Hans Einstein
Einstein was born in Berlin, the son of Josefa Spiero Einstein Warburg and Dr. Fritz Einstein. He spent his childhood in Hamburg, Germany as Nazism gradually took hold. His parents were Quakers, but of Jewish origin. A year after Hitler took power in 1934, his mother moved Einstein and his sister to the Netherlands, leaving his father behind. He finished high school at Eerde, a boarding school in the Netherlands at age 16 and moved to the United States as an exchange student. He attended Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. One of the first things he did upon arriving was look up his last name in the phone book. The only Einstein he found was a relative: Albert Einstein's son, Hans Albert Einstein. They became friends and he was often invited over whenever Albert visited. He earned his medical degree from New York Medical College in 1946 and did his internship at Paterson General Hospital in Paterson, New Jersey. Following that, he became a medical officer in the United States Army. He then completed residencies in Internal Medicine and Pulmonary Diseases at the New York Veterans Hospitals.
Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein
Einstein was averse to the Abrahamic conception of Heaven and Hell, particularly as it pertained to a system of everlasting reward and punishment. In a 1915 letter to the Swiss physicist Edgar Meyer, Einstein wrote, "I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him." He also stated, "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own —- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms."