After the war, Waldeck-Pyrmont studied agriculture. On 1 November 1929, he joined
Adolf Hitler's
Nazi Party, becoming a member of the
Schutzstaffel (SS) on 2 March 1930. He was immediately appointed
adjutant to
Sepp Dietrich, before becoming
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's
adjutant and staff chief in September 1930. Waldeck-Pyrmont was elected to the
Reichstag in March 1933 on the
electoral list of the Nazi Party. At the November 1933 election, he was returned as a deputy for electoral constituency 23, (
Düsseldorf West) and retained this seat until the final days of the Nazi regime. Also in 1933, he was promoted to the rank of SS lieutenant general. Buchenwald had first caught the attention of Waldeck in 1941 when, glancing over the camp's death list, he came across the name of
Walter Krämer, a head hospital orderly at Buchenwald. He recognized it because Krämer had successfully treated him in the past. Waldeck investigated the case and discovered
Karl-Otto Koch, the camp's commandant, had ordered both Krämer and Karl Peix (a hospital attendant) killed as "political prisoners" because they had treated him for
syphilis, a fact Koch wished to keep secret. Waldeck also received reports that a certain prisoner had been shot while attempting to escape. By that time, Koch had been transferred to the
Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, but his wife,
Ilse, was still living at the Commandant's house in Buchenwald. Waldeck ordered a full-scale investigation of the camp by
Georg Konrad Morgen, an SS major who was a judge in a German court. Throughout the investigation, more of Koch's orders to kill prisoners at the camp were revealed, as well as evidence of embezzlement of property stolen from prisoners. One of his first acts in his new role was ordering French hostages to be placed on German troop trains, to discourage sabotage attempts on them. He was made a general in the
Waffen-SS in July 1944. ==Arrest and later life==