Died the day Albert Einstein: story of a photographer

Albert Einstein, whose theories exploded and had reformed our ideas of how the universe functions, died of heart failure on April 18, 1955,. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private matters, and only a photographer managed to capture the events of that extraordinary day: LIFE magazine of Ralph Morse.

Armed with his camera and a case of whiskey - for opening doors and loosen tongues - Morse compiled a record of intense silence of passing of an icon of the 20th century. But apart from a now-famous - office of Einstein image, exactly as you left it, taken hours after his death - never published photos Morse took that day. At the request of the son of Einstein, who asked to respect the privacy of the family as they mourned, editors of life chose not to run the full story and for more than five decades Morse photographs lay in the magazine files, forgotten.

The story of how Morse got the photos, meanwhile, provides a lesson in tenacity and thinking on your feet.

After receiving a call tomorrow a life editor April saying that Einstein had died, Morse seized their cameras and drove the 90 miles from his home in Northern New Jersey to Princeton.

"Einstein died in Princeton Hospital," Morse, now 96 and living in Florida, said LIFE.com, "so I went there first. But it was a chaos, journalists, photographers and onlookers. So I went to the office of Einstein at the Institute for advanced studies. Along the way, I stopped and bought a case of whisky. I knew that people may be reluctant to talk, but most are happy to accept a bottle of liquor, rather than money, in Exchange for his help. So I arrive at the building, find the Superintendent, give a fifth of whiskey and as well, the office will open.

Early in the afternoon, body of Einstein was transferred for a short time in the hospital to a funeral home in Princeton. The simple coffin which contained the corpse, later autopsy, only remained at the funeral home during one hour or less. Morse made his way there and soon saw two men carrying a coffin in a hearse. All Morse knew, burial of Einstein was imminent. The hope that reached a spot near the Tomb, quickly led to the Princeton cemetery.

"I drive out to the cemetery to find where Einstein will be buried," recalls Morse. "But there must be two dozen tombs are dug that day!" See a group of men digging a grave, offer them a bottle ask them if they know anything. One of them said: ' he is to be cremated in about twenty minutes. Trenton!' "So I give them the rest of the Scots, jump in my car and Trenton and the crematorium just before that Einstein friends and relatives."

"Didn't have to tell anyone where he was," Morse says of his time photographing the events of the day. "I was the only photographer there, and it was a kind of a given that if there was a photographer at the scene, the chances were good life era."

At one point earlier in the day, son of Hans Einstein asked Morse for his name - a seemingly insignificant and friendly research that would prove, within hours, to have a significant impact.

"While is it winding down the day, I was very excited," recalls Morse, "because I knew that I was the only man with these photos. This was great news! Einstein was a huge, world famous public figure, and we had this story cold." He moved to Manhattan and the offices of life, insurance you could be honored by their colossal scoop.

"I came to New York with the film, and there are signs everywhere in the office: ' Ralph, see Ed!'" Ed Thompson was editor in Chief of life. A great journalist. Ed says: "Ralph, I've heard that you have a hell of an exclusive." I said, ' Yes, I believe to do '. And he says, 'well, we won't run." I was stunned. It turns out the son of Einstein, Hans, called while I was on the way to New York and asked that we not run the story, that we respect the privacy of the family. So Ed decided to kill the story. You can not run a magazine without an editor to make those decisions, and Ed had made theirs. So I thought, 'Well, that 's', and went on to my next mission. I thought that the daylight would never see the photos and they forgot them."

Here, 60 years later, life presents a selection of photographs from that day - photographs that capture the scene on a morning of spring in New Jersey, when Ralph Morse found racing around a city Ivy League trying to find out what happened to the great Albert Einstein...

Finally: The tale of stranger than fiction in the brain of Einstein - Dr. Thomas Harvey controversially removed during autopsy, carefully cut into sections and then kept for years for research purposes - and intrigue long associated with the famous organ are too complicated to enter here. However, the day Einstein, died Ralph Morse was able to take some quick photos of Dr. Harvey at the hospital. Morse said he is sure that it is not the brain of Einstein under the knife of Dr. Harvey in the box which ends the previous Gallery,

Then, after a pause, Morse says: "you know, was long, long ago. I don't remember all the details. Then, what being cut there... "His words hang in the air.

Then, maliciously, Morse laughs.

-Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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Ghosts in the Sun: Hitler’s Personal Photographer at Dachau, 1950

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Do places have memories? Do buildings where people did terrible, bestial things to other human beings somehow retain an echo of that savagery within their walls, their floors, their foundations? Is it just our imagination that makes the skin crawl at places like Cambodia’s Genocide Museum, or Elimina Castle in Ghana, or any one of the Nazi’s extermination and slave-labor camps — or is it possible that there’s still something there, palpable and chilling, years later?

Even the most die-hard realist might find it hard to resist those sorts of questions when looking at Hugo Jaeger’s eerily quiet, color pictures from Dachau in 1950. Jaeger, after all, was not just another visitor to the former concentration camp; as Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer, he traveled with and chronicled Hitler and his Nazi cohorts at rallies, military parades, parties and, frequently, in quieter, private moments. The photos Jaeger made during his stint with Hitler were evidently so attuned to the Führer’s vision of what a Thousand Year Reich might look like that Hitler himself reportedly declared, upon seeing Jaeger’s early work: “The future belongs to color photography.”

