Albert Einstein letter to Maja Winteler-Einstein

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 

Albert Einstein letter to Maja Winteler-Einstein 

folder 1 

A hand-written letter from Albert Einstein, addressed to his sister Maja Winteler-Einstein, dated December 14, 1938, in which Einstein encourages his sister to visit him in America on a visitor’s visa and describes the relief work he is undertaking on behalf of persecuted victims of Nazi Germany. 

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-Jewish theoretical physicist. He was born in Ulm, Germany to Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch. He was visiting the United States in 1933 when Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. Due to the anti-Semitic rhetoric coming from the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler, Einstein decided not to return to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He renounced his German citizenship, and became a United States citizen in 1940. Shortly after, the Nazi party confiscated his property in Germany. During World War II, Einstein supported the Allied Forces, but denounced the idea of creating and utilizing nuclear weapons. He accepted a position with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in October 1933, where he would remain affiliated until his death in 1955.