Who has a closet full of Nazi memorabilia?

•  MENACHEM KAISER

NEW YORK: At the Ohio Valley Military Society’s annual Show of Shows, there is plenty for sale that isn’t Nazi memorabilia. All sorts of mementos from all sorts of wars: Civil War caps, antique pistols, Purple Hearts, samurai swords, World War I trench kits. But there is a lot of Nazi memorabilia.

At this year’s Show of Shows, which took place in February in the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, there were nearly 2,000 tables, and my best guess is that at least half had Nazi items — and often only Nazi items — for sale. There were Nazi flags, busts, helmets, Lugers, cutlery, batons, an autographed photo of Hitler. A small brass swastika pin could be picked up for $20; an SS serving bowl with gold engraving, $1,000; a yellow- and white-gold Luftwaffe Pilot Observer badge adorned with 170 diamonds, $130,000.

For a while I shadowed a tall, affable dealer from Belgium who specialized in badges and who’d already spent nearly all of the $100,000 in cash he’d brought with him. He stopped at one table and efficiently inspected a couple of dozen Nazi-era Iron Crosses, whispering to me which were fake or had been modified, before settling on one he liked, or at least thought worth the $500 he paid for it.

I’d gone to the Show of Shows, the largest military memorabilia show in the country, because I wanted to better understand the trade in Nazi artifacts, to try to get a sense of these collectors, their motivations. The market for Nazi mementos is thriving — annual sales are, according to one expert, as high as $100 million — and in the United States nothing about it is illegal. (Many other countries, particularly in Europe, do have regulations, though generally they have to do with the display of Nazi symbols, not trade or possession.) It isn’t conducted in the shadows or on the dark web or only at specialty shows or only in Kentucky. Nazi items are openly sold by dealers and auction houses countrywide, at trade shows and in storefronts and online.

From Wehrmacht epaulets and belt buckles to Hitler’s top hat and Eva Braun’s underwear, if an object played a material role in the Third Reich, no matter how incidental, no matter how banal or bizarre, then it’s probably for sale. Items that allegedly belonged to or were touched by or are otherwise imbued with the spirit of a major Nazi personality, most often Hitler, can be exorbitantly expensive (even though most of these relics have an extremely questionable provenance). Last year, a watch supposedly worn by Hitler went for $1.1 million at auction.

For years I’ve seen up close the pull Nazi artifacts can exert. I’ve spent time with Polish treasure hunters seeking, and occasionally finding, any variety of objects left behind by the Nazis. But I hadn’t understood how pervasive the trade was — hadn’t understood, in fact, that it was a trade, how thoroughly these artifacts had been commodified. And I certainly hadn’t realized how the big the market was here, in the United States.