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“The emotions tied to reclaiming something taken so brutally can’t be measured in dollars—it’s priceless,” said James Dennehy, assistant director in charge of the FBI in New York City, after the organisation helped bring back Nazi-looted Monet painting after 80 years.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Art Crime Team, the New York and New Orleans Field Offices, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana Wednesday announced the repatriation of a Claude Monet pastel on paper, “Bord de Mer.”

“The emotions tied to reclaiming something taken so brutally can’t be measured in dollars—it’s priceless.”

Discover how the #FBI helped return a Nazi-Looted Monet, missing for over 80 years, to the heirs of original owners: https://t.co/wL66ULxImd pic.twitter.com/zZIzOtHcWq

— FBI (@FBI) October 9, 2024

The painting, created around 1865, was purchased by the Parlagi family at an Austrian art auction in 1936. A few years later, in 1940, during World War II, the pastel was seized by Gestapo, the Nazis’ secret police force.

Eventually, the Monet was purchased at an auction by a Nazi art dealer and disappeared in 1941.

The Parlagi family has spent decades looking for the painting.

Also Read: After Mona Lisa, Climate Protesters Throw Soup at Monet Painting

In 2023, the FBI got a lead when the artwork was listed for sale at a Houston art gallery. The team contacted Dr. and Mrs. Kevin Schlamp, the owners of the artwork, and explained its looted history. Schlamps voluntarily surrendered the piece.

Following this, with the help of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana, a consent judgment was secured in May 2024. The judgment awarded full ownership of the Monet to the Parlagi heirs.

“We are honored to have played a role in returning this stolen artwork to its rightful owners,” said James Dennehy. “While this Monet is undoubtedly valuable, its true worth lies in what it represents to the Parlagi family. It’s a connection to their history, their loved ones, and a legacy that was nearly erased,” he added.

The FBI’s work on this case is ongoing. Several other pieces of artwork were stolen from the Parlagi family in 1940 and the search is on.

Video: Environment Activists Smear Paint On Monet Artwork In Stockholm

The apparently pristine Gerardmer lake in the Vosges mountains of eastern France conceals a bleak legacy of 20th-century conflict — dozens of tonnes of unexploded ordnance from the two world wars.

The lake 660 metres (2,170 feet) above sea level is a popular summer bathing spot and is sometimes also tapped for drinking water for the picturesque local town.

Gerardmer’s mayor Stessy Speissmann-Mozas started asking questions about the water safety after the Odysseus 3.1 environmental group said samples taken from the lake showed high levels of TNT explosive, as well as metals like iron, titanium and lead.

The group said it found artillery shells in the mud at the bottom of the lake. Some were “gutted, allowing the explosive they contained to escape”, Odysseus 3.1’s founder Lionel Rard said in a documentary broadcast by the France 5 channel in May.

Samples sent to a German lab showed TNT levels among “the highest ever measured by that team”, as well as metal concentrations above legal limits.

‘Stick all this in the lake’

The mayor has said the government should pay for a more detailled study of the risks from the munitions that were initially dumped in Gerardmer by the French army. As a theatre of multiple conflicts over the past century and more, France is particularly afflicted by unexploded ordnance.

Most dates back to the world wars but shells are still found from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, noted Charlotte Nihart of Robin des Bois (Robin Hood), an association that has charted unexploded bombs across France.

Unexploded ordnance is involved in around 10 deaths nationwide every year.

During the wars, retreating armies would dump munitions in lakes to stop enemy forces getting them, Nihart said.

In Gerardmer, disposal drives started in 1977 after a man was burned by a phosphorous shell. They continued through to 1994, removing explosives up to 10 metres below the lake surface.

“They took out 120 tonnes of munitions, made up of almost 100,000 individual pieces of different types from 1914-18 and 1939-45,” said Pierre Imbert, an assistant to the mayor and former local fire chief and diver.

Disposal teams brought each explosive to the surface, where they could remove the detonator.

“Then they went and blew it up at the end of the lake,” Imbert recalled.

Photos he has kept from the disposal campaigns show everything from “handmade grenades from World War I, more recent things from World War II, and even a little axe”.

Officials called a halt to the ordnance disposal due to the difficulty of working further from the shore and deeper under the mud of the lake bed, the regional authority told Robin des Bois.

The region estimated that around 70 tonnes remain at the bottom of Gerardmer.

“There’s no way of evaluating the quantity of munitions still sunk in the mud” up to 30 metres below the surface, Imbert said.

‘Decontaminate everything’

Since 1945, some of the munitions have moved around in the lake currents.

The state should “decontaminate everything around the edge” of the lake, said Aurelie Mathieu, head of the Vosges region’s AKM eco-tourism association.

But the regional authority is refusing to act on the sole basis of the Odysseus 3.1 analysis.

“Neither the ARS (regional health agency) nor Anses (national health and safety agency) were involved in this investigation and we have no details of the methods used to collect and analyse samples,” it told AFP.

Samples were taken by state agencies in February and analysed by “several French and German labs”, it added.

