A gold watch believed to have once belonged to Adolf Hitler fetched more than $1 million at a controversial auction in the United States. The watch, which has a reversible case and is engraved with an imperial eagle and swastika, fetched $1.1 million on Thursday, according to auction house Alexander Historical Auctions. That was well below the original estimate of between two and four million dollars.
Many other objects from the Nazi era were also sold at the auction in the US state of Maryland. According to the Alexander Historical Auctions website, an Imperial eagle believed to have been to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin raised $200,000. A bronze writing pad on which Hitler is said to have signed the Munich Agreement to annex the border areas of what was then Czechoslovakia in 1938 was auctioned for $290,000 (286,500 euros).
According to the auction house, the gold watch was donated to Hitler in 1933 by members of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, note). She was found on 4 May 1945 – four days after Hitler’s suicide in Berlin – by a French soldier in Hitler’s former Alpine residence in Berchtesgaden. The watch is said to have been in the soldier’s family for decades.
Sharp criticism of the Jewish umbrella organization EJA
The auction of the objects had drawn sharp criticism in advance. The Jewish umbrella organization European Jewish Association (EJA) called for the auction to be cancelled. “The sale of these items is despicable,” EJA president Rabbi Menachem Margolin said in an open letter to auction organizers.
Nazis may belong in museums, but certainly not under the hammer, Margolin emphasized. The objects belonging to the “genocide” Hitler in no way contribute to teaching the atrocities of the Nazi era, he stressed, referring to the estimated six million Jewish victims of the Nazi era. The letter was signed by more than 30 Jewish representatives from Europe and Israel, including the German-Israeli Association in Berlin.
In 2017, the Alexander Historical Auctions auction house had already auctioned Adolf Hitler’s red telephone that had been found in the Berlin Führerbunker after the end of the war for $243,000 (almost €238,000).
Source: Krone
I am Ida Scott, a journalist and content author with a passion for uncovering the truth. I have been writing professionally for Today Times Live since 2020 and specialize in political news. My career began when I was just 17; I had already developed a knack for research and an eye for detail which made me stand out from my peers.
