Hitler’s top hat sold for over £42,000 at controversial auction of Nazi items

Adolf Hitler’s top hat has sold for more than $55,000 (£42,500) at a controversial auction in Germany of Nazi memorabilia.

The auction at Hermann Historica began on Wednesday in Munich and continued on Thursday.

Other items sold on the first day were a silver-plated copy of Mein Kampf that once belonged to senior Nazi Hermann Goering for about $145,000 (£112,600) and a cocktail dress belonging to Hitler’s paramour Eva Braun for $5,000 (£3,900), double the expected price, Deutcshe Welle reported.

Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association, had appealed to the auction house to cancel the sale, saying that it would “send a message that some things particularly when so metaphorically blood soaked, should not and must not be traded.”

“The Nazis’ crimes are being trivialized here,” the German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner Felix Klein told Funke newspaper group. “They’re acting as if they’re trading in perfectly normal historical art objects,” he also said, adding that “there is a danger that Nazi relics become cult objects.”

Hermann Historica director Bernhard Pacher told Deutsche Welle that most customers “are museums, state collections and private collectors who really meticulously deal with the subject.”