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Adolf Hitler’s telephone sold out in dollar .2 million

Adolf Hitler’s telephone was sold at auction in the United States on Sunday for $243,000. The winning bid was made by phone but the name of the bidder has not been released.

The phone was presented to Hitler by the Wehrmacht and was used by the Nazi leader to issue most of his commands during the last two years of World War II, according to a description in the catalog for Alexander Historical Auctions in Maryland.

The phone was recovered from the Fuhrerbunker in 1945 and has been kept in a box in an English country house ever since.

Made by Siemens as a black Bakelite phone, it was later painted red and engraved with Hitler’s name and a swastika, the catalog says.

The auction house describes the telephone as “Hitler’s mobile device of destruction” and called it “arguably the most destructive ‘weapon’ of all time, which sent millions to their deaths around the world.”

British officer Ralph Rayner recovered the phone from Hitler’s bunker while visiting Berlin on the orders of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery just a few days after the end of the war, according to Rayner’s personal account and shipping documents from that time period, according to the auction house.

Ralph Rayner returned to Devon in western England with both the phone and a porcelain model of an Alsatian, also taken from the bunker, hidden in his suitcase.

The china dog, made by slave laborers at Dachau concentration camp and probably presented to Hitler by Heinrich Himmler, SS chief and architect of the Final Solution, was also auctioned Sunday. It was bought by a different phone bidder for $24,300.

Ranulf Rayner hopes these objects will end up in a museum one day. “I don’t want them to be hidden again,” he said. “I want them to remind the world of the horrors of war.”