A SILVER-PLATED pencil purported to have belonged to Adolf Hitler has sold for a tenth of its pre-auction estimate at a Belfast auction house.

The pencil sold for £5,400, far below the estimate of between £50,000 – £80,000, at Bloomfield Auctions today to an online bidder.

Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association, had last week urged the sale of the items belonging to the Nazi leader was halted for moral reasons.

An original signed photograph of Hitler was expected to sell for between £10,000 and £15,000, but went for just £6,200.

The pencil sold today is believed to have been given to Hitler by his long-term partner Eva Braun as a gift for his 52nd birthday on April 20, 1941.

It is inscribed with ‘Eva’ in German and the initials “AH”.

Criticism 

Dublin-based art dealer and gallery owner Oliver Sears, whose mother is a Holocaust survivor, told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that the auction is about “making money at all costs without any consideration of the morality of what they are doing”.

He added: “My mother is an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor, does she and her troop really have to endure this?

“There must be a line somewhere where a moral sense of decency simply precludes an individual from wanting to make money out of this trade.”

Sears also told Morning Ireland last week that legislation should be enacted to prevent the sale of such items.

“We have reached a stage where we are going to have to bring in legislation,” said Sears, “because there are still a few businesses that insist on trading in this material.”

Fianna Fáil Senator Lorraine Clifford-Lee told Morning Ireland that she plans to introduce a Private Members’ Bill to prohibit the sale of memorabilia associated with Nazism.

“It is absolutely repulsive that anyone should seek to profit from the most horrendous regime in memory,” Clifford-Lee told Morning Ireland.

“We also have to think about what is going on in the current day, we have the rise of fascism here in Ireland, but right across Europe as well, and these types of sales and these types of items are interlinked with that rise in fascism.”