Henri Matisse painted "Le Mur Rose," or "The Pink Wall," in 1898. The piece, once owned by the Fuld family, was found after World War II.

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PARIS — Finally, justice for Henri Matisse's "Le Mur Rose."

The oil painting, which was stolen from a rich German Jewish family sometime after 1937 and kept by a Nazi officer responsible for delivering poison gas to Auschwitz, is to be given Thursday to a British charity that supports medical rescue in Israel.

The story of "Le Mur Rose," or "The Pink Wall," is steeped in death, mystery and injustice.

"It's a remarkable and in some ways slightly creepy story," said Stuart Glyn, chairman of the British charity Magen David Adom UK, which operates emergency care centers in Israel.

The painting belonged to Harry Fuld, a German Jew who made his fortune in telephones, founding the H. Fuld & Co. Telefon und Telegraphenwerke AG in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1899, the charity says.

"The Fuld family were almost manic collectors, with the broadest of tastes," Glyn said in a phone interview.

Harry Fuld Jr., a son, fled Germany in 1937, packing artwork into crates, which he gave to a shipping company. The collection never left. Instead, the Nazis confiscated it. Kurt Gerstein, an officer in the Nazis' murderous Waffen SS, got the Matisse, either as a bribe or because he bought it, Glyn said.

Gerstein hung himself in 1945 while jailed in France.

French gendarmes recovered the painting three years later from a cache near Gerstein's home in Tuebingen, Germany, said Didier Schulmann, curator at the Pompidou Center national museum of modern art in Paris. It has been part of the museum's collection since 1949.