This sale is from the collection of David Cheney who was the founder of a NH Holocaust museum called “Crossing the Wire” which later was downgraded to a travelling exhibition due to the crippling cost of running the museum. A brief biography of David is listed below which we encourage anyone with interest in this sale to read.  Everything in the sale came from his collection and is being sold without reserve.  Nothing will be passed or ‘bought in’.  Some historically unique items from the collection will be donated along with a final monetary donation in David Cheney's name to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.   Click Below on the "Enter the Sale" button to see the catalog and items in the sale.
 
We (the auction house) would like to make it clear that the items being sold in this sale are historic items.  The first collectors of WWII items generally were US and Allied forces taking them in the context of “spoils of war”. In no way does this sale glorify Nazi Germany.  The auction house took efforts to list any individuals and identifying information on documents and letters to assist anyone who may have a personal interest in those items.  In the event the items sell and an individual finds a document of interest after the sale we promise to contact the buyer requesting their permission to be contacted by the interested party.  We do however protect the privacy of all of our buyers and therefore can not guarantee the ability to provide that information. The consignor/collector of these items believed strongly in documenting the atrocities of the Holocaust and spent years researching and creating displays for his museum which are a testimony for his passion for the history and the tragedy.   For more information about David's Museum and an article from the AP from 1997 click here  http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/01-97/01-12-97/a03sr020.htm and a reference to an interview he did with NH public radio  http://www.nhpr.org/node/330 

DAVID CHENEY
David D. Cheney (1943-2007) traced his interest in World War II to a high school history course where he wrote a paper on Adolf Eichmann.  Cheney was not an exemplary student -- his passions tended more toward drag racing than academics -- but what intrigued him was the nervousness the subject of the Holocaust provoked in suburban Massachusetts at that time.  The detail he repeatedly cited years later was that his history teacher sent a permission slip home to all the parents in Cheney's class, in case any of them didn't want their sons or daughters to hear the presentation.

What began as a rebellious and mischievous act soon grew into an obsession.  The more he learned, the more amazed and angry Cheney grew at the silence and nervousness he saw around him.  He read book after book, but he also began spending whatever spare money he had on something other than car parts and Elvis records: He began collecting artifacts.

Being a person who preferred the hands-on and practical over the academic and theoretical, Cheney appreciated the power of artifacts to evoke reality.  He could never fully explain his desire to keep expanding his collection, but he frequently returned to one central idea: these things are evidence.  He often told his son, "If anybody ever tells you the Holocaust never happened, tell them they're wrong.  I've got the proof."

Collecting these items in the 1960s and 1970s required skill, knowledge, connections, and, more than anything else, luck.  When he opened his gun shop, New Hampshire Ordnance, in 1973, Cheney found his access to sources for the artifacts grew.  His advertisements all included requests for militaria, and he frequently put pieces of the collection he was willing to part with for sale in the shop.  Over the years, his reputation for encyclopedic knowledge and honesty grew, and he built a large network of veterans and collectors who were able to supply him with items.

By the early 1980s, Cheney had grown dissatisfied with keeping his collection hidden from public view.  He built an annex to the gun shop, The World War II Military Museum, and offered visitors the chance to see a portion of the collection.  As the gun business flourished in the late 1980s, Cheney needed the museum space for the shop again, but he hoped the need was temporary.

In 1994, Cheney and his son traveled to Europe for the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Normandy invasions.  They were some of the only people on their tour who were not D-Day veterans.  They visited most of the landing sites and attended the official ceremonies on Omaha Beach on June 6th (sitting closer to the stage than did a U.S. Congressional delegation that included Robert Dole, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Patrick Leahy).  It doesn't get more hands-on than sitting amidst veterans fifty years to the day after they had first arrived at that very place.  Talking with them, hearing their stories, explaining his own interest in the era, Cheney determined to share his passion in a new and more profound way.

By the mid-1990s, Cheney had grown weary of the gun business, and the trip to Normandy helped him decide to act on his long-held desire to build a proper museum for his collection.  He refurbished the shop entirely and created “Crossing the Wire: A Museum of the Holocaust”.  He spent months designing the exhibits, searching for just the right lighting, choosing the sounds that would fall like ghosts from speakers in the ceiling (the sounds of old radio broadcasts, of speeches, of scratchy records).  The effect was breathtaking, and visitors repeatedly remarked at the overwhelming power of all he had accomplished in a small space.

Rural New Hampshire is hardly an ideal spot for a Holocaust museum, however, and visitors were slow to arrive.  Cheney was nervous about advertising the museum, afraid people would misunderstand his purpose or consider him a neo-Nazi.  As irrational as he knew his fears to be, a part of him remained afraid his presentation needed a permission slip.  Despite having spent so much of his income over the years amassing the collection, despite having risked his financial security to build the museum, he was reluctant to charge visitors even the five or six dollar entrance price -- indeed, he let anyone who showed particular interest in for free.

Crossing the Wire stayed open for less than a year, as Cheney could not afford to continue.  (In fact, he would not live to pay off the debts he accrued in creating the museum.)  Even if he could not sustain it, though, he had built his dream.  He re-opened New Hampshire Ordnance, returning to the business he knew best so he could regain an income.  He did not give up his desire to use his collection for educational purposes, though.  He developed a portable version of the museum and brought it to schools throughout New England.

David Cheney spent a lifetime building his collection, and he would want it to end up with people who can understand his passion and, indeed, his obsession -- an obsession for evidence; an obsession to document and delineate a tangible, terrible reality.  More than anything else, this collection stands as a testament to one man's determination that, indeed, we must preserve the evidence from the great crimes of the 20th century so that future centuries cannot dismiss those crimes as myths or legends.  We remember the past to give hope to the future.

Some historically unique items from the collection will be donated along with a final monetary donation in David Cheney's name to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., his favorite of all the many museums he visited, a museum that seemed to him to reach his ideal of how the Holocaust should be remembered.