To look at them, the pictures wouldn’t seem to be worth much. “But next month the salesroom at Jefferys, a modest auction house in Lostwithiel in Cornwall, is expected to be buzzing with collectors from all over the world bidding for the sketches. They will be interested not in the aesthetic value of the pictures but in the signature, sometimes AH, sometimes A Hitler. The watercolours are – probably – the work of the young Adolf Hitler, painted while he served on the border of France and Belgium as a corporal during the first world war.”