The Man Who Stalked Einstein Read Online Free Page B

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     conspirator sooner than their shotguns.”
    Elsa could not have been pleased with the news of her husband’s English idyll, but
     it is unlikely she was surprised. Married fourteen years, she and Einstein had begun
     their affair in 1912, when he was still married to his first wife, Mileva Marić. When
     Marić separated from Einstein in 1914, after he had accepted a professorship in Berlin,
     he noted, “I am extremely happy with the separation, even though I rarely hear from
     my boys. The peace and quiet feel enormously good, as does the really nice affair
     with my cousin.”
    Three years Einstein’s elder, Elsa was his cousin on both sides of his family. The
     daughter of his mother’s sister and of his father’s brother, she had been born an
     Einstein, became a Loewenthal when she married her first husband, and took back the
     surname Einstein once again when she married Albert in 1919. She and little “Albertle”
     had played together as children. She was well aware of his wry wit and the devastating
     effect his intelligence and fame had upon women.
    “Marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an incident,”
     Einstein once said. Although Elsa usually traveled with her husband and kept a stern
     eye on him, she soon experienced the same heartache as Mileva had. In 1923, four years
     into their marriage, Einstein fell in love with his twenty-three-year-old secretary,
     Betty Neumann. Elsa knew about it, but it was nearly two years before she convinced
     her husband to break it off. Even so, she could not banish the feelings Einstein had
     for Neumann. Einstein wrote Neumann, “I will have to look to the stars for what is
     denied me on earth.” Elsa didn’t doubt that there had been others. Locker-Lampson’s
     assistants were only a distraction. She would say nothing and focus on her preparations
     for their imminent departure.
    The steamship Westmoreland left Antwerp with Elsa aboard in early October 1933. It stopped in Southampton to
     pick up Einstein and his assistant, Walther Mayer, on October 7, before making its
     way across the Atlantic to New York. To avoid publicity, Flexner arranged for a tugboat
     to meet the ship when it cleared customs at Ellis Island. The tug transferred the
     Einstein party to a car for the short drive to Princeton. For the time being, Einstein
     was officially a man without a country. He was among the first of roughly two thousand
     Jewish scientists, mathematicians, and developers of technology—including fourteen
     Nobel Prize recipients—who would find themselves dismissed from their jobs, unable
     to support their families, and threatened with deportation to the Nazi death mills
     that would soon spring up across Europe.
    In recalling the many years of strife with his longtime foe, Philipp Lenard cited
     Einstein as “the most important example of the dangerous influence of the Jewish circles
     on the study of nature.” A month later, any remaining controversy over Einstein’s
     resignation from the Prussian Academy became moot. On the heels of the Third Reich
     barring Jews teaching in German universities, it also made any person of Jewish descent
     ineligible for membership in the Academy. Lenard saw his opportunity to further cement
     his status with the Nazi hierarchy. Noting, “We must recognize that it is unworthy
     of a German to be the intellectual follower of a Jew,” Lenard partnered with his like-minded
     colleague, Johannes Stark, to vigorously enforce a series of laws calling for the
     dismissal of Jewish academics from their university employment.
    Max Planck tried to head off the carnage by appealing directly to the Fuehrer, Adolf
     Hitler. It was to no avail. “Our national policies will not be revoked or modified,
     even for scientists,” Hitler told him in no uncertain terms. “If the dismissal of
     Jewish scientists means the annihilation of German science, then we shall do without
     science for a few