Einstein on the Run Read online

  Having collected a by now customary honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow along with a former prime minister of France, Édouard Herriot, near the end of June Einstein left London and returned to his home and his wife in Belgium. Although he could not have anticipated it, he was about to embark on perhaps the most anxious and exhausting period of his life: a direct clash between his personal vision of the world and the dark reality of Nazi Germany, in which England – in the person of the enigmatic Commander Locker-Lampson – would help to save Einstein from being assassinated.

  Through your well-organised work of relief you have done a great service not only to innocent scholars who have been persecuted, but also to humanity and science. You have shown that you and the British people have remained faithful to the traditions of tolerance and justice which for centuries you have upheld with pride.

  Opening words of a speech by Einstein at the Albert Hall in London, October 1933

  Hitler estimated that what he called the ‘rebirth of Germa-ny’ in 1933, and after, cost 330 lives. A current scholar of Nazism, Daniel Siemens, offers a more realistic estimate in Stormtroopers, his history of Hitler’s Brownshirts, bearing in mind that on 31 July 1933 the leader of the Brownshirts, Ernst Röhm, issued a secret decree that for every stormtrooper killed by political opponents, regional leaders should execute up to twelve members of the enemy organisation behind the attack. According to Siemens, during 1933, the Nazis interned more than 80,000 Germans, and killed more than 500 people, ‘maybe even twice as many’, either directly or through beatings and torture. Some of the dead were described by name in The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror – a book compiled by the World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism – which was published on 1 August in German and a month later in an English edition. It commented: ‘Murder stalks through Germany. Mutilated corpses are carried out of Nazi barracks. The bodies of people disfigured beyond recognition are found in woods. Corpses drift down rivers. “Unknown” dead lie in the mortuaries.’

  The educated German middle classes mostly condemned the Nazi excesses in private, but averted their eyes from them in public. Fear was obviously the main reason for their behaviour, but there was also an element of approval of the violence as a supposedly necessary transition from the economic and political chaos of recent years to a brighter and more stable future under Hitler.

  In May, the viciously anti-Semitic illustrated brochure mentioned in the Prologue featured Einstein and some sixty prominent Jews and alleged Jews, alive and dead, including Charlie Chaplin. (Chaplin was described as ‘a little sprawling Jew, as boring as he is repulsive’.) Entitled Juden Sehen Dich An (Jews Are Watching You), the brochure was written by Johann von Leers, a close collaborator of Josef Goebbels and a future officer in the armed wing of the SS, the elite corps of the Nazi Party. Beneath Einstein’s photograph von Leers provided the caption: ‘Discovered a much-contested theory of relativity. Was greatly honoured by the Jewish press and the unsuspecting German people. Showed his gratitude by lying atrocity propaganda against Adolf Hitler. (Not yet hanged.)’ The brochure must have sold well in Germany, because it went into a second edition.

  The German-Jewish reaction to the Nazi persecution was mostly one of paralysis, like ‘a bird fascinated by a serpent’, according to Elsa Einstein’s close friend Antonina Vallentin, a biographer born in Poland, educated in Germany and by 1933 settled in France. In her 1954 biography of Einstein, Vallentin was highly critical of German Jews at this time. ‘Had they become so totally absorbed in the German nation? Were they Germans more than they were Jews, in spite of being rejected by the new Germany?’ Many of them openly blamed Einstein for provoking the persecution with his criticisms of the Nazis from the safety of exile. ‘We get as many angry letters from the Jews as we do from the Nazis,’ a distraught Elsa wrote to Vallentin from Le Coq in April 1933. ‘My husband has not allowed himself to be silenced. Nothing could stop him from speaking out his mind. He has remained faithful to himself.’ But, she added miserably, her daughters were still in Berlin: a source of huge anxiety both to themselves and to their mother in Belgium. Although Margot soon escaped, Ilse was in Berlin until May. (Ilse died in Paris in 1934, and Margot emigrated to the United States, like her mother.)

  Along with the abuse of Einstein from Germany – some of it from Jews – came widespread support from other countries. For example, he received a moving letter from Murray, his friend from the ill-fated International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. Writing from Oxford on 31 March, Murray remarked:

  I need hardly tell you with what feelings of indignation and almost despair your friends here have been watching the persecution both of Jews and Liberals in Germany, or with what great personal sympathy we have thought of you. Fortunately you are out of Germany, and if you choose to renounce your nationality all the world will be ready to welcome you. It is not for me to influence your choice. I know your friends in Oxford would love to have you here, but I know also that there will be competition among all civilised countries for the honour and pleasure of having you as a citizen.

