Brașov gave Bran Castle to Queen Marie in 1920, her daughter lost it in 1948, and Romania returned it to her grandchildren's generation in 2006

On 1 December 1920 the city council of Brașov voted unanimously to give Bran Castle to Queen Marie of Romania. She made it her favourite home. Her daughter, Princess Ileana, received the castle by her will. During the Second World War Ileana ran a hospital there called the Queen's Heart. After King Michael's abdication, Ileana and her family went into exile in 1948, and the castle passed to the Romanian state, which ran it as a museum. Ileana's children, Archduke Dominic of Habsburg and his sisters Maria Magdalena Holzhausen and Elisabeth Sandhofer, claimed it. On 18 May 2006 Romania returned the castle to them, with the Ministry of Culture keeping the administration for three years. The state moved its collections to the nearby Vama Medievală, a building the family also owned, where the Bran National Museum opened on 31 May 2009 with Queen Marie's heart on loan from the National History Museum. The heirs took control on 18 May 2009 through their company, Compania de Administrare a Domeniului Bran, and reopened the castle on 1 June 2009 with their own furniture. They sold their own Chateau Bran wine at the opening. Maria Magdalena died in Salzburg in 2021. In May 2026 VT Bran, an entity of Joel Weinshanker's Ad Populum group, which runs Graceland, bought 80 percent of the castle's operating company from Ileana's heirs. The heirs kept the castle itself as co-owners.