Gottlieb Reber

After his schooling, he entered the textile industry in Bremen and Hamburg ca 1900 before starting his own successful business in Langerfeld, near Cologne, which enable him to indulge his passion for art—particularly that of modern French artists—which he claimed to have studied at the University of Bonn.

A prolific patron of the Cubists, Reber's fortune suffered following the stockmarket crash in 1929, and from the 'thirties he was forced to sell many of his artworks.

Although believed to be a Nazi sympathizer, on 12 March 1943 Reber's German citizenship was revoked, mainly for his high-ranking activity in German Freemasonry, which he refused to relinquish, but also (he claimed) for speaking out against the treatment of French Jews, and for his proclivity for collecting the radical modernists.

By early 1945, he was expelled from Florence and under house arrest at Avellino, under orders of the Questura at Naples, his re-entry visa to Switzerland having been refused by the Swiss authorities.

On being questioned by an Allied Field Security officer in 1945, Reber claimed that the most important deal he arranged in Florence, via Hofer, was approximately twenty million lire-worth of Conte Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi's paintings.