Physicist. Einstein was born at Ulm, Germany, of an assimilated Jewish family. While working in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland, he published in 1905 three revolutionary papers; one of them, on his special theory of relativity, gained him international fame. He then taught physics at the universities of Bern, Zurich, and Prague. In 1914, Einstein was appointed professor of physics at the Berlin Academy of Science and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, where he published in 1916 an extended version of the theory of relativity. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein happened to be out of Germany; he never set foot in that country again. He resigned from the Prussian Academy of Science and eventually emigrated to the United States, where he worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, for the rest of his life.
By his very nature Einstein was a fierce enemy of Nazism and all totalitarian regimes. Thus, in January 1933 he wrote: "My great fear is that this hate and power epidemic will spread throughout the world. It comes from below the surface like a flood, until the upper regions are isolated, terrified, and demoralized and then also submerged." The Nazis canceled his honorary citizenship (held from 1914, in addition to his Swiss citizenship), confiscated his property, and put a price of 50,000 reichsmarks on his head. In a statement to the Swiss press, he said: "As long as I have the choice, I shall live only in a land where political freedom, tolerance, and equality of all citizens reign."
In the United States, Einstein took part in Jewish rescue efforts, and in 1941 he tried in vain to influence President Franklin D. Roosevelt by writing to Eleanor Roosevelt, drawing her attention to the policy of the State Department, "which makes it all but impossible to give refuge in America to many worthy persons who are victims of the Fascist cruelty in Europe." Though Mrs. Roosevelt was ready to raise the issue with her husband, nothing came of it. After the war, Einstein also expressed criticism of Switzerland's policy toward refugees, stating that the country "behaved with unjust brutality - even towards those [refugees] whom it has allowed to enter its territory."
It was his hatred of Nazism that motivated Einstein, despite his pacifism, to warn Roosevelt, in August 1939, concerning the possibility that Germany might acquire sufficient quantities of uranium in the recently incorporated territory of Czechoslovakia to produce "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" that "might well destroy [a] whole port together with some surrounding territory." Einstein therefore recommended that the United States acquire uranium from the Belgian Congo. When the letter reached Roosevelt after the outbreak of the war, in October 1939, the National Research Defense Committee began to organize production of the atom bomb. In May 1946, after the war and the dropping of the first atom bombs, Einstein, presiding over the National Commission of Nuclear Scientists, declared: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking, and thus we are being driven unarmed towards a catastrophe. . . . The solution of this problem lies in the heart of humankind."
