London – A collection of surgical equipment that belonged to a Nazi concentration camp commandant is being put up for auction in southwest England this week.
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The wooden box of tools belonged to Anton Burger, a major in the SS who worked at the Theresienstadt concentration camp between July 1943 and February 1944, where 140,000 Jews were held and 33,000 of them died.
News of the sale has provoked outrage in the Jewish community, The Daily Mail reports.
Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies, the main representative body of British Jews, said that “to seek to profit from such ghoulish objects is deeply troubling”.
Theresienstadt was used as a propaganda tool during the Second World War, with the Germans trying to fool the world that it was a “paradise camp”.
Burger played a key role in covering up the true horrors of the camp during stage-managed visits by the Red Cross – which were used to help conceal the sickening purpose behind it and other camps from the watching world.
The fact that the wooden instrument case is marked ‘”nstrumente gemischte”, German for “mixed instruments”, has led to the theory that this may have been made as part of the deception, to suggest it was for musical instruments.
Disturbingly, given the contents of the box, there is no evidence that Sturmbannfuhrer Burger ever received medical training.
Grace Cloke, from Villa Hall Auctions, explained that the husband of the vendor was Jewish, and his parents met and married at a concentration camp in Austria.
They had Hitler’s silverware up to view in a museum the other week in New York. What is it any different?
Sooo sick these tools could very well have been used to torture yidden. Typical European insensativity to the holocaust
It is mind boggling that anyone would want them. It is chilling that they have been preserved so neatly in a case and in order – just like their culture liked. A sobering reminder of events not so long ago. Hashem Yerachaim.