Nuremberg Trial Flea Market Trove Headed for Chabad Center
Documents from the Nuremberg Trials recently found in a flea market in Israel are to go on display at the Chabad Jewish Educational Center in Berlin.
According to an announcement from the Berlin Chabad center, the documents will be on display to the public next week as part of events marking the Jan. 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day. They will then be sold at auction in Jerusalem.
The documents, which contain incriminating evidence of Nazi crimes, were found last year by a collector in a flea market in Jaffa, the Chabad center said.
In its description of the lot, the Jerusalem-based Kedem auction house said they consist of English translations of Nazi documents; reports, protocols and memorandums distributed among the prosecutors; official documents connected to the trial; and hundreds of copies of documents from the time of the Nazi regime.
The documents include a stenographic report about a 1938 meeting regarding the so-called Jewish question, led by Hermann Goering, and a letter referring to the confiscation of art from Jewish owners on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday.
Other documents include a copy of a document titled “Instructions for the treatment of the Jewish question” and an activity report on Nazi mass shooting operations in the former Soviet Union.
The papers reportedly are part of a collection that belonged to Isaac Stone, who headed the Berlin Document Center and the U.S. Foreign Service Office in the 1940s.
Juliana Rangel, head of the library and documentation division of the United Nations International Court of Justice in The Hague, told JTA the documents “certainly have a historical interest,” but “do not add anything to the Archives as they were entrusted to the Court by the Four Powers.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO