Two rare signed copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf sold for $64,850 at the Nate D. Sanders Auction house in Los Angeles. The sale brought in nearly three times its expected price.The rare first and second editions found new owner after eleven bidders fight for controversial memorabilia. The autographed copies of the two-volume work steeped in anti-Semitism are inscribed as Christmas gifts to Josef Bauer, an officer in the German SS during World War Two and a participant in Hitler’s failed Munich coup in 1923.
While copies of the book “Mein Kampf” are not rare, these 1925 and 1926 editions signed by Hitler are scarce.
“I think it’s very heinous,” said Nate Sanders, who is Jewish and the owner of the auction house. “But it’s an auction item, it is a memento, it’s a piece of memorabilia, and a piece of history.”
The same Bauer books fetched $25,000 in a sale at Bonhams auction house in London in 2012.