  OFFERS FROM UNIVERSITIES IN MANY COUNTRIES

  Murray was right. During April, Einstein received offers of professorships from the Collège de France in Paris, the University of Madrid, the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and from other countries, including Holland and Turkey. He agreed to the French and Spanish appointments on condition that he could devote to them only a little time; he accepted the offer from Princeton, with the proviso that he would not arrive until October 1933; and he turned down the Hebrew University. In the meantime, of course, during June he expected to visit Oxford, where Lindemann would certainly have been sympathetic to finding Einstein a professorship, had he wished for one. ‘I now have more professorial chairs than reasonable ideas in my head,’ Einstein joked in late April to his old friend from Olympia Academy days in Zurich, Maurice Solovine. ‘The devil makes a fool of himself with their size!’

  In each case, except in Oxford, his Jewishness proved to be an issue. In Paris, the editor of an influential royalist journal, Action Française, Léon Daudet, vigorously protested against the election of Einstein to the Collège de France. ‘There is no need for us to provoke a casus belli with the Germany of Hitler out of love for Israel,’ wrote Daudet. He explicitly linked the matter with the notorious Dreyfus Affair that had divided France on anti-Semitic lines between 1894 and 1906.

  The Spanish appointment caused the Jewish Chronicle (in England) to rejoice:

  Spain’s offer to Einstein of a chair at the Madrid University is an incident by which no Jew can fail to be moved profoundly. Four centuries and more ago she expelled the Jews from the peninsula. Today the German Reich has laid a bridge over that time gap and marched back to the medieval days. Thereupon modern Spain opens its doors, and grants a signal honour to the leading Jew among German exiles.

  Einstein agreed to visit Spain during 1934. But when the Spanish Catholic press attacked his professorial appointment, he withdrew from it.

  In the case of the Princeton professorship, Einstein himself objected to the fact that Princeton University practised a numerus clausus in the admission of Jewish students. Although the new Institute for Advanced Study was not part of Princeton University, it relied, according to its literature, ‘on a fortunate symbiosis’ with the university ‘with which it enjoys close academic and intellectual relations’, as Einstein noted in a letter to the institute’s director, Abraham Flexner. He was therefore concerned that his name might be associated with this Princeton University admissions quota for Jews.

  Regarding the Hebrew University, there had long been major differences between Einstein and its management, originating in his first visit to Palestine in 1923. By 1929, these had become so severe that he resigned from the university’s governing body. But Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader based in Britain, was still resolutely determined to persuade the world’s most famous Jewish intellect
ual to spend time in Jerusalem as a visiting professor. Einstein’s exile from Germany in March 1933 seemed the perfect moment for yet another invitation from the Hebrew University. In Weizmann’s view, as told to the New York Times, ‘There is his place, and there he would cease to be a wanderer among the universities of the world. . . . Jerusalem, although it cannot offer him the same facilities, has certainly a claim on him – particularly since he does not need any special equipment but only a pencil and a piece of paper – and that we could afford him in Jerusalem.’

  Einstein robustly – and very publicly – refused. A reporter from the Jewish Chronicle who interviewed him in Le Coq in April asked whether he was willing to cooperate with the university. Despite the crisis for Jews in Nazi Germany,

  [h]e answered emphatically in the negative. . . . He did not specify the exact nature of his complaint but, in view of his statements, I felt justified in enquiring whether he had had an opportunity of closely examining the work of the Hebrew University and upon what his opinions were based. The professor replied that his opinions had been formed at the time when he was a member of the curatorium of the university and on information which he had obtained from those in whom he had complete confidence. He had also formed his opinion when he saw who had been retained by the university and who had been estranged.