“Initial results confirmed the conclusions of previous campaigns — no concerning levels were detected” in the lake water, the regional authority said.

“No health risk has been identified” either for drinking the water or for swimming in it, it added.

One company has put in a bid to map the ordnance still lying at the bottom of the lake.

It would cost “almost 300,000 euros ($334,000)”, mayor Speissman-Mozas said.

He is interested in the offer, as long as the national government pays.

“It’s the French army who put all these munitions here,” he reasoned.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Plabennec, France:

Aimee Dupre had always kept silent about the rape of her mother by two American soldiers after the Normandy landings in June 1944. But 80 years after the brutal assault, she finally felt it was time to speak out.

Nearly a million US, British, Canadian and French soldiers landed on the Normandy coast in the weeks after D-Day in an operation that was to herald the end of Nazi Germany’s grip on Europe.

Aimee was 19, living in Montours, a village in Brittany, and delighted to see the “liberators” arrive, as was everybody around her.

But then her joy evaporated. On the evening of August 10, two US soldiers — often called GIs — arrived at the family’s farm.

“They were drunk and they wanted a woman,” Aimee, now 99, told AFP, producing a letter that her mother, also called Aimee, wrote “so nothing is forgotten”.

In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired their guns in the direction of her husband, ripping holes in his cap, and how they menacingly approached her daughter Aimee.

To protect her daughter, she agreed to leave the house with the GIs, she wrote. “They took me to a field and took turns raping me, four times each.”

Aimee’s voice broke as she read from the letter. “Oh mother, how you suffered, and me too, I think about this every day,” she said.

“My mother sacrificed herself to protect me,” she said. “While they raped her in the night, we waited, not knowing whether she would come back alive or whether they would shoot her dead.”

The events of that night were not isolated. In October 1944, after the battle for Normandy was won, US military authorities put 152 soldiers on trial for raping French women.

In truth, hundreds or even thousands of rapes between 1944 and the departure of the GIs in 1946 went unreported, said American historian Mary Louise Roberts, one of only a handful to research what she called “a taboo” of World War II.

“Many women decided to remain silent,” she said. “There was the shame, as often with rape.”

She said the stark contrast of their experience with the joy felt everywhere over the American victory made it especially hard to speak up.

– ‘Easy to get’ –

Roberts also blames the army leadership who, she said, promised soldiers a country with women that were “easy to get” to add to their motivation to fight.

The US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes was full of pictures showing French women kissing victorious Americans.

“Here’s What We’re Fighting For,” read a headline on September 9, 1944, alongside a picture of cheering French women and the caption: “The French are nuts about the Yanks.”

The incentive of sex “was to motivate American soldiers”, Roberts said.

“Sex, and I mean prostitution and rape, was a way for Americans to show domination over France, dominating French men, as they had been unable to protect their country and their women from the Germans,” she added.

In Plabennec, near Brest on the westernmost tip of Britanny, Jeanne Pengam, nee Tournellec, remembers “as if it was yesterday” how her sister Catherine was raped and their father murdered by a GI.

“The black American wanted to rape my older sister. My father stood in his way and he shot him dead. The guy managed to break down the door and enter the house,” 89-year-old Jeanne told AFP.

Nine at the time, she ran to a nearby US garrison to alert them.

“I told them he was German, but I was wrong. When they examined the bullets the next day, they immediately understood that he was American,” she said.

Her sister Catherine kept the terrible secret “that poisoned her whole life” until shortly before her death, said one of her daughters, Jeannine Plassard.

“Lying on her hospital bed she told me, ‘I was raped during the war, during the Liberation,'” Plassard told AFP.

Asked whether she ever told anybody, her mother replied: “Tell anybody? It was the Liberation, everybody was happy, I was not going to talk about something like this, that would have been cruel,” she said.

French writer Louis Guilloux worked as a translator for US troops after the landings, an experience he described in his 1976 novel “OK Joe!”, including the trials of GIs for rape in military courts.

“Those sentenced to death were almost all black,” said Philippe Baron, who made a documentary about the book.

– ‘Shameful secret’ –

Those found guilty, including the rapists of Aimee Helaudais Honore and Catherine Tournellec, were hanged publicly in French villages.

“Behind the taboo surrounding rapes by the liberators, there was the shameful secret of a segregationist American army,” said Baron.

“Once a black soldier was brought to trial, he had practically no chance of acquittal,” he said.

This, said Roberts, allowed the military hierarchy to protect the reputation of white Americans by “scapegoating many African-American soldiers”.

Of the 29 soldiers sentenced to death for rape in 1944 and 1945, 25 were black GIs, she said.

Racial stereotypes on sexuality facilitated the condemnation of blacks for rape. White soldiers, meanwhile, often belonged to mobile units, making them harder to track down than their black comrades who were mostly stationary.

“If a French woman accused a white American soldier of rape, he could easily get away with it because he never stayed near the rape scene. The next morning, he was gone,” Roberts said.

After her book “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” appeared in 2013, Roberts said the reaction in the US was so hostile that the police would have to regularly check on her.

