For the JC April 2025
Imagine, if you will, being the obscure relative of one of the most famous people in the world, a person who attracts admiration and occasional opprobrium whenever their name is mentioned.
And you bear the same surname, and perhaps, are forever having to explain to new acquaintances that yes, you are related, but no, even though you were close as children, you don’t really move in the same circles these days.
Such a person, Thomas Harding explains to readers in his new book, The Einstein Vendetta, was Robert Einstein, cousin to — yes, the Nobel prize-winning scientist Albert Einstein. We are in Italy in summer 1944, as the fortunes of war are beginning to turn against Hitler’s Germany. Robert and his family have been living a somewhat idyllic existence at the Villa Il Focardo, a beautiful estate on which grew olives and peaches, and animals were raised.
Robert, of course, is Jewish. His wife Nina and their two daughters, Luce and Cici, are not. And the family also comprises Nina’s identical twin nieces, Lorenza and Paola, whom Robert and Nina` are raising as their own, another niece, Anna Maria, and Nina’s sister, Seba.
As the Nazis flail in the dying days and months of the war, Robert Einstein is persuaded that his presence in the villa is actually a danger to his extended family. So with great reluctance, he leaves Il Focardo and hides in the woods nearby, with Nina paying risky visits to him whenever she can.
One terrible day, the Einstein family’s fears are realised, as a group of Nazi military arrive at the villa and demand to know where Robert is. All the women repeatedly tell the unit commander that they don’t know. He doesn’t believe them and frogmarches Nina out into the woods, forcing her to call out for her husband,
As the husband and wife have previously agreed between them, Robert does not respond to his wife’s calls. The commander — referred to by the other soldiers as “the captain” — is frustrated beyond measure. He pushes Nina back to the villa.
The women are separated: Seba, Anna Maria, and the twins, are in one place, Nina and her daughters, Luce and Cici elsewhere. And when the inevitable gunshots are heard, three women are dead.
So far, so horrible. It is the contention of Robert — who survives the murders of his wife and daughters by almost a year, before committing suicide — that the deaths can directly be attributed to the albatross of the family name. It didn’t matter to the Germans that the three Einstein women were not Jewish: they were relatives of Albert Einstein, declared enemy of the Reich. Lorenza and Paolo and the tenant farmers who worked on the estate were equally convinced.
Supporting this contention was the discovery of small notices left near the bodies. Typed in Italian, the notices said: “The German HQ makes it known: The family Einstein is guilty of espionage. They have been in constant contact with the enemy. The family was executed on the third day of August 1944”. The signature was only “The Commanding Officer”.
Harding’s book, some of which is based on remarkable late-life interviews with nonagenarian eyewitnesses, and part from unprecedented access to the German prosecutor’s files, then takes a different turn. He tracks the various inquiries made into the shootings, both immediately post-war by an American war crimes investigator, Milton Wexler, and a long time later by German and Italian lawyers, journalists, and a forensic expert.
But there is disappointment for those who were hoping for a “gotcha” type of denouement, identifying the commanding officer of the German unit and bringing him and the other soldiers to belated justice.
It seems clear that the murders of Nina, Luce and Cici Einstein were taken so seriously — tragically just three among so many Holocaust-era deaths — precisely because of the relationship to Albert Einstein. But neither in his lifetime — nor in that of the very long-lived twin sisters, who consistently fought for some kind of resolution to the case — was there a satisfactory or agreed name for the perpetrators of the war crime.
As Harding advises us in his preliminary author’s note, he went to court in order to gain access to the German prosecutor’s files. But though in the end three different names were in the frame, no-one was ever held responsible.
The enormity of Nazi wickedness can, perhaps, only be understood by describing Hitler’s victims in the most personal way possible. In that regard, even without the name of the killer, Harding has rendered an amazing service to the Einstein family.
The Einstein Vendetta by Thomas Harding is published by Penguin Michael Joseph on April 17 2025 at £22