[MORE: How Time Inc. bought Hugo Jaeger's archive of color photos.]

But what of the photos in this gallery, made five years after Hitler’s death (by suicide in a sordid bunker) and the fall of the Reich?

Even an avowed Nazi like Jaeger could not pretend that documenting a brick-and-mortar remnant of “master race” depravity would help serve the Nazi cause. In fact, at the time Jaeger was making these pictures, Dachau was still occupied — by refugees left homeless, and in some cases stateless, by the war that Jaeger’s degenerate cohorts started years before.

(At left: The dead at Dachau, 1945. Photo: David E. Scherman—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.)

Whatever the reasons for Jaeger’s 1950 visit to Dachau — which opened exactly 80 years ago, on March 22, 1933 — the photographs he made of the decaying, sunlit place feel at-once banal and vaguely obscene. Taken by anyone else, the pictures would be forgettable snapshots; when we know Hugo Jaeger was behind the camera, however, the sunlight itself seems cold, and Dachau teems with restless, invisible, unappeased ghosts.

– Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
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Ali, Frazier and the ‘Fight of the Century’: A Photographer Remembers

After refusing to register for the draft in 1967 — at the very height of his career — 25-year-old Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight championship title and endured a forced layoff from the ring for three years. In 1971, after winning the appeal of his conviction and five-year prison sentence before the U.S. Supreme Court, the former champ returned to boxing, fighting a few bouts against lesser (albeit ranked) rivals before facing the title-holder, Philadelphia’s “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier.
Long before the first bell of their March 1971 fight sounded, the contest was billed as “The Fight of the Century” and, amazingly, it lived up to the hype. That night, a star-studded crowd watched two of the greatest fighters who ever lived battle for supremacy in the world’s premier sports arena.
John Shearer—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Frazier had earned the heavyweight belt a year earlier. “I often felt bad for Joe,” photographer John Shearer told LIFE.com, recalling the weeks and months he spent with both fighters before the bout at New York’s Madison Square Garden. “He was completely miscast as the bad guy in the fight. In so many of the pictures I made of him that winter, when he’s with friends and relaxed, there’s something genuinely charming there — but something in his face suggests that if you scratched the surface, you’d find a world of other feelings.”
“The pictures I made of Ali training in Chris Dundee’s Miami Beach gym, meanwhile, are incredibly revealing in another way,” Shearer said, “not least because you can see that Ali had a belly. And this is not all that long before the fight. He just wasn’t in the kind of shape he needed to be in to battle a warrior like Joe Frazier.”
Many of Shearer’s photos of Frazier — including several in this gallery — make the clear case that Frazier simply wanted the title more than Ali. He was fighting, scratching and clawing for it long before the two men stepped into the ring.
“When I see the pictures I made of Joe running by himself, for example,” Shearer says, “the one thing that strikes me, maybe even more now than when I was making the photos, is his discipline. He was training, training, training. He was driven. And in many ways, he was a man alone.”
“That fight was the last time Ali took Joe for granted,” Shearer says. “I wonder if, deep down, he hit a point in Miami where he looked for that fire, that drive, and it just wasn’t there. You know — you want to fight, you want to hold that title belt again, but you can’t make yourself run those extra few miles at five in the morning, or spar for twenty more minutes every single day.”
Another aspect of Frazier that Shearer captured before the title belt was his creative self. Frazier was a singer and a performer, with his own band — and with his own backup singers, the Knockouts — and the truth is, he wasn’t bad.
“The two places Frazier communicates best,” wrote LIFE’s Thomas Thompson in a March 1971 cover story for the magazine, “are in the ring, when a cloak of menace and fury drops over him, and on a nightclub stage, where he sings with strength and sincerity.”
“The image of Frazier remained, unfairly and for the longest time, that he was just another fighter,” says Shearer. “That he was just another guy with his nose pushed off to the side of his face. But he felt, strongly, that he was every bit as articulate as Ali and, as importantly, perhaps, that he was every bit the showman that Ali was.”
As for the bout itself, one of the key factors that ratcheted up the rhetoric was the record purse offered both fighters. As LIFE observed in its March 5, 1971 issue: “[Ali] and Frazier are both going to get $2.5 million the morning after the fight whether anybody comes or not. A flat $2.5 million. Guaranteed. The most money ever paid to any man for a maximum 45 minutes’ work.”
“It was electric in the Garden the night of the fight,” Shearer remembers. “It was the night of the great showdown between the era’s two gladiators, and there was a sense that the unprecedented hype for the fight might actually fall short of the reality. And, remember, without a doubt it was a very, very pro-Ali crowd. They all came to see him win, to see him destroy Joe Frazier.”
That’s not the way it worked out, though. The relentless, punishing Frazier stalked and pummeled Ali all night, and in the 15th and final round floored him, for only the third time in Ali’s career, with an absolutely titanic left hook. Ali got back on his feet quickly, but the damage, literally and figuratively, had been done. Frazier won by unanimous decision, and held on to the crown until losing it in spectacular fashion to George Foreman two years later, in 1973.
“Frazier didn’t fight by going for the head, the way a lot of other boxers did against Ali,” Shearer remembers. “He went after Ali’s body the whole fight, pounding away, taking terrible blows to the head himself. You know, you keep whacking at the base of the tree, and the tree is going to come down. And that’s what happened. That’s really the story of that first, unforgettable fight between those two great champions.”
— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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