FBI Recovers Three Paintings

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Federal investigators have recovered three paintings stolen from a German museum near the end of World War II, the FBI announced this week.

The works by 19th Century artist Heinrich Burkel (1802—1869) were valued at approximately $125,000 and were among a group of about four dozen paintings stolen on March 22, 1945, as Allied forces swept through Germany. They were found when the owner put them up for auction six weeks ago.

The FBI said the paintings belonged to the city museum in Pirmasens, in western Germany near the French border.

The museum moved the paintings to a school in 1942 to protect them from bombing. On September 19, 1945, the museum reported that about 50 paintings stored in the school’s air-raid shelter had been lost “during the arrival of the American troops” six months earlier.

The three paintings were brought to United States and were acquired by a New Jersey resident about 20 years after the war, the FBI said. In the late 1980s, they were handed down to his daughter. In October, the paintings were offered for sale by auctioneer William H. Bunch Auctions & Appraisals of Chadds Ford, Penn.

The Pirmasens City Museum’s director, Heike Wittmer, saw them in the dealer’s online catalog and contacted German authorities, who in turn contacted the FBI and the auctioneer.

They will be returned to Germany voluntarily within about a month, the FBI said. The other paintings were not found.