Exile to London and Ongoing Work

Fritz Saxl, who had effectively run the institute since Warburg's illness and resumed full direction after his death in 1929, recognized the mounting danger the rise of the Nazi party posed to an institute closely associated with a prominent Jewish family and to a scholarly method the regime's cultural politics found suspect, and he began arranging the library's relocation out of Germany well before Hitler's 1933 seizure of power made the danger acute. The library and institute, comprising some sixty thousand volumes along with photographic archives and staff, were shipped from Hamburg to London in 1933 and 1934, an operation funded partly by British sympathizers concerned to save the collection, and the Warburg Institute continued its work from London under Saxl's direction through the remainder of the 1930s and the Second World War.

The Institute became a School of the University of London in 1944, formalizing its position within British academic life after more than a decade as an independent refugee institution, and it has remained a constituent part of the University of London ever since, now housed within the University's School of Advanced Study alongside other specialist humanities institutes. The Warburg Institute continues today to maintain Warburg's original library classification system and his interdisciplinary approach, sustaining a strong ongoing research program in the history of magic, astrology, alchemy and related esoteric subjects as part of the broader study of the classical tradition's survival in Western culture.