Telegram written by Karl Dönitz, the last leader of the Third Reich, to the head of the Luftwaffe expected to fetch up to $30,000 
 
 Marooned on a naval base in north-west Germany, pinned down by advancing Allied forces and with Adolf Hitler dead, the last leader of the Third Reich hammered out a surrender order. 
 
 
 
 Seventy years later his telex will be auctioned in New York, the flimsy sheet of pink expected to fetch US$20,000 to US$30,000 as rare a relic from the world’s deadliest conflict. 
 
 In it, Karl Dönitz tells the head of the Luftwaffe, Field Marshal Robert von Greim, that he has signed an unconditional surrender and that all hostilities will cease at 1am on 9 May 1945. 
 
 “This was unavoidable in order to prevent the complete destruction of certain parts of the front, which was expected to occur in a short time, and, in so doing, to save as many people as possible for Germany,” the telegram explains. 
 
 Tom Lamb, history expert and curator of Wednesday’s sale at Bonhams, said it was the first German telegram he had ever seen. 
 
 “The Germans had a scorched-earth policy as they pulled out so they burnt, destroyed every piece of paper they had,” he said. “And if they didn’t do it, the Russians did it, so the survival of this is extraordinary.” 
 
 Von Greim received the telegram at 10.40pm on 8 May. He fled Germany and was arrested by US forces outside Prague. The telegram was found in his attache case. 
 
 It was kept by the interrogating US army officer and is being offered for sale by a private American collector. 
 
 Von Greim was to be swapped in a prisoner exchange with the Soviets but took cyanide and killed himself on 24 May 1945. 
 
 Lamb expects significant interest in the document, not only from US collectors but from German and British ones as well. “This is a very important historical document and it could go to any country that values that,” he said. 
 
 More than 300 lots of second world war memorabilia, the majority collected by veterans, are up for grabs. There are flags, uniforms, recordings, notes, cigarette cases and mementos of all kinds from Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Russia and the US, as well as India, China and Japan. 
 
 The most expensive lot is two logbooks valued at US$150,000 to US$200,000 and owned by Robert Lewis, the US co-pilot of the Enola Gay B-29 bomber that dropped the world’s first atomic bomb. 
 
 Lewis, who shunned the spotlight during his lifetime, wanted the items sold only after his death, a wish his youngest son is working to honor, and to find a publisher for his father’s book. 
 
 “He didn’t want of this stuff to sit in a basement, in a dark room on a shelf in a cardboard box with the door marked museum archives,” Steven Lewis said. “He wanted the public to know.” 
 
 The Lewis collection includes his flying logs from 1942-47, plans for the 6 August 1945 Enola Gay mission, and photographs. 
 
 
 
 The atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima killed 140,000 people by December 1945. When Lewis saw the huge mushroom cloud, he uttered the famous remark, “My God, what have we done?” 
 
 Japan eventually surrendered on 15 August 1945 after the Americans dropped a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. 
 
 Steven Lewis says his father was never conflicted about the mission despite the catastrophic loss of life. “He said, ‘Steven, I couldn’t get over the power,’ and he said, ‘I hoped that it would be enough to end the war,’ and that’s the way he felt. 
 
 “That was a mission that he got chosen because he was the best at what he did and everyone on that crew was.” 
 
 War memorabilia auctions are a relatively new field, but Lamb expects interest to grow as the last veterans pass away and collections shift into second and third generations. “What I’m trying to do here is to bring to the public attention that this is a valid field,” he said. 
 
 It was “an extraordinary, extraordinary conflict”, he said. “There has never ever been a struggle or a battle as long, as involved, as expensive in lives, in money, in the history of mankind.” ||||| An infamous Nazi telegram sent to Adolf Hitler that threw him into a rage after Hermann Göring, his second-in-command, asked to take over the leadership has sold at auction for over £35,600. 
 
 The telegram, sent by Göring in the final days of the Second World War requesting to take up the reigns of the disintegrating Third Reich from the Nazi leader, was bought in the US for two-and-a-half times the expected price. 
 
 Göring had been in southern Germany when he learnt that Hitler was in hiding in a bunker in Berlin. Fearing he would miss his chance at power if he waited, Göring sent Hitler the brief message on April 23, 1945, asking to be put in charge. 
 
 Risking treason, he wrote that if he did not receive a reply by 10pm that night, he would assume that the Führer had lost his freedom of action and he would take up the leadership. 
 
 According to accounts of those close to Hitler, the telegram sent the leader into a rage and contributed to the breakdown of his mental state. 
 
 In Hitler's testament, written on April 29, 1945, Göring was formally dismissed of all authority and was spared death due to his long years of service if he would immediately resign all of his offices. Before dawn on April 25, Göring was imprisoned. 
 
