The Church of Preux-Au-Bois sold for £10,500, far exceeding its £3,500 estimated price at the sale at Jefferys Auctioneers in Lostwithiel, Cornwall.
Before the auction, critics expressed disapproval over selling works by the most notorious dictator of modern times, but this did not dent buyers’ interest.Carlo, from Estonia, said he was working for an eastern European businessman, adding: “I had a budget to bid for anything that has Hitler’s signature. I have something to take back.”I think they are probably being bought for business – the paintings are not very good and it’s not nice to have a Hitler on your living-room wall.”The works, which vary from postcard-sized watercolours to larger works, were found in Belgium in a suitcase in an attic, close to where Hitler served during the First World War, and were found to be stylistically similar to other work by the German leader.Some of the works were signed “A Hitler”, while others bore the initials, “AH”, and they featured mainly landscapes, some with buildings. Steps were taken to prove the authenticity of the watercolours without success, according to the auctioneers, but the paper has been dated and the style of the works was found to be consistent with Hitler’s other series of paintings.It has been reported that the owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, contacted the auctioneer after reading about the sale of a single Hitler watercolour last November. The portrait of a German postman, painted in 1924, fetched £5,200.A spokesman for Jefferys said: “The sale itself went very well, the prices exceeded our expectations.”He brushed off an incident involving Aaron Barschak, the self-proclaimed comedy terrorist who gate-crashed Prince William’s 21st birthday party in 2003.Barschak, with a man dressed as the Nazi dictator, shouted across the auction house in Cornwall to say they were bidding “£6m” for one work, claiming the painting was a “Mussolini”.They were escorted out by security officers, as Barschak shouted: “See – they’re throwing Jews out!”"We like to think of this as our Guernica”, he said, referring to Pablo Picasso’s painting of the effect of the German attack in 1937 on the Spanish town, the first place to be targeted by Hitler’s bombing campaign. He added: “Why is this auction being hidden away from publicity in a corner of Cornwall? We wanted to bring it to people’s attention.”His wife, Tamara, added: “This is a comical protest The sale here is offensive – it should never have been held.

Adolf Hitler was a mass murderer and to make money from that is wrong.”Jefferys said: “The protest is not worth any comment. It was a schoolboy prank, and we are very pleased with the way it was handled by the security staff.”. Neanderthal finds are like prehistoric buses. You wait for tens of thousands of years, and then two important revelations come along together. French and Belgian archaeologists have found proof that Neanderthals – mankind’s closest relatives – were living in near-tropical conditions, hunting rhinoceros and elephant, close to what is now France’s Channel coast 125,000 years ago.
No traces of Neanderthal activity have previously been found in north-west Europe during this period – a 15,000-year interval between two ice ages.Historians previously thought that Neanderthals, who thrived in cold conditions, had failed to adapt to the warmer weather and had retreated to the east or to the north. The new site at Caours, near Abbeville, close to the mouth of the river Somme, proves that this was not so.A two-year dig by two French government research bodies has uncovered evidence of a Neanderthal “butcher’s shop” on an ancient riverbank to which animals as large as rhinoceros, elephant and aurochs, the forerunner of the cow, were dragged. The Neanderthals – known to be squat, powerful people, who had language and fire and buried their dead – sliced up the animals with flint tools for their meat and pounded their bones for their marrow.Earlier this month, British archaeologists reported that they had found evidence that a few members of the species (Homo neanderthalis) may have survived in caves in Gibraltar much later than was previously thought – until about 28,000 years ago, or maybe even 24,000 years ago.

Previously, it was thought that they vanished about 30,000 years ago.Both finds are potentially vital new pieces in the frustratingly incomplete jigsaw of modern understanding of our tough and resourceful, near-human, European predecessors. The problem is that the two discoveries seem to be part of different jigsaw puzzles.Jean-Luc Locht, a Belgian expert in prehistory at the French government’s archaeological service, was a researcher at Caours “This is a very important site, a unique site,” he said. “It proves that Neanderthals thrived in a warm north-west Europe and hunted animals like the rhinoceros and the aurochs, just as they previously, and later, hunted ice-age species like the mammoth and the reindeer.”If we have lost the record of them elsewhere in this period, it must be because the erosive action of the last ice age wiped the record clean.”No Neanderthal remains have been found so far on the new site on the Somme, or among the new finds in Gibraltar. In both cases, their presence at a particular (and highly significant) period has been revealed by other discoveries: flint tools in the case of Gibraltar; a treasure trove of flint tools and fossilised animal bones in the case of the Somme.The animal bones, found in a geological layer laid down about 125,000 years ago, show signs of having been sawn through, crushed or stripped of their meat by flint tools. The animal species identified include a small fragment of elephant bone, several rhinoceros teeth, and many remnants of aurochs, wild boar and several kinds of deer.The dig, which will continue next summer, has also unearthed flint scraping or cutting tools and a flint pounding implement, used for crushing bones or splitting other pieces of flint.Patrick Auguste, one of the other principal researchers on the site, an expert on archaeozoology, or prehistoric animals, at the French national research body, the CNRS, said: “You have to wonder at the artistry, the exceptional skill, with which the flint tools have been shaped. The Neanderthals may have had thicker fingers than us, but they were certainly not clumsy.”The back-to-back French and British announcements create a prehistorical conundrum.