A Maryland auction house is proudly peddling the globe-shaped bar that once served Adolf Hitler’s Nazi yacht parties.
“Offered here is probably one of the most fascinating Hitler relics ever offered — the complete bar and five bar stools removed from Adolf Hitler’s yacht ‘Aviso Grille’ at the time the vessel was scrapped,” reads a description of the bar and brass stools by Alexander Historical Auctions. “The bar, fittingly, resembles the ‘world’ which Hitler hoped to conquer!”
Hitler used the 377-foot yacht and its more than 30 staterooms to entertain and house the upper echelon Nazi ranks and other notorious characters including, the Auction house reports, Benito Mussolini, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. It was from the vessel’s foredeck that, on May 1, 1945, Hitler’s death — by suicide in a Berlin bunker with his longtime partner Eva Braun — was announced.
The Chesapeake City-based auction house is selling off the Nazi memorabilia on Oct. 29, its starting bid set to $75,000 and its value estimated to be between $150,000 and $250,000. Selling Hitler’s belongings and other Nazi artifacts is hugely controversial and is illegal in many nations and auction houses.
The bar and stools’ journey to Maryland is a strange tale.
British forces seized the Grille as war reparations in 1945. She was next sold to a Canadian businessman, then resold to a Lebanese investor who tried to sell her to Egypt’s King Farouk — when Jewish saboteurs tried to sink her with mines. They failed, but Farouk backed out of the deal, and in 1949 the investor brought her to the US to find a buyer. Unable to, he sold the ship to the North American Smelting and Refining Company for scrap in 1951, and she was later towed to and broken up in New Jersey’s Doan Salvage Yard.
The most recent owner is not identified, but the bar comes with a notarized letter from them describing how their father was “close friends with the owner of Doan Salvage Yard,” who personally invited him to come see Hitler’s former bar, which he purchased and kept in a Maryland barn for the next 70 years.
