The beginnings of the present-day institute trace back to the era of National Socialism: in October 1936, the so-called "Mittelstelle Saarpfalz – 'Landsleute drinnen und draußen'" ("Central Office Saarpfalz - 'Compatriots inside and outside'") was inaugurated. The reestablishment was intended to function as the Genealogy and Emigration Research Department of the "Saarpfälzisches Institut für Landes- und Volksforschung" ("Saarpfalz Institute for Regional and Folk Research"). This institute had been recently initiated by the leader of the "Saarpfalz" district, Josef Bürckel, and was subsidized by the district council of the Palatinate. Fritz Braun, a consultant for border and foreign affairs in the NSDAP district cultural office and an avowed National Socialist, became the head of the "Mittelstelle," which was then located in the Karlsberg building on Stiftsplatz 5 in Kaiserslautern.
The primary task of the "Mittelstelle" was to act as a propaganda institution for the Nazi regime, with the main objective of legitimizing and disseminating its racist and expansionist ideology (keywords: genealogy, "Blood and Soil," "Germanization"). Notably, the overarching "Saarpfalz Institute" included the pseudoscience of "NS-Rassenkunde" ("Nazi Racial Studies") alongside folklore and toponymy research. This period laid the foundations for the .
Fritz Braun, a dedicated National Socialist and antisemite, was temporarily drafted as a reserve lieutenant in the Wehrmacht after the start of the war. In the meantime, from 1940 to 1942, he worked in the annexation administration in Lorraine. During the German occupation of France, a branch of the now-renamed "Mittelstelle Westmark" was established in Metz. Braun played a significant role in Josef Bürckel's brutal "Germanization policy" in Lorraine, contributing to the expulsion of more than 60,000 people to unoccupied France by the end of 1940. This included the Germanization of French surnames and his racist "training" sessions for the German Labor Front (DAF) to discriminate against foreign forced laborers. In early 1942, he provided the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi), which was under the SS, with a requested list of all "foreign ethnic" laborers in Lorraine. The goal was the deportation of up to 80,000 more people, a plan that could not be realized due to the course of the war.
Braun also participated in the "Germanization policy" in German-occupied Poland. At the request of SS and police leader Odilo Globocnik, Braun supplied historical data on descendants of Palatine emigrants for the settlement of Germans and those of German descent in the Zamość district in late 1941. This settlement plan required the large-scale expulsion and mass murder of the local population. Braun's contact and correspondent in Globocnik's staff, who had ordered the murder of over 175,000 Jews in the extermination camps during Operation Reinhard, was the Austrian ethnologist and SS officer Franz Stanglica. Stanglica, a member of the guard units of the Oranienburg and Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps, was responsible for the murder of up to 50,000 Jewish citizens in his planning area alone during Operation Reinhard. Additionally, by 1943, over 100,000 more Poles, classified as not "capable of Germanization," were either deported and murdered, forced into labor, or left to starve as a result of colonization policies. Due to his position, activities, and connections to the SS, it can be assumed that Braun was well aware of the consequences of his work and the outlines of the Holocaust. In any case, he expressed his "joy" to Stanglica about his contribution to the "ethnic task" of resettlement.
After the US occupying forces closed the "Mittelstelle" as a "Nazi organization" in 1945, Braun continued his research on Palatinate emigration in the subsequent years, initially as a freelancer after a brief period of captivity and denazification. His commitment to the displaced homeland populations was one of the arguments for appointing him as the head of the self-proposed "Heimatstelle Pfalz" ("Homeland Office Palatinate") in 1953 by the re-established district association in Kaiserslautern. Braun's involvement in Nazi expulsion policies during the war evidently played no role as an assessment criterion, nor did the fact that he falsely assured the district association that he had not cooperated with the "Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle" before. The "Heimatstelle" was still located at Stiftsplatz in Kaiserslautern until 1960, then moved to Augustastraße, and finally, in 1964, to the building of the Landesgewerbeanstalt, now the Pfalzgalerie Museum. In the creation of the "Heimatstelle," its explicit continuity with the predecessor institution was emphasized by the District Council Palatinate, which is extremely difficult to comprehend from today's perspective in light of Braun's NS career.
Upon Braun's retirement in 1970, Kaiserslautern historian Karl Scherer succeeded him as director. During Scherer's tenure, the "Heimatstelle" moved to the Gründerzeit villa at Benzinoring 6 in 1972, and there was an expansion, reorientation, and modernization of research content towards regional history and ethnology.
In the context of this development, the renaming of the institution in 1986 to the still-valid designation "Institut für pfälzische Geschichte und Volkskunde" (IPGV) in 1986 should also be seen. Since the 1980s, the internal structure and tasks of the institute, despite occasional adjustments, have remained fundamentally unchanged.