Apart from studying at the University of Vienna to be a teacher of Greek and Latin, Richard Nadler worked part-time as a research assistant in the Coin Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. After passing the first teaching examination in Latin in autumn 1938, he applied to the Vienna School Board for a position as a teacher. He was employed from October to December 1938 in the Staatliches Erziehungsheim (state approved school) Hacking before returning to the museum, where he worked as a researcher in the Coin Collection and was involved with the salvaging of art and cultural objects. In September 1940 he was enlisted as non-commissioned clerk in the Wehrmacht. He was captured by the British but released in October 1945. He was officially dismissed from the museum on 8 August 1945 as an "illegal Nazi". In a letter to the Austrian government in autumn 1945 he asked to be removed from the registered list of former Nazis, stating that he had been a member of the SA only for two weeks in 1933 and had registered for the SA again and sought membership of the NSDAP after the annexation only in order to obtain a position as a teacher; he had never been a member of the Party. In 1946, Sonderkommission 1. Instanz, Senat 7, allowed Nadler's claim that he had never been an "illegal". As he had taken the teaching examination during his time in the museum without obtaining a doctorate or conducting research, however, he was dismissed with effect from the end of February 1946. He lived later in Krems an der Donau, where he was a contracted teacher at the Bundesgymnasium.