“He looked for direct contact to ‘his’ artists whom he supported both financially and creatively with his many purchases,” according to a report by Heike Biedermann, an art historian at the Dresden State Collections. “The prices for works on paper were low, so he managed to buy a large amount of art without having extraordinary wealth.”

‘Degenerate’ Art

His collection was 90 percent comprised of works on paper, though he owned about 40 paintings. When the Nazis swept to power, the art Glaser loved was scorned as “degenerate.” He was banned from practicing as an attorney in 1933, and could no longer work as a tax adviser from 1937.

The house parties stopped, and he began to peddle works from his collection to support his family as his financial situation deteriorated. After December 1938, Jews were banned from selling art.

Rudolph, the lawyer representing his heir, learned from a family acquaintance that Glaser sold two Schmidt-Rottluff paintings, a Klee, a Kandinsky, a Kokoschka and a Nolde to pay the “Judenbusse,” a tax that Hermann Goering extorted from Jews after the pogroms of 1938 as “atonement for the hostile stance taken by Jews toward Germans.”

Gestapo, Inferno

With his house subject to frequent searches by the Gestapo, Glaser destroyed all documentary evidence of the forbidden art sales and kept what was left of his collection hidden.

During the Dresden inferno, he hid in his Dresden home. In the mayhem that followed, he slipped out of the city to join his wife and daughter, sheltered and concealed in a farmhouse about 10 miles (16 kilometers) to the south.

Rudolph said she is in suspense about the dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt’s accounts, which Focus magazine said were found with the cache of art in the Munich apartment. Focus, which first reported the find, also said a file of 181 unframed artworks in his son’s apartment is believed to have belonged to Glaser.

Hildebrand Gurlitt, like Glaser a lover of “degenerate art,” was born in Dresden 20 years later and died in the same year, 1956. Gurlitt went on to buy art for Adolf Hitler’s planned Fuehrermuseum in Linz, and sold the modern works the Nazis hated on their behalf.