“What Kind of Person Has a Closet Full of Nazi Memorabilia?”, 2023-09-29 ():
At the Ohio Valley Military Society’s annual Show of Shows, there is plenty for sale that isn’t Nazi memorabilia. All sorts of mementos from all sorts of wars: Civil War caps, antique pistols, Purple Hearts, samurai swords, World War I trench kits. But there is a lot of Nazi memorabilia. At this year’s Show of Shows, which took place in February in the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, there were nearly 2,000 tables, and my best guess is that at least half had Nazi items—and often only Nazi items—for sale. There were Nazi flags, busts, helmets, Lugers, cutlery, batons, an autographed photo of Hitler. A small brass swastika pin could be picked up for $20; an SS serving bowl with gold engraving, $1,000; a yellow & white-gold Luftwaffe Pilot Observer badge adorned with 170 diamonds, $130,000…I’d gone to the Show of Shows, the largest military memorabilia show in the country, because I wanted to better understand the trade in Nazi artifacts, to try to get a sense of these collectors, their motivations. The market for Nazi mementos is thriving—annual sales are, according to one expert, as high as $100 million—and in the United States nothing about it is illegal.
The truth is that many collectors of Nazi memorabilia are, in fact, collectors, a term I’m using semi-technically to describe those who dedicate themselves, often obsessively and for reasons inscrutable to the outsider, to amassing some or other class of objects, usually something interestingly varied in terms of condition, provenance and rareness—action figures, stamps, coins, Pez dispensers. This isn’t to say there’s never a profit motive, but there is, or at least at some point was, a base desire on the part of collectors to, simply, possess.
“There’s a lot to collect”, Michael Hughes, the author of The Anarchy of Nazi Memorabilia: From Things of Tyranny to Troubled Treasure 2022, told me. “Absolutely, Nazi memorabilia appeals to the systematic collector who collects complete series, like baseball cards.” Dr. Hughes, an academic who describes himself as a “reformed collector” and who has interviewed or otherwise interacted with hundreds of collectors of Nazi memorabilia, says most aren’t all that strange or exceptional, at least with respect to the larger collecting community. “Generally the people I have met over the last 30 years are just your average Joes”, he said.
As one collector put it to me: “I have more in common with a Beanie Babies enthusiast than I do with a neo-Nazi.” The man with perhaps the most valuable Nazi memorabilia collection in the United States also has what is likely the most extensive collection of Back to the Future memorabilia, including a DeLorean used onscreen in Back to the Future Part III.
…There are collectors of Nazi memorabilia who are Jewish, whose relatives died in the Holocaust. None were eager to speak with me on the record—not because they thought they were doing anything shameful but because, as one told me, “Most people don’t get it, and will never get it”—but made it clear that their fascination with Nazi artifacts in no way diluted their completely standard views regarding World War II, Nazis and the Holocaust. (When a friend of mine, who is Jewish and who’s been keenly interested in the Holocaust his entire life, heard I was at the Show of Shows, he asked me to pick him up a badge once worn by a member of the SS, the Nazi regime’s most important paramilitary arm, explaining that he enjoyed imagining how the German officer who originally wore the thing would react to the fact that it was now being stored in a Jew’s underwear drawer.)
The Nazi object’s sinisterness is not ignored but is definitely not a deterrent; if anything, it makes it more interesting. One collector I spoke to explained it in terms of Star Wars: Which is more compelling, he asked, the Light Side or the Dark Side?