Matthias Weniger has put on a pair of white cloth gloves and carefully lifted a tarnished silver candleholder, looking for a yellowed sticker on the bottom of it.

The candlestick is one of 111 silver objects at the Bavarian National Museum that the Nazis stole from Jewish families during the Third Reich in 1939.

That's when they ordered all Jews living in Nazi Germany to bring their personal silver objects to pawn shops across the Reich - one of many laws created to humiliate, punish and exclude Jews.

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.

"Therefore it’s really important to try to find the families and give back the objects to them,” he added.

Many owners were murdered in the Holocaust or, if they succeeded to flee from the Nazis, ended up in far-flung corners of the globe.

A detective work

Despite these odds, and with a combination of thorough detective work, dedication and deep knowledge of history, Weniger has so far managed to return about 50 objects to the family members and relatives of the original owners.

Once Weniger discovers the names of the original owners, he starts looking up Jewish obituary and genealogy databases, in hopes that direct descendants or more distant relatives may have posted their names online.

“And so you get from one generation to the next generation and you end up with telephone books … with LinkedIn, with Facebook, with Instagram or email addresses that correspond to a member of the younger generation of that family," the researcher explained.

In most of the cases, Weniger says he gets lucky and is able to track down the right relatives.

Weniger makes a point of personally delivering the pieces to the families. He traveled to the U.S. earlier this year, and last week, he returned 19 pieces to families in Israel.

There, Weniger met up with Hila Gutmann, 53, and her father, Benjamin Gutmann, 86, at his home in Kfar Shmaryahu north of Tel Aviv and gave them a small silver cup.

Weniger had managed to track down the family with the help of the tracing service of Magen David Adom - Israel's version of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The cup was likely used for Kiddush to bless the wine on the eve of Shabbat -but nobody knows for sure because the original owners, Bavarian cattle dealer Salomon Gutmann and his wife, Karolina, who were the grandparents of Benjamin, were murdered by the Nazis in the Treblinka extermination camp.

“It was a mixed feeling for us to get back the cup,” Hila Gutmann said. “Because you understand it's the only thing that's left of them.”

While the grandparents of Benjamin Gutmann were murdered in the Holocaust, their son Max -Benjamin's father- survived because he fled from the Nazis to Palestine.

Despite the pain triggered by the loss and return of the silver cup, the Gutmanns say they're happy to have it back and plan to use it in a ceremony with all their other relatives on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in September.