In 1933 he did voluntary work with the Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst (a precursor of the Reichsarbeitsdienst) in Jedwilleiten at the Neman River delta and joined the SA.
[1] In 1942 he had the rank of Hauptsturmführer, and as director of an Ahnenerbe department he was responsible for replacing the staff of universities in German-occupied Netherlands and Belgium with Nazis and collaborators.
[1] Schneider had an influential role in the Ahnenerbe and procured medical instruments from the Netherlands for lethal experiments conducted by Sigmund Rascher and Ernst Holzlöhner in the Dachau concentration camp.
[3] In 1945 Schneider fled from Berlin to Lübeck, where he used his contacts in the SD (intelligence service) to obtain a new identity as Hans Schwerte, born in Hildesheim on 3 October 1910.
[4][5] Schwerte studied again, now in Hamburg and Erlangen, where he received his doctorate in 1948 for a dissertation about Rainer Maria Rilke's notion of time.
After accidental discovery of Schneider's past, his American colleague Earl Jeffrey Richards notified the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Commentators were generally intrigued by the close parallels between Schneider/Schwerte's two lives, and wondered whether Schwerte had become a genuine antifascist in the 1960s or had merely taken the dissimulation to extremes, and what exactly it was that took him to the locations of his Nazi past.
[1] In spite of its unusual features the case is often regarded as symptomatic for the way in which West German universities dealt with the past, given the incomplete nature of denazification and the general continuity in their staff.