HITLERS PERSONAL TELEPHONE UP FOR AUCTION

'Hitler's personal telephone' gifted by Red Army to British officer goes up for auction

The red Bakelite telephone which was used by Hitler in his Berlin bunker CREDIT:ALEDXANDER HISTORICAL AUCTIONS/EPA

•  Roland Oliphant 

18 FEBRUARY 2017 •

It is a dated but ordinary piece of office equipment of the kind that might normally only attract the attention of retro-conscious hipsters. 

But the rotary dial Bakelite telephone going under the hammer at a Maryland auction house this weekend is not just a curiosity from the pre-digital age. 

It is Adolf Hitler’s personal travelling telephone, which the dictator almost certainly used to issue orders that led to the deaths of millions.

Hitler's name and a Nazi eagle are engraved on the back of the telephone  CREDIT:ALEDXANDER HISTORICAL AUCTIONS/EPA

The phone, originally gifted to Hitler by the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, was discovered by Soviet soldiers after they stormed his Berlin bunker in 1945. 

Red Army officers then presented it to Brigadier Sir Ralph Rayner, a British officer, when he visited the bunker days after the fall of Berlin, the auction house says. 

Bill Panagopulos, from Alexander Historical Auctions in Chesapeake City, which is now selling the phone on behalf of Rayner’s son, calls it a ”weapon of mass destruction".

He says the seller and auction house hope that the telephone ends up in a museum, where people who see it "really understand what extreme fascist thinking can bring about."

It is estimated the Seimens W38 phone will fetch $200,000 to $300,000 and Mr Panagopulos says bidding will start at $100,000 this weekend.

The red-painted telephone is emblazoned with Hitler’s name and a Nazi party symbol and features several special adaptations.

The  handset of the phone must be rotated almost 60 degrees before it can be lifted out of its cradle, which would have prevented it from shaking loose while being transported with Hitler on trains and vehicles.