The leather coat, which was found by an Allied serviceman following the end of the Second World War, came with a letter of the soldier, in which he was explaining to his mother how he found it, saying that unfortunately it belonged to Nazi Albert Speer and his name was stamped on it. It has been said that the trademark leather coat inspired TV’s ‘Allo ‘Allo!’s Herr Flick costume. It was up for sale at an auction in America, where it fetched $7,500, in Los Angeles.
The soldier who found the coat wrote in his letter about his visit to a large chalet in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, at Hitler’s ‘Eagle’s Nest.’ The letter was dated May 4, 1945, the same day when Bavaria surrendered following an RAF raid. The servicemen took plenty of souvenirs for his parents, including the leather coat of Albert Speer. ‘It’s beautiful here and the weather is good. I looked around today in a huge chalet of a high ranking Nazi. It was a house of a minister of Germany,’ he wrote. He also mentioned a gold necklace he had taken for his mother and which had a diamond in it. He asked his mother not to tell anybody about it. For his father he said he had this leather jacket he found in the chalet. He said there were no Nazi symbols on it, but unfortunately, the name of Albert Speer was stamped on it.
It is believed that the jacket was worn by Albert Speer the last time he was Adolf Hitler on April 23, only over a week before Ralph, the serviceman who wrote the letter returned home. Adolf Hitler committed suicide at his bunker, on April 30 and Albert Speer was his chief architect, who also designed the plan of the Reich Chancellery, among many other buildings, the Mail Online reports.
During the Second World War he was Minister of Armaments and War Production and was one of the supporters of the forced labour that was going on in concentration camps. He was also tried at the Nuremberg trials, where he admitted on his crimes and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Mr Sanders from Nate D Sanders auction rooms in Los Angeles, United States said that the item is not only fascinating because it once belonged to Nazi Albert Speer, but also because it came from the soldier who initially found it at the chalet, following the bombing by the Royal Air Force.