At the end of each day, Wilfried Wabra’s grandmother used to sink gratefully into what she called her “Jew chair”, an antique armchair with silk upholstery and an exquisitely carved backrest.
The chair, together with her dresser and her grandfather clock, had been looted by the Nazis from the homes of concentration camp victims in a systematic program of furniture theft.
Today, more than seven decades after the end of World War II, a younger generation of Germans is waking up to a realisation that hundreds of thousands of their household heirlooms were plundered from Jewish homes left empty by the Holocaust.