Henry Emil Salloch, painter and graphic designer, was born Heinz Emil Salloch in Berlin, Germany on December 31, 1908. He studied at the Muthesiushochschule in Kiel, Germany and later taught art in Berlin. His refused to join the National Socialist Party and defied the Party's edicts when he refused to stop teaching art to Jewish students or to use the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter in his class. His idealism put him in grave danger and he fled to Cuba and immigrated to the United States in 1937. Salloch became a citizen of the United States on June 5, 1945.

He moved up the east coast from Florida to New York. In the late 1930s Salloch lived in the coastal village of Montauk on Long Island. According to the 1940 U.S. Census he was single and living in New York City. He traveled extensively about the eastern coastline but began to visit the American Southwest in the early 1950s.

Salloch was married to Erika Salloch, a professor of German at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.  As a young Jewish woman, Erika escaped Nazi Germany in 1937. Their home in Chestertown was located on Water Street and the house was filled with Native American rugs, watercolors and weavings.

The Erika and Henry Salloch Prize is given by the Department of Modern Languages at Washington College, in memory of Erika and Henry Salloch, to the student whose achievement and personal commitment have contributed to the understanding of other cultures.

A retrospective exhibition of Henry Salloch's work was mounted at the Ostholstein-Museum in Eutin, near Hamburg, Germany in 2006 and his work is represented in the Berlin Stadt Museum.