Leopold Blumka was the owner of a renowned art and antiques shop in the center of Vienna. His parents, Eduard Ludwig Blumka (1862-1916), from Tabor (South Bohemia), and Amalie, née Moses, born in 1864, from Mattersdorf (now Mattersburg), as well as his uncle Moses Blumka (1855-1918) and his cousins Ernst Blumka (1886-1969) and Hugo Blumka (1887-1941) dealt in antiques. In 1920, Leopold Blumka and Ludwig Herzog (born 1887), owner of an antiques shop at Volkertstraße 3 in Vienna’s 2nd district, founded the auction house for old art Blumka & Herzog as a general partnership (OHG) with large premises in Palais Trauttmansdorff located at Herrengasse 21 in Vienna’s 1st district. In 1924, Blumka opened an antiques shop at Rauhensteingasse 3 in Vienna’s 1st district as a sole proprietorship. He and his mother lived at Rauhensteingasse 8 until 1938.

After the annexation of Austria to the National Socialist German Reich, Blumka valued the business on Rauhensteingasse at around RM 14,000 in his Declaration of Assets (VA); the auction house was not mentioned in the VA. In June 1938, the Property Transaction Office (VVSt) appointed the sculptor Otto Buhr as provisional administrator. Buhr, previously a restorer for the Viennese art dealer Lia Madl and a member of the SA and NSDAP since 1932, sold the majority of the contents of the warehouse to buyers located in various countries, including Switzerland. In 1938, 14 export applications were submitted to the Central Office for the Protection of Monuments under the name Leopold Blumka. The recipients included Konrad Strauss in Berlin and Wilhelm Böhler in Munich. In May, the authorities blocked several guild symbols and trademarks from a consignment to the auctioneer Theodor Fischer in Lucerne. In August, Blumka registered numerous objects as removal goods for export to Switzerland and France. Hans Schedelmann, originally from Germany and living in Vienna since 1937, a supporting member of the SS since 1934 and a member of the NSDAP since 1936, who traded in old weapons from his apartment, applied for the “Aryanization” of Blumka's antiques shop in July 1938 for a purchase price of RM 6,000, but withdrew his application. The store was closed in the course of the November pogrom. As Blumka announced to the VVSt at the beginning of December, Buhr had already liquidated the company. Following Buhr's dismissal as administrator at the beginning of January 1939, the VVSt nevertheless appointed Otto Faltis as liquidator in February.His trade licence revoked in April. Blumka, whose securities had been sold for Reichsfluchtsteuer (Reich Flight Tax) payments, left Vienna for Bregenz at the beginning of March 1939 and arrived in Switzerland, where he initially stayed with Theodor Fischer. In preparation for his escape, he had handed over a suitcase containing antique silverware from his private property to Lieutenant Colonel Ödon (Edmund) Fischhof(f), a friend from Budapest, who was to smuggle the valuables into Switzerland. Fischhof was arrested near Lörrach on the German-Swiss border, the suitcase was seized, and Fischhof was processed for identification by the Gestapo in September 1940 because of an “allegedly planned assassination attempt on the Führer”, but he was soon able to leave for Hungary. In May 1940, Blumka's sole proprietorship was deleted from the Viennese commercial register; the deletion of the auction house for old art Blumka & Herzog did not take place until November 1941. After emigrating to the USA in 1941, Blumka was able to re-establish himself as a successful art dealer in New York and acquire US citizenship. In his Blumka Gallery, which opened in 1942 on 57th Street in Manhattan, whichwas known for its art shops, he specialized in medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art. He married Ruth Zickel (1920-1994), a daughter of the Munich gallery owner Fritz Zickel, who had fled from Germany. After several changes of location, the gallery is still run today by Blumka's son Anthony (Tony) Blumka. Blumka's mother Amalie died in Vienna in September 1938 and his sister Julie, born in 1894, married Sterblitsch, was murdered in Maly Trostinec in May 1942. Blumka's former business partner Ludwig Herzog had fled to Palestine.

After the end of the Nazi era, Blumka sought the return of his suitcase, which had been seized in 1939, with the help of the Monuments Office in Vienna. Investigations revealed that the silver objects had been disposed of by the Municipal Pawnbroker's Office in Berlin, which was subordinate to the Reich Ministry of Economics. After 1945, Leopold Blumka placed numerous objects from the restituted collections of Oscar Bondy and Albert Pollak on the US art market. He and his wife also made a name for themselves as donors of works of art to US museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Blumka's affidavit, according to which the weapons expert and art dealer Hans Schedelmann had selflessly supported him in rescuing art objects and building a new life, played a major role in the People's Court proceedings against Schedelmann being dropped in 1948.