During the course of his career he would write or co-write over 30 operetta and musical theatre librettos, many of which were later made into films. With the rise of Nazi Germany and the enactment of the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Schanzer left Berlin and moved to his villa in the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl. He returned to Vienna in 1936, but following the German annexation of Austria in 1938, he fled to Abbazia, a town now in Croatia but then under Italian control. He tried to emigrate to the US or England but was unsuccessful. Schanzer was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and was to be deported to a concentration camp. He committed suicide while in custody by taking the poison which he had always carried with him after his flight from Austria.