AFP — Has a 300-year-old Stradivarius violin worth $10 million and stolen by the Nazis during World War II turned up in France?

Pascale Bernheim, an expert on looted musical instruments, thinks so.

The first clue was an article in a local newspaper.

It reported that violinist Emmanuel Coppey had demonstrated his talent on several old violins during an evening of wine and music in the city of Colmar in the Alsace region near the German border.

Luthier Nicolo Amati had made the first in 1624, and Antonio Guarneri crafted the second in 1735, Les Dernieres nouvelles d’Alsace said.

The third was made by fellow Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari back to 1719.

“I am absolutely convinced that it is the Lauterbach,” named after one of its first owners, Bernheim told AFP.

Nazi soldiers stole the violin from a museum in the Polish capital, Warsaw, in 1944, according to French newspaper Le Parisien, which investigated the story.

The string instrument survived years in East Germany during the Cold War, then was last seen in France in the early 1990s.

Stradivari made only nine violins in 1719, two of which are missing — the “Lauterbach” and the “Lautenschlager.”

But the “Lautenschlager” has a back made of two pieces of wood — not one,........

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