  To Weizmann himself, Einstein wrote privately on 7 May, using a word more usually associated with anti-Semites: ‘It is completely clear to me that tampering with the constitution will be of no use as long as downright vermin continue to play the leading role in the executive and faculty in Palestine.’ His particular bugbear, as Weizmann well knew, was the university’s founding chancellor, Judah Magnes, a prominent but academically undistinguished rabbi from New York who wanted to model the Hebrew University along American collegiate lines. Only when Magnes agreed to step down as chancellor after the report of an official committee of inquiry in 1933–34 chaired by the British scientist and educationist Sir Philip Hartog, so as to become the university’s first president in 1935, was Einstein willing to rejoin the board of governors. Even then, he did not agree to leave Princeton and visit the Hebrew University as a professor.

  Jewish affairs of various kinds – rather than academic or scientific matters – undoubtedly motivated Einstein’s next visit to England in July, about a month after his return from giving lectures in Oxford and Glasgow. However, its chief goal remains something of a mystery.

  On 20 July, a cryptically brief letter from Locker-Lampson in London to Lindemann in Oxford, mentioning their mutual friend Winston Churchill, abruptly and dramatically announced: ‘Someone has seen Einstein and is bringing him to England and has asked me to put him up at my cottage this weekend. I have, therefore, arranged to do this and am taking him to Winston’s on Saturday. I do hope you are likely to be there.’ A second letter on 21 July from Locker-Lampson’s secretary to another Einstein friend and zealous protector in England – the London-based, Palestinian-Jewish linguistic scholar Abraham Yahuda – referred more specifically to ‘a friend’ of the commander who ‘has seen Professor Einstein abroad’. The secretary added: ‘He may even arrive tonight, although I really cannot be certain of anything till he turns up.’

  The identity of this unnamed Locker-Lampson/Einstein contact has not been established. Nor is it clear why Einstein decided to leave Belgium at short notice and arrive unaccompanied in London on the evening of 21 July. Although his mission was certainly political, connected with the Nazi threat to the German Jews, its precise purpose is unknown. Perhaps it had some connection with his personal affairs, such as the possibility of his becoming a naturalised British citizen and also of his fighting the confiscation of his money and property in Germany. But these seem to have been ancillary considerations for Einstein, judging by a letter he wrote from Le Coq on 20 July. This was in response to one sent to him from Paris, dated 18 July, written by a German-Jewish businessman and anti-Nazi activist, Lionel Ettlinger, then staying discreetly in a Paris hotel. Ettlinger proposed a plan for a central office in Geneva attached to the League of Nations dedicated to the political problems imposed on German Jews by Hitler’s regime. Would Einstein agree to advocate such a plan? Einstein responded: ‘I am going to England tomorrow to speak to the most respected English Conservatives.’ He would submit the plan to them, and if they judged that his support would help its reception by the politicians, he would lend his name. By now, Einstein was becoming more circumspect in his public pronouncements against the Nazis. As he warned Ettlinger: ‘When I appear in public as a prosecutor against the German government, this has the most terrible consequences for the German Jews.’

  CONVERSATION WITH WINSTON CHURCHILL

  On the day after Einstein’s arrival in London, 22 July, Locker-Lampson took his guest to see Churchill at the latter’s country house, Chartwell, in Kent, not far from Locker-Lampson’s cottage in Surrey. A photograph shows the two of them in Chartwell’s garden, with Einstein in a white cotton suit and tie looking uncharacteristically smarter than a casually countrified Churchill. Lindemann was present, too, and presumably acted as an interpreter, since Churchill spoke little or no German – or perhaps Locker-Lampson did the translating. Later that day, Einstein reported to his wife in Belgium that he had been with Churchill around midday. ‘He is an eminently wise man, and it became quite clear to me that these people have planned well ahead and will act soon.’ Twenty Jewish researchers had already been found places in England. During the afternoon an important English cancer researcher had made interesting comments about his research. Einstein was glad to get to know these ‘leading Englishmen’. Lindemann was ‘untiring’, Locker-Lampson ‘touching’; he ‘seems to have no egoistical motives for his undertaking – a black swan.’ (Einstein’s final German phrase translates literally as ‘a white raven’.) Yahuda was scheduled to arrive from London that evening.

  Einstein with Winston Churchill at the latter’s country house, Chartwell, July 1933. They discussed the Nazi threat to world peace, which they recognised to be serious, ahead of most of their contemporaries, and agreed that an armed response would be necessary.

