The Man Who Stalked Einstein

by Hillman, Bruce J.

  Goebbels shot the Nazi straight-arm salute, fingers extended, palm forward, into the cool night air. As the deafening applause settled down, a group of students began to sing the Horst-Wessel song, the anthem of the Nazi Party. The tune was picked up by other students and soon the surrounding thousands. The celebration was just beginning. It would continue long into the night.

  One man who did not join in the singing, but who was nonetheless elated with the evening’s events, was Philipp Lenard. The 1905 Nobel Prize recipient for physics, director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Heidelberg, and powerful scientific advisor to Adolf Hitler risked a rare smile. It had taken a very long time, but he could finally gloat about his victory over Albert Einstein. For nearly fifteen years, he had led the opposition that finally forced the relativity Jew to flee his native Germany. The burning of Einstein’s foolish scribblings that evening in Berlin—and numerous other locations throughout the Fatherland—was the beginning of the end of memory for Einstein’s outlandish ideas about relativity, of which Lenard had written “. . . even now, were falling apart.”

  Driven by professional disagreement, intense envy over the public’s adoration of Einstein, and virulent anti-Semitism, Lenard had unrelentingly harassed Einstein and publicly denigrated his theory of relativity. Beginning with two dramatic confrontations with Einstein in 1920, Lenard and his minions publicly assailed Einstein as the living personification of an ignoble Jewish spirit in science and a threat to Aryan German culture. He had been the mastermind behind the 1920 anti-Einstein lectures at the auditorium of the Berlin Philharmonic. A month later, he had famously debated Einstein about the theory of relativity at Bad Nauheim. He had too often been forced to stand alone, but he had persevered, was persevering even now that Einstein and his wife Elsa had fled to America. It had not been easy, but that night’s triumphant burning of Einstein’s work had made it all worthwhile.

  It was Lenard and the few who had stood with him who had persistently antagonized Einstein and reversed Einstein’s popular standing. By the early 1930s, Einstein had been made to feel like a pariah in the country of his birth. He absented himself from Germany for longer periods than he had in the past, traveling, lecturing on the theory of relativity, and speaking out about German militarism to pacifist groups. Predictably, the end of Einstein’s tenure in Germany arrived as Hitler was on the verge of consolidating his power.

  In the fall of 1932, as Elsa packed their things for a two-month trip to America, Einstein bravely told friends that they would return to Berlin after he had completed what would be his third professorship in residence at Cal Tech, in Pasadena, California. But he probably knew this was wishful thinking. He found himself increasingly at odds with the rising tide of National Socialism. While Einstein, a nonpracticing Jew who once described his ethnicity as “the son of Jewish parents,” still felt most at home in Europe and especially among his friends in the German scientific community, he had no illusions about who Hitler was and what drove his intentions. A few years after leaving Germany, from his safe perch in New Jersey, Einstein wrote about his impressions of Hitler during his run to power:

  Then Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual capabilities and unfit for any useful work, full of envy and bitterness, against all whom circumstances had favored over him. . . . In his desperate ambition for power, he discovered that his speeches, confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim from those whose situation and orientation resembled his own. . . . But what really qualified him for leadership was his bitter hatred of everything foreign and, in particular, his loathing of a defenseless minority, the German Jews. Their intellectual sensitivity left him uneasy, and he considered it, with some justification, as un-German. . . . [He propagated] the fraud about the alleged superiority of the “Aryan” or “Nordic” race, a myth invented by the anti-Semites to further their sinister purposes.

  In early 1931, Einstein had written a letter of resignation to Max Planck, the elder statesman among German physicists and the man who had recruited him to Berlin. After much consideration, he decided not to send it. Later, in December the same year, he wrote in his diary, “Today I decided to give up my position in Berlin,” but once more he did not act on his intention. Just before they left their holiday cottage in Caputh for their December 1932 voyage to America, Einstein said to his wife, “Look at the house very closely. You will never see it again.” Elsa took what her husband had said very seriously. She packed thirty pieces of luggage for the brief sabbatical. They would be prepared if the political circumstances worsened.

