The online auction site eBay has removed several sale items and begun conducting an “urgent investigation” after the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail found the website was selling the clothes of concentration camp victims from the Holocaust.
Among dozens of items on auction last week was a striped uniform thought to have belonged to a Polish baker who died in Auschwitz, which was on sale for about $18,000, the Daily Mail reported.
EBay vowed to donate $40,000 to an undisclosed charity before removing more than 30 other death-camp souvenirs. Sale items included a pair of shoes belonging to a camp victim, yellow Star of David armbands, a Holocaust victim’s damaged suitcase, and a “concentration camp toothbrush,” the Daily Mail said.
The seller, Viktor Kempf, a Ukrainian now living in Canada, also was selling a complete Auschwitz prisoner uniform, claimed to have once belonged to a “Wolf Gierson Grundmann,” whose name can be found on a database of concentration camp victims held by the Yad Vashem center in Jerusalem, the report said.
EBay said in a statement: “We are very sorry these items have been listed on eBay and we are removing them. We don’t allow listings of this nature, and dedicate thousands of staff to policing our site and use the latest technology to detect items that shouldn’t be for sale. … We very much regret that we didn’t live up to our own standards.”
According to the Daily Mail, eBay has not broken any U.K. laws by selling materials from the Holocaust, but the same trade is banned in Germany, Austria and France.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.