Hitler’s top hat sells at auction in Munich for $55,000

Hitler’s top hat sold for more than $55,000 at a controversial auction of Nazi memorabilia in Germany.

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

Other items that 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 and a cocktail dress belonging to Hitler’s paramour Eva Braun for $5,000, 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.”