Pic of Heinrich Himmler moments after suicide to go under the hammer
By ANIThursday, February 17, 2011
LONDON - A previously unseen photograph of Heinrich Himmler, taken minutes after he committed suicide, is all set to go under the hammer next month.
The picture, captured by Lance Corporal Guy Adderley of British Intelligence in May 1945, shows the Nazi second-in-command lying dead after biting a cyanide pill, still wearing his trademark round glasses.
After his death, propaganda photographs of his corpse slumped on a makeshift bed were released. But Adderley kept this grainy photograph among his wartime mementoes.
Adderley’s family will sell the photograph at the auctioneer Dreweatt’s sale of militaria in Bristol on March 29, with a pre-sale estimate of 2,000 pounds-3,000 pounds.
“This is a very important and historic collection. Himmler was Hitler’s Reichsfuhrer, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany,” the Telegraph quoted Malcolm Claridge, the auctioneer and militaria expert, as saying.
“He oversaw the Gestapo and the concentration camps and is regarded as the architect of the Holocaust.
“Adderley’s collection takes us right to the heart of Himmler’s arrest and into the very room in the British safe house in L�neburg where he bit into the cyanide capsule he had concealed in his mouth.
“Guy Adderley was one of the team that arrested Himmler, and there are also two photographs showing British and Russian officers in the safe house with Adderley in the background,” Claridge added. (ANI)
