Nazi personal belongings stolen from museums – Cases across Europe WORLD

Theft of Nazi artifacts from museums is on the rise.

Recently, around 20 Nazi items were stolen from the Deutsches Museum Nordschleswig in Signderburg, Denmark, including an SS uniform and the Adolf Hitler Youth costume. This is the latest in a string of war museum robberies across Europe, in which Thieves’ target are items related to the Nazi regime.

“The uniforms are sought after in collectors’ circles and are valuable trophies, which is probably a reason for the theft,” the Danish museum said on its Facebook page last Tuesday. According to the German magazine Monopol, the value of the stolen SS uniform, which is not authentic, amounts to approximately $ 31,400. The thieves appear to have specifically targeted German WWII artifacts, particularly the Waffen SS, without regard to artifacts associated with the Allied forces.

The robbery at the Danish museum is part of a wave of similar robberies in the Netherlands. In August, six men broke into the Eyewitness Museum in Beck, smashing the door and display cases and allegedly was left with $ 1.75 million worth of items. Last month, thieves at the Oerlogsmuseum in Osentrecht, under cover of night, removed historic artifacts worth more than $ 1 million (Among them, 23 figures in SS uniforms and armor). To protect their collections, some museums began to remove objects from the exhibition space. “Yesterday, I collected articles related to the Hitler Youth and the SS uniforms were also being removed,” Frans van Venrooij, director of the 1940-1945 War Museum in Lονn-op-Zant, told The Guardian. For the same reason, the Overloon War Museum is returning the “Auschwitz Book of the Dead” ahead of schedule to the Dutch Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam, from where it had been borrowed. The series of robberies follows the recent boom in the Nazi souvenir market, which was accompanied by an increase in the number of counterfeit items from that period.