The only daughter of Baron Salomon James de Rothschild and Adèle Hanna Charlotte from the German branch of the Rothschild family, Hélène Betty Louise Caroline was born in Paris on 21 August 1863. After the early death of her father, Hélène grew up in seclusion under the guardianship of her uncle Mayer Alphonse de Rothschild in the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild at 11 Rue Berryer in Paris. Contrary to the tradition of marrying a close relative, Hélène married Baron Étienne van Zuylen van Nyevelt van de Haar, a native of the Netherlands, on 16 August 1887. The couple had two sons, Hélin (1888–1912) and Egmont (1890–1960). In 1890, Étienne inherited Kasteel de Haar near Utrecht, which the couple spent a great deal of money building and renovating in the “goût Rothschild” style over the following years. Hélène was one of the pioneers of motor sport: She was one of the first women to take part in car races – under a pseudonym – such as the Paris-Amsterdam-Paris race in 1898. Hélène was also a writer: She wrote novels, poems and short stories, was part of a feminist circle of women writers and ran a literary salon in Paris. Together with her friend, the French-English poet Renée Vivien, she published poetry and prose under the pseudonym Paule Riversdale. After the accidental death of her son Hélin near de Haar in 1912, Hélène mainly resided in Paris in her city villa at 70 Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. Hélène no longer lived with her husband Étienne. When he died in 1934, the title and the family estates, including the château, passed to her son Egmont.

As a member of the Rothschild family, Hélène van Zuylen van Nyevelt's property came to the attention of the Nazi regime after the occupation of France by the German Wehrmacht in the early summer of 1940. As early as August 1940, her name appeared on a list entitled “Special file Paris”. The central organ of the robbery was the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Reichsleiter Rosenberg Task Force) (ERR), made up of various groups, special commandos and field offices. From this point onward, the West Office, based in Paris, began to seize books and archive material, including the extensive library of van Zuylen van Nyevelt, for the central library of the planned Nazi elite university “Hohe Schule”. While furniture, antiques, books, photo albums and private correspondence were stolen from the Parisian city palace in January 1941, Hélène had managed to escape the repressive measures of the German occupying forces by fleeing. Together with her Portuguese partner Maria Olga de Moraes Sarmento da Silveira, she had been able to leave for Lisbon and flee from there to New York on 12 April 1941, where she remained throughout the war.

After the end of the war, the books looted from all over Europe for the central library of the “Hohe Schule” were found by the British occupying forces in the former Olivetan monastery at Tanzenberg Castle in Carinthia and returned to their former owners. Hélène van Zuylen van Nyevelt received over 7,000 books back in 1946 and 1947, and in 1947 some furniture and antiques that the ERR had distributed to various locations in Germany via the Musée du Jeu de Paume. Hélène van Zuylen van Nyevelt died in Lisbon in 1947. In 1950, her legal successors received further copies back, which in the meantime had been handed over to the book sorting center of the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) together with the remaining collection from Tanzenberg. In 2023, the Art Restitution Advisory Board recommended the restitution of a book found in the ÖNB to the legal successors of Hélène van Zuylen van Nyevelt.