JERUSALEM.- An Israeli court issued an injunction Wednesday halting the auction of tattoo stamps used by Nazis on Jewish and other inmates of Auschwitz, following an appeal from a Holocaust survivor group.

Tzolman's Auctions, a Jerusalem seller, had listed eight original tattoo stamps of digits used to brand inmates at the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp.

A million Jews died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was set up by Nazi Germany in what is now Poland during World War II, along with tens of thousands of others including Catholic Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war, between 1940 and 1945.

"The original stamps used to tattoo the numbers on Auschwitz prisoners," Tzolman's website bragged. "The most shocking Holocaust item."

According to Tzolman's, there are only three such stamp sets known in the world, with this being the largest.

The sale, set for November 9, was protested by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, which called it "morally unacceptable" and said the artefacts should go to them.

The Center Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel meanwhile filed a request to the Tel Aviv district court that the sale be frozen.

Attorney David Fohrer wrote in the appeal: "Such an evil item can't have an owner... Its sale is illegal and goes against the public decency doctrine.

"This is an item that is not private property, rather a horrific monument belonging to the entire public, and serving as evidence to the crimes of the Nazis and their aides."

The court issued "a temporary injunction" on Wednesday blocking the sale, setting November 16 as the date for an "urgent hearing" on the matter.

Colette Avital, head of the Center Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, said that the stamps belonged in a museum.

"Objects like this shouldn't be traded, and certainly should not be owned privately," she told AFP.

"These are objects that were used for especially cruel crimes," she said, used "to turn people from humans into numbers".

Meir Tzolman, owner of the namesake auction house, did not have an immediate response when contacted by AFP.


© Agence France-Presse