Emigration to U.S. in 1933
Emigration to U.S. in 1933
In February 1933 while on a visit to the United States, Einstein decided not to return to Germany due to the rise to power of the Nazis under Germany's new chancellor, Adolf Hitler.[59][60] He visited American universities in early 1933 where he undertook his third two-month visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He and his wife Elsa returned by ship to Belgium at the end of March. During the voyage they were informed that their cottage was raided by the Nazis and his personal sailboat had been confiscated. Upon landing in Antwerp on 28 March, he immediately went to the German consulate where he turned in his passport and formally renounced his German citizenship.[58] A few years later, the Nazis sold his boat and turned his cottage into an Aryan youth camp.[61]
In early April 1933, he learned that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions, including teaching at universities.[58] A month later, Einstein's works were among those targeted by Nazi book burnings, and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed, "Jewish intellectualism is dead."[58] Einstein also learned that his name was on a list of assassination targets, with a "$5,000 bounty on his head."[58] One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not yet hanged".[58]
He resided in Belgium for some months, before temporarily living in England.[62][63] In a letter to his friend, physicist Max Born, who also emigrated from Germany and lived in England, Einstein wrote, "... I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise."[58]
In October 1933 he returned to the U.S. and took up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (in Princeton, New Jersey), that required his presence for six months each year.[64][65] He was still undecided on his future (he had offers from European universities, including Oxford), but in 1935 he arrived at the decision to remain permanently in the United States and apply for citizenship.[66][67]
His affiliation with the Institute for Advanced Study would last until his death in 1955.[68] He was one of the four first selected (two of the others being John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel) at the new Institute, where he soon developed a close friendship with Gödel. The two would take long walks together discussing their work. His last assistant was Bruria Kaufman, who later became a physicist. During this period, Einstein tried to develop a unified field theory and to refute the accepted interpretation of quantum physics, both unsuccessfully.
Other scientists also fled to America. Among them were Nobel laureates and professors of theoretical physics. With so many other Jewish scientists now forced by circumstances to live in America, often working side by side, Einstein wrote to a friend, "For me the most beautiful thing is to be in contact with a few fine Jews—a few millennia of a civilized past do mean something after all." In another letter he writes, "In my whole life I have never felt so Jewish as now."[58]