Disbarment and Dispossession: The Glaser Collection

It was late in the night on February 13, 1945, that the Allies unleashed a firestorm onto Dresden, as the first wave of British RAF Lancasters released high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices from the skies above. Nearly thirteen hundred aircraft dropped four thousand tons of explosives during the joint British and American aerial mission that lasted approximately thirty-seven hours. The day following the last raid, Dr. Fritz Salo Glaser, who had survived the assault, had been scheduled to report to the Theresienstadt ghetto and transit camp. The destruction wrought on Dresden in the days prior ultimately spared him from deportation. He had escaped the immediate dangers of Nazi persecution, but the same could not be said for his impressive art collection, as the survival of the Glaser family to that point had in part depended on its liquidation.

Salo Glaser–he later petitioned to have "Fritz" added to his given name– was born in Zittau, Germany, the son of a merchant who was a leader in the local Jewish community. He studied musicology and law at several educational institutions at the turn of the century, focusing on the latter and earning a doctorate degree before establishing his own practice in Dresden at Wilsdruffer Strasse 1, mostly working in tax law. He soon after married Erna Löffler and they had two children.

A portrait of Dr. Fritz Salo Glaser prior to WWII. Courtesy of Dr. Sabine Rudolph and the Glaser family.

Glaser was an intellectual skeptical of religion, who, after voluntarily serving in WWI, left Judaism upon his father's death in 1922 and became more involved in the emerging social and cultural movements of the Weimar Republic. He gave legal support to defendants on the left of the political spectrum, representing a participant in the insurrections of German communist Max Hoelz, the "Red Robin Hood," and becoming a contracted lawyer in Saxon district courts in and around Dresden for the Rote Hilfe, the German branch of the International Red Aid which was a welfare organization that supported communist political prisoners. Although never a practicing communist, he sympathized with its ideology.

During this interwar period, Glaser also immersed himself in the flourishing German cultural scene, hosting social events at his home and amassing a collection of contemporary works of art, including those by Expressionists and New Objectivity artists such as Emil Nolde, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, and Wassily Kandinsky. A gracious patron, he even befriended German artist Otto Dix. The collection consisted mostly of watercolors and graphics on paper, but approximately forty paintings as well.

The National Socialists came to power in 1933, and that very year, the persecution of Glaser due to his Jewish heritage and communist affiliations began. Some of the earliest antisemitic laws of the Third Reich targeted those in the civil services, including the legal system. The Law on Admission to Legal Practice of April 7, 1933, barred any non-Aryan lawyer from practicing in Germany. Glaser was excluded from the racial clause and would have been allowed to continue his practice having been a German WWI veteran and already admitted to the bar years prior. However, another clause of the law was applied instead, debarring him due to his "communist activities," which were cited as a lecture he had given over a decade prior. His knowledge of tax law allowed him to work as an advisor until July 1936, at which point he was completely barred from any work in his profession. Deprived of employment and a continual source of income, Glaser turned to selling off his art collection piecemeal to support his livelihood and family.

Glaser's financial distress worsened after the November pogroms. In the cover of darkness, during Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, he fled his home to avoid arrest and deportation to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Upon his return, he was arrested and imprisoned for three weeks. On November 12, the Ordinance on Atonement by Jews of German Nationality was issued by the Reich and read: "The antagonistic stance of Jewry toward the German people and Reich, which does not shrink even from the cowardly acts of murder, requires us to stage decisive defense and require hard reparations." The Reich had levied a one billion Reichsmark reparations payment on Germany's Jews. A prior ordinance from April 1938 had required Jews with the total value of their assets exceeding RM 5,000 to register them with the state. Those individuals were now required to forfeit twenty percent– later raised to twenty-five percent when the Nazis realized their goal of one billion wouldn't be met at the current percentage rate– of the value of their reported assets beginning in December 1938 as a "Jewish Capital Levy" which was enacted by further decree that November. Glaser was assessed an "atonement tax" fee of RM 23,250. To pay the tax, he sold paintings by Klee, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. This was complicated further as another ordinance issued by the Reich that December forbade Jews from selling their works on the open market and Glaser was selling works by "degenerate" artists. Frequently monitored and harassed by the Gestapo in Dresden, he destroyed the records of his collection in an attempt to further conceal the illegal sales of his collection.