“People were angry at my book because they didn’t want to lose this ideal of the good war, of the good GI,” she said. “Even if it means we have to keep on lying.”

AFP was unable to obtain any official comment from the US Department of Defense on the subject.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

Aimee Dupre had always kept silent about the rape of her mother by two American soldiers after the Normandy landings in June 1944.

But 80 years after the brutal assault, she finally felt it was time to speak out.

Nearly a million US, British, Canadian and French soldiers landed on the Normandy coast in the weeks after D-Day in an operation that was to herald the end of Nazi Germany’s grip on Europe.

Aimee was 19, living in Montours, a village in Brittany, and delighted to see the “liberators” arrive, as was everybody around her.

But then her joy evaporated. On the evening of August 10, two US soldiers — often called GIs — arrived at the family’s farm.

“They were drunk and they wanted a woman,” Aimee, now 99, told AFP, producing a letter that her mother, also called Aimee, wrote “so nothing is forgotten”.

In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired their guns in the direction of her husband, ripping holes in his cap, and how they menacingly approached her daughter Aimee.

To protect her daughter, she agreed to leave the house with the GIs, she wrote. “They took me to a field and took turns raping me, four times each.”

Aimee’s voice broke as she read from the letter. “Oh mother, how you suffered, and me too, I think about this every day,” she said.

“My mother sacrificed herself to protect me,” she said. “While they raped her in the night, we waited, not knowing whether she would come back alive or whether they would shoot her dead.”

The events of that night were not isolated. In October 1944, after the battle for Normandy was won, US military authorities put 152 soldiers on trial for raping French women.

In truth, hundreds or even thousands of rapes between 1944 and the departure of the GIs in 1946 went unreported, said American historian Mary Louise Roberts, one of only a handful to research what she called “a taboo” of World War II.

“Many women decided to remain silent,” she said. “There was the shame, as often with rape.”

She said the stark contrast of their experience with the joy felt everywhere over the American victory made it especially hard to speak up.

‘Easy to get’

Roberts also blames the army leadership who, she said, promised soldiers a country with women that were “easy to get” to add to their motivation to fight.

The US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes was full of pictures showing French women kissing victorious Americans.

“Here’s What We’re Fighting For,” read a headline on September 9, 1944, alongside a picture of cheering French women and the caption: “The French are nuts about the Yanks.”

The incentive of sex “was to motivate American soldiers”, Roberts said.

“Sex, and I mean prostitution and rape, was a way for Americans to show domination over France, dominating French men, as they had been unable to protect their country and their women from the Germans,” she added.

In Plabennec, near Brest on the westernmost tip of Britanny, Jeanne Pengam, nee Tournellec, remembers “as if it was yesterday” how her sister Catherine was raped and their father murdered by a GI.

“The black American wanted to rape my older sister. My father stood in his way and he shot him dead. The guy managed to break down the door and enter the house,” 89-year-old Jeanne told AFP.

Nine at the time, she ran to a nearby US garrison to alert them.

“I told them he was German, but I was wrong. When they examined the bullets the next day, they immediately understood that he was American,” she said.

Her sister Catherine kept the terrible secret “that poisoned her whole life” until shortly before her death, said one of her daughters, Jeannine Plassard.

“Lying on her hospital bed she told me, ‘I was raped during the war, during the Liberation,'” Plassard told AFP. 

Asked whether she ever told anybody, her mother replied: “Tell anybody? It was the Liberation, everybody was happy, I was not going to talk about something like this, that would have been cruel,” she said.

French writer Louis Guilloux worked as a translator for US troops after the landings, an experience he described in his 1976 novel “OK Joe!”, including the trials of GIs for rape in military courts.

“Those sentenced to death were almost all black,” said Philippe Baron, who made a documentary about the book.

‘Shameful secret’

Those found guilty, including the rapists of Aimee Helaudais Honore and Catherine Tournellec, were hanged publicly in French villages.

“Behind the taboo surrounding rapes by the liberators, there was the shameful secret of a segregationist American army,” said Baron.

“Once a black soldier was brought to trial, he had practically no chance of acquittal,” he said.

This, said Roberts, allowed the military hierarchy to protect the reputation of white Americans by “scapegoating many African-American soldiers”.

Of the 29 soldiers sentenced to death for rape in 1944 and 1945, 25 were black GIs, she said.

Racial stereotypes on sexuality facilitated the condemnation of blacks for rape. White soldiers, meanwhile, often belonged to mobile units, making them harder to track down than their black comrades who were mostly stationary.

“If a French woman accused a white American soldier of rape, he could easily get away with it because he never stayed near the rape scene. The next morning, he was gone,” Roberts said.

After her book “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” appeared in 2013, Roberts said the reaction in the US was so hostile that the police would have to regularly check on her.

“People were angry at my book because they didn’t want to lose this ideal of the good war, of the good GI,” she said. “Even if it means we have to keep on lying.”

AFP was unable to obtain any official comment from the US Department of Defense on the subject.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)