Following the Anschluss in 1938, the Rothschilds became immediate targets of the Nazi regime. Alphonse and Clarice happened to be attending a philatelic exhibition in London when German forces entered Austria. They instructed their daughters, Bettina (1924-2012) and Gwendoline (1927-1972) to travel to safety in Switzerland, but their train was stopped in Innsbruck on 12 March when they heard the order, “All Jews off the train”. The children were taken to a police station and briefly detained before being unexpectedly released later that day. Only later did they learn that, instead, the SS had arrested their uncle Louis at Vienna's Aspern airport.

Post-war restitution brought little restoration of the Rothschilds' Austrian world. The Rothschilds recovered many artworks and properties, yet the world they had built in Vienna had largely disappeared.

From 1947, Louis, together with other family members including Clarice, filed restitution claims under the First Restitution Act. Several of their residences had been occupied by the Gestapo [Fig. 16 and 17], and although Louis recovered parts of the family’s properties, he later reached a settlement under which significant assets passed to the Austrian state while pensions were provided for former Rothschild employees. The Heugasse palace was demolished in 1954. Clarice likewise abandoned the ruined Theresianumgasse palace, though she successfully reclaimed the Rothschild Gardens at Hohe Warte before donating them to the City of Vienna.

Only the Langau estate in Lower Austria remained in the family’s ownership, eventually passing to Clarice’s daughter Bettina Looram, who later retired there with her husband. The Telegraph’s obituary of Bettina recalls her words: “The bank has gone, Schillersdorf, the other fine castles, the Viennese town houses, all have gone. Only beautiful Langau is left, the place that Grandfather Albert loved and which still has a high place in the affections of his youngest descendants”.

Although thousands of objects from the Rothschild collections were returned to them in the immediate postwar years, the Federal Monuments Authority, outlining a 1918 law banning art exports, made export permits contingent on the surrender of more than 250 artworks to Austrian museums. These coerced donations were not restituted until 50 years later, when, amid growing international scrutiny of wartime looting, Austria reassessed these acquisitions through the 1998 Art Restitution Act. Bettina’s efforts for Rothschild pieces to be returned to the family were finally rewarded by the Art Restitution Advisory Board decision of 11 February 1999, and the returned objects were consigned at Christie’s in the 8 July 1999 auction.

While many recovered objects were gifted by Bettina Burr (born circa 1946), Alphonse and Clarice’s granddaughter, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2015, restitution remains an ongoing process. In 2023, Austria approved the return of the Rothschild Vienna Mahzor, a rare 15th-century Jewish prayer book found in the Austrian National Library and omitted from earlier restitution proceedings.

The story of Rothschild Vienna is the story of a family that helped shape the cultural life of a city, lost almost everything within months of the Anschluss, and spent generations seeking the return of what had been taken. The collections survive today in museums and private hands across the world, but they also stand as reminders of a vanished world. As Bettina Burr remarked in 2015, “it’s a wonderful story and that it has a good ending” — restitution has allowed these objects to bear witness once more to their history.