As director of the Leipzig Opera, he conducted world premieres of works by Ernst Krenek and Kurt Weill, including Jonny spielt auf and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

He was dismissed by the Nazis in 1933, lived at risk in Stalingrad, Berlin, Prague, and finally Ostend, where he took his life together with his wife's.

[2] He was particularly controversial there because of the premieres of Krenek's operas Jonny spielt auf and Leben des Orest, and Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny: The house was so raging that you literally didn't hear the orchestra during the entire closing of the play, I was on duty there.

In the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the musicologist Alfred Heuß wrote a malicious commentary on the occasion of the Rienzi performance during the Wagner Festival week on 12 February 1933: "Unsuspecting, Brecher handled his peculiarly small baton for the last time in a Wagner performance.

"[2] His last appearance in Leipzig was probably Weill's Der Silbersee on 4 March 1933, when he left the podium during the performance because of constant roaring by the SA present, who were attacking his Jewish origins and objecting to the opera.

[2]Brecher lived in Berlin for a while, when Erich Ebermayer noted on 13 October 1935 in his diary: Today I had a shocking encounter in Grunewald.

Today, however, I met two people: Gustav Brecher, the former Generalmusikdirektor of Leipzig, and his wife, the daughter of privy councillor Deutsch, the creator of the AEG and friend of Walther Rathenau.

Above all, Brecher himself seems to suffer deeply under the outlawry and to have been struck at the core of his being; he cannot live without music as the true musician he is.

[5] The latter, who was not Jewish, left Ostend in August 1939[6] The fate of the Brecher family is not known but they disappeared without a trace around May 1940 when the Germans occupied Belgium.

[2] Their files in the National Archives of Belgium (Algemeen Rijksarchief) in Brussels retrospectively state they "left for England".