After the early death of his first wife Margarete Ast (1904–1924), he embarked on extensive travels and expeditions taking photographs, which became his profession and passion: Spain and north–west Africa in 1924; Egypt and Somalia in 1925; Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1927; Romania and Albania between 1926 and 1930; Portuguese Guinea in 1930–1931 (with Bernhard Struck, Museum of Ethnology, Dresden); British Solomon Islands, British New Guinea, as well as Bali in Indonesia in 1932–1933; Swedish Lapland in 1934; Burma, Thailand and French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) in 1936–1937; and, French–Morocco in 1949–1950.
[citation needed] Bernatzik financed his research and living expenses as a travel writer and freelance scientist, by publishing photo coverages, giving public slide lectures and purchasing collections for ethnological museums in Germany and Switzerland.
In June 1935, he applied for his postdoctoral habilitation to the University of Graz to be a professor based on the work he had done on "The development of the child on the Solomon Island of Owa Raha".
Plans for another expedition to the Chinese province of Yunnan were cut short by Hitler's attack on Poland in September 1939.
[citation needed] Persistent speculation and rumours were aired regarding Bernatzik's role during the Third Reich and the Second World War.
At the beginning of the war, Bernatzik was recruited into the Armed Forces and was stationed in Wiener Neustadt as a training officer for Air Defense.
It was commissioned the NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy whose leader, Franz Ritter von Epp had been a general in Africa during the First World War.
But from his point of view during that epoch, he obviously considered his behavior as inevitable, as a means to proceed with his work and to defend himself against various denunciations, to which he was very exposed.
[citation needed] Hugo Bernatzik lived with his family in Heiligenstadt, Vienna in a villa commissioned by his father in 1911, built by the architect Josef Hoffmann and furnished by artists from the Wiener Werkstätte.