Israel Holocaust memorial sheds doubt on tattoo stamps up for auction

Tattoo stamps put up for auction were not used by Nazis on Jewish and other inmates of Auschwitz as claimed, a spokesman for Israel's Holocaust memorial said Friday.

An Israeli court in November issued an injunction after Tzolman's Auctions, a Jerusalem seller, listed for sale what it said were original tattoo stamps of digits used to brand inmates at the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.

The Center Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel had filed a court request to freeze the sale, while Memorial Yad Vashem called the auction "morally unacceptable".

Yad Vashem was then tasked with examining their authenticity and "arrived at the conclusion that these objects were not used to tattoo Jews in Auschwitz", the spokesman said, without elaborating on the assessment.

The memorial filed its report to the district court in Tel Aviv on Thursday.

A million Jews died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was set up by Nazi Germany in what is now Poland during World War II, along with tens of thousands of others including Catholic Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war, between 1940 and 1945.

"The original stamps used to tattoo the numbers on Auschwitz prisoners," Tzolman's website had declared. "The most shocking Holocaust item."

Colette Avital, head of the Center Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, had said that "objects like this shouldn't be traded, and certainly should not be owned privately".

Germany's Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited Yad Vashem on Thursday, calling it a "place of remembrance for the million-fold suffering caused by the genocide of the Jews of Europe, which Germans meticulously planned, documented and perpetrated".