After studying philosophy and art history in Berlin and Bonn, Baeumler received his doctorate in Munich in 1914 with a thesis on the problem of general validity in Kant's aesthetics.
In 1933, he was appointed by the National Socialist Prussian Minister of Culture Bernhard Rust to a newly established chair of philosophy and political pedagogy at Berlin University, without the faculty's involvement, and at the same time director of the newly founded Institute for Political Pedagogy.
"Poor Berlin faculty: Baeumler their philosopher, Neubert their Romanist," Victor Klemperer commented.
He contributed to the Zeitschrift für nationalrevolutionäre Politik under the pseudonyms "Leopold Martin" and "Wolf Ecker".
[5] At the Reichstag elections of 1932, Baeumler openly declared his allegiance to the NSDAP along with other philosophers,[6] but it was not until after the party had come to power that he applied for membership.
Baeumler went on to explain: "In a word, it can be said here what National Socialism means intellectually: the replacement of the educated by the type of soldier."
In 1934, Baeumler demanded the "political soldier" as a student ideal,[9] the establishment of "men's houses" and the exclusion of the "feminine-democratic".
Baeumler worked there primarily as Rosenberg's liaison to the universities[11] and also edited the Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehung and, from 1936, the journal Weltanschauung und Schule, whose editor was Hans Karl Leistritz.
His task in the Rosenberg Office, Science Department, was in particular "to work on the assessment of humanities scholars to be appointed to universities and to deal with the fundamental questions of pedagogy.
[16] One of Baeumler's more well-known texts is "Hellas and Germania", published in his 1937 book, "Studies in German Intellectual History".
The basic thesis of this text is that any renewal for Germany, and indeed the West in general, would require a recovery of the values which permeated Ancient Hellas.
Rather, our knowledge confirms the intuitive certainty of Winckelmann, Hölderlin and Nietzsche that our fate is decided in the face of Hellas.
"[17] In this 1942 paper, Baeumler shows how, in the Nazi regime, the concepts of race and heredity have a preeminent meaning.
For him, historical epochs of the harvest are only suitable for an intellectual content to reach "that degree of its formation in which it becomes teachable".
Only after the new world view had undergone its "shaping" by artists and thinkers would it be handed over to the school as teaching material.
In this work from 1942, Baeumler justifies the teacher training college, which at this time had taken on its final form according to a Führer decree, with "necessities of national existence" and "circumstances of the matter".
As an influential philosopher in Nazi Germany, Baeumler used Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy to legitimize Nazism.
Thomas Mann read Baeumler's work on Nietzsche in the early 1930s, and characterized passages of it as "Hitler prophecy".
Martin Heidegger praised Baeumler's edition of Der Wille zur Macht as a "faithful reprint of Volumes XV and XVI of the Complete Edition, with an intelligible afterword and a concise and good outline of Nietzsche's life story.
Only the two volumes compiled by Baeumler under the title Die Unschuld des Werdens (The Innocence of Becoming) with materials from Nietzsche's estate are still in the original version from 1931 in the programme of the Kröner publishing house.