Hitlers `poisoned champagne sold for 1,400 pounds

A1937 bottle of Mo�t and Chandon champagne said to have been retrieved from German dictator Adolf Hitlers wine cellar in Berlin, has been auctioned off for 1,400 pounds despite fears of it being poisoned.

London, Aug.18 : A1937 bottle of Mo�t and Chandon champagne said to have been retrieved from German dictator Adolf Hitler's wine cellar in Berlin, has been auctioned off for 1,400 pounds despite fears of it being poisoned.

According to a report in The Sun, a British soldier swiped the bottle of champagne at the end of the Second World War.

But the unnamed soldier never opened it because it was rumored that the Nazis had injected it with cyanide.

The soldier gave it to solicitor Nigel Wilson, 62, 15 years ago. He put it up for auction in Sherborne, Dorset.

Two Swedish TV presenters purchased the bottle to use it for a program about dictators.

Fredrick Wikingsson, one of the presenters, was quoted as saying: "We certainly won't play Russian roulette with it. We might sell it and give the cash to a Jewish charity."

A fortnight back, another report revealed that Hitler had a vast collection of music by Jewish and Russian composers despite the fact that politically he deemed both Jews and Russians as 'sub-human'.

While the Jews were herded off to concentration camps spread across occupied Europe, Hitler gave personal orders to regular Wehrmacht troops that Russian soldiers were not to be treated as PoWs and provided the same benefit as surrendered British and French troops; the reason being that Slavs were inferior to the Nordic race.

About 100 gramophone discs belonging to him, found near a dacha outside Moscow, reveal his musical tastes.

Compositions by German maestros Beethoven, Wagner and Bruckner apart, the collection also boasts of works by Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Rachmaninoff.

The most astonishing composition among the lot, historians say, is a Tchaikovsky violin concerto featuring the violinist Bronislaw Huberman, a Polish Jew who fled Vienna in 1937, a year before the Anschluss, and was publicly declared an enemy of the Third Reich.

Officially, Hitler despised Jewish music as much as he did the Jewish race. He wrote in Mein Kampf that Jewish art 'never existed'.

The collection, according to The Telegraph, includes:

Richard Wagner - ouverture of the Flying Dutchman performed by the orchestra of the Bayreuth Festival House, Modest Mussorgski - aria "Death of Boris Godunoff", sung by the Russian bass Fjodor Schaljapin. Pyotr Tchaikovsky - one entire album with the star violinist Bronislaw Hubermann as soloist, Alexander Borodin. Sergei Rachmaninov, and, Austrian musician/singer Artur Schnabel.

ANI