Andrea Sears-Van Nest wasn’t prepared for the view of history her parents left behind in documents she found after her mother’s death last year.
The document trove traces her parents’ struggles in Nazi Germany and includes letters detailing the role Albert Einstein, who once employed her father as a secretary, played in helping him immigrate to America.
Sears-Van Nest knew that her father, Edwin Sears, a DU law professor, and her mother, Vera Sears, who taught dance at the school, had fled Nazi Germany.
But she was stunned to find that when her Jewish father was hiding from the Nazis in Europe, his former employer, Albert Einstein, was working to find him safe haven in America.
And though she knew that her father had been a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials, she had no idea that he kept documents detailing some of the Reich’s bloody history until she found a memo signed by Hermann Goering, who was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the trials.
“I started going through the stuff pulling out box after box, we would pull something out and say, ‘Oh, here is a letter from Einstein,’ and then we hit the Nazi papers. We had no idea until we saw Goering’s signature on Nazi stationery. There were 10 or 15 papers like this,” Sears-Van Nest said.
“Secret Reich Business”
Among the documents is a memo detailing the failed assassination attempt on Adolph Hitler mounted by some of his officers. The memo, which was sent to Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and Waffen-SS, is labeled “Secret Reich Business.”
The attempted coup was carried out by Colonel Graf von Stauffenberg and other high-ranking Nazi officers, and detailed in the 2008 movie “Valkyrie.”
A translation of the memo says the plot’s perpetrators had a pessimistic opinion of the military and political situation, “bordering on defeatism.”
The documents detail events that took place roughly between 1920 and 1949, Sears-Van Nest said.
Edwin Sears met his future wife while studying law at the University of Berlin. He acted as Einstein’s secretary from 1927 to 1929, when the scientist worked at that university.
Edwin and Vera, a ballet dancer, married shortly before the Nazis disenfranchised Jews and made it illegal for them to marry Christians.
Edwin, who died in the mid-1960s, was Jewish, his wife a Gentile. “Before the Nazis took over, everybody commingled, it wasn’t any big deal to date someone of a different faith,” Sears-Van Nest said.
Edwin Sears, who had become a professor of law at the University of Berlin, lost his job along with other Jews in 1933.
The loss was a stroke of luck, said Sears-Van Nest. “These were some very educated Jews. Sadly enough, they were the lucky ones because they said, ‘We can’t find work; we have to leave.’ The others were carted off to concentration camps.”
Sears went into hiding, first in Germany and then Switzerland and Belgium, while his wife, who had less to fear from the Nazis, remained in Germany. She was later allowed to leave the country.
Einstein’s help
Einstein, who was by that time working at Princeton University, traded a series of letters with Edwin Sears, outlining his efforts to gain his entrance to the states. The letters show that while Einstein wanted to help Sears and his wife, he could not financially sponsor them.
He put the couple in touch with an attorney in New York who did sponsor their move to the U.S. “All these letters show that my dad could have been killed at any second. Einstein said, please help this man, he was my secretary. It shows a side of Einstein that was really touching,” Sears-Van Nest said.
Edwin Sears emigrated, and he and his wife moved to Denver. He learned English and received a scholarship to DU, where he finished his law degree in one year.
The army drafted him and sent him to Nuremburg, where he prosecuted German industrialists who had used slave labor. Sears-Van Nest believes that he got the memo outlining the assassination attempt, though there is no obvious link to the case he worked on.
Edwin Sears was a professor of law at the University of Denver from 1943 until 1951. He oversaw his own law firm until his death in 1964.
Vera Sears studied dance with Martha Wilcox at the University of Denver and taught at the Lamont School of Music at DU before becoming director of the Children’s Dance Theatre at Lamont. Vera Sears was 95 when she died last year.
The document collection has been appraised at $25,000 and is housed in the Department of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library.
“I think archival materials that are primary sources give us a unique window into history. These particular sources reflect the life of a victim of Nazi German, as well as the haven he was provided here in the U.S.,” said Jeanne Abrams, professor at Penrose and the Center for Judaic Studies.
Tom McGhee: (303) 954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