 Hitler and his partner, Eva Braun, killed themselves a few days later on April 30. 
 
 The war ended just days later and Göring later took his own life after being found guilty of war crimes during the Nuremberg Trials. 
 
 The piece of paper had previously been expected to sell for £15,000 at the Alexander Historical Auctions in Stamford near New York on Tuesday. Instead, an unnamed buyer in North America bought it for $54,675 (£35,600). 
 
 The telegram was found in the Berlin bunker by American soldier Captain Benjamin Bradin on May 8, 1945, and decided to keep it as a souvenir. 
 
 The brief message was passed down to his son and then to his son's university history professor, who then put it up for sale. ||||| “The photographs had to be taken by someone who was very close,” Mr. Tredwen said. “All photographs of Adolf Hitler were very much controlled because obviously they did not want photographs coming out that made him look bad. They would not have been made for the general public.” 
 
 There were no signatures in the book to suggest ownership, or the identity of the photographer, he said. 
 
 He described the bidding as “very competitive,” with telephone bidders from Britain and the United States, as well as interest online from Germany, China, South Africa and other countries. 
 
 Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Get the Morning Briefing by Email What you need to know to start your day, delivered to your inbox Monday through Friday. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. 
 
 Mr. Tredwen, a specialist of more than a dozen years in military history items, said buyers of Nazi memorabilia were generally historians. “I have never in my life met anyone who shared the political views of the Third Reich,” he said. “They are literally only there to collect. World War II was one of the biggest events to affect the world.” 
 
 “People are fascinated by how evil the Third Reich were,” he added. 
 
 The description of the item online traced its journey from April 1945, when a British Fleet Street photographer, Edward Dean, “obtained” it from a Russian soldier whom he had watched find the album in a drawer in Braun’s bunker bedroom, shortly after the couple committed suicide. The item changed hands several times after Mr. Dean auctioned it. 
 
 In one photograph, Hitler salutes as he walks toward the camera down a path at his Berghof headquarters in the Bavarian Alps. His guards are also depicted on duty and in relaxed poses in the images, which date mostly from the early to mid-1930s. 
 
 Ownership of items related to Nazi history poses ethical questions. Some art collectors have stepped forward to try to find out whether their art was looted from Jews. A replica of a gate that was believed to have been stolen from the Dachau concentration camp in Germany was recovered last year. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 And an attraction in Berlin that recreates the interior of Hitler’s bunker and opened last year suggests an uncomfortable phenomenon — that Hitler sells. 
 
 Memorials dedicated to preserving the historical context of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were killed, have often called on collectors or people with personal items from survivors to donate the artifacts. 
 
 In January, in commemorating the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration and death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, the memorial director, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywinski, issued a statement calling for donations. 
 
 “We kindly ask the public to hand over any documents, photos, personal letters, diaries, or other materials that are in private hands,” he said. 
 
 “I am absolutely convinced that only mutual effort can lead to a fuller understanding of the mechanisms of hatred, and analyses from the perspective of the victims, given the course of events, cannot fully serve the purpose,” he added. “Today, we need new sources for a comprehensive picture of the history of Auschwitz and the Holocaust.”
– Tomorrow at Bonhams auction house in New York, more than 300 lots of WWII memorabilia—uniforms, flags, cigarette cases—from nearly 10 countries will go on the selling block. But one piece of memorabilia is especially rare, somehow making it out of war-torn Germany before it could be thrown into the fire pit. The surrender order signed by Nazi Adm. Karl Doenitz, who took over the Third Reich for Hitler after he perished, is expected to bring in between $20,000 and $30,000 during tomorrow's sale, the Guardian reports. "This is a very important historical document, and it could go to any country that values that," Tom Lamb, curator of the sale, tells the paper. Doenitz's note—put together while he was holed up on a military base in northwest Germany—to Robert von Greim, the head of the German air force, spelled out an "unconditional" end to fighting as of 1am on May 9, 1945. "This was unavoidable in order to prevent the complete destruction of certain parts of the front … and, in so doing, to save as many people as possible for Germany," the telegram reads, per the Guardian. The surrender note was found in von Greim's briefcase when he was captured by US forces in Austria on May 8, 1945; he killed himself a couple of weeks later. Doenitz, for his part, was convicted of war crimes, served 10 years, and died in 1980 in Hamburg, per the Jewish Virtual Library. The fact that the surrender papers even made it to auction is "extraordinary," Lamb says. "The Germans had a scorched-earth policy as they pulled out, so they burnt, destroyed every piece of paper they had," he tells the Guardian. "And if they didn't do it, the Russians did it." (A handwritten notebook of WWII code-breaker Alan Turing was sold for $1 million earlier this month.)