The rise to power of the right-wing NSDAP during the Great Depression and Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reich chancellor on January 30 1933 were greeted by many Germans - also by some in the MGH - in the hope of a political and economical new beginning. In autumn 1932, the conservative elites of the Weimar Republic and leading representatives of German industry and agriculture had already begun pressuring Reichspresident Paul von Hindenburg to give Hitler the reigns of power, forming a nationalistic right-wing coalition behind the National-Socialists and their „Führer“. Like Hitler himself, they were convinced that the destruction of the Weimar democracy was the only possible way to resurrect Germany and realise their dreams of a new national Reich.
This was the context of the „Schnellbrief“ sent by the executive state secretary in the Reichsministerium des Inneren, Hans Pfundtner , to the MGH as one of the „subordinate agencies“ of his ministry on April 11 1933. Pfundtner, a Prussian administrative lawyer and member of the right-wing conservative DNVP since 1919, had only recently joined the NSDAP, in March 1932, but had immediately made himself a name with a memorandum inciting the National-Socialists, whom he referred to as „national activists“, to immediately begin with a radical ideological purge of the bureaucracy as soon as they rose to power. Pfundtner's communiqué ordered that, in accordance with the „Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums“ (civil service restauration act) passed on April 7 1933, all Jewish civil servants, employees and workers were to be dismissed from their positions at the MGH. Besides complying with the law, he thus additionally implemented a key aspect of National-Socialist ideology: As stated in article four of the NSDAP party manifesto, no Jew could belong the German Volk. Being nationalistic thus always also meant being anti-Semitic.
Paul Fridolin Kehr , the 72-year-old chairman of the central board of directors of the MGH and head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut for German history, was an experienced and internationally well-connected scholar who must have understood how things stood. Nevertheless, he may have wanted to believe that he was still dealing with a long-serving Prussian civil servant, not a National-Socialist, as he responded to Pfundtner's letter on April 16 1933, treating the order issued by the Reichsministerium des Inneren as a mere „formality“ and sidestepping Pfundtner's unmistakable command to implement racial cleansing with the declaration that no Jewish civil servant, employee, or worker had been engaged by the MGH during his term in office. This was indeed formally correct, if not factually so, for strictly speaking, neither Harry Bresslau, who had worked as the head of a section, nor the Jewish editors working on freelance basis, whom he had listed in his overview in 1926, fell into these categories.
In fact, in that same month as he wrote this evasive answer, Kehr entered personal negotiations with Pfundtner's superior, Reichsinnenminister Wilhelm Frick , a lawyer and „veteran warrior“ of the NSDAP, seeking additional financial resources for the MGH. He hoped to make use of the new regime in order to save the MGH from financial ruin and the threat of being disbanded by underlining that their work served the preservation of national and - even better - „ur-German“ cultural assets. Kehr paved the way for the transformation of The MGH into the „Reichsinstitut für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde “ in 1935.