  Einstein’s premonitions proved to be well founded. Any hope that he would be able to resume his academic life in Berlin turned to dust as, three months later, the couple prepared for their return from California. On March 10, 1933, the day before they were to depart Pasadena, Elsa’s daughter, Margot, was twice cornered in the Einsteins’ Berlin apartment by marauding, brown-shirted storm troopers seeking to intimidate her stepfather. The apartment was raided three more times during the next several days. The intruders made off with a number of Einstein’s personal items, including a prized violin. Einstein telegraphed Margot that she should make every effort to safely remove his extensive books and papers from the apartment to the French embassy, then leave Germany as soon as she could. She managed to do so and met her husband in Paris. At about the same time, Elsa’s other daughter, Ilse, and her husband escaped to the Netherlands. Months later, after he decided to immigrate to the United States, a significant portion of Einstein’s papers accompanied him on board ship.

  The final insult came during his steamship passage aboard the Belgenland back to Europe. Einstein received word that authorities from Potsdam had ransacked their country cottage. The stated reason for the SA invasion was that Einstein was suspected of supplying arms to revolutionary elements. The Nazis confiscated his beloved sailboat—the Tuemmler—on the pretext that it could be used to smuggle contraband weapons to socialists. Less than four years earlier, he and Elsa had built their vacation home in the small village of Caputh, only a short drive from downtown Berlin. Both of them dearly loved the rustic beauty and peacefulness so close to the bustle of their daily lives. “For us, this house was a place of comfort and security,” he later wrote. “A place in which everyone could find his own happiness and his own content.” For Einstein, the ransacking of his cottage was an unmistakable signal that returning to Germany would put their lives at risk. “They’ll drag you through the streets by your hair,” one friend warned him. When questioned about the Potsdam police searching for hidden weapons in his home, he responded cryptically, “Everyone measures according to his own shoes.”

  The Einsteins disembarked in Antwerp and sought the assistance of personal friends, King Albert I and his queen, Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a native of Bavaria who had been raised in the small town of Possenhofen, near Munich. The Queen had met Einstein for the first time in 1929, when she invited him to dinner to explain relativity to her. By the end of the evening, Einstein had accompanied her in a duet, playing his violin. Invited to dinner again a year later, “I was greeted with heartwarming cordiality,” he wrote Elsa. “These two people are of such a purity and benevolence that it is hardly found.” A deep friendship developed between the scientist and the royal couple. Now, Einstein was without a homeland. Albert and Elizabeth took him and Elsa under their sovereign protection.

  As he was not yet ready to make up his mind about where he would next live and work, Einstein and Elsa bided their time in a cottage in Le Coq sur Mer. Einstein’s residence along the Belgian coast gave him the psychological space to consider his immediate options. Everything would have been perfect except for the rumors reaching them that the Nazi agitator Alfred Leibus had offered a $5,000 reward for Einstein’s assassination. Concerned for her esteemed guest, the Queen staffed the cottage with two impressively muscled bodyguards. Whether it was out of fear of these bodyguards or simply that no one wished to risk mounting an attack, Einstein
lived there securely.

  What Einstein decided to do next indelibly inscribed his name among the Reich’s enemies. He resigned his membership in the Prussian Academy. It was an action that he could not have taken lightly. Even prior to the rise of the Nazis, anti-Semitism was rampant among Germany’s elite scientists, so his membership in the prestigious society had been hard won. Planck had to campaign vigorously on Einstein’s behalf. In fact, he’d even approached Philipp Lenard for his support, unaware of Lenard’s growing resentment toward Einstein. Sensing some hesitation, Planck guilelessly asked Lenard if it wasn’t appropriate for such a famous theoretician as Einstein to reside in the company of his equally celebrated peers. Lenard famously responded, “Just because a goat may reside in a stable, it does not make him a regal thoroughbred.”

