It’s the end of an era for the Rothschilds in Austria.
Once the Habsburg empire’s top financier, the family that started to do business in Vienna around 1815 is selling its last piece of land in Austria, closing a 200-yearlong history that included booms, busts, crashes and wars.
The family branch represented by heir Bettina Burr has agreed to sell two trusts that own about 7,000 hectares (17,300 acres) of forest in the Lower Austria region to the Vienna-based packaging firm Prinzhorn Holding GmbH, according to three people familiar with the deal, who requested anonymity since the transaction has yet to be added to the land register.
The forest – about 20 times the size of New York’s Central Park – is part of an estate Baron Albert von Rothschild bought in 1875. The Nazis seized the land after Germany occupied Austria in 1938, and it was partially returned to the family after World War II. Rothschild heir Bettina Looram moved back to live there until her death in 2012. Two branches of the family then split the estate, and both will now been have sold to Prinzhorn, which bought the adjacent forest a year ago.
“This brings an ambivalent 200-year relationship to an end,” Roman Sandgruber, a historian who last year authored the book, “Rothschild – The Rise and Fall of a Cosmopolitan Viennese Family,” said in an interview. “The Habsburgs respected the family, elevated them to nobility as they benefited from their finance knowledge. The Catholic Habsburgs, however, always kept a certain distance from the Jewish Rothschild family.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/rothschilds-sell-last-piece-of-austrian-empire-after-200-years