“I am writing to respectfully ask you to withdraw the auction. This is not a legal appeal to you, but very much a moral one. What you are doing is not illegal, but it is wrong,” wrote Rabbi Menachem Margolin in a letter to Herman Historica.
BRUSSELS—A European Jewish leader has asked a Munich auction house to cancel the sale of Nazi Memorabilia, saying that ”some things simply cannot be traded.”
Hermann Historica will be holding an auction on the 20th of November that includes a number of pieces for sale from infamous Nazis Hess, Goring, Himmler and Hitler himself. The pieces include framed photographs, silver dinner services, plates, letters and jewellery belonging to Goring’s wife.
As Europe marked the 81st anniversary of Kristallnacht or ‘’Night of Broken Glass’’, the first Nazi pogroms against Jews in Germany, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, Chairman of the European Jewish Association (EJA), wrote a letter to the head of the auction house in which he said: “I am writing to respectfully ask you to withdraw the auction. This is not a legal appeal to you, but very much a moral one. What you are doing is not illegal, but it is wrong.’’
“I need not remind you of the many millions of lives lost as a result of national socialism, nor of the approximately six million Jewish lives that were lost due to mindless antisemitic hatred. This is history,’’ he wrote.
He continued, “Yet today, across Europe and including Germany (which now has the highest recorded cases in Europe), antisemitism in on the rise, and we believe the sale of such memorabilia has little intrinsic historical value but instead will be bought by those who glorify and seek to justify the actions of the greatest evil to affect Europe. The trade therefore in such items should simply not take place.’’
Rabbi Margolin also reminded that recently in Israel there was a case of a letter written by a child murdered in the Holocaust that was put up for sale. This sale went to court and the ensuing public pressure resulted in the cancelling of the sale.
‘’The message from society was clear and unambiguous: some things simply cannot be traded,’’ he wrote in his letter.