Like all dedicated seekers of truth – eternal and ephemeral – this blogger likes to expose himself (though not in his Burberry mackintosh) to the edges of human experience – last week, in two unusual expeditions.

Ludlow Racecourse is an attractive sporting venue set on the gravel-bearing flood plain of the River Teme. There has been recorded horseracing there since 1729, and about a hundred years ago a fine members’ stand was erected in cast iron. Facing north, it prevents a low winter sun from shining in the punters’ eyes. However it also exposes them to the full blast of any northerly wind descending off the Shropshire Hills.

A serviceable, if not architecturally outstanding Members’ Bar and Restaurant was put up about a dozen years ago, and now earns extra revenue – like any sensible Members’ Bar – as an antiques fair and general entertainment venue. Last week it hosted an auction of German Nazi memorabilia.

Specialist Document auctioneers, Mullocks had put together a sale which included a wide ranging catalogue of items from that devastating period in German history. The star lots were scheduled for the end of the sale – a series of paintings executed by a struggling Austrian artist in the early 20th Century – the youthful and evidently romantically-minded Adolf Hitler.

Understandably, commentators, including the auctioneer’s expert Richard Westwood-Brookes, were anxious to point out how bad the paintings were, and how if they hadn’t been painted by Hitler, they’d have been worth nothing. As it happens the pictures didn’t look so bad to me (I’ve certainly seen worse at the Ludlow Art Society exhibitions) but please don’t take that as any kind of condonation of the old mass-murderer’s subsequent behaviour – and, in any case, I’m a notoriously bad judge of pictures.

The racecourse is just two miles from here, so I decided I should go and see what sort of people would turn up to buy the moustachioed monster’s early daubs. In the part of the building set aside for the sale, media folk – maybe a dozen news teams with TV cameras and appendages – easily outnumbered real people, and as the Nazi highlight of the sale was reached, it became clear that most of the serious bidding was coming down the phone line – Shropshire is not the epicentre of the art-dealing or, for that matter, Nazi memorabilia world. Nevertheless, a few prospective bidders had come in person, but not, as I’d half thought, the infamous British Hitler fan, David Irving or even his defender, Christopher Hitchens.

There were a couple of German TV crews and, in a Hitler/Wagner cross-reference, a pair of blonde, pigtailed and fairly stout Brunhilde’s, dressed in black, as well as a few men sporting slightly iffy apparel and/or haircuts who, in the circumstances, could easily have been take for Hitler fanciers. The buyer of the first painting – an alleged self-portrait, depicting a little man in a brown suit of plus fours dangling his legs over the side of a rustic bridge – at £10,000 (over 5 times its estimate) was a man with short-cropped grey hair, in his 40s with a Birmingham twang who told reporters he was John Ratledge. As no individual of that name who is the right age appears on the electoral register, he might have been being coy about his identity. Who wouldn’t be, after you’d told the hordes of the press that you were going to hang the thing on your office wall.

The collection of fifteen paintings which the vendor had stored in his garage for 60 years then forgotten about, sold in the end for c£95,000 – perhaps £94,900 more than he paid for them.

Is there shame or guilt to be apportioned for profiting from Hitler in this way?

Would the ethically correct action have been to put them on the next bonfire.

The tacky event inevitably produced a few tacky headlines…

“HEIL OF A PRICE!” from Dirty Desmond’s Express.

“GOERING, GOERING, GONE!” from the usually less adventurous Shropshire Star.

I can now thankfully cross off my list of things to do before I die: “Attend an auction of a dead Nazi leader’s works of art.”

In my next blog I’ll tell you how Harry Harvey (he was called Henry last week, but thought it better to be Harry) fared at his Xfactor audition.

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