A telephone owned by Adolf Hitler has sold at auction for $243,000.
The rotary dial Bakelite telephone, which has an engraving of an eagle, a swastika and Hitler’s name stamped onto it, went under the hammer at a Maryland auction house yesterday. Its vendor said he believed it was used by the Nazi leader to issue orders that led to the deaths of millions of people.
Andreas Kornfeld of Alexander Historical Auctions in Chesapeake City said the successful bid was made – appropriately enough – by telephone.
The auction house does not disclose the names of buyers, meaning that for now it remains unclear who bought the phone or what will happen to it.
Hitler apparently used the phone so regularly that he took it with him when travelling around Germany during the last two years of the war.
It was removed from the bunker in which he committed suicide in April 1945 by British Army officer Brigadier Sir Ralph Rayner and is thought to be one of the few possessions to have survived his aides’ attempt to destroy his apartments following his death. It had been stored for the last seven decades in a safe in England.
Having retrieved it from the scene of Hitler’s death, Brigadier Rayner took the telephone back to England and, aware that British troops caught looting faced a court martial, hid it. Before he died in 1977, he gave the phone to his son, retired Army officer Major Ranulf Rayner. Now 82, Major Rayner decided to sell it hoping it would go on display as a reminder of the atrocities carried out by the Nazis.
Bill Panagopulos, from Alexander Historical Auctions, called it a “weapon of mass destruction”.
A porcelain figure of an Alsatian dog, also owned by Hitler, fetched $24,300. It was bought by a different bidder.