The k. k. Postmuseum, founded in 1889 by order of the Minister of Trade, opened to the public at the Rotunde in the Vienna Prater from 1891. In 1913 it moved to the newly built Technisches Museum Wien (TMW). Because of the First World War, however, the postal museum section of the TMW did not open until 1923. It was renamed Post- und Telegraphen-Museum in 1930 to better reflect the modern technological developments in the postal service. After the annexation, the museum was initially answerable to the section of the Reich Post Ministry responsible for Austria. Later it was incorporated along with the historical postal collections in Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Dresden as a department of Reichspostmuseum in Berlin, losing its autonomy in this way, although staff matters were still dealt with by the Reichpost office in Vienna. The Institute for the History of the Postal Service was established at the University of Vienna in 1943 on the initiative of the then director of the Vienna department of the Postmuseum, Erhard Riedel, who was instrumental in the transfer in 1943/44 of extensive archive material (pictures, documents, photographs and books) from the museum to the institute. After the institute was closed in 1947, these items were returned. In 1945 the Post- und Telegraphen-Museum once again became autonomous. In Second Republic it was answerable to the post office authorities, the Generaldirektion für die Post- und Telegraphenverwaltung, initially department 4 and then, from 1951, the office of the director general. The Postmuseum was closed in 1980 and incorporated, like the Eisenbahnmuseum (railway museum), into the TMW, although not with its entire contents. Parts of the library and archives were transferred to the Austrian post office headquarters (Generaldirektion der österreichischen Post).

The Art Restitution Advisory Board received dossiers on two collections: the 1,200 or so letters from the western Ukrainian city of Kamenz Podolsk (Kamianets-Podilskyi), which a Wehrmacht soldier handed to the Vienna department of the Reichpostmuseum in 1942/43, were returned to Ukraine by the Republic of Austria in 2009 and 2015 without a Board recommendation as cultural items appropriated during the Nazi occupation. This case did not legally come under the Art Restitution Act. In the case of the transfer of philately collections by the Provincial Tax Office for Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland to the Postmuseum in 1967, several dozen envelopes were connected with victims of the National Socialists. The dossiers on Aranka Baumhorn, Laura and Robert Blumenfeld, the Bunzl company, Antonie and Berthold Hermann, Hans Koller, Eduard Mayer, Flora Schwarz, Leonie and Oskar Singer-Lokesch, Wilhelm Spielmann, Hugo Spitzer and Franz Wittenberg were dealt with by the Art Restitution Advisory Board in 2008. To date only the letters by Hans Koller have been restituted, while the decision on the Bunzl dossier was revised on the basis of new research findings.