  In a letter to the Prussian Academy of March 28, 1933, Einstein acknowledged that he owed the Academy his thanks for “the opportunity to devote my time to scientific research, free from all professional obligations. I know how much I am obliged to her. I withdraw reluctantly from this circle also because of the intellectual stimulation and the fine human relationships which I have enjoyed throughout this long period.” He cited the “current state of affairs in Germany” as the reason for his resignation and doubtlessly considered the matter concluded.

  Unfortunately, it was not. The Academy issued an April 1 press release indicating its members were “shocked to learn from newspaper reports about Albert Einstein’s participation in the loathsome anti-German campaign in America and France,” scolding Einstein for his “agitatorial behavior abroad.” The document went on to note that by withdrawing from the Academy, Einstein also was giving up his Prussian citizenship, which was conditional upon his Academy membership. Indeed, the German government first tried to postpone his relinquishing of his citizenship by invoking a rarely applied tax law requiring Einstein to pay a fine for fleeing the country. Einstein simply ignored the decree, recognizing it as a thinly veiled ruse to bring him back into Germany and arrest him.

  The Academy’s charge that Einstein had participated in anti-German activities had some basis in fact. Einstein had made a number of statements to U.S. pacifist groups over the previous few months, condemning Nazi antagonism toward Germany’s Jews.

  Nonetheless, he denied the charges in an indignant letter to the Academy dated April 5, 1933. Although Einstein acknowledged that he had described the German citizenry as suffering from a “psychiatric disease” and that he had urged a “threatened civilization to do their utmost to prevent the further spread of this mass psychosis, which is expressing itself in Germany in such a terrible way,” he denied that he had ever been a part of any “loathsome campaign.” He stood behind every word he had ever published and asked that, in fairness, his defense of his actions be disseminated to the members of the Academy and the public at large.

  The Academy’s wrongful accusations had slandered him. He had resigned his Academy membership and his Prussian citizenship because “I do not wish to live in a state in which individuals are not granted equal rights before the law, as well as freedom of speech and instruction.”

  Having concluded his dispute with the Prussian Academy, Einstein deposited his passport at the German consulate in Brussels and returned his attention to deciding where he would work in the future. Paul Ehrenfest, a Dutch friend, tried to prevail on Einstein to join him in Leiden. Similarly, scientists at Christ Church College in England, where he had spent a number of happy times, argued that Oxford would provide the best environment for continuing his work on what increasingly had been attracting his professional attention: a general field theory that would incorporate all known building blocks of the universe into a coherent whole. While Einstein surely considered these options, he was most taken with the possibility of moving to the United States. During his three trips to the United States, Einstein had been favorably impressed by the freedoms that Americans enjoyed. He also appreciated the absence of a formal class system that in Europe denied advancement to those born into lesser circumstances.

  Physicist Robert Milliken had seen the possibility of recruiting Einstein to Pasadena early in their relationship, so the door was open to him at Cal Tech. Einstein might well have chosen this option except for the mistake Milliken made in introducing Einstein to the renowned American educational reformer and secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation, Abraham Flexner. Flexner, who was Jewish, had incited a revolution in American medical education. He had closed down sham medical schools and helped to develop a more rigorous medical curriculum. In the spring of 1932, while visiting Los Angeles, he asked Milliken’s permission to meet the vaunted German physicist then serving his second professorship in residence. The two hit it off. They were seen walking together, in deep conversation, late into the evening, well beyond the time Elsa had set aside for her husband and Flexner to meet.

  Flexner spoke to Einstein about his plan to start a small, very exclusive research university or think tank. Having secured a $5 million pledge from department store magnate Louis Bamberger, Flexner envisioned a highly vetted, prestigious faculty. It would have visiting scholars but would not present degrees. Although Flexner had decided his institute would be located in Princeton, New Jersey, it would have no formal affiliation with Princeton University.

