How Britain Saved Einstein

Exiled, homeless and on the run from Nazi assassins, 1933 was a grim year for Albert Einstein. Yet not all was lost, writes Andrew Robinson, as the famous physicist discovered during his visits to Britain

- Andrew Robinson

In late July 1933, six months after the Nazi regime came to power in Germany and forced many distinguished German Jews to leave their native land, Albert Einstein paid his one and only visit to the House of Commons in Britain. Born Jewish in Germany in 1879, the world’s most famous scientist had observed closely the rise of Nazism from his home in Berlin in the 1920s while enduring vitriolic public criticism and even death threats. In March 1933, he had anticipated the German-Jewish exodus and, returning to Europe from the US, gone into voluntary exile in Belgium with his second wife, Elsa. Now he found himself in London on a political mission to help Germany’s Jews, looking down from the Distinguished Visitors’ Gallery of the House and listening to a speech under the parliamentary 10-minute rule. It proposed the motion: “That leave be given to bring in a bill to promote and extend opportunities of citizenship for Jews resident outside the British empire.”