Einstein Letter Warns of German Anti-Semitism 10 Years Before Nazis' Rise to Power
By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | November 15, 2018 08:09am ET
In a letter penned in 1922, Albert Einstein articulated his eerily accurate fears about the rise of nationalism, antisemitism and violence in his home country of Germany.
A handwritten letter from Albert Einstein to his sister, Maja, has sold for $39,350 at an auction in Jerusalem. The letter, penned in 1922 from a secret location in northern Germany, reveals the physicist's prescient fears about the rise of nationalism and violence in his country a full decade before the Nazi party rose to power.
Einstein wrote the letter from hiding after the assassination of his friend Walther Rathenau, the German foreign minister and a fellow Jew, at the hands of right-wing extremists. Warned by police that he might be next, the prominent physicist left Berlin and fled to an undisclosed location in northern Germany. While the letter has no return address, scholars believe it was written while Einstein was staying in the port city of Kiel before embarking on a speaking tour in Asia, according to the Kedem auction house in Jerusalem, which sold the letter. [Beyond Relativity: Einstein's Lesser Known Work]
https://www.livescience.com/64096-einstein-letter-warns-anti-semitism.html
