Britain to compensate for looted Nazi art

LONDON - British authorities have agreed to compensate the heirs of a Czech doctor whose Old Master drawings were looted by the Nazis and later acquired by the British Museum.

The government will pay £175,000 ($504,904) to the heirs of Arthur Feldmann, an art collector whose property was stolen when the Nazis invaded then-Czechoslovakia.

Feldmann's grandson, Uri Peled, and the British Museum, had jointly proposed the compensation arrangement, which will allow the works to remain at the London institution.

The Gestapo seized the works from Feldmann's his home in Brno. He was tortured and killed by the Nazis, and his wife, Gisela, died at Auschwitz.

The drawings are St. Dorothy with the Christ Child, 1508, by a follower of Martin Schongauer, a German engraver; Virgin and Child Adored by St. Elizabeth and the Infant St. John by Martin Johann Schmidt, from the 18th century; An Allegory on Poetic Inspiration with Mercury and Apollo by the 18th-century English artist Nicholas Blakey, and The Holy Family by Niccolo dell'Abbate, the 16th-century Bolognese.

AP