[6] Despite being a respected scientist in his field, Bredig was forced to leave the university by the National Socialists in 1933, ending his teaching and research career.
[11] Like Fritz Haber, another German chemist of Jewish descent,[10] Bredig felt a deeply patriotic attachment to Germany.
[12] Another outcome of his work was that Bredig introduced the idea of a Zwitterion, a dipolar ion with at least one positive and one negative functional group, and a net charge of zero.
[14] Bredig spent the next year and a half doing postdoctoral work at the laboratories of J. H. van't Hoff in Amsterdam, M. Berthelot in Paris and S. Arrhenius in Stockholm.
[3] In 1899, the Deutsche Elektrochemische Gesellschaft (German Electrochemical Society, founded 1894[4]) awarded an honorary prize to Bredig for his work.
[3]: XLVIII He was granted his teaching licence (venia legendi) after speaking on the topic "Über die Chemie der extremen Temperaturen" ("On the chemistry of extreme temperatures").
Haber left to become Headmaster of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin.
In 1922, Bredig participated in the International Chemical Reunion in Utrecht, the first meeting of chemists from Germany, Austria, England and the USA since the beginning of the war.
It was a step towards the rebuilding of peaceful discourse and scientific internationalism, led by Bredig's friend Ernst Cohen and his colleague Hugo Rudolph Kruyt [nl] of the University of Utrecht.
In his inaugural speech, Denkmethoden der Chemie (Thinking Methods of Chemistry), Bredig was open about his political beliefs, which could be described as liberal-democratic, supporting pacifism and internationalism.
[3]: XLVIII On January 30, 1933 Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist (Nazi) party assumed power, and began to use a variety of laws to enforce their agenda.
[33][34] This created large numbers of vacancies: an estimated 26% of chemists and biochemists were driven from posts at German and Austrian universities.
[35][36] Required with other professors at German universities to take an oath of allegiance pledging his loyalty to Adolf Hitler, Bredig refused.
[3]: IL The "retirement" of Bredig and other senior scientists such as Stefan Goldschmidt and Paul Askenasy left a significant gap in the university's expertise.
[3]: XLVIII His son Max Albert Bredig was warned by colleagues and left his job in Berlin in 1937, taking only his books.
He succeeded in reaching Sweden, England, and eventually the United States, joining Kasimir Fajans at the University of Michigan.
Before leaving, he sent his letters, books, photographs, and scientific notes out of Nazi Germany to the Netherlands where they were kept in safety until the end of World War II.