Before he reached professorship, a defamation campaign pressed by a colleague convinced the Nazi authorities to revoke his teaching permissions in 1935.
Peuckert doggedly refused to compromise his work with Nazi pressure, an attitude rewarded after the war when he was appointed as a professor at the University of Göttingen and became chair of Volkskunde, the only such position in Germany for many years.
In Bremen in 1959, Peuckert gave a lecture on ointments with hallucinogenic properties that were prepared and used by witches to leave their bodies and travel in the night.
As a brief aside, he mentioned that he had once tried such an ointment himself and achieved results entirely compatible with the out-of-body experiences testified to by the witches.
This sentence gave rise to an uproar, as papers made claims he himself practiced witchcraft and flew through the night.