The transporter Paul David Herzfeld lived with his wife Stefanie at Ausstellungsstraße 45/I/14 in Vienna's 2nd district. He fled in August 1938 via Czechoslovakia to Palestine. He lived in the 1950s in Tel Aviv, where he also died. Before his departure, he had stored his removal goods, including his gramophone record collection, with the Vienna transport company Caro und Jellinek, where it was seized by the Gestapo and later sold through Vugesta. The historian Heinrich Srbik, president of the Academy of Sciences, was informed not only of the planned sale of the records in May 1942 by the Dorotheum but also of the fact that the collection included recordings of the Habsburg famly from the First World War. In a letter to Vugesta Srbik requested and obtained these fifteen records for the Academy's phonogram archive.

In 1993 the phonogram archive gave the records to the Österreichische Mediathek. They were originally identified in 2007 as belonging to someone else, so that the Art Restitution Advisory Board decision had to be corrected. In 2013 they were finally restituted to the legal heirs of Paul Herzfeld.