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Police won't take action against Northamptonshire officer who sold Auschwitz relics
Removing items from the camp is illegal under Polish law, though it is unclear who removed the items that were sold
October 5, 2018 08:50
Removing items from the camp is illegal under Polish law, though it is unclear who removed the items that were sold
October 5, 2018 08:50A UK police force has indicated it will not take any action against a serving officer who sold items taken from Auschwitz death camp.
Police Constable Matthew Hart of Northamptonshire Police is understood to run, together with a relative, Paula Hart, an eBay account by the name of ww2autographs.
Over the past six months and as recently as August, the ww2autographs account sold a number of lots labelled as “WW2 German Camp Birkenau Osweicim relic.” These included four different lots of barbed wire from the camp, as well as items described as “fence insulators”.
Under Polish law, it is illegal to either remove pieces of the camp or to sell them. However, there are no such restrictions under British law. It is unclear who was responsible for the removal of the items from the vicinity of Auschwitz.
A spokesperson for Northamptonshire Police told the JC: “We can confirm a serving police officer has declared a business interest.
“Our Professional Standards Department have spoken to the officer in connection with this and no wrongdoing has been identified.
“Following our intervention, the officer concerned has permanently removed the items in question from sale. We are satisfied that, at this stage, no offences have been committed.”
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the main Nazi extermination camp in Eastern Europe, based near the Polish town of Osweicim. More than 1.1 million people were murdered there, and more than 90 per cent of them were Jewish.
The items sold by the ww2autographs eBay account, which has since changed its name to “doneselling” and appears to have withdrawn all items from sale, were described as having been “recovered from the outer ‘Mexico’ part of the camp, NOT the current enclosed camp”, and were referred to as “extremely rare”.
The “Mexico part of the camp” refers to the partially expanded warehouse extension. In the latter half of 1944, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were transported from Hungary to Birkenau, the Nazis were unable to murder all their victims straight away. “Mexico” served as a transit camp for tens of thousands of incoming Jews until the Nazis were able to send them to the gas chambers.
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the UK’s Holocaust Educational Trust, said: “Auschwitz-Birkenau is a universal symbol of the Holocaust. Every part of the physical fabric of the camp is material evidence of the brutal murder of more than one million people which took place there.
“It is disgusting that anyone could think it appropriate to take or acquire items from the site of the largest mass murder in history, and even more so to try to profit from them.
“The fact that the person concerned is a serving police officer makes this story all the more shocking.”
