HITLER memorabilia has become a multimillion-pound business with autographs routinely fetching £2,000.

Reams of writing paper embossed with the Nazi eagle and the intials AH were liberated by American soldiers from a warehouse near Hitler’s mountain retreat on the Obersalzberg. It can now be bought on the internet for £30-£50 a sheet. Calling cards from the same source, usually marked “Adolf Hitler, Deutscher Reichskanzler”, are also available.

Hitler’s ink blotting pad — a signature is revealed if it is held to a mirror — fell into the hands of Gerdy Troost, his interior decorator. A single authenticated autograph dated February 18, 1936, is on offer for thousands of pounds. It is one of perhaps tens of thousands that Hitler scribbled during his political career.

Maria Zeldovitch, a Russian interpreter at the postwar Nuremberg trials, has sold thousands of copies of a photograph she took of the wedding certificate of Hitler and Eva Braun, signed in the Berlin bunker at the end of the war. The bride started to write “Braun” then, realising her mistake, scratched it out and wrote her husband’s name. The photographs sell for £25.

Hitler watercolours are the probably the safest investment. A signed sketch of a German postman sold at auction for £5,200 in Cornwall this month. It is said to have belonged to Otto Günsche, Hitler’s personal adjutant, who remained with him in the Berlin bunker in May 1945 and who supervised the burning of Hitler’s body.

France, Germany and Austria ban the sale or display of Nazi memorabilia.

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