After receiving commercial training in the Fuchs Book Factory, Marlier fulfilled his military service obligation in Infantry Regiment 22 in Kassel, after which he moved to Nuremberg.

[4] In 1904, Marlier was charged with battery and disturbance of the peace, and sentenced to six days in jail.

According to the police, Marlier had slapped the face of a woman waiting at a cab stand.

[5][6] In 1914, Marlier engaged architect Paul Baumgarten (later a favourite architect of Adolf Hitler) to build a magnificent villa, overlooking the Großer Wannsee, in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.

Marlier became involved in a tangle of legal troubles, and in 1921, he was forced to sell the Wannsee Villa to industrialist Friedrich Minoux for 2,300,000 reichsmarks.