 By the late 1930s, he held a prestigious position at the Wannsee Institut, the German center for studies of the Soviet Union.By the time of the invasion of Poland, the 30-year-old Buchardt was an "Obersturmführer" and the head of a small group of German-Baltic SS officers deployed to the Port of Gdynia to loot its archives, museums and libraries.The following year, he was assigned to the Office for the Resettlement of Poles and Jews in Poznań, where he classified the level of "Germanicness" of various sectors of the Polish population on a scale of 1 to 5.