  Einstein had lectured at Princeton University several times and enjoyed the experience. The college’s leafy walkways and gothic, fitted-stone architecture were more appealing to Einstein, and especially to Elsa, than the foreign, materialistic feel of Southern California. Sensing triumph, with only one more hurdle to surpass, Flexner timorously asked Einstein what sort of salary he had in mind. The Rockefeller Foundation had given him a generous budget, but perhaps not enough to command the attention of such a great man. Einstein naïvely suggested $3,000 annually, quite a low figure by American standards. Smiling, Flexner told him that he would work out his salary with Elsa. Einstein readily agreed. They settled at $16,000.

  The freedom to think and write and the flexibility of the arrangement that Flexner promised so appealed to Einstein that he quickly agreed in principle to become the second faculty member of the institute, after the mathematician Hermann Weyl. This is not to say that Einstein hadn’t any qualms about moving to such a strange place as America. He had expressed how he felt about the United States in a 1925 letter to his friend Michael Besso, who had worked with him on the theory of special relativity: “To find Europe delightful, you have to visit the United States. While people have fewer prejudices there, they nevertheless are hollow and uninteresting, much more so than in Europe.” In a similarly dismissive vein, he noted, “American men are nothing but the pet dogs of their wives. People seem to be endlessly bored.”

  The threat to his and his wife’s lives demanded that Einstein reconsider those views. In the end, Einstein agreed to spend four or five months annually in Princeton at what would become the Institute for Advanced Studies. In the worst case, he thought, he would make up for U.S. intellectual deficiencies by spending the rest of his time at Oxford or Leiden or Madrid, where he also had accepted a yet-to-be-defined appointment. It was not to be. Despite living another twenty-two years, Einstein never again touched foot on European soil.

  Einstein grew restless with domestic life in Le Coq sur Mer while waiting for some signal from Flexner that things were settled with U.S. Immigration and ready for him in Princeton. An unusual opportunity presented itself in the form of an invitation from a wealthy member of the British Parliament, a former army commander and pilot named Oliver Locker-Lampson, whom Einstein had once met at Oxford. Einstein traveled to England without Elsa, who preferred her quiet existence along the Belgian shore.

  Locker-Lampson was an admirer of Einstein and was greatly pleased by Einstein’s acceptance of his invitation. During the few short weeks of his visit, the two men became good friends. At Einstein’s request, Locker-Lampson introduced a bill in Parliament to increase opportunities for Jews to emigrate from Germany to Great Britain. In
proposing the law, Locker-Lampson nodded to Einstein, who was standing in the gallery of the House of Commons that day, and said, “Germany has turned out its most glorious citizen. . . . The Huns have stolen his savings, plundered his place of residence, and even taken his violin. . . . How proud this country must be to have offered him shelter.”

  The shelter Locker-Lampson provided was a cottage on the Norfolk moors. While Elsa prepared in Le Coq sur Mer for their voyage to America, her husband contemplated the universe—or so he said—guarded by two attractive young women who had been introduced to him as Locker-Lampson’s “assistants.” Einstein happily spent his final days in England drinking beer with his well-proportioned protectors and greeting visitors wishing to meet the famous scientist. The press delighted in photographing Einstein with his shotgun-toting “bodyguards.” When asked whether he felt secure with his protectors’ sharpshooting talents, he speculated, “The beauty of my bodyguards would disarm a conspirator sooner than their shotguns.”

  Elsa could not have been pleased with the news of her husband’s English idyll, but it is unlikely she was surprised. Married fourteen years, she and Einstein had begun their affair in 1912, when he was still married to his first wife, Mileva Marić. When Marić separated from Einstein in 1914, after he had accepted a professorship in Berlin, he noted, “I am extremely happy with the separation, even though I rarely hear from my boys. The peace and quiet feel enormously good, as does the really nice affair with my cousin.”

  Three years Einstein’s elder, Elsa was his cousin on both sides of his family. The daughter of his mother’s sister and of his father’s brother, she had been born an Einstein, became a Loewenthal when she married her first husband, and took back the surname Einstein once again when she married Albert in 1919. She and little “Albertle” had played together as children. She was well aware of his wry wit and the devastating effect his intelligence and fame had upon women.