Einstein steps off the boat in America, a scientist with no country to go home to
By the autumn of 1933, Albert Einstein had no passport from the country that once claimed him as its most famous scientist. He had renounced his German citizenship in March, after Hitler's rise made clear he would never safely return, and spent the months since drifting between Belgium and England. On October 17, 1933, Einstein arrived in the United States to take up a position at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He did not return to Germany.
Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, barely off the ground when Abraham Flexner recruited Einstein, became living proof that America could be the destination for Europe's displaced scientific talent. Einstein's arrival helped set a pattern: within a decade, émigré physicists were pulled into the Manhattan Project, and the center of theoretical physics shifted from Berlin and Göttingen to American campuses for the rest of the century.
QWhy did Einstein give up his German citizenship once before, decades before Hitler ever took power?
Einstein first renounced his German citizenship in 1895, at age sixteen, to avoid compulsory military service, and moved to Switzerland. He acquired Swiss citizenship in 1901 and kept it for the rest of his life, even after 1933. In 1914 he reversed course and returned to Berlin, taking up Prussian and German citizenship again to work at the Prussian Academy of Sciences. That second German citizenship is the one he surrendered in 1933. So when he stepped off the boat in Princeton, he was not technically stateless in the strictest sense, his Swiss passport still existed, but it was no longer the one tied to his scientific career or his German-speaking academic world.
QWhat specific warning did Einstein help send to Roosevelt years after he settled in Princeton?
Einstein never worked on the bomb itself, but the chain of events that produced it started with a signature he added in 1939. He put his name to a letter warning Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany might be pursuing nuclear weapons and urging American research into fission, a warning that helped trigger the Manhattan Project.
QHow long did it take Einstein to become a naturalized American citizen after he landed in Princeton?
Einstein did not become a US citizen the moment he arrived. He landed in October 1933 but waited seven years, finally gaining American citizenship in 1940. That was the same era in which he was pressing Roosevelt about the danger of a German atomic program. For most of the 1930s he lived and worked in Princeton as a man without an American passport, his legal status unsettled even as the Institute for Advanced Study built its reputation around him. Once naturalized, he kept his Swiss citizenship alongside his new American one for the rest of his life, holding passports from two countries and none from the one where he was born.
