He came from an assimilated Jewish home,[1] the sixth of seven children of the industrialist Ignaz Petschek and his wife Helene, née Bloch.
[4] At the beginning of the 20th century, Ignaz Petschek parted company with his brothers and acquired considerable shareholdings, especially in the central and eastern German lignite industry, which gave him a dominant position there.
[7] In March 1926, he was elected to the board of directors of Oehringen Bergbau AG, one of the family's largest and most important shareholdings in Upper Silesia.
[1] After the death of Ignaz Petschek in 1934 his four sons continued the enterprises of the Ústí nad Labem part of the family largely independently of each other until their expropriation under the Nazis in 1939–1940.
Hermann Göring set up a committee in January 1938 to find ways of quickly "Aryanizing" the Petschek companies.
After the Munich Agreement, the Nazis gained access to the business premises in Ústí nad Labem in October 1938.
The assets, business concerns, and property of all family members were transferred to non-Jews by the German authorities in forced sales or confiscated by the Gestapo.
[citation needed][19] Frank Petschek appears in the list of cultural property claims in the National Archives.
[20] A musical manuscript handwritten by Ludwig van Beethoven was restituted following recognition that the Petschek family had been plundered under the Nazi regime.