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accused him—in later years, and to Einstein’s great anguish—of having ignored him during his youth.
    Einstein, who described himself as a socialist, became convinced that World War I was largely the result of the scheming and incompetence of “the rulingclasses,” a conclusion with which many contemporary historians agree. He became a pacifist. When other German scientists enthusiastically supported their nation’s military enterprises, Einstein publicly condemned the war as “an epidemic delusion.” Only his Swiss citizenship prevented him from being imprisoned, as indeed happened to his friend the philosopher Bertrand Russell in England at the same time and for the same reason. Einstein’s views on the war did not increase his popularity in Germany.
    However, the war did, indirectly, play a role in making Einstein’s name a household word. In his General Theory of Relativity Einstein explored the proposition—an idea still astonishing in its simplicity, beauty and power—that the gravitational attraction between two masses comes about by those masses distorting or bending ordinary Euclidean space nearby. The quantitative theory reproduced, to the accuracy to which it had been tested, Newton’s law of universal gravitation. But in the next decimal place, so to speak, general relativity predicted significant differences from Newton’s views. This is in the classic tradition of science, in which new theories retain the established results of the old but make a set of new predictions which permits a decisive distinction to be drawn between the two outlooks.
    The three tests of general relativity that Einstein proposed concerned anomalies in the motion of the orbit of the planet Mercury, the red shifts in the spectral lines of light emitted by a massive star, and the deflection of starlight near the Sun. Before the Armistice was signed in 1919, British expeditions were mustered to Brazil and to the island of Principe off West Africa to observe, during a total eclipse of the Sun, whether the deflection of starlight was in accord with the predictions of general relativity. It was. Einstein’s views were vindicated; and the symbolism of a British expedition confirming the work of a German scientist when the two countries were still technically at war appealed to the better instincts of the public.
    But at the same time, a well-financed public campaignagainst Einstein was launched in Germany. Mass meetings with anti-Semitic overtones were staged in Berlin and elsewhere to denounce the relativity theory. Einstein’s colleagues were shocked, but most of them, too timid for politics, did nothing to counter it. With the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s and early 1930s, Einstein, against his natural inclination for a life of quiet contemplation, found himself speaking up—courageously and often. He testified in German courts on behalf of academics on trial for their political views. He appealed for amnesty for political prisoners in Germany and abroad (including Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro “boys” in the United States). When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Einstein and his second wife fled Germany.
    The Nazis burned Einstein’s scientific works, along with other books by anti-Fascist authors, in public bonfires. An all-out assault was launched on Einstein’s scientific stature. Leading the attack was the Nobel laureate physicist Philipp Lenard, who denounced what he called the “mathematically botched-up theories of Einstein” and the “Asiatic spirit in Science.” He went on: “Our Führer has eliminated this same spirit in politics and national economy, where it is known as Marxism. In natural science, however, with the overemphasis on Einstein, it still holds sway. We must recognize that it is unworthy of a German to be the intellectual follower of a Jew. Natural science, properly so-called, is of completely aryan origin … 
Heil Hitler!”
    Many Nazi scholars joined in warning against the