[1][2][3] In 1946 he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Theology and was also appointed to an additional position as Professor of Nordic Philology.

[5] In 1942 in Das Heilige im Germanischen, he opposed Rudolf Otto's influential viewpoint that the source of religion lay in a "stirring in the heart" of awareness of the numinous, arguing that all religious experience has a social and historical context.

[6][7] In Yngvi und die Ynglinger (1964) he dismissed the widely accepted view espoused by, for example, Otto Höfler that Germanic peoples had sacral kingship.

[8] The issue and his arguments are still debated today: in a re-examination in 2004, Olof Sundqvist substantially agreed, finding that "this paradigm [sacral kingship] implies a number of methodological difficulties";[9] Francis Oakley, however, argued in 2010 that although Baetke successfully rebutted the notion that Scandinavian kings were worshipped, he could not dismiss the evidence that they had some sacral status as mediators with the gods.

[2] However, he never joined the Nazi Party or any of its subsidiaries, including the Reich Author's Organisation, and during the war his election to the examining board of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Leipzig and to the Saxon Academy of Sciences both went unratified by the regime.