In 1938, after the so-called ‘Anschluss of Austria’, an English exchange student rescues the literary estate of the author Arthur Schnitzler, who died in 1931, from his house in Vienna before it might be destroyed by the National Socialists and brings it to safety in Cambridge, where most of it remains to this day. There Schnitzler’s (divorced) widow begins, with Jella Lepman’s help, to forge some of the typescripts (some with handwritten additions), secretly stealing the originals and taking them to Schnitzler’s son in the USA. From there, they were later taken to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. Why did they do this? How did it come about? It was only in 2014 that the counterfeiting activity became known to the public. As part of the Digital Historical-Critical Edition of Arthur Schnitzler’s works a start has been made on reconstructing the eventful history of this poetic estate and identifying the individual forgeries by means of extensive typescript analyses. The history of this estate tells an exemplary and at the same time unique story of the fate of an intellectual family in the turbulent times of the 20th century.