The article is about the valiant efforts of Dr. Matthias Weniger, Curator and Head of Provenance Research at the Bavarian National Museum in Munich, to restitute silver stolen by the Nazis from Jews in Germany and Austria in 1939. He has doggedly researched the fate of the former owners of these objects, and tracked down descendants and heirs.
For Dr. Weniger, the mission to return these silver items to the families has become personal. “It’s very late, but better to do this now than never,” he told me. “It’s been satisfying for me to do something to heal some wounds after such a long time.
My first post-Covid speaking engagement was at the invitation of Rabbi Sholom Bluming in the Bahamas. The Jewish community is growing there and it was a full house. Lots of interesting questions following the talk.
“Stolen Silver: Nazi Plunder And The Unfinished Quest For Restitution” is the story of how, in 1939, Jews across Germany and Austria were forced to hand over their jewelry, gold, silver and other precious metals to the Nazis. Many of these were purchased by the Bavarian National Museum in Munich where they sat in a cupboard for decades. But one curator, Dr Matthias Weniger, took it upon himself to try and locate descendants and return these heirlooms to them.
I was asked by Ben Fox, who owns Shepherd.com – motto: “Like browsing the best bookstore in the world” – to select five of my favorite books on Berlin. Makes perfect sense since Stolen Legacy is rooted in the history of that city.
You can check out my selections and why I chose them here.
Stolen Silver: Nazi Plunder and the Unfinished Quest for Restitution, a story I wrote for B’nai B’rith magazine about another kind of restitution, won the Simon Rockower “Boris Smolar Award for Excellence in Enterprise or Investigative Reporting.”
