Montreal
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A Montreal auction house is being criticized by Jewish and pro-Israel groups for hosting an online auction featuring Nazi memorabilia.

The over 100 items sold by Champagne Auctions items included a military insignia, a soldier’s notebook, and a naval flag featuring the swastika.

The auction house told CTV News that it expected the buyers of the Nazi memorabilia put on sale Thursday night to be mostly private collectors with an interest in military history.

“We are selling historical pieces for military collectors,” Claude Champagne of Champagne Auctions told CTV.

Members of Montreal's Jewish community were not convinced, with many assuming the worst.

Sara Fogg, a spokesperson for the Montreal Holocaust Museum, said that when items are sold in an auction, it’s hard to say where they will end up, and there is a definite worry that some of them will be bought by Nazi sympathizers.

She told CTV that the sale of Nazi memorabilia is something they frequently see.

“We would obviously hope that these objects would end up rather in the hands of institutions that can preserve them,” said Fogg.

In such a setting, they can be shown to the public with stories of survivors and victims “in a way that’s informative … and aware of the context they were created in.”

B’nai Brith Canada has long called on the Canadian government to ban the sale of Nazi artifacts for profit.

Honest Reporting Canada, a pro-Israel advocacy group, called on Champagne Auctions to remove the items from its online auction “ASAP.”

“Profiting off the murder of 6 million Jews is flat out wrong + dishonours the memories of those who perished in the Holocaust,” they tweeted.