Manitoba auctioneer selling more Nazi items

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This article was published 06/10/2021 (1080 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nazi paraphernalia is up for sale in an online estate auction being handled by Stonewall’s McSherry Auction Services, with Swastika-emblazoned flags, pins and a Deutscher Volkssturm Wehrmacht armband among the items up for bidding.

The items, in Lot 82 through Lot 85 of the sale, are identified as “German,” with the word “Nazi” never appearing on the website’s text.

It’s the second time in less than two years that the auctioneer has put paraphernalia related to the Nazis up for sale. Stuart McSherry kept the conversation short when contacted by phone about the recent lot.

“I don’t have any reason to talk to you. Why would I talk to you?” he said Thursday morning, with six days to go in the online auction, which also features jewelry, a meat slicer, a wooden rotary phone and hundreds of other items.

“Who are you? The law? What are you, a reporter? I’m not interested in dealing with you, all right?”

The 80 items being auctioned in February 2020 included a Hitler youth knife, an application form for the SS and a photograph of Nazi war criminal Julius Streicher, the publisher of the notoriously anti-Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer.

McSherry, who runs about 80 auctions per year, told the Free Press last year he had signed an agreement with a seller looking to let go of a few pieces of “militaria.” McSherry said he didn’t give much thought to the items at hand, nor to the implications of providing a platform for their sale.

“The product is just a product to me,” he said at the time. “I never stopped to think about it.”

While legal experts agreed that holding the 2020 auction was not illegal, human rights groups, lawyers and Jewish organizations questioned whether it was ethical.

Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, the director of policy for the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, is troubled by the new items being put up for auction.

“We find it extremely disturbing every time we see items like this on the market. We believe there should not be a market for Nazi propaganda. Nobody should be earning a profit off of items involved in the execution of a genocide,” she said.

“In this case, as in all others, we ask the auctioneers as people of conscience to remove these items from the marketplace,” Kirzner-Roberts said, adding the centre would happily work with McSherry or the seller to find an appropriate museum or learning institution where the paraphernalia can be donated and given proper context. “They should not be earning profits for people.”

McSherry told the Free Press in February 2020 he was “selling a part of history” and that it was not the first time items such as those were up for sale. After getting more context, he said he reached out to the seller to ask whether he’d remove a lot featuring a book depicting “a perfect Aryan town” and the photograph of Streicher.

“The involvement of the people (that these items) affect might have been overlooked,” he said at the time, adding he’d strongly consider not selling such items in the future.

 

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca