Klemens Wilhelm von Klemperer (November 2, 1916 – December 23, 2012) was a historian of modern Europe and professor at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
He was a prominent member of the generation of young refugees and emigrants who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and established themselves as historians and often leading scholars in the United States.
He delivered a lecture in June 1998 at Westminster Abbey to mark the unveiling of a sculpture of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the "Martyrs' Gallery".
In the waning months of his life in Austria, he served as executor for the manuscripts in the estate of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Austrian playwright, poet, and great uncle by marriage to the Kuffner branch of his Viennese family.
After arriving in New York, von Klemperer joined Harvard University as one of 14 students accepted under Franklin D. Roosevelt's support initiative for refugee scholars.
Although the topic was not new, he shed new light on the subject and presented an in-depth study and balanced view of what actually transpired, based on his own painstaking research.
In 2008, a significant work of art, which had been seized from his father Herbert von Klemperer in 1938, was returned to his family through a legal process of restitution.
The painting, a portrait of a bagpiper by Hendrick ter Brugghen, one of the Utrecht Carravagisti, had been forcibly sold to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Köln where it hung for the next 70 years.
In 2009, the restituted painting was sold by the von Klemperer family at Sotheby's for a record price, and now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.