After graduating from the Benedictine grammar school in Merano, Hans Abeles studied at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Vienna, where he gained his doctorate in 1897. In 1903/04 he worked as a ship's doctor at Austrian Lloyd. During stays on land in Africa and Asia, he acquired ethnographic objects such as fans, jewellery with beadwork and puzzle games for children – mostly mass-produced goods for the European market and for travellers. Back in Vienna, he worked at the women's hospice located at Peter-Jordan-Straße 70 in Vienna’s 19th district, and published in specialist journals. His observations on disease patterns in indigenous populations in Africa and Asia and his experiences as a ship's doctor were incorporated into lectures and articles. In 1925, Abels qualified as a private lecturer at the University of Vienna. In 1934, he married Elsa (Else) Löwenhek (Löwenheck), a doctor born in Vienna on 23 May 1906, his former student and the daughter of a liquor merchant from Galicia, in Brigittenau Temple. Until 1938, Hans and Else Abels lived in Villa Höfken in the "Cottage" district in Vienna’s 18th district, at Sternwartestraße 33, where Hans Abels' practice was also located.

A few months after the "Anschluss" of Austria to the German Reich, on 25 October 1938, the Museum für Völkerkunde (MVK, now the Weltmuseum Wien) recorded the receipt of a "donation" from Hans Abels in the entry book under Post XVI/1938. The description of the objects, initially categorised as "Varia", and their more precise regional classification were not to be made until after the end of the Second World War (43 inventory numbers). The MVK archives merely noted that Abels had acquired the objects while travelling through South Africa, India and Japan, whereby their origin corresponded exactly to the destinations of the Lloyd at the time. However, there was no reference to the specific circumstances of the acquisition by the museum and the fact that Hans Abels was one of those persecuted by the Nazi regime. Hans and Else Abels had to move within Vienna several times after March 1938 before they managed to flee to England at the beginning of July 1939. They de-registered from Sternwartestrasse at the same time as the MVK took over the collection. Hans and Else Abels reached New York via Liverpool in January 1940. Else Abels' mother and two sisters had emigrated to New York already in 1935. Hans Abels died in 1942 at the age of 69. Else Abels found work as a specialist for lung diseases at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx and married again, this time the musician Carl Ziegler. Else died in New York City in 1995. In 2007, the Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the restitution of the collection to the heirs of Hans and Else Abels, and it was returned at the Austrian Cultural Institute in New York in 2021.