A museum in Switzerland is removing five paintings, including works by Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, from one of its exhibitions while it investigates whether they were stolen by the Nazis, according to a report.
The pieces are part of the Emil Bührle Collection at the Kunsthaus Zurich art museum, the BBC reported.
Bührle was a German-born industrialist and art collector who became fabulously wealthy selling weapons to the Nazis during World War II, the BBC noted.
Questions have circulated for years about the initial owners of the paintings.
The five artworks being investigated are: "Jardin de Monet à Giverny" by Claude Monet, "Portrait of the Sculptor Louis-Joseph" by Gustave Courbet, "Georges-Henri Manuel" by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, "The Old Tower" by Vincent van Gogh, and "La route montante" by Paul Gauguin.
The decision to remove the paintings comes after new guidelines were published this year focusing on dealing with artworks that have not been returned to the family from which they were stolen, the report said.
The foundation for the collection said it was "committed to seeking a fair and equitable solution for these works with the legal successors of the former owners, following best practices."
Switzerland was among 20 countries that agreed in March to adopt best practices from the U.S. State Department on how to deal with Nazi-looted art.
Stuart Eizenstat, the Secretary of State's special adviser on Holocaust issues, said up to 600,000 artworks and millions of books and religious objects were plundered during World War II with the "same efficiency, brutality and scale as the Holocaust itself."
The Holocaust was "not only the greatest genocide in world history," he said during a speech March 5 at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. "It was also the greatest theft of property in history."
