Giant globe-shaped bar from ‘Hitler’s yacht’ to be auctioned in US

A giant aluminium globe-shaped bar, complete with five brass barstools, will be offered for sale by a Maryland auctioneer – as the bar from “Hitler’s yacht”.

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What was once the centrepiece of the Aviso Grille spent seven decades hidden in a barn in the US state but will come up for auction this month, with an estimated value up to $250,000.

Previous sales of Nazi and Hitler-related artifacts have proved controversial. In 2019 the Washington Post investigated the market for such memorabilia, finding that mainstream auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christies, and online sites including eBay, had curbed or banned their sale.

Nonetheless, the bar is now billed by Alexander Historical Auctions as “simply a fantastic relic, symbolic of the false grandeur and excesses of Hitler’s ‘Hundred Year Reich’.”

In fact the Nazi regime commonly referred to a Thousand-Year Reich, though it actually lasted for 12 years, from 1933 to Hitler’s defeat and suicide in 1945, at the end of a world war in which as many as 85m people died, more than 11m in the Holocaust, of which 6m were Jews.

Hitler’s boat was built in 1935. It lasted four years longer than he did, the bar being salvaged when the vessel was broken up at a boatyard on the Delaware river in 1951.

It was an ignominious end for a yacht Hitler once intended to sail up the Thames, had he managed to invade Britain. The metal was sold to the US military but according to the auction house the bar ended up in the hands of a friend of the boatyard owner, whose son kept it.

The identity of the current owner was not given, but he or she was quoted by Alexander Historical Auctions as saying: “My father was close friends with the owner of Doan Salvage Yard. The yard owner personally invited him to the yard and gave him the opportunity to purchase the world bar.”

The auctioneer lists its lot as “a large, cumbersome piece, sold as-is, where-is”. Potential bidders are informed the bar and stools can be viewed by appointment at a third-party venue, “in the Elkton, Maryland, area”.

The Aviso Grille took a circuitous route to its grave on the Delaware. Early in the second world war, fitted for combat, it laid mines in the North Sea. But it saw little action and a final entry in the ship’s log on 2 May 1945 read: “Flag at half-mast in memory of the hero’s death of our Führer.”

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Hitler shot himself on 30 April 1945, avoiding capture by Russian forces which had taken Berlin, and therefore punishment for his crimes, via a suicide pact with his wife, Eva Braun. Their bodies were burned.

The yacht was seized by the British Admiralty and passed to several owners before reportedly catching the eye of King Farouk of Egypt. According to the Maryland auctioneer, he lost interest in purchasing the yacht in 1947, after saboteurs attempted to blow it up in Malta harbour, using limpet mines.

The yacht ended up in New York, failed to find a buyer and was sold for scrap.