The possessions of Jews in concentration camps collected by a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials went under the hammer last week after being locked away for 70 years.
Moses Kove, a New York district attorney who spent two years prosecuting Nazi criminals, collected ephemera such as ghetto currency, medals and yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear in Germany and France.
The selection also included letters and postcards from Terezin and other concentration camps, photographs of himself with David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, and his own notes about the trial.
The lawyer kept them in a closet for three decades before bequeathing them to his stepdaughter, who locked them in a bank vault for another 40 years.
How Kove obtained the items is unclear; they may have been used as trial evidence or been given to him by prisoners while he was in Germany.
The collection was sold for $3,000 (£2,200) to the JFCS Holocaust Centre of San Francisco.
Although never expected to fetch high sums, Kove apparently regarded them as a partial price for his service extracting confessions from Hitler’s henchmen.
“He insisted I did not donate them, telling me: ‘the Germans had my blood’”, according to his stepdaughter, Meridyth Mischel Webber, who received the bag of papers and artefacts from Kove in 1977, long after he married her mother Rose.
“I never knew what he meant but he was reluctant to discuss the collection or his experiences in Nuremberg, and I respected that,” she said, adding that it it was clear to her that the trial took a terrible toll on his health of the lawyer.
Kove visited the concentration camps as part of his pre-trial research.
“He came home with shingles and married my mother in a New York City hospital,” Ms Webber explained.
“They enjoyed only three years together before he died aged 72.
“But he was a king of a man.”
She said the item which most affected her was a transcript of Kove’s examination of a camp doctor: “He was a Mengele-like figure. My stepfather asked how a doctor who was supposed to heal the sick could do such terrible things to people.The doctor replied: ‘They [the prisoners] were going to die anyway’.”
Kove also interrogated Rudolph Hess, commandant of Auschwitz, who quibbled with him over the number of Jews murdered in the camps, insisting: “I don’t think it was more than about two million.”
The items were sold at Jonathan Greenstein’s auction house, the only one in the United States devoted solely to Judaica and Jewish art. It has previously sold such items as Sammy Davis’s menorah and Joan Rivers’s Seder plate.
Mr Greenstein said he was “honoured and humbled” to have had the chance to find “new caretakers for these priceless pieces of history”.
But he expressed surprise that the collection fetched less than a third of what he expected and that no other Holocaust museums bid for it.
