The phone that Adolf Hitler used to order deaths of millions of Jews and frantically commanded in the last moments of the Russian conquest of Berlin, sold for €470,000 ($507,000)! It is said that Hitler never separated from his red phone, and that it traveled everywhere with him. The item, described as “virtually unequalled in historical importance,” was recovered from the ‘Fuhrerbunker’ beneath Berlin.
Among the last calls he made on the phone was one in which he ordered the execution of his brother-in-law, General Hermann Fegelein, for treason, and the second to burn his apartment. Shortly afterwards, with his wife Eva Braun, committed suicide.
The phone is found by a British officer, Brigadier Sir Ralph Rayner, who arrived to the bunker shortly after Hitler’s suicide in April 1945 while the Russian forces advanced. After the war, the phone with engraved swastika and Hitler’s name Rayner “brought” and take home, hidden in a bag.
Before he died, in 1977, Rainer passed the phone on to his son, Ranulf who has now decided to sell it in the hope that it will be found in a museum setting, as a reminder of the terrible crimes carried out by the Nazis.