Bidding for Adolf

"Here I have a cue card for an early Hitler speech," the auctioneer announced in his nasal Bavarian accent. "The words that Hitler penciled on it repeat the pattern to be followed in his harangue: 'November 1918--Criminals--The Political Situation Today--Our Irrevocable Demands--The Coming Elections--Our Candidates--Our Tactics--The Jews.' " Bidding in the stuffy auction room on Munich's fashionable Maximilianstrasse started briskly. The scruffy cue card was quickly knocked down to a broker acting on behalf of an anonymous British collector. Price: $545.

Next came Hitler's ostrich-skin wallet, which was stuffed with 37 pictures, two negatives of Eva Braun and a free ticket to a 1927 high school dance in Linz, Austria. A broker bought it for a Texas oilman. The price: $665. An autographed Hitler portrait went for $670. Hitler's 1927 membership card in an automobile club fetched $270. An elderly German paid $130 for a short shopping list (vegetable soup and cognac) that der Fuehrer had written out for Munich's famed Dallmayr delicatessen.

Esoteric Impulses. All told, the Munich auction last week sold some five dozen Hitler souvenirs, all of them from the estate of the late Anny Winter, who was Hitler's housekeeper from 1929 to 1945. Anny's ardor for collecting just about anything Hitler touched netted her grandnephews a windfall of $16,400.

Collectors and souvenir hunters have always been inspired by strange and esoteric impulses. A lock of Napoleon's hair, which even Josephine would not have given a sou for, can today fetch upwards of $200. A frying pan used by Britain's "Great Train Robbers" when they were hiding out in a Midlands farmhouse in 1963 recently went for $120. Even so, the mania for Hitleriana is an especially puzzling phenomenon. In the past year, sales of Third Reich mementos have begun to rise sharply. A few of the collectors are old diehard Nazis like a former SS Gruppenfuehrer who has a private museum in his Munich home. But young Germans are turned off by the craze for souvenirs of Adolf. The French put a quick end to the collection of Hitleriana by outlawing the trade in Third Reich relics.

Peculiar Types. The largest group of collectors is American. Munich Auctioneer Count Arnhard Klenau von Klenova, who conducted last week's sale, claims to know of at least 200 American collectors. In his Hollywood home, Bob Hope has books with Hitler's name plate, several sheets of Hitler's personal stationery and a porcelain dinner plate inscribed "Kanzlei des Fuehrers" (Fuehrer's Chancellery), which Hope acquired while entertaining troops in Germany in 1945. The West Point archives, says the count, are also searching for relics. "Though I personally know only a very small portion of our regular customers," adds Klenau, "I'm convinced that they are not collecting for political reasons. I look at them as affluent, elderly, admittedly somewhat peculiar types who have an urge to get close to history."

West German Psychologist Julia Mueller, author of a book on German youth problems, disagrees. "The main reason for the attraction seems to me to be the almost inconceivable obscenity with which the Nazis did everything," says she. "This, in an age where pornography has become emasculated by overexposure, may offer itself as a quite successful substitute for the feelings pornography aimed to arouse."

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