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
