Austrian Branch
In Vienna, Salomon Mayer Rothschild established a bank in the 1820s and the Austrian family had vast wealth and position. The crash of 1929 brought problems, and Baron Louis von Rothschild attempted to shore up the Creditanstalt, Austria's largest bank, to prevent its collapse. Nevertheless, during World War II they had to surrender their bank to the Nazis and flee the country. Their Rothschild palaces, a collection of vast palaces in Vienna built and owned by the family, were confiscated, plundered and destroyed by the Nazis. The palaces were famous for their sheer size, and for their huge collections of paintings, armour, tapestries, statues (some of which were restituted to the Rothschilds by the Austrian government in 1999). All family members escaped the Holocaust, some of them moving to the United States, and only returning to Europe after the war. In 1999, the government of Austria agreed to return to the Rothschild family some 250 art treasures looted by the Nazis and absorbed into state museums after the war.
Read more about this topic: Rothschild Family
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“The war shook down the Tsardom, an unspeakable abomination, and made an end of the new German Empire and the old Apostolic Austrian one. It ... gave votes and seats in Parliament to women.... But if society can be reformed only by the accidental results of horrible catastrophes ... what hope is there for mankind in them? The war was a horror and everybody is the worse for it.”
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