Adolf Hitler’s painting of French lover up for auction

A portrait believed to have been painted by Adolf Hitler will go up for auction in Germany next week.

The artwork depicts the Nazi dictator’s former lover, a French woman named Charlotte Lobjoie, according to Reuters.

The 63 x 48cm oil painting, signed A. Hitler, features “a young woman with a red scarf loosely on her head that casts a heavy shadow over her face, and holding a pitchfork”, the website reports. “She is wearing a light-coloured shirt, open from the neck down, exposing part of her breasts.”

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The painting is being sold at the Weidler auction house in Nuremberg, the city that hosted the Nazi party’s annual propaganda rallies between 1933 and 1938.

Auctioneers says the painting, Portrait of a Girl, is expected to fetch at least €60,000 (£52,000).

The company has held numerous sales of the Fuhrer’s watercolours and drawings, attracting heavy criticism from Holocaust survivors.

Hitler described himself as an artistic genius – despite having twice been rejected by the Vienna Academy of Art. Before his rise to power, he struggled to make a living selling amateur paintings to tourists.

Later he became “an insatiable art collector, a passion which turned into the most brutal art theft of all time”, Der Spiegel reports.

“More than 20,000 works were confiscated” by the Nazis, says The Independent, many from Jewish victims of the Holocaust.