The Einstein Vendetta, review: ‘the tragic fate of Robert Einstein, Albert’s cousin’

Imagine 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. But imagine also that this famous relative is an intellectual wanted by the Nazis for being an outspoken opponent of the regime and who has a bounty of around £100,000 on his head after escaping Germany in 1933.

This was the predicament – Thomas Harding explains to readers in his new book The Einstein Vendetta – facing Robert Einstein, cousin of the Nobel prize-winning scientist Albert. We are in Italy in the summer of 1944, as the war is 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 overflowing with olive trees and peach orchards.

Robert, of course, is Jewish. His wife Nina and their two daughters, Luce and Cici, are not. The family are living with Nina’s identical twin nieces, Lorenza and Paola, whom Robert and Nina were raising as their own; another niece, Anna Maria; and Nina’s sister, Seba.

Nazi enemy: Robert Einstein with his wife Nina, who was shot[Missing Credit]

As the Nazis flail in the dying days of the war, Robert Einstein is persuaded that his presence in the villa is 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, a group of Nazi soldiers arrive at the villa and demand to know where Robert is. 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 has been previously agreed between Nina and her husband, 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 and declared enemies of the Reich. Lorenza and Paola and the tenant farmers who worked on the estate were equally convinced of this.

Supporting this theory were small notices discovered near the bodies. Typed in Italian, they read: “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 notices were signed by “The Commanding Officer”.

Harding’s book, which is partly based on remarkable late-life interviews with nonagenarian eyewitnesses to the event, then takes a different turn. He tracks the various enquiries made into the shootings immediately after the war by an American war crimes investigator, Milton Wexler, and those undertaken 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. It appears clear that the murders of Nina, Luce and Cici Einstein were taken so seriously precisely because of their relationship to Albert Einstein. Though three names were in the frame, the perpetrators have never been identified, let alone punished.

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 a wonderful service to the Einstein family.

The Einstein Vendetta, by Thomas Harding

Michael Joseph