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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukraine's Cabinet ordered a vast archive containing works by Johann Sebastian Bach and other German composers and long considered lost in World War II to be returned to Germany, officials said on Wednesday. The government adopted a decree on the return Tuesday, said Ruslan Pyrig, head of the State Archive Committee.

The archive, which contains nearly 5,120 documents, remained virtually untouched in Kyiv until Christoph Wolff, a Harvard music professor, found it in June 1999 after a 20-year search and alerted Ukraine to its historic significance. In January, Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma pledged to return the archive to Germany. The collection is part of the missing archives of the Berlin Sing Academy, a still-performing group established in 1791. The documents were moved from Berlin in 1943 to shield them from Allied bombing raids and later fell into Soviet hands.

The documents, which Bach scholars are eager to study, are part of the musical estate of Bach's son Carl Phillipp Emanuel, himself a well-known composer. The collection also holds works by several of Bach's 19 other children and by a variety of other 18th- and early 19th-century German composers.