German curator's mission is to return 111 heirlooms to families of Holocaust victims by the end of the year

Matthias Weniger, The curator of the Bavarian National Museum, has made it his mission to return as many heirlooms that were lost by Jewish families during the Holocaust as he can.

What started with anti-Jewish discrimination and persecution in 1933, after the Nazis were voted to power in Germany, led to the murder of 6 million European Jews and others in the Holocaust before World War II ended with Germany's surrender in 1945.

Weniger, who is a curator at the Munich museum and oversees its restitution efforts, has made it his mission to return as many of the silver objects as possible to the descendants of the original owners.

"These silver objects handed in at the pawn shops are often the only material things that remain from an existence wiped out in the Holocaust," Weniger told The Associated Press in an interview last week at the museum’s workshop where he displayed some silver items that have yet to be restituted.