The Law

 Kremser's legal opinion, and therefore the committee's decision, was premised on the false assertion that Adele’s will gave the Austrian Gallery an ownership interest in the paintings.  In coming to this conclusion, however, Kremser misread Adele’s will and expressly disagreed with all of the leading Austrian legal experts who have written on this precise legal issue in the last several years (before the Bloch-Bauer case arose). In his 1994 article on "The Legacy of an Object Not Belonging to the Estate,” Prof. Rudolf Welser concluded:

[The rule] that the testamentary disposition of an object not belonging to the estate is valid when the object belongs to an heir, does not apply in the case when the testator sets forth that the heir should upon his own death leave an object from his own separate property to a third party.

 Adele's will reads as follows: 

I ask my husband after his death to leave my two portraits and the four landscapes of Gustav Klimt to the Austrian Gallery.

 In the estate files is a declaration dated January 1926 from Gustav Bloch-Bauer (Ferdinand’s brother), the attorney for the estate, stating:

It should be noted that the referenced Klimt paintings are not the property of the deceased testatrix, but of her husband.

 Thus, it is clear that Adele's request in her will was not a legal bequest, but was at most a "Legacy of an Object Not Belonging to the Estate" asking her husband Ferdinand to dispose of his own property in a certain way after his death. This wish, according to Prof. Welser and the other Austrian legal scholars, is, and was, unenforceable. To enforce such a request against the terms of Ferdinand’s last will would violate the and circumvent the strict laws regarding testamentary dispositions.  And yet Kremser and Wran led the commission members to believe the exact opposite so that there would be no opposition to the government’s pre-ordained decision not to return the paintings.