Marianne Schmidl

Marianne Schmidl (3 August 1890 in Berchtesgaden – April 1942 in the Izbica Ghetto) was the first woman to graduate with a doctorate in ethnology from the University of Vienna.

[1] An Austrian ethnologist, teacher, librarian and art collector, Schmidl was plundered and murdered in the Holocaust by the Nazis because of her Jewish origins.

Marianne Schmidl's mother, Maria Elisabeth Luise Friedmann (1858–1934), lived in Munich, and worked for the writer Paul Heyse.

From March 1921 she worked at the Austrian National Library, with a permanent civil servant position from 1924, as a lecturer for anthropology, science, mathematics and medicine.

In the course of this, she researched ethnographic museums in Switzerland, France, England, Belgium, Germany and Italy and published numerous scholarly works.

[12] Marianne Schmidl is remembered today not only as Austria's first Ph.D. in ethnology,[13] but also because – in the course of the principles for the restitution of looted art formulated at the 1998 Washington Conference – she was the original owner of many drawings by the brothers Olivier and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld could be made out.

After the "Anschluss" of Austria in 1938, Schmidl was forced to submit a property declaration on 30 September 1938 for her art collection on which the Nazi imposed special taxes.

[14] Her non-Jewish brother-in-law, Karl Wolf, brought the lot to the Viennese dealer Christian Nebehay, who in turn passed them on to the Leipzig action house C. G. Boerner.