Fritz Manns, a historian from Bremen with a doctorate, had been a member of the NSDAP since 1932 and a member of the SA in 1933/34 and 1938. On 1 August 1938, he began working as an assistant at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) in Vienna, where he had already done academic work on a numismatic topic from antiquity as part of his dissertation. From the end of August 1939 to September 1940, he served in the German army. After being temporarily released from military service in November 1940, he was called up for military service in the Soviet Union at the end of July 1941. There is evidence of his service in Kiev and the Crimea, where he worked in museums as a member of a propaganda company. On 28 April 1942, Manns was taken on as a curator in the tenured civil service of the KHM. According to a letter from the KHM dated January 1942, Manns "constantly" donated "valuable Russian literature of both a general museum and specialised nature" to the museum's library. In two instalments, he gave the Museum für Völkerkunde (MVK, now the Weltmuseum Wien) a collection of 63 old textiles, mostly made of velvet, and embroideries, which he had "secured" in a museum in the Crimea, for "fiduciary safekeeping". Some of the textiles were labelled with Cyrillic letters and numbers and originally came from the Muslim Crimean Tatars and the Jewish sect of the Karaites. Although the exact origin of the objects and the circumstances of their confiscation are not documented, their acquisition undoubtedly took place in the context of Nazi Germany's brutal war of extermination against the Soviet Union and the systematic looting of cultural property.

Fritz Manns died on 25 March 1945, in the course of hostilities in the Oderbruch. With effect from 6 June 1945, the Austrian authorities posthumously ordered his release from the KHM in accordance with the Prohibition Act. This meant that his relatives lost their entitlement to a pension. In 1946, the director of the MVK, Robert Bleichsteiner, registered the textiles from the Crimea as confiscated property, but no restitution was made. The objects were not inventoried until 1972, when they were transferred to the Museum of Folk Art and Folk Life in Vienna as permanent loans. They were never shown to the public. Intensive research, supported by the Ukrainian Embassy in Vienna, revealed that at least 28 of the objects appear on loss lists of artefacts that had been stolen from the Bakhchisaray Palace Museum in Crimea between 1941 and 1944. As the case did not fall under the Art Restitution Act, the objects were returned at an intergovernmental level in 2009: The embroideries were returned to the Republic of Ukraine together with a collection of confiscated letters ("Russian letters"), which had been taken from the territory of present-day Ukraine to the Technical Museum in Vienna during the Second World War, in a ceremony at the MVK. After their return, they were transferred to the Bakhchisaray Museum of Cultural History (Bakhchisaray Palace Museum).