Germany underwent significant regime change in January 1933 when the NDSDAP (Nazi Party) took power, and lost little time in imposing Germany's first twentieth century one- party dictatorship. Glaser participated in small clandestine resistance groups for about a year, before relocating to the Saarland, a part of Germany still under French military and political control, following terms imposed at the end of the war in 1919. The first question he encountered from local Communists in the Saarland was the standard one: "Comrade, do you have permission or an order from your regional [Communist Party] leadership to come here?" There was at this time growing pressure from the new German government for the Saarland to be returned to Germany, and the German position enjoyed increasingly unambiguous support from the British and US governments. From the Saarland Glaser moved on to Paris, which had become a focus for German Communists fleeing from Germany, where their party political activities were now illegal. In Paris he worked on several newspapers produced by exiled anti-Nazi German left-wingers. In 1935 he returned to the Saarland which by now was being returned to German control following the January referendum. He was arrested, but later in the year was able to return to France. He now settled not in Paris but in Normandy where he found a job in an SNCF (railway) workshop. He fell in love with and married a French woman: his civil status changed from that of a German refugee to that of a French citizen. He had already, by this stage, been stripped of his German citizenship. Shortly after this, as rumours of Stalin's atrocities became harder to ignore, and appalled by news of the Treaty concluded between Hitler's Germany and the "Communist" Soviet Union in August 1939 ahead of another Polish partition, Glaser resigned his Communist Party membership.