He had his honorary professorship removed when Adolf Hitler came to power.[8] In 1914, the Emperor Wilhelm II proclaimed before the Reichstag the Burgfrieden ("the peace within a castle under siege"), announcing that henceforward all of the regional differences between the different states of the Reich; between rich, middle class and poor; between Roman Catholics and Protestants; and between rural and urban no longer existed and the German people were all one for the duration of the war. During the war, many Germans longed to have the sense of unity that the Burgfrieden inspired continue after the war, and it was during this period that many ideas started to circulate about how to convert the wartime Burgfrieden into a peacetime volksgemeinschaft.