They disdained Eastern European Jews and opposed Marxism, Zionism, and liberalism, while failing to grasp the uncompromising racial nature of Nazi antisemitism.
Schoeps went into exile in Sweden at the end of 1938, seven weeks after the Nazi Kristallnacht mobs destroyed most German Jewish businesses and places of worship and just before the organized persecutions of the Jewish people began in earnest.
Historian Matthias Hambrock describes the German Vanguard as a "small, quasi-esoteric club" that "consisted almost entirely of 'heads'", i.e. intellectuals and students.
In it, Schoeps wrote, among other things: "National Socialism saves Germany from destruction; today Germany is experiencing its völkisch renewal" and called for an "acceleration of the absolutely necessary separation of German and non-German Jews as well as the collection of all German-conscious Jews under uniform authoritarian leadership while bypassing the old organizations as much as possible".
[4] The Biographical Manual of German-Speaking Emigration After 1933 to 1945, Volume 2: "Politics, Economics, Public Life", cites Schoeps's cousin Heinz Georg Salomon Frank, a lawyer, as another of the leaders of the German Vanguard.