A Maryland auction house has reportedly sold Adolf Hitler’s personal traveling telephone for $243,000 to an anonymous bidder on Sunday, Feb 19.
According to Bill Panagopulos of Alexander Historical Auctions in Chesapeake City the infamous phone was given (presented) to Brig. Sir Ralph Rayner during a visit to Hitler’s Berlin bunker by the occupying Russian officers.
Rayner’s son sold the red Siemens phone, which bears Hitler’s name and a swastika, is “arguably the most destructive weapon of all time, which sent millions to their deaths” according to a catalog description given by the auction house.
On May 5, 1945, a day after Germans surrendered, Rayner was ordered by Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery to make contact with the Russians in Berlin, according to the auction house.
The Russians offered Rayner a telephone that belonged to Eva Braun, Hitler’s bride, but he joked that he preferred red.
“His Russian hosts were pleased to hand him a red telephone,” the auction house said in the catalog. “The telephone offered here.”
Rayner told CNN that his father brought the phone and a dog figurine, which was made by slave laborers at Dachau concentration camp, back to their home in Devon in western England.
“My father didn’t see it as a relic of Hitler’s glory days, more a battered remnant of his defeat, a sort of war trophy,” Rayner told CNN. “He never thought it would become an important artifact.”
“I don’t want them to be hidden again,” he said. “I want them to remind the world of the horrors of war.”