  This, unfortunately, is all that is known about the sole personal encounter between two of the leading candidates for the title of ‘Person of the Century’ in Time magazine in 1999. Indeed, Einstein said almost nothing about Churchill post-1933, while Churchill maintained an absolute silence about Einstein until his death – as he did about many other world-leading figures whom he encountered. (When in 1946 Churchill was offered a large sum of money by a news agency for an article attacking a 1945 article by Einstein praising socialism, he ignored the invitation.) As for the star witnesses of the Chartwell meeting, Lindemann and Locker-Lampson, each kept his own counsel. Einstein’s signature does not even appear in Churchill’s visitors’ book.

  No doubt Einstein and Churchill were an unlikely couple – like Einstein and Locker-Lampson, for that matter – given Churchill’s aristocratic background, intense patriotism, convinced militarism and ignorance of science (hence his need for Lindemann). And yet they were similar in their early distrust of Nazism, even if Einstein was – almost inevitably – the more prescient of the two about the Nazi military threat. ‘As soon as Hitler took power, Einstein was quicker than any politician to judge what was going to happen,’ wrote C. P. Snow, who met both Einstein and Churchill. ‘He was much more rapid than Churchill in recognising that the Nazi Reich had to be put down by force.’

  After the meeting with Churchill, Locker-Lampson introduced Einstein to two other senior British politicians, also out of office in 1933, during the next three days. The two of them took tea with Sir Austen Chamberlain, the former foreign secretary (and former boss of Locker-Lampson), who shared Churchill’s attitude towards Nazism and in 1934 also became an early advocate of British rearmament. They also dined at the country house in Surrey of David Lloyd George, the former prime minister, who was less perceptive than Chamberlain about the Nazis. In neither case does
a direct record of the meeting survive. However, Lloyd George’s widow later noted of Einstein that: ‘L. G. was no scientist, but the two fraternised very quickly, L. G. being naturally sympathetic to the sufferings of the Jews under Hitler.’ In a telling detail observed by Locker-Lampson, Einstein, while signing Lloyd George’s visitors’ book, paused for a moment at the ‘Address’ column, and then wrote ‘Ohne’ – ‘Without any’.

  DISTINGUISHED VISITOR AT THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

  On 26 July, this detail was highlighted by Locker-Lampson in a speech before his fellow Members of Parliament sitting in the House of Commons in London, while Einstein himself sat listening in the Distinguished Visitors’ gallery. The occasion was a motion introduced by Locker-Lampson under the ten-minutes rule: ‘That leave be given to bring in a bill to promote and extend opportunities of citizenship for Jews resident outside the British Empire.’

  He opened his short, and even now quite stirring, argument on an individual note:

  I am not personally a Jew. I do not happen to possess one drop, so far as I know, of Jewish blood in my veins, but I hope that I do not require to be a Jew to hate tyranny anywhere in the world. I hope I only require English birth and breeding to loathe the oppression of a minority anywhere. It is un-English, it is caddish to bully a minority, and it is the duty of this House to consider the circumstances of people who are no longer citizens of a state which we recognise. I am not anti-German, and many of us in this House are almost pro-German. But I was one of the few people on this side of the House who, after the war, pleaded for fair play for Germany. I felt that the great German people had been misled by their leaders.

  Then he spoke of the Nazis’ current treatment of German Jews, in particular Einstein:

  And who altered me towards Germany? It was the German Jews who pleaded best for Germany, who day in and day out, tried to get England to be fair to Germany. And those citizens of Germany, the most eloquent and the most patriotic, are now being driven out. Germany is not driving out her cut-throats or her blackguards; she has selected the cream of her culture and suppressed it. She has admitted – and this is the point – that the Jews stand higher in the realms of art and of affairs, and for their superiority they must be punished. She has even turned upon her most glorious citizen – Einstein. It is impertinent for me to praise a man of that eminence. The most eminent men in the world admit that he is the most eminent. But there was something beyond mere eminence in the case of Professor Einstein. He was beyond any achievements in the realm of science. He stood out as the supreme example of the selfless intellectual. And today Einstein is without a home. He had to write his name in a visitors’ book in England, and when he came to write his address, he put ‘Without any’. The Huns have stolen his savings. The road-hog and racketeer of Europe have plundered his place. They have even taken away his violin. A man who more than any other approximated to a citizen of the world without a house! How proud we must be that we have afforded him a shelter temporarily at Oxford to work, and long may the tides of tyranny beat in vain against these shores.