“This is a meticulous and finely written account of Dina Gold’s struggle to seek belated justice for her mother, with all the twists and turns one would expect from a fictional detective story — but it is all true.”
When Dina Gold was a little girl, her grandmother told her stories about the glamorous life she had led in pre-war Berlin and how she dreamed of one day reclaiming the grand building that had housed the family business.
Dina’s grandmother died in 1977, leaving behind no documents, not even an address, to help locate the property or prove its ownership. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Dina had not forgotten her grandmother’s tales and set out to find the truth.
In 1990, Dina marched into a German government ministry at Krausenstrasse 17/18, just two blocks from Checkpoint Charlie, and declared:
“I’ve come to claim my family’s building.”
And so began her legal struggle — to reclaim the building that had belonged to her family.
The six-story office block had been the headquarters of the H. Wolff fur company, one of the most successful Jewish fashion firms in Germany. Built by Dina’s great-grandfather in 1910, it was foreclosed on by the Victoria Insurance Company in 1937. Ownership was transferred to the Deutsche Reichsbahn, Hitler’s railways, that later transported millions of Jews to death camps.
Today the Victoria is part of ERGO, a leading German insurance company. Few are aware that the Victoria was once chaired by a lawyer with connections to the top of the Nazi party. The Victoria was also part of a consortium that insured SS-owned workshops using slave labor at Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
Dina has delved deep into archives across the world and made shocking discoveries. What she found has repercussions even in today’s Germany.
In a major victory, Dina persuaded the German government to put up a plaque in July 2016 acknowledging in both German and English the history of “The Wolff Building.”
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.”
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.”
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.
