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By Root 601 0

The five-year arrangement would begin in the autumn of 1933 because Einstein had already committed himself to another spell at Caltech. He was fortunate that he had, for it was during this third visit to Pasadena that Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933. For Germany's half-million Jews, the exodus began slowly, with only 25,000 leaving by June. Einstein, safely in California, did not speak out, but acted as if he would return when the time came. He wrote to the Prussian Academy asking about his salary, but had already made his decision. 'In view of Hitler,' he wrote to a friend on 27 February, 'I don't dare step on German soil.'25 That very day the Reichstag was set alight. It signalled the beginning of the first wave of state-sponsored Nazi terror.

In the midst of the violence unleashed by the Nazis, 17 million voted for them in the Reichstag election on 5 March. Five days later, on the eve of his planned departure from Pasadena, Einstein gave an interview and made public what he thought about events in Germany. 'As long as I have any choice in the matter,' he said, 'I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance and equality of all citizens before the law prevail. Civil liberty implies freedom to express one's political convictions, in speech and in writing; tolerance implies respect for the convictions of others whatever they may be. These conditions do not exist in Germany at the present time.'26 As his words were reported around the world, he was condemned in the German press as newspapers vied to demonstrate their allegiance to the Nazi regime. 'Good News of Einstein – He Is Not Coming Back!' read the headline in the Berliner Lokalanzeiger. The article seethed at how 'this puffed up bit of vanity dared to sit in judgement on Germany without knowing what is going on here – matters that forever must remain incomprehensible to a man who was never German in our eyes and who declares himself to be a Jew and nothing but a Jew'.27

Einstein's comments left Planck in a quandary. On 19 March he wrote to Einstein of his 'profound distress' over 'all kinds of rumours which have emerged in this unquiet and difficult time about your public and private statements of a political nature'.28 Planck complained that 'these reports make it exceedingly difficult for all those who esteem and revere you to stand up for you'. He blamed Einstein for making the difficult situation of his 'tribal companions and co-religionists' worse. When his ship docked at Antwerp in Belgium on 28 March, Einstein asked to be driven to the German embassy in Brussels. There he surrendered his passport, renounced his German citizenship for a second time, and handed over a letter of resignation from the Prussian Academy.

While he pondered what to do and where to go, Einstein and Elsa moved into a villa in the small resort of Le Coq-sur-Mer on the Belgian coast. As rumours circulated that Einstein's life might be at risk, the Belgian government assigned two guards to protect him. In Berlin, Planck was relieved when he learnt of Einstein's resignation. It was the only honourable way to sever ties with the Academy and 'at the same time save your friends from an immeasurable amount of grief and pain', he wrote to Einstein.29 There were few prepared to stand up for him in the new Germany.

On 10 May 1933, swastika-clad students and academics carrying torches marched down Unter den Linden to the Opernplatz just across from Berlin University's main entrance and set fire to some 20,000 books plundered from the shelves of the city's libraries and bookstores. A crowd of 40,000 watched as the flames consumed the 'un-German' and 'Jewish-Bolshevik' works by the likes of Marx, Brecht, Freud, Zola, Proust, Kafka, and Einstein. It was a scene repeated in every major university town in the country, and men like Planck read the smoke signals and did little, if anything, to resist. The book-burning was just the beginning of the Nazi assault on 'degenerate' art and culture, but a far more significant event had already occurred for German Jews when