Today in History—October 17: Albert Einstein Arrives in the United States

On this day in 1933, Albert Einstein arrived in the United States, never to return to his native Europe.

The world-famous Nobel Prize-winning physicist had recently accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey—but the Nazi takeover of Germany earlier that year ensured that the United States was where he would remain.

This was not Einstein’s first visit to America. He had spent the past three winters at Caltech in Pasadena, California, and he had first come to the United States in 1921, arriving to much fanfare as an international celebrity.

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But Einstein’s arrival in 1933 was different.

The Nazi movement, with its virulent antisemitism, targeted Einstein and other Jewish scholars. Nazi agitators branded Einstein’s theory of relativity as “Jewish physics,” Nazi publications threatened to hang him, and there was a bounty on his head. Against this backdrop, in June 1932 Einstein accepted an offer to become one of the first faculty members at the IAS. But he didn’t move to Princeton immediately.

In January 1933 Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In March Einstein was aboard a ship returning to Europe from the United States when he learned that Nazi police had searched his vacation home in Caputh for a supposed cache of weapons—they found nothing more dangerous than a bread knife. Einstein had planned to summer in Caputh but instead surrendered his German passport upon arrival in Belgium.

When Einstein arrived in New York in 1933, reporters and photographers followed him, although he held his violin case over his face and rushed off to Princeton. Newspaper reports at the time declared that the “pope of physics” had made Princeton into the new “Vatican.” Einstein became a U.S. permanent resident in 1935, obtained citizenship in 1940, and made Princeton his home until his death in 1955.