Hitler paintings sold for £95,589

LONDON (AFP) — A series of watercolours by Adolf Hitler were sold at a British auction house on Thursday for over 100,000 euros.

The 13 paintings, most of them landscapes and found in a garage earlier this year by the seller, went for 95,589 pounds at auctioneers Mullock's.

An apparent self-portrait showing a man with a side-parting sitting on a stone bridge, and signed with the initials A.H., sold for 10,000 pounds at the auction at Ludlow.

Richard Westwood-Brookes of the auctioneers -- who had earlier said the pictures "are hardly Picasso" -- said the final price, which included buyer's premium, was a surprise.

"I am very pleased. I thought they would go for between five and six thousand," he said.

The paintings date back to between 1908 and about 1914, when the former German leader was a young man trying to earn a living as an artist in Vienna.

"Unfortunately for the world, he was not accepted into the Vienna Academy, which was where he wanted to be," Westwood-Brookes said.

"Of course, if he had been accepted, then we would have known him today as an artist and not as an evil tyrant."

Westwood-Brookes said the seller bought them from someone who found them in 1945.

Many of the works are signed with the initials "A.H." The sale also included a collection of official Nazi magazines for schoolboys and women, featuring knitting patterns and recipes.

In 2006, 21 of Hitler's works were sold in Britain for 118,000 pounds.