Paintings taken by GI back in Germany

WASHINGTON • Five paintings missing since the Second World War are being returned to collections in Germany at the behest of the heirs of their American acquisitors.

The paintings, including three won by an American GI in a poker game, were turned over to the German government on Tuesday. Their return was organized by the State Department and the Monuments Men Foundation, which promotes the work of those who protected cultural works during the war and seeks to track down and repatriate objects that went missing.

The three paintings won by the GI in the poker game and mailed home to his wife are from an art gallery in the German city of Dessau that had been stored in a potassium mine for safekeeping during the war. They are works by the Flemish Baroque painter Frans Francken III, the German painter Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich and Austrian artist Franz de Paula Ferg, according to the foundation.

The other two — a painting of Queen Victoria and her eldest daughter, Victoria, who married German Emperor Frederick III, and a painting of Charles I — had been in a castle near Frankfurt that was confiscated by the U.S. military in 1945 and turned into an officers’ club. They were purchased by an American woman who was serving in Germany as a librarian in the U.S. Special Services after the war, said the foundation.

The paintings are among hundreds of thousands of cultural items missing since the end of the war that the Monuments Men Foundation hopes to help recover and return to their rightful owners. The heirs of the GI and the librarian contacted the foundation last year amid publicity surrounding the release of the George Clooney film Monuments Men, about a U.S. team that tried to protect artworks during the Second World War.