For the first time since World War II, German troops will soon march down the Champs-Elysees.
During a summit meeting last week with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, French President Francois Mitterrand invited the Eurocorps, a European army created by France and Germany, to march in France’s annual Bastille Day military parade.
As a result, troops from Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain and Germany will participate in France’s July 14 Independence Day celebrations.
Observers explained that Mitterrand extended the invitation after it was decided that Germany could not participate in this week’s commemorations marking the 50th anniversary of D-Day.
During their meeting last week, Kohl also told Mitterrand that Germany was returning 28 paintings taken from France during World War II.
The paintings had been displayed in an East German museum since the war.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disintegration of East Germany, French authorities requested that Germany return all of the paintings.
The works had been stolen from France by a Nazi officer who charged one of his soldiers to transport the masterpieces back to Germany. The officer failed to collect them after the war.
Years later, the former German soldier recounted the story to a priest, who advised him to turn the stolen paintings over to a museum.
Most of the paintings are believed to have belonged to Jewish families. They include works by Cezanne, Corot, Courbet, Delacroix, Gauguin, Manet, Monet and Pissarro.
Only seven of the paintings will be returned to their original owners or their heirs. The owners of the other paintings could not be found and the works will be turned over to French museums.
Kohl symbolically presented one of the paintings — a Monet — to Mitterrand and asked him to return it to its rightful owners, an unidentified French Jewish family.
The works had survived a “fairy tale journey” and belonged back in France, said Kohl.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
