LOS ANGELES — It was a David and Goliath battle that many doubted she could ever win.

But Maria Altmann had every faith she would prevail in her attempt to recover five Klimt paintings taken from her Jewish family by the Nazis in 1938. After a seven-year legal campaign, she was proved right.

“I’m a very positive person, and I did think that we would win because I couldn’t see how we could lose,” the 91-year-old said at her family home in Los Angeles. “They had stolen them from us and kept them for 68 years, so it was time that something was done about it.

“People ask me if I feel bad for the Austrians, but that’s so ridiculous. They never made the slightest attempt to compensate us for all the years they had them. They just wanted to keep them.”

The paintings at the heart of the struggle included Gustav Klimt’s world-famous golden portrait of Mrs. Altmann’s aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, which her uncle commissioned from the artist and was completed in 1907. The painting, known as “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” became the world’s most expensive last year when it was sold for $135 million to the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder.

A second portrait of her aunt, commissioned in 1912 and entitled “Adele II,” and three landscapes were also among the haul of pictures taken from the Vienna home of her uncle, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, in 1938. The four paintings sold for just over $200 million at Christie’s last autumn.

Mrs. Altmann, who fled Nazi-occupied Austria with her husband Fritz after his release from Dachau concentration camp, settled briefly in Liverpool before immigrating to America in 1940. Her uncle escaped Austria for Czechoslovakia and then Switzerland. While his wife had written in her will that the paintings were to be given to the Austrian National Gallery, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer was the actual owner, having paid for the pictures. In his will, he left them to his nieces and nephews.

But for decades the Austrian government insisted the pictures were its rightful property. Mrs. Altmann, the youngest of five siblings and the last surviving direct relative of Mr. Bloch-Bauer, remembers vividly how the Nazis knocked on her door in 1938 and took all her jewelry.

The Nazis also seized Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s collection of porcelain, his home, and his sugar factory. The paintings ended up in Austrian museums.

Previously, they had been in the former bedroom of his wife, who died in 1925. Mrs. Altmann recalled how her uncle had turned the room into a memorial.

Mrs. Altmann finally realized the paintings should be with her family after visiting Vienna in 1998 and meeting a campaigning journalist, Hubertus Czernin, who had researched the case. “I had never even thought of taking the paintings away,” she said. “I was under the impression that they were theirs.”

She teamed up with Randol Schoenberg, a Los Angeles lawyer who is the grandson of another Viennese refugee, the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Their battle to recover the pictures, which is the subject of a BBC documentary, began in 1999. Mr. Schoenberg used a law that allows Americans to sue foreign governments from within America.

Eventually Austria appealed to the Supreme Court, where the panel ruled by six to three that the pictures belonged to Mrs. Altmann.

Mrs. Altmann, who has four children, said she would have been happy to leave the pictures in Austrian museums if the government had acknowledged they were hers and compensated the family.

She took possession of the pictures last year and exhibited them at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The golden portrait was then sold to Mr. Lauder and is now on show at his New York gallery.

Mrs. Altmann did not feel bad selling the pictures. “I never had them in my home. They were in my uncle’s house and then in the museum. So I had no feeling of ownership any more,” she said.