In September 1933, a humble wooden hut on a secluded Norfolk heath became the unlikely location of one of the most important hideouts in history.
Almost a century later, the rarely told story of the three weeks Albert Einstein spent in a moor, on the run from Nazi killers, has been turned into an unusual type of docudrama.
Using Einstein’s own words, Netflix’s Einstein and the bomb will shine a light on how the celebrated German Jewish scientist’s brief stay on Roughton Heath came at a crossroads in his life – and consequently changed the course of history.
“It wasn’t until we looked closer that we realized quite what a seismic moment in his life it was,” says screenwriter Philip Ralph, a “wordy specialist” who used only Einstein’s actual speeches, letters and interviews to create the writing theoretical physicist’s dialogue. .
“What came out of my research was that in many ways this was the most important turning point in Einstein’s life.”
By then, Einstein was public enemy number 1 in Germany. In May 1933 a brochure titled Jews are watching you accused Einstein of lying “horror propaganda against Adolf Hitler”. Under his picture it said, “Not yet hanged.”
In September, after German secret agents murdered the Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing in Czechoslovakia, the Nazis – who had already stolen Einstein’s savings, raided his summer home, ransacked his Berlin apartment and taken his violin – offered a reward of at least Offered £1,000 for his murder. .
The next day, Einstein heeded his wife Elsa’s pleas to leave her in the holiday home they had rented near Ostend in Belgium and flee to England by sea. He would never set foot on the continent of Europe again.
“Prior to that point, Einstein was an outspoken, passionate advocate for nonviolence and pacifism. But at the end of those three weeks he gave a speech to 10,000 people at the Royal Albert Hall where he effectively said there is an existential threat to European civilization, and we’re going to have to fight it,” said Ralph .
In 1939, fearing the Nazis would get there first, he successfully urged President Franklin Roosevelt to speed up the US development of a nuclear bomb, a decision recently depicted in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster. movie Oppenheimer.
It was during Einstein’s stay on the remote moor, protected by armed guards, that he first realized that he needed to use his influence in society to publicly speak out against the Nazis and appeal to world leaders to act, said Ralph. “We chose the title Einstein and the bomb for it was the shift in his thinking that took place over that three-week period in Norfolk that directly led him to put his name to that letter to Roosevelt.”
The little Norfolk goat belonged to a trusted acquaintance, the anti-fascist Conservative MP and First World War naval commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, who offered it to Einstein as a refuge under his protection.
Earlier that year, Locker-Lampson highlighted Einstein’s situation in Parliament and introduced an ultimately unsuccessful private members’ bill to “extend opportunities of citizenship to Jews living outside the British Empire”.
Perhaps to draw attention to Einstein’s plight, members of the press were somewhat inappropriately invited by Locker-Lampson to the secret hideout and allowed to interview and photograph the famous Nobel laureate.
It was a press call that, given the real threat to Einstein’s life, a reporter at the Observer. “England is not a very good place to hide in,” reported the newspaper’s diarist on 17 September 1933. “Dr. Einstein, who came here to escape Nazi persecution, finds his log cabin photographed in the newspapers, with full details of the location, and Cromer Council considers the issue of presenting an address. It is suspected that Germany is looking the other way.”
When Einstein agreed to give the speech at a ticketed event at the Royal Albert Hall to raise money for Jewish academic refugees from Germany, his decision was criticized by the Daily mail. The editorial, which claimed to be sorry and “have every sympathy with the German Jews as such”, appealed to Einstein to “stop this indiscriminate agitation in this country against the Nazi regime”.
Two days after delivering his historic speech, in which he called on all nations to “resist the forces that threaten intellectual and individual freedom … won by our forefathers by bitter struggle,” Einstein the USA and the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University. Elsa successfully joined him on the way and he spent the rest of his life in exile, where he wrote affidavits recommending that the US offer visas to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution and helped create the world’s first refugee aid agency, the International Rescue Committee.
