Nazi knickers put a twist in debate about auctioning Hitler-era items

That’s the question circling plans by auction house Hermann Historica to put the 114-centimetre silk undergarments – once owned by the head of Germany’s wartime Luftwaffe and Hitler’s deputy and designated successor – on the block. They’re going along with items like the vial that contained the cyanide Goering used to cheat the hangman in October 1946 and a length of the rope used to hang Julius Streicher, owner of the virulently anti-Semitic Der Stuermer newspaper.
Hermann Historica says the items come from the collection of John K Lattimer, a US Army doctor who had medical charge of prominent Nazis during the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials.
Also being sold are the gavel used by Robert Jackson, the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg; X-rays taken of Hitler; and medical reports following a July 1944 bomb assassination attempt.
Any sale of plus-sized Nazi underpants is guaranteed to raise a titter – British tabloid The Sun offered the headline “Silk Heil” about the auction, set for tomorrow. But it also raises questions about the propriety of trading in Nazi possessions.
“These XXL underpants from Goering – what explanatory value could they possibly have?” asks Albert Feiber, a Munich historian and curator of a documentation centre focusing on the Nazi period.
“This auction is not only tasteless, it is representative of a more than strange and questionable way of dealing with our history,” Charlotte Knobloch, vice president of the World Jewish Congress, says.
“One should check the feasibility of legally preventing such commercial sensationalism,” she adds.
Then again, one might argue that the extra-large undergarments were a sign of how the once dashing World War I fighter pilot had gone to seed as his beloved Luftwaffe crumbled.
Nazi memorabilia have long been popular with collectors. The money to be made from them rises as the memory fades of the horrors associated with Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust his Nazis unleashed on Europe amid World War II.
It is not necessarily an underground market. Deceased Motorhead frontman Lemmy made no secret of his personal collection of items belonging to Hitler or Hitler’s wife, Eva Braun.
For this weekend’s auction, Hermann Historica says it is aiming to interest museums and serious collectors.
“Hermann Historica is fully aware of Germany’s fateful history between 1933 and 1945 and strictly rejects all neo-Nazi and national socialist currents,” it says.
Others question why the auctions draw so much interest, when it can seem like items linked to Nazis are a dime a dozen.
German historian Andreas Mix of the Memorium Nuremberg Trials museum notes that so many people had been involved in the trials, whether as guards, lawyers or medical personnel, that “it’s entirely possible that someone took something”.
He called for the provenance of the items on tomorrow’s block to be investigated more carefully, noting that auction houses were often less than open about the origins of their collections for sale.
Hermann Historica says its involvement with the items began with Lattimer’s daughter. John Lattimer died nine years ago. His daughter wrote on the auction house website that much of the “junk” had been given to him by widows of former military comrades.
“He was honoured to add their prized items to his own artefacts, and so the collection grew; some grand treasures and some modest tokens, but all significant fragments of history,” Evan Lattimer wrote.
The auction catalogue is titled “Hitler and the Nazi Leaders – A Unique Insight into Evil”. Justifying the sale, the auction house says: “A taboo of this part of history would only lead to anon-transparent market. We kindly ask for your understanding.”
While Hermann Historica was on the whole a respectable auction house, there were others dealing in what historian Feiber describes as a “murky market”. German law forbids trading in propaganda contrary to the constitution, and thus also Nazi memorabilia, he says.
“Anyone buying something like this has to sign to the effect that it is for research purposes and for the purpose of historical-political education. But who checks this?”
Feiber also notes that items belonging to Hitler come up for sale from time to time. “It’s a relatively large market,” he says. But Mix adds that German museums were not prepared to pay the prices that these curiosities demand. Some of the items are simply “tasteless, macabre and scurrilous”.