Hanna, the eldest daughter of the Viennese lawyer and art collector Alfred Spitzer, worked as a language teacher, educator and domestic help at various private language schools and in households in Vienna after passing her teaching qualification exams in English and education in December 1916 and working briefly for the Friends Relief Mission in the summer of 1921. Together with her sister Edith Neumann, she inherited the extensive art collection when their father died in 1923 and their mother Hermine in 1930. In December 1927, several paintings from the Spitzer collection were auctioned off at the Dorotheum in Vienna. Further sales followed in the 1930s, as the two sisters were plagued by financial worries. Around 80 works were up for sale at the 1935 fall exhibition at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna, which featured pieces from the Spitzer and Heinrich Rieger art collections. After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938, Hanna Spitzer was among those persecuted due to her Jewish origins. She fled to London in 1939 and finally to the USA in the summer of 1940, where she found work as domestic help for various families in New York. Hanna Spitzer was able to take a part of her father's art collection with her to the USA. The majority of the collection, which was to have been sent by the Zdenko Dworak shipping company, was allegedly lost as the result of a bomb hit at the company's depot in Vienna. Hanna Spitzer tried to earn a living in New York by selling individual works from the Spitzer Collection; a long-standing business relationship with Otto Kallir, for example, to whom she sold works by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, is documented. Spitzer repeatedly appeared as a lender. Her application to the Fund for the Compensation of Losses of Assets of Political Persecutees, submitted in 1962, was rejected. It was not until 1977 that she was granted a small amount of assistance following a new application. Hanna Spitzer died in New York on 4 December 1982. In her will, she had instructed that a number of works of art be donated to friends and acquaintances. Six works by Theodor von Hörmann, Wlastimil Hofman, Wilhelm Bernatzik, Robert Russ and Emil Jakob Schindler were to be given to the Österreichischen Galerie on condition that the paintings be marked with a plaque stating that they had been donated by Hanna Spitzer in memory of her father Alfred Spitzer.