Berlin: A black and white photograph shows Adolf Hitler reading on a deck chair on the veranda of his Bavarian Alps headquarters. In another image, he pauses during a stroll, an easy grin on his face. He looks into the camera, and smiling onlookers look at him.
The photographs, chilling in their casual depiction of the murderous dictator, were among dozens of images of Nazi officials in an album that was discovered among the belongings of his companion, Eva Braun, in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin in 1945, according to C&T Auctioneers of Britain. The album was found in a drawer in her bedroom.
The album was sold at an auction Wednesday in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Britain, to an unidentified bidder for £34,000 (Dh153,167; $41,000), the auctioneers said. The images could not be republished without permission, but they remained visible on the auction site and in a Reuters video.
“Very few significant artefacts liberated from the Fuhrer Bunker in 1945 exist today in the open market, especially with such concrete provenance dating all the way back to the time of liberation,” the auction house said in a statement.
Matthew Tredwen, an owner of the auction house, said in a telephone interview that it was not clear who took the photographs, but that the proximity to Hitler, and to other high-ranking officials in the Nazi Party including Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, suggested the person or people behind the camera had trusted access. Braun, a photographer, is credited with other surviving pictures and films of Hitler.
“The photographs had to be taken by someone who was very close,” Tredwen said. “All photographs of Adolf Hitler were very much controlled because obviously they did not want photographs coming out that made him look bad. They would not have been made for the general public.”
There were no signatures in the book to suggest ownership, or the identity of the photographer, he said.
He described the bidding as “very competitive,” with telephone bidders from Britain and the United States, as well as interest online from Germany, China, South Africa and other countries.
Tredwen, a specialist of more than a dozen years in military history items, said buyers of Nazi memorabilia were generally historians. “I have never in my life met anyone who shared the political views of the Third Reich,” he said. “They are literally only there to collect. World War II was one of the biggest events to affect the world.”
“People are fascinated by how evil the Third Reich were,” he added.
The description of the item online traced its journey from April 1945, when a British Fleet Street photographer, Edward Dean, “obtained” it from a Russian soldier whom he had watched find the album in a drawer in Braun’s bunker bedroom, shortly after the couple committed suicide. The item changed hands several times after Dean auctioned it.
In one photograph, Hitler salutes as he walks toward the camera down a path at his Berghof headquarters in the Bavarian Alps. His guards are also depicted on duty and in relaxed poses in the images, which date mostly from the early to mid-1930s.
Ownership of items related to Nazi history poses ethical questions. Some art collectors have stepped forward to try to find out whether their art was looted from Jews. A replica of a gate that was believed to have been stolen from the Dachau concentration camp in Germany was recovered last year.
And an attraction in Berlin that re-creates the interior of Hitler’s bunker and opened last year suggests an uncomfortable phenomenon — that Hitler sells.
Memorials dedicated to preserving the historical context of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed, have often called on collectors or people with personal items from survivors to donate the artefacts.
In January, in commemorating the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration and death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, the memorial director, Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywinski, issued a statement calling for donations.
“We kindly ask the public to hand over any documents, photos, personal letters, diaries, or other materials that are in private hands,” he said.
“I am absolutely convinced that only mutual effort can lead to a fuller understanding of the mechanisms of hatred, and analyses from the perspective of the victims, given the course of events, cannot fully serve the purpose,” he added. “Today, we need new sources for a comprehensive picture of the history of Auschwitz and the Holocaust.”
— New York Times News Service
