Rothschilds Sell Last Piece of Austrian Empire After 200 Years
January 24, 2019, Updated on January 26, 2019
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/rothschilds-sell-last-piece-of-austrian-empire-after-200-years
FTA
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.”
Vienna Beginnings
Frankfurt-based Mayer Amschel Rothschild in the early 19th century sent his five sons to various capitals across Europe to do business with cash-strapped governments dealing with railway construction, revolutions and wars. The family split its main branches between Vienna, Paris, Naples, London and Frankfurt, supporting Europe’s most powerful royals.
Salomon Rothschild started to do business in Vienna around 1815. The family quickly became the Habsburg empire’s biggest financier, invested in railways and iron works and turned within decades into the country’s biggest landowner.
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Prinzhorn’s Plans
The buyer of the second Rothschild property, Cord Prinzhorn, will be reuniting the two family forests. He bought the smaller part, measuring 5,400 hectares, last year for 92 million euros ($105 million). The price of the second part of the forest is a bit higher than the first, according to two of the people.
Prinzhorn Holding declined to comment. Efforts to reach Bettina Burr through phone numbers listed in the phone directory were unsuccessful.
Prinzhorn started with a small paper mill in Pitten, about an hour south of Vienna, in 1853. Cord Prinzhorn’s father built the company into a European player after taking it over in the 1970s, and the company is now expanding across Europe and into countries such as Turkey.
The forest Prinzhorn is buying is full of historic lodges that were built about 120 years ago, and is in one of the most popular hiking, fishing and nature-rich areas around Vienna. While Prinzhorn has said he sees the forests as a long-term asset and a renewable source of a raw material, he also wants to preserve the historic buildings and maintain the lands as spaces for animals and for people to hike, fish or just enjoy the outdoors.