Glaser was arrested and again imprisoned after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler in Munich in November 1939. He settled in Berlin upon his release following month and remained there until late 1941. Upon his return to Dresden in January 1942, Glaser, who by now was in his mid-sixties, strung together work in industrial and manual occupations. During these final three years of the war, he continued to sell works from his collection to survive and had avoided deportation due to his marriage to an Aryan until the notice of February 1945. Following the aerial bombardment of Dresden, he was reunited with his family, who had remained safe as they had been sheltered in a small town on the outskirts of Dresden.

But tragically, the persecution of the Glaser family continued after the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. Glaser was employed with the district courts in Dresden–then in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, later, the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic–and resumed practice as a lawyer in mid-1946. In 1947, he decided to defend several judges and public prosecutors who had been indicted for crimes against humanity for imposing Nazi-era legislation, in particular capital punishment. Dresden city officials interpreted his actions as support of neofascist ideas and denied him status as a persecuted person of the Nazi regime and any reparations for his and his family's suffering under the Third Reich. Glaser repeatedly protested their decision, but to no avail. The lawyer who once defended communists during the Weimar Republic was now clashing with the new communist East Germany, eventually becoming ostracized from the courts and legal community and once again in financial distress from his diminishing income.

Glaser died in Dresden in October 1956, a little more than a year after he had again been banned from practicing law. Upon his death, his wife and daughter were left largely destitute and forced to sell works that the family had saved from the war for their livelihood. His wife's continued attempts to reinstate their victim status for a small pension were repeatedly denied as well.

The history of the persecution and collection slowly faded for decades until works began to resurface at the turn of the last century, many at the initiative of Glaser's heirs and their Dresden lawyer Dr. Sabine Rudolph, who has been representing the family since completing her doctorate in 2007 with a dissertation on Nazi looted art and restitution, including the Glaser case.

In addition to those works of art dispersed throughout collections in Europe, several works lost from the Glaser collection are most likely in the United States. Some are believed to have entered through the art trade in New York. Works that Glaser sold to Josef Nierendorf of the Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin during the Nazi era may have later reached Josef's brother, Karl, and the Nierendorf Gallery in New York. Other works may have entered American collections via art dealer I. B. Neumann, who had emigrated from Germany to the United States prior to the war and opened an art gallery in New York as well. "It would be desirable if restitution or other fair and equitable solutions could be found for these works of art as well as for those in Germany and Europe," states Dr. Rudolph, as she and the Glaser family seek to reassemble the lost collection one work at a time.

Glaser's Most Wanted

Three paintings sold by Glaser as a result of Nazi persecution are featured in the Foundation's WWII Most Wanted Art Deck of playing cards. Paul Klee's Landscape with Blue and Red Trees was among the work's sold to pay the mandatory "Jewish Capital Levy" imposed on Glaser in late 1938. An incomplete letter from Glaser to his son that was found in his estate indicates that Glaser sold Sultan & Lady by Emil Nolde and Otto Dix's Elsa, the Countess–under duress, given the relentless persecution–sometime in the period after his return to Dresden in 1942 and prior to his flight in the final months of the war. Given that these two paintings were in the possession of the same Berlin collector soon after the war, one must assume that the negotiations and eventual sale were finalized. All three works are believed to have survived the war and their last known whereabouts were in private collections.

The Foundation wishes to thank Dr. Sabine Rudolph for her contributions towards this piece.

Glaser Most Wanted: Nolde	Glaser Most Wanted: Dix	Glaser Most Wanted: Klee