Adolf Hitler’s artistic ambitions may have died in a Vienna admissions office, but his watercolors remain surprisingly alive on the auction circuit—and, now, on prestige television.
This week’s episode of HBO’s Industry features a quiet reveal that would have felt implausible if it weren’t so well documented: a tasteful watercolor of Neuschwanstein Castle turns out to be signed “A. Hitler.” The moment lands as satire, but it also reflects an awkward reality of the art market. These paintings exist, and they sell for real money.
In 2015, a group of Hitler watercolors fetched roughly €400,000 at auction in Nuremberg, with one version of Neuschwanstein Castle selling for €100,000 to an anonymous buyer from China. Other works, including still lifes and architectural views, have continued to circulate, provided they omit Nazi symbols and pass basic legal thresholds in Germany. As a specialist at one auction house put it in 2019: the works have no artistic value, yet could sell for thousands of euros.
This is where Industry gets it right. The painting is a kind of shorthand for inherited wealth, moral rot, and the polite normalization of things that should probably make people uncomfortable. In the show, the artwork is framed not as propaganda, but as a family heirloom: “possessions closest to your soul,” as one character puts it. The joke, if there is one, is that the market has been making the same distinction for years. Of course, there may have been Nazi’s on the family tree as well. Who’s to say?
Auction houses often describe these works as “historical artifacts,” a category that performs a great deal of ethical labor. Framed that way, the paintings are no longer expressions of ideology or failure; they are curios, conversation starters, or investment-grade oddities. The buyers and sellers, almost always anonymous, rarely need to explain themselves. The hammer falls. The room moves on.
There is no shortage of things the art market has learned to accommodate, but Hitler’s watercolors remain a particularly neat case study. They are not good enough to defend on aesthetic grounds, nor offensive enough, apparently, to stay unsellable. Their value lies almost entirely in the story, and in the market’s confidence that any story can be neutralized with the right label and a strong enough price.
That Industry treats this as background texture rather than scandal may be the most accurate detail of all.
