Ernst Adolf Bunzl, son of the court lawyer Theodor Bunzl and his wife Isabella, née Bachstetz, graduated in law in 1913 and worked as a lawyer starting in 1920. In 1922, he married Helene Waerndorfer, daughter of Lili, née Hellmann, and Fritz Waerndorfer, the co-founder of the Wiener Werkstätte. The year after his marriage, Ernst Bunzl took over the law firm of Eduard Uhl located at Naglergasse 6 in Vienna’s 1st district. The couple, who remained childless, lived in Vienna’s 8th district, in an apartment located at Josefstädter Strasse 46, which housed their extensive art collection. This included hand drawings by Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, prints from the 15th to 19th centuries, copperplate engravings with designs for goldsmith work, jewellery, numerous Asian pieces, silverware, a glass collection, valuable furniture and carpets as well as a library with over 1,000 volumes. Helene Bunzl died in the Fürth Sanatorium in Vienna in January 1938.

Around six months after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, in September 1938, Ernst Bunzl left Vienna as a persecuted Jew - although baptized Catholic from birth - reaching France via Yugoslavia. He handed over his belongings, including numerous works of art and silverware which he had, among other things, received from his mother-in-law Lili Waerndorfer, to the shipping company Hausner & Co, which transported them to Paris. In December 1938, he married Gertrude Clarice Hausner-Holme, the daughter of the shipping company's owner, in Paris. He then fled with her to Marseille and then to Brazil after the invasion of France by German troops in 1941. The removal goods were seized in Paris, presumably sent to the German Reich and disposed of. After the end of the Nazi regime, from his new home in São Paulo, Bunzl tried to recover the expropriated property or to be compensated for its loss by the Berlin restitution authorities. After his death in 1962, his widow, who had become the sole owner of her father's company, which had been “aryanized” by Hugo Deipenbrock and restituted to her after 1945, successfully continued her efforts to obtain compensation for the property seized in Paris. Gertrude Hausner-Holme died in Vienna in 1993.

On 11 January 2019, the Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the return of a Chinese cast iron figure (“Head of a Dignitary”) from the Song Dynasty to the legal successors of Ernst Bunzl. The object was donated by Anton Exner to the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (now the MAK - Museum of Applied Arts) in 1948 and undoubtedly came from Bunzl's collection. However, no evidence was found that a set of Wiener Werkstätten cutlery formerly owned by Fritz and Lili Waerndorfer, which had been purchased by the MAK in 1967, had ever been owned by Ernst Bunzl or had been expropriated from him. The Advisory Board therefore did not recommend returning the cutlery at its meeting on 27 September 2024.