April 26, 2008
24/4/2008- Czech Internet auctions offer thousands of items related to the Nazis and their operators say more and more people have wanted to buy them in the recent years, the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) reported Thursday. The Aukro.cz website offered 1335 items in the section "Germany 1933-1945" on Wednesday. "We have recently sold a knife of the National Socialist Motor Corps for 80,000 crowns," Oto Obdrzalek, one of the auctions operators, told the paper. "Apart from collectors, neo-Nazis are very interested in these items," Klara Kalibova from the Tolerance and Civic Society NGO told MfD. "A Hitlerian wing has recently won in the extremist National Resistance movement and its members buy these items to strengthen their identity,"
Kalibova said. Czech auction operators are not concerned about the identity of the buyers, the paper writes. "We only demand a written statement declaring that the person is a collector and does not support Nazism," Oto Lustig, from the Odklepnuto.cz auction website, said. However, Lustig said Holocaust survivors often send him letters complaining about the offer of Nazi-related items. Buyers use nicknames as their signatures. Some of these clearly show their support for neo-Nazi ideas, such as Fritz88 and Pavel88, the two numbers symbolising the "Heil Hitler" salute, the paper writes.
A police officer specialising in right-wing extremism told MfD that the police monitor these auctions servers. "But it is very difficult to prove promotion of Nazism because the sellers and buyers always claim that they are interested in military history," he said. Nazi symbols are not displayed only on the Internet, but also in shops, Mfd writes, mentioning the Vagner shopping centre in Brno, south Moravia. Big plastic figures of Adolf Hitler and SS officers can be seen in the plastic models shop's show case of the Vagner centre, the paper writes. Though the plastic Hitler cannot be bought in the shop, one can order it through the Internet, a shop assistant said.
© the Czech News Agency