Academic opponents already threatened the Institute politically a full three years before 1933.

Evidence

A Frankfurt professor of economic theory, Fritz Schmidt, complained in July 1930 to the Prussian Ministry of Culture that assistants at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research were selected on a prejudiced basis, that a considerable number of communist and revolutionary students, in many cases foreigners' had recently gathered there, and that lively agitation was developing. He added, threateningly: The ministry will not be able to remain indifferent to this, when the revolutionary communist movement in Prussia is at the same time being prosecuted as hostile to the state.’ He may have been referring to the edict of June 1930 by the Prussian Government, which made it illegal for civil servants to belong either to the NSDAP (Nazi Party) or to the Communist Party, and may have been using this as an excuse to make a more general threat to continue academic disputes with political means. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 136

Categorization

• XREF: Pre-1933 Nazi-era pressure on the Institute connects to wider framework of how academic institutions faced political attack in Weimar’s final years; resonates with the general trajectory toward 1933.