an auction of Nazi objects.

The Maison Vermont de Pas auction house nixed the April 26 sale on Monday following the protests by the National Bureau for Vigilance against Anti-Semitism, or BNVCA, and the CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish communities. The objects included passports and books that were collected from a residence of Adolf Hitler. BNVCA President Sammy Ghozlan said his group was satisfied with the decision. His group has asked French government officials to urge those in possession of Nazi objects from the 1930 and 1940s to give them to police.

“There is a connection between the sale of such goods and the sort of violence we witnessed only yesterday in Kansas City,” Ghozlan told JTA in reference to the murder of three people on Sunday outside a Jewish community center and a nearby retirement community in Overland Park, Kan. Police arrested a 73-year-old white supremacist in connection with the deadly shootings.

“People who adhere to the Nazi ideology are incited to act on it by these objects and literature of hate until someone actually goes ahead and does it,” Ghozlan said.

The collection that the auction house sought to put on the block comprised approximately 40 objects that French soldiers took from Hitler’s residence in Bavaria in 1945 and from a neighboring house where the Nazi boss Hermann Goering lived, Le Parisien reported Sunday. CRIF said in a statement that the sale of the objects offended the memory of Jews and non-Jews who “fell victims to the Nazi barbarity.”

Ghozlan, a former police officer, said the sale was “reprehensible not only from a historical and moral perspective, but also from a legal one, since the objects being sold were illegally pillaged and taken back to France as war booty.”

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.