Neckel resisted the politicisation of his department at BerlinMarie-Luise Bott, "'Deutsche Slavistik' in Berlin? Zum Slavischen Institut der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität 1933–1945" in Die Berliner Universität in der NS-Zeit, Volume 2 Fachbereiche und Fakultäten, ed. Rüdiger vom Bruch with Rebecca Schaarschmidt, Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005, , p. 277, note 6 and was open-minded on race and its relevance to his discipline;Heinrich, p. 249 and note 86. nevertheless, the increasingly völkisch point of view in his writings, his initial support for Kummer and Herman Wirth, and his advocacy of the autochthonous theory of the origin of the runes have led some to see a marked decline in the calibre of his scholarly work beginning in the mid-1920s.See for example Mees, p. 175. His former teacher Heusler wrote repeatedly to his friend Wilhelm Ranisch that he seemed "no longer entirely sane" and that he seemed to have developed "an unhealthy ambition, not to say megalomania".Klaus Düwel and Heinrich Beck, ed., Andreas Heusler an Wilhelm Ranisch: Briefe aus den Jahren 1890–1940, Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1989, , cited in Fritz Paul: nicht mehr im vollen Besitz seiner Geisteskräfte; krankhaften Ehrgeiz, um nicht zu sagen: Größenwahn. According to Mees, pp. 175-76, Heusler "had come to the conclusion by 1933 that Neckel had simply gone mad".
