WWII history

Albert Einstein's atomic bomb warning letter that 'stopped Hitler winning WW2' revealed

On the eve of the 75th anniversary since the Allies formally accepted Nazi Germany’s surrender in World War 2 – known as Victory in Europe Day – it’s easy to forget just how close Adolf Hitler came to overtaking the world with his fascist Nazi philosophy. Today, nuclear weapons are just another part of the huge military arsenal possessed by nations across the world as a constant deterrent against military conflict, but in 1939 the idea of a nuclear bomb was alien. But, a year earlier, in December 1938, physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch made the startling discovery of nuclear fusion in a Berlin laboratory that would immediately revolutionise nuclear physics and lead to the atomic bomb.

Fears among scientists who were refugees in Germany soon became heightened over the possibility of Hitler getting his hands on the breakthrough and so, in August 1939, Hungarian-born physicists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner drafted a letter that would change the course of history.

The document read: "In the course of the last four months it has been made probable – through the work of [Frederic] Joliot in France as well as [Enrico] Fermi and [Leo] Szilard in America – that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated.