An Israeli court has stopped an auction of a hobby-and-holiday item that contained ink samples linked to the Auschwitz gas chambers.
An auction house had scheduled the sale of the kits to perform tattooing in Poland for Tuesday.
Mark Rachmanovich, a lawyer for the death camp’s former warden, has appealed to the Federal Administrative Court in Jerusalem, Israel’s Channel 2 TV reported. The country’s Supreme Court refused to order the arrest of the alleged criminal.
The district attorney in the southern Polish city of Krakow filed the court injunction on Monday.
Meanwhile, the 91-year-old camp’s former commander, Josef Mengele, has been denied refugee status in Israel and is expected to be deported to Austria, Agence France-Presse reported.
Rachmanovich, also called “the Medic of Auschwitz,” had told Israel’s Channel 10 TV that the Auschwitz director Gustav Hilter oversaw the procurement of the ink samples from Nazi Germany’s Department of Illness and Injury of the Nazi Occupation Authorities, or DIAI.
Officials at the time told The Associated Press that such collected substances would be used to protect German prisoners of war from infection.
After World War II, Auschwitz was turned into a museum, and Mengele was tried and sentenced to death in the Krakow genocide trial. He was executed in 1979, although it was then commuted to life in prison.
The auction of the items also was set to include other relics from the death camp and of Mengele, including a catalogue for the tattooing labs, an eyeglass case he used to hunt for victims, a famous SS insignia, a map with markings that were apparently taken during the death camps run by Mengele and an exquisite silver plate with the number of Mengele’s office.
The AP contributed to this report.
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