One of the biggest surprises at Nagel’s (33% buyer’s premium) sale in Stuttgart on October 16-17 came right at the end of the auction.
On offer were numerous letters from German scientists, primarily physicists, to a family of south German industrialists. They dated from the late-19th century up to the 1960s and were divided into several lots which mostly met with moderate interest.
The big exception was a one-page handwritten letter in German from Albert Einstein, addressed to the physicist Max von Laue. It was sent from Princeton on June 1, 1939, to where Einstein had moved in 1933 to avoid the persecution by the Nazis.