The Lucrative Business Of Adolf Hitler Art Forgeries

Deutsche Welle reports that German police raided the Kloss Auction House in Berlin in January, 2019 and seized three paintings suspected of being forgeries of Hitler's work. All three are marked "A. Hitler" on the bottom, come with certificates of authenticity, and were supposedly painted from 1910 to 1911. Each one was valued at €4,000 (over $4,500). There's no telling whether or not the auction house was in on it, or was duped into believing the paintings were real. But at least Kloss representative Heinz-Joachim Maeder came to the same conclusion about Hitler's work as everyone else: "In my view, they have no artistic value. It's simply adequate craftsmanship. If you walk down the Seine and see 100 artists, 80 will be better than this."

The very next month, as The Art Newspaper says, police seized not three but 63 fake watercolors, pastels, sketches, and more from the family-owned Weidler Auction House. This time authorities suspected the auction house knew that they were forgeries. Only five of the works — still-life paintings — were deemed authentic. Bids started in the hundreds of euros and went to over €100,000.

Prospect Magazine goes further and states that 77 entire Hitler-based lots — groups of auctioned items — were sold from 2009 to 2018 by Mollocks auction house. In total, the works went for £271,000 (over $320,000). That time Mollocks admitted that they couldn't verify the authenticity of the paintings, but people bought them anyway.