Visor hats from Third Reich generals, Nazi officer hip daggers, Luftwaffe paratrooper jumper smocks and a 1938 “Wedding Edition” of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kamph are all up for bid at an upcoming sale from Beachwood Auctions.
The auction includes dozens of Nazi regime items alongside World War II-era weapons, uniforms and memorabilia including Russian pistols, Roman soldier statues and antique Baltic knives.
Current bids range from hundreds to thousands of dollars on Nazi clay wall plates, black S.S. cufftitles and a framed portrait of Hitler making a phone call.
Items such as those should not be sold for personal collections, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland told Scene.
“Any attempt to glorify Nazis or minimize, deny, or equivocate the Holocaust is abhorrent and fuels the anti-Jewish hatred that persists in our society today,” Jeffrey Wild, board chair of the JFC, said in an email.
“Artifacts associated with the Nazi regime belong in museums,” he added, “where they can be used to educate against hate.”
The origin of the items is unclear. Beachwood Auctions didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The company was founded in 2019 by Mayfield Heights resident Mikheil Kavtaradze, state records show. Though based in Solon, the company bears the name of the eastside suburb with one of the highest populations of Jewish residents in Ohio. It previously hosted an online auction including Nazi memorabilia in 2023, according to archived pages.
Several public sales including Nazi items have led to public outcry in the recent years.
In 2014, an auction in Paris hawking 40 items from Hitler’s home in Bavaria was shut down after receiving criticism from the French Culture Minister Aurelie Filipetti. A similar situation played out in 2021, when an Israeli court quashed an sale in Jerusalem finding it was selling off ink kits once used to tattoo prisoners at Auschwitz.
Earlier this year, an auction of 600 items, including letters from captives in death camps, was cancelled after outcry from Holocaust awareness groups.
“We urge those responsible at the Felzmann auction house to show some basic decency and cancel the auction,” Christoph Heuber, the vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee, told the Associated Press at the time.
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