Relatives of Nazi victims and sympathisers join forces for powerful new exhibit on looted property

Descendants of Nazi sympathisers and victims of the Nazi era have worked together to platform the past in an extraordinary new exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library 

‘Looted: Two Families, Nazi Theft and the Search for Restitution’ tells the very personal story of the Wertheimers and Kaltenhausers families, and an historic bid to restore stolen property.

In Austria, following the Anschluss – the German takeover of Austria in March 1938 – Jews fled persecution by the Nazis. Many had their belongings stolen or had to sell them under duress.

One Jewish family from Braunau am Inn in Upper Austria, the Wertheimers, were forced to sell their home for a fraction of its worth in 1939. Some of the Wertheimers’ belongings came into the possession of their pro-Nazi neighbours, the Kaltenhausers, either through direct looting or as the result of pressured emergency sales.

Some family members became refugees in Britain, South America, and Shanghai. One of the three Wertheimer sisters was later among the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.

Many decades later, Katharina Mayrhofer, a descendant of the Kaltenhausers, discovered a table in the attic of her family house near Braunau. Its origins were unclear. Mayrhofer embarked on a search for the original owners of the table, which led her to a collaborative project of restitution and restoration with Helen Emily Davy, a descendant of the Wertheimers.

The exhibition runs until 10 October 2025.

• The Wiener Holocaust Library is the world’s oldest and Britain’s largest collection of original archival material on the Nazi era and the Holocaust.