Westmount company stops auction of Nazi medals 'to avoid any polemic'
B'nai Brith denounced "efforts to commercialize Nazi memorabilia and the unethical practice of profiting from genocidal paraphernalia."
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A Westmount business decided to cancel an auction after being informed B’nai Brith, the Canadian Jewish human-rights organization, was preparing to ask it to remove Second World War German medals that feature a Nazi swastika from the online sale.
The auction was scheduled to begin on Friday and was made available through the website LiveAuctioneers.com. It was going to be held by Westmount’s P&R Auctions Collectors Service.
When reached for comment on Saturday, Patrick Desparois, part owner of the auction house, initially told the Montreal Gazette he considered the items to be historic.
“We’re really just selling history. It is a part of history. Unfortunately, history is not always rosy,” Desparois said. “As an auction house, we sell items that are historic. We are not encouraging propaganda. Not in any way. History is often sad, but we are selling historic items.
“I can sympathize. My (business) partner is Jewish, by the way. He understands this very well.”
Less than two hours later, Desparois said he contacted the person who wanted to sell the items and said they decided to cancel the auction “to avoid any polemic.”
Through an email exchange, a spokesperson for LiveAuctioneers.com said: “Our company neither owns nor sells any of the merchandise appearing in auction-house catalogues posted to LiveAuctioneers.com, and does not condone the promotion of hateful ideologies. The auction in question is no longer available for bidding on the marketplace.”
Included among the many items that were scheduled to go up for bids was a “German WWII Hitler Youth 1936 pin” and a “German WWII RAD pin.” Both of the items, and several other medals, have the Nazi swastika featured on them. On Saturday, some of the items already had bids on them before the auction was cancelled.
A Montreal Gazette reader noticed the auction and informed the newsroom. The issue has arisen a couple of times in recent years, and other auction houses, including one based in Montreal, removed similar items after groups like B’nai Brith complained.
“While the sale of Nazi materials is not illegal in Canada, B’nai Brith denounces efforts to commercialize Nazi memorabilia and the unethical practice of profiting from genocidal paraphernalia,” Marvin Rotrand, the national director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights, said before the auction was cancelled. “Items from the Nazi era belong in the collections of museums that can educate visitors about the tragic and horrendous history of Nazi Germany.”
Rotrand had said B’nai Brith intended to contact the auction company soon and also called on “merchants in general” to stop making Nazi memorabilia available for sale to the public.
“It’s hurtful to Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and it sends the wrong message about a regime that murdered six million Jews and millions of others,” Rotrand added. “It’s entirely wrong.”
Desparois noted the other auctions advertised what they were selling, while his company had not.
“We haven’t spent a cent (on advertising) on it because I don’t want to make a polemic with this,” he said before the auction was cancelled. “I am not interested in promoting items like this.”
In November 2019, an auction house in Richmond, B.C. removed similar medals from an auction after the Vancouver branch of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs expressed its concerns.
In February 2020, a Montreal online auction company removed Nazi memorabilia items, including Second World War badges with swastikas on them, after receiving a complaint from the Toronto-based Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.
In November 2021, B’nai Brith Canada convinced three antique stores in Edmonton to remove Nazi memorabilia from its shelves. In a statement, B’nai Brith Canada said the sale of such memorabilia “often encourages the romanticization of Nazi ideology.”
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