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Review: Einstein on the Run

This book tells the story of how the great Albert Einstein was rescued from the clutches of the Nazis by an Englishman

December 17, 2019 16:49
Star scientist in town: Einstein lectures at London’s Royal Albert Hall
2 min read

Einstein on the Run by Andrew Robinson (Yale University Press, £16.99)

It is fitting that, as a lifelong Anglophile, the great Albert Einstein should have been rescued from the clutches of the Nazis by an Englishman. And the story is all the better for the fact that his rescuer was a slightly oddball member of the breed, the now-forgotten Tory MP and naval officer Commander Oliver Stillingfleet Locker-Lampson.

Einstein on the Run recounts the brief episode in the autumn of 1933 when, in danger of assassination by Nazi hitmen, and with a bounty on his head, Einstein fled his temporary refuge in Belgium to take up the offer of Locker-Lampson’s safe haven in East Anglia.

The MP had earlier been an admirer of Hitler, whom he had regarded as a necessary bulwark against the Soviet Union and Communism. But mounting persecution of Germany’s Jews in the early 1930s had turned him against the Nazis. Locker-Lampson was no antisemite and he idolised Einstein, whose situation after Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933 became desperate.