Moses (Moritz) Blumka (1855-1918), born in České Budĕjovice in southern Bohemia, ran an art and antiques store at Himmelpfortgasse 1 in Vienna’s 1st district, 7, and in 1911, together with his son Ernst Blumka, founded the company M. Blumka & Sohn, a dealership in antiques, at the same location. Ernst Blumka and his younger brother, Hugo Blumka, born on 12 May 1887, was a result of Moses Blumka's later divorced marriage to Johanna, née Lichtblau (1862-1920). Johanna married the antiquarian bookseller Oskar Weinstein in 1901. After the death of his father, Ernst Blumka continued to run the business as an unrecorded sole proprietorship. His younger brother Hugo's antique shop at Seilerstätte 11 in Vienna’s 1st district, , was also not entered in the commercial register. In 1914, Ernst Blumka married Irene, née Rausnitz, who was born in Bad Vöslau in 1892, and Hugo married Hermine (Mimmi), née Wälder, who came from a family of gold workers, in 1920. All of them were members of the Jewish community. Hugo Blumka, a lieutenant in the Imperial and Royal Army during the First World War, returned to Vienna from captivity as a prisoner of war in Siberia in 1920 and from 1927 onwards acted as an authorised expert and appraiser for antiques and works of art for the Italian Chamber of Commerce.

A few weeks after the annexation of Austria to the National Socialist German Reich, the art dealer and court-appointed expert Amatus Caurairy appraised both the warehouses and the home furnishings of Ernst and Hugo Blumka in May and June 1938. Their private property included carpets, jewellery, works of art as well as gold and silver objects. Ernst Blumka's collection included works by Franz Alt, Max Schödl and Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. Caurairy calculated a value of just under RM 8,800 for Ernst Blumka's stock of goods and approximately RM 9,300 for his home furnishings. The jewellery, gold and silver objects were valued by the jeweller Ambros Moritz at approximately RM 6,200, the carpets by Eduard Janeczka at approximately RM 2,100. Blumka's car had already been seized in April. In Hugo Blumka's case, the objects in his private apartment represented a total value of just under RM 11,000, according to the expert opinion. As Hugo Blumka informed the tax office at the end of August 1938, his business, which was estimated at just under RM 2,000 in the Declaration of Assets, had already been “completely sold out” and the business had been closed down; he had used the proceeds for his living expenses. In 1938, several export applications were submitted to the Central Office for the Protection of Monuments under the names of Ernst and Hugo Blumka; recipients of Ernst Blumka's consignments included Konrad Strauss and the Gurlitt Gallery in Berlin. In August, he applied for an export licence for numerous furnishings from his apartment to be sent to England. After the inspection by Ignaz Schlosser from the State Museum of Decorative Arts, Herbert Seiberl from the Central Office for Monument Protection returned a picture by Franz Alt and an oil painting by Jakob Alt from export. The house at Himmelpfortgasse 17, jointly inherited from their father, which had served as the Blumka brothers' residence and housed Ernst Blumka's business, was “aryanized” by the lawyer Karl Junginger from Krems in 1938. The provisional administrator Karl Falkenberg had already liquidated Ernst Blumka's business and there were no goods left when the Property Transaction Office commissioned the Kommerzialrat Otto Faltis with the final liquidation at the beginning of February 1939.

Ernst and Irene Blumka, who had fled to England in September 1938, initially lived in Hove (Sussex), then in London and took on British citizenship. Ernst Blumka died in 1969 and his wife Irene in 1983. After having fled Vienna in mid-January 1939, Hugo and Hermine Blumka had been living in the USA since September of that year, and later acquired US citizenship. Hugo Blumka died in Cleveland, Ohio (USA) in May 1941. The house at Himmelpfortgasse 17 was restituted to Ernst Blumka and the heirs of Hugo Blumka in 1948, according to the partial decision of the Restitution Commission, but according to the final decision of 1953, they had to pay the former “Ariseur” almost 36,000 schillings, as the Reichsfluchtsteuer (Reich Flight Tax) had been paid from the purchase price.