Online Auctioneer Hopes to Sell Portraits of Hitler's Parents to Scholars, Not Nazis — And for $100,000

Hitler owned portrait paintings of parents, listing #559

The two portraits being sold by Web-based Craig Gottlieb Militaria Auctions from September 1-17 could easily be someone's grandparents. But the two portraits contain a sliver of history that is much deeper and darker than your average early-20th-century personal portrait: They depict Alois and Klara Hitler, parents of Adolf. The two oil paintings were likely commissioned by their son during his reign as head of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s. Because of this chilling background, Web site proprietor Craig Gottlieb speculates that they could they could fetch $100,000 or higher when they are auctioned off next month.

A detail of the portrait of Hitler's father.

Speaking with ARTINFO,Gottlieb could not say with 100 percent certainty that the paintings were commissioned by Adolf Hitler himself, but he was able to give several convincing reasons why it is believed there is a personal connection. The paintings are likelyauthentic because they appear in a list of personal artwork owned by Hitler (which can be found online at the Library of Congress). The painting of Klara is not from life but from a photograph of her found in a small, historically well-known locket that was uncovered among Hitler's personal effects at the end of WWII. The locket currently belongs to a colleague of Gottlieb's, and photos of it appear alongside the portraits on the Gottlieb Auction Web site, for authentication and contextual purposes, though it is not for sale.

A detail of the portrait of Hitler's mother

"The locket being Hitler's personal property, it just stands to reason that Hitler commissioned these paintings, or someone did on behalf of him," said Gottlieb.

According to the Gottlieb Auction site, a French veteran of World War II "liberated" the portraits after the war and his family has had them ever since. The paintings have been in the United States since the 1980s, when part of the family that owned them immigrated. The pair has hung together since the war — and probably since they were commissioned — so they will not be separated for sale. The reason for putting the portraits up for auction is unknown.

Selling a work associated with Nazism is controversial. But Gottlieb stresses that he is not a Nazi supporter or a white supremacist. On the contrary, he is a historian interested in preserving unique artifacts from military history. He is also Jewish. He considers the portraits to be "an interesting historical jumping-off point," and he hopes that they eventually end up in museums where they can be analyzed through an educational and historical lens. Gottlieb postulated that the expensive estimates for lots on his Web site weeded out the more unsavory types of Nazi memorabilia collectors — he described his audience as "self-selecting" — and stated that he would never knowingly sell the paintings to someone who was a Nazi sympathizer.

The portraits are well-done, though they are not of such high artistic merit that they would normally fetch thousands of dollars at auction. However, the historical context will likely push the sale price to six figures. Gottleib's $100,000 estimate is based on the recent successes of other well-known historical artifacts connected to infamous historical figures. In June, a gun once belonging to Al Capone sold for £67,250 ($110,000) at Christie's South Kensington and recently a photograph of Billy the Kidwas purchased by one of the Koch brothers for a whopping $2.3 million at a Denver auction. The high prices for such works have little to do with artistic merit and much to do with historical significance.

This is not the first time in the recent past that an artwork associated with Hitler has come up for auction, though given the connection with one of the most infamous figures of the 20th century, such sales tend to draw controversy. Hitler was himself a working, if mediocre, artist for much of his adult life, and paintings by him mostly show up at auction in small recesses of the English countryside: several watercolors painted by Hitler were auctioned off at Jeffreys in Lostwithiel in 2006, while several other works were auctioned off by Mullock's Specialist Auctioneers & Valuers in Shropshire in 2009, followed just a few months later by a controversial etching of Hitler and Lenin at the same auction house.

The portraits of Alois and Klara may benefit from the same fascination attested to in these UK sales. Or perhaps we can look for a president closer to home, at Greg's Auto Repairin Florence, New Jersey, where the toilet from Hitler's yacht has been preserved for all to use.