[9] When Austria joined Hitler's Third Reich in 1938, Altman's textile plant and properties in Vienna were confiscated by the Nazis.

[10] His brother Fritz Altmann – husband of Jewish refugee Maria Altmann, who made her living in America after the war selling Bernhard's cashmere sweaters – was taken prisoner by the Nazis and Bernhard was forced to sign over the business in return for Fritz's release from Dachau Concentration Camp.

[12] In 1942, still in New York, Altmann focused again on what he had perfected in Vienna before being forced out by the Nazis: cashmere, as well as a new pattern he had been working on called argyle, neither of which the United States had seen on a mass scale.

"[13] With Maria and Fritz as the primary "boots on the ground" in California, the cashmere business started in North America in 1947; Bernhard subsequently opened a factory in Texas.

[16] Artworks seized from Bernhard Altmann by the Gestapo in 1938, were sold via the Dorotheum auction house[17] and ended up in Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.