The auction of letters from Holocaust victims and documents from those responsible, scheduled to take place in Germany on Monday, has finally been suspended after public outrage. The pressure from Poland, which had defined the candidacy as “offensive”, was fundamental. The Neuss auction house, near Düsseldorf (west), removed all items from its website on Sunday. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski thanked his German counterpart Johann Wadephul on social networks
“Respect for victims requires the dignity of silence, not the din of commerce,” Sikorski said. “The memory of the victims of the Holocaust is not a commodity and cannot be traded,” he criticized, demanding that the documents be handed over to the Auschwitz Museum. Meanwhile, the German ambassador to Poland, Miguel Berger, welcomed the definitive cancellation of the public sale. “It should never have happened,” he said.
Rozmawiałem z ministrem SZ Niemiec @JoWadephul w sprawie planawanej w Neuss aukcji przedmiotów z czasu terroru niemieckiego podczas drugiej wojny światowej. Zgodziliśmy się, że należy zapobiec takiemu zgorszeniu.
— Radosław Sikorski 🇵🇱🇪🇺 (@sikorskiradek) November 16, 2025
The German Ministry of Culture has already announced that it will take measures to prevent future auctions of this type. “The documents or expert reports of Nazi authors offered at auction are not intended for private collections. These historical documents of suffering and crimes should be preserved in memorials, museums and research institutes,” head of the department Wolfram Weimer told the DPA news agency. Her Polish counterpart, Marta Cienkowska, reported the opening of an investigation into the origin of the objects to determine whether any of them should be returned to Poland.
Initially, the Felzmann auction house in Neuss (150,000 inhabitants) had planned to auction on Monday hundreds of letters from the collection of a Nazi private investigator with the title The System of Terror, Volume II, 1933-1945. It is, in part, the correspondence of German concentration camp prisoners with their families.
The documents of the perpetrators of the crime were also on sale: among the over 600 lots were the notes of Arthur Liebehenschel, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, who had written them in preparation for his defense at the trial held in Krakow in 1947.
Among the items auctioned were several Jewish stars, such as one from the Buchenwald concentration camp “with signs of use”; anti-Semitic propaganda posters; Gestapo tokens; and other Nazi materials. The auction announcement drew strong criticism from the International Auschwitz Committee and the Fritz Bauer Institute, which studies the history and impact of the Holocaust. Both entities have requested, like the Polish government, its cancellation.
The auction was defined by Holocaust survivors and their relatives as a “cynical and shameful initiative”, according to Christoph Heubner, vice-president of the International Auschwitz Committee, who also criticized the fact that “the suffering of all the people persecuted and killed by the Nazis was used for commercial purposes”, and recalled that “the documents on persecution and the Holocaust belong to the families of the persecuted. They should be displayed in museums or commemorative exhibitions and not be degraded to a commercial object”.
“The letter from a Polish Auschwitz prisoner from 1940 for 180 euros? The Gestapo file with information on the execution of a Jewish inhabitant of the Mackheim ghetto in East Prussia in July 1942 for 350 euros? Or perhaps you prefer the statement on the death of a patient in the state sanatorium of Hadamar, murdered in 1944 as part of the so-called euthanasia, also for 350 euro?”, criticized the Fritz Bauer Institute last week in a statement in which he expressed his opposition “to the trade in documents relating to Nazi persecution and the Holocaust”.
“These types of documents should not be traded. The written and audiovisual documentation of Nazi crimes and their subsequent history must urgently be entrusted to public archives and memorials,” reads the text from the Fritz Bauer Institute. “Only there will the documents be preserved, cataloged and archived appropriately for the future and made available for contemporary historical research and the interested public, taking into account their provenance, all copyright and personality rights, as well as the interests worthy of protection of the persons concerned or their descendants.”
Initially the Neuss auction house, which specializes in stamps and coins, had a different opinion. When the newspaper asks Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitunghe declared that private collectors carried out “intense research work”, that they contributed to “historical analyses” and that their activity did not serve “to trade in suffering, but to preserve memory”. In the end, however, he backtracked and decided to stop the auction.
