LONDON, Aug 17: A bottle of champagne thought to have been taken from Adolf Hitler’s wine cellar was sold at auction in Britain on Friday. The bottle of 1937 Moet et Chandon was bought by an anonymous Swedish bidder for 1,688 pounds ($3,359) at Charterhouse auctioneers in Sherbourne, south-west England.

It is believed to have been in Hitler’s personal stock and grabbed by a British soldier in Germany as Hitler’s Nazi regime collapsed at the end of World War II. The bottle was given to solicitor Nigel Wilson, 62, to thank him for some legal work.

“He had it given to him by a soldier who, as far as we can work out, retrieved it from the ruins of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin after the Nazis were defeated in May 1945,” said Charterhouse valuer Chris Copson.

“They made their way in to the Chancellery, the Russians had been there first, there was a lot of looting and the soldier and members of his unit took themselves a little souvenir of the event.”He added: “There was a rumour that some of the bottles of champagne had been poisoned by injecting through the cork which might be why the soldier never actually drank it.

“Champagne doesn’t particularly age well anyway, but in light of that information I would say it’s extremely unlikely that anyone would want to drink it.”—AFP