Einstein on the run: how the world’s greatest scientist hid from Nazis in a Norfolk hut

In September 1933, a humble wooden hut on a secluded Norfolk heath became the improbable location of one of the most important hideouts in history.

Nearly a century later, the rarely told story of the three weeks Albert Einstein spent holed up in a heathland bothy, on the run from Nazi assassins, has been turned into an unusual type of docudrama.

Netflix’s Einstein and the Bomb will shine a light on how the celebrated German Jewish scientist’s brief sojourn on Roughton Heath came at a crossroads in his life – and, consequently, changed the course of history.

“It was only as we looked closer that we realised quite what a seismic moment in his life it was,” said the screenwriter Philip Ralph, a “verbatim specialist” who used only Einstein’s actual speeches, letters and interviews to script the theoretical physicist’s dialogue.

(Albert Einstein with the sculptor Jacob Epstein at Commander Locker-Lampson’s retreat at Cromer. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive)

“What came out from my research was that it was, in many ways, the most important turning point in Einstein’s life.” By then, Einstein was public enemy No 1 in Germany.

In May 1933, a brochure entitled Jews Are Watching You accused Einstein of “lying atrocity propaganda against Adolf Hitler”.

Under his picture, it stated: “Not yet hanged.”

In September, after German secret agents assassinated the Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing in Czechoslovakia, the Nazis – who had already stolen Einstein’s savings, raided his summerhouse, ransacked his Berlin apartment and taken his violin – offered a reward of at least £1,000 for his murder.

The next day, Einstein yielded to his wife Elsa’s pleas to leave her in the holiday home they had been renting near Ostend in Belgium and flee to England by sea.

He would never set foot on continental Europe again. In 1939, fearing that the Nazis would get there first, he successfully petitioned President Franklin Roosevelt to accelerate the US development of a nuclear bomb, a decision recently depicted in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film Oppenheimer.

It was during Einstein’s stay on the remote heath, protected by armed guards, that he first came to the realisation that he must publicly use his influence in society to speak out against the Nazis and call on world leaders to act, Ralph said.

“We chose the title Einstein and the Bomb because 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.”

(A map of the hut)

The small Norfolk bothy 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 place of refuge under his protection.

Perhaps to draw attention to Einstein’s plight, members of the press were somewhat incongruously invited by Locker-Lampson to the secret hideout and allowed to interview and photograph the famous Nobel prizewinner.

It was a press call that, given the very real threat to Einstein’s life, appalled a reporter at the Observer.

“England is not a very good place to hide in” Einstein left for the US and the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University.

Elsa successfully joined him en route and he spent the rest of his life in exile, where he wrote affidavits recommending the US offer visas for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution and helped to found the world’s first refugee aid agency, the International Rescue Committee.

Ref: Einstein on the run: how the world’s greatest scientist hid from Nazis in a Norfolk hut (theguardian)

Photo Credit- Bettmann/Bettmann Archive, theguardian