Twenty watercolors by Adolf Hitler put up for auction last Friday in Trieste failed to find a buyer after Jews protested and Italian authorities set strict conditions for their sale.
The 20 small cityscapes of Vienna and Munich, painted before World War I and signed “A. Hitler,” had been expected to fetch at least $300,000.
But nobody even bid – though the auction room at the Hotel Savoia Excelsior was full of spectators.
Controversy over the propriety of auctioning off the paintings had arisen during the week before the sale. Fears were raised that they could be used for neo-Nazi propaganda purposes.
A strong protest from the European Jewish Congress denounced “the provocation that hides behind the auction of pseudo-works of art which in reality do not have any other basis except that they were painted by Hitler.”
The statement said, “The people responsible for the sale make themselves accomplices of those who attempt to rehabilitate the person responsible for the greatest tragedy in contemporary history.”
The EJC appealed to the Italian authorities to prohibit the auction, saying that if it took place, “it would be synonymous with incitement to racial hatred.”
The Italian authorities did not ban the sale, but they put strict conditions on it.
They decreed that the paintings had to be sold in one lot, rather than in five lots as originally planned. And they also ruled that the paintings could not be sold out of Italy.
The paintings – whose artistic quality has been described by a leading Italian art historian as “disgusting” – belong to Imelde Siviero, who inherited them from her brother, Rodolfo.
Rodolfo Siviero spent his entire professional career after World War II tracking down and retrieving for the Italian state works of art belonging to Italy which the Nazis had carried away. He is credited with retrieving more than 150 important works of art.
When he died nine years ago, the 20 Hitler paintings turned up among his possessions. He is believed to have acquired them at the end of the war from the widow of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy.
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