IT’S ONLY a few square metres of fabric with a striking red, white and black design. But for some the very sight of this flag offends, as a symbol of the Nazi regime which attempted to wipe the Jewish and Gypsy races from the face of the earth.

Auctioneer Neil Davey is sympathetic to the viewpoint of people like the Daily Echo reader who complained about us even running the story about his sale.

“I can see why some don’t like it,” he says. “To them the Nazis are still recent history, it’s quite raw, but people forget that during the 19th century when Napoleon was rampaging, people wouldn’t have anything French in their homes. Nowadays it’s all forgotten.”

And as he points out, it’s not illegal to sell Nazi memorabilia in the UK although in Germany it can be an offence to even publish a picture of a swastika.

The flag was originally captured in May 1945 by the US 89th Division and signed by the triumphant American soldiers and is expected, like most memorabilia from that time, to go for a tidy sum.

Neil believes the interest in this type of item stems principally from an interest in militaria.“People, especially Russians, do like to collect it,” he says.

Don’t they mind that some of the objects may have been handled by men and women who have committed the gravest atrocities? Is there not a frisson of evil about these things?

He doesn’t think so. A while back, he says, he handled a pair of daggers that had been personally presented by Hitler to a soldier. “I can’t say I got any sort of bad feeling from them,” he says, although he admits he would never sell items directly related to the holocaust or death camps because: “I think there is a line and that’s it.”

He has met buyers of memorabilia from the Jewish doctor who purchased some Nazi daggers: “I think he may have been going to present them to a Holocaust museum,” to the New Forest collector who keeps his Nazi stuff in a ‘sort of private den in a converted garage’. “In my professional opinion the people who buy this are not rogues, they are not weirdos, they are just military collectors,” he says.

He’s never come across anyone he would classify as a Nazi. “The people who buy are pretty level-headed professionals and tend to have money because of the high prices.”

His view is backed up by comments made last year in a national newspaper by one of Britain’s best-known collectors; Lemmy of the rock group Motorhead. “By collecting Nazi memorabilia, it doesn’t mean I’m a fascist or a skinhead,” he insisted. “I’m not. I just liked the clobber. And let me tell you, the kind of people who do collect this stuff, they aren’t yobbos either.”

The morality of buying and selling Nazi memorabilia was thrown into sharp relief by Jewish comedy writer Laurence Marks – of Birds of a Feather fame – in a play called Von Ribbentrop’s Watch.

The story tells of the dilemma facing a Jew who discovers that the timepiece he’d bought a few years back had belonged to Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, and could be worth £50,000.

The reason Marks wrote it was because it actually happened to him; he only discovered his watch’s provenance after he sent it to be mended and the watchmaker discovered the JVR initials and a swastika carved into the casing.

Marks considered selling until his writing partner, Maurice Gran, pointed out he would be effectively pocketing Nazi money so he inquired about presenting the cash to Jewish charities instead but was turned down. “Of course I could understand that the Von Ribbentrop Community Hall attached to a north London synagogue could be seen in bad taste,” he quipped.

In the end, Marks decided he didn’t want anyone to acquire the watch ‘just to get a little closer to a regime that they wished had survived and flourished’ and placed it in a bank vault but, he says, the point of the play is to make the audience consider what they might have done.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews would appear to be in no doubt.

Spokesman, Mark Frazer, said: “No doubt some of these collectors will have purely academic motives and we’d have no quarrel with that. But we are aware of those at the other end of the spectrum who dress up in Nazi uniforms for role-plays and recreations of life under the Third Reich.

“Such fantasies are certainly troubling if not dangerous and one would have to question their obsession with such a dark period in history.”