The Einstein murders

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Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. In the summer of 1944, As German forces were retreating in northern Italy, a small group of soldiers made a detour to a remote villa in search of the cousin of Albert Einstein. Robert Einstein posed no threat to the Nazi regime.

But nonetheless, they were determined to hunt him down. The tragic events that followed are the basis of a new book by the best-selling author Thomas Harding. He spoke to Rob Attar about an appalling crime. and the decades-long hunt for justice that followed. Can we begin with Robert Einstein? He's a cousin of the world-famous physicist Albert, but he's actually quite a remarkable man in his own right too. What can you tell us about Robert's early life?

So Robert Einstein was living with Albert Einstein for the first 11 years of his life. So they were very much sharing the same background, the same experiences as young children. They lived in Munich. Robert's father and Albert's father were in business together. They were in the business of electrification at the end of the 19th century. So for example, in Munich, they were electrifying beer halls and certain public spaces.

And that's where Robert grew up until the business did really badly, until Robert's father and uncle's business went bankrupt and they were forced to shut it down. And because of that, the... Father and the uncle decided to move to northern Italy, to Milan, or close to Milan. And they had another go at setting up another electrification business. And this is not just a story about Robert, but about his whole family too.

Could you please introduce us to his wife and then his children? Absolutely. So Robert's wife, Nina, she was from northern Italy. She was a Protestant. I should say that Robert was Jewish, like Albert Einstein, of course. He grew up Jewish. They didn't really practice religious Judaism, but they were very much part of that cultural milieu. He did attend synagogue from time to time. We believe neither Robert nor Albert took part in a bar mitzvah, we think.

But they considered themselves very much Jewish. They might call themselves cultural Jews in today's parlance. Nina, Robert's wife, was Protestant. She was from the Valdezian sect of Christianity from northern Italy. And Robert stayed in Italy after he grew up, and that's why he met Nina. They ended up living in Rome, and that's where they had two children, Lucia and Anna Maria, who they called Cici. As it happens, Lucha was born in Munich.

because during the First World War, Robert actually served in the German army in the First World War. So you can see from the way I'm describing it, there was kind of a to-ing and fro-ing. He was kind of going back and forwards between Italy and Germany, but he would consider himself, even though he... fought for the germans first world war his home was italy and in fact he became an italian citizen between the two wars

And so you have Lucia, you have Nina, you have Ana Maria Cici, so the two daughters, and Robert all living in Rome. And that's where they were. in the 1930s until this new event happened where Nina's brothers wife died shortly after childbirth and their twins then were effectively adopted by robert and nina so now you've got this really large family you've got

Robert and Nina. You've got the two daughters, Lucha and Chi-Chi. And then you've got these other two adopted daughters, Lorenza and Power and Mazzetti. So it's quite a large family.

And so Robert and Nina decided to move out of Rome and they move into a country house between Rome and Florence. And that's where they were in 1935, 1936. And what does it mean to be a Jewish man? in Mussolini's Italy at this point, and obviously with a family or children that might be considered to be half Jewish.

Well, this is a complicated answer. I don't know about you, but I didn't really know much about Italian history, certainly Mussolini's period. Before I started this project, I knew more about German history. I'd written a lot about my German family. I'd written books about...

My family in Berlin, how my great uncle hunted down the Commandant of Auschwitz, Hans and Rudolf. And I wrote another book, The House by the Lake, about my German family's house outside of Berlin. So I knew quite a lot about Germany. Honestly, I'm embarrassed to say I knew almost nothing about Italy. So when I started looking into it, I was surprised that this is more complicated than it first seems. For a large period of Mussolini's regime,

Jews were actually not a threat really more than any other part of society. When I looked into it, I learned that Jews were as likely to be members of the fascist party as any other members of society. That was until... Everything changed when Mussolini became friends with Hitler in the late 1930s. And Mussolini really changed. Not to say that he wasn't anti-Semitic before.

Not to say that he wasn't pursuing anti-Semitic policies, which he was, but at the same time, he had various high-profile Jews in his cabinet. He had a longtime mistress who was Jewish. And as I said, the Jews were as likely to be members of the party. party as anybody else proportionally. This changed with this friendship, this allyship with Hitler in the late 1930s, and now Mussolini then absolutely put into effect anti-Jewish.

Policies very much mirroring the Nuremberg laws in Germany. So in 1938, he had these things called the racial laws. Jews couldn't work for the government. Jews couldn't. own property, above a certain size, Jews can employ non-Jewish people. You can see these reflect a lot of the Nuremberg Laws, and this is not a coincidence. This is very much because

Mussolini was inspired, in love with, adored, whatever, however you want to describe it, with Hitler. And this affected very much Robert Einstein's family. The kids were now older, so Lucha was now at university. She was... at risk of being thrown out of university. Robert, who owned another farm, which is where the story really all happens, at Il Focardo, outside of Florence, that was now at threat. Because it's Italy and because things...

were never enforced systematically, the real consequences took longer to actually impact them. For a long time, they basically were able to keep going with the lives that they had. And then I suppose the key change is when Nazi Germany then invades Italy following the Italians surrender to the Allies. And then you actually have German forces.

in the area and sort of German control in the area where Robert and his family are living. And they seem to be particularly interested in Robert Einstein, don't they? Exactly. So you have this kind of period where Mussolini, this brief period where he's actually put in jail by... the Italian government following kind of a capitulation to the Allied forces. He's then liberated by the German army in this extraordinary raid. And then he was put back in power.

Some people say he's a puppet. Other people would say that he was very much in control with the support of the Germans. And the German army then actually has an occupation of Italy, including Florence. And this is when... The family, Robert Einstein's family, is really in jeopardy. The Minister of Interior actually announced on Italian national radio that all Jews had to be rounded up.

and deported to concentration camps. I mean, this was on the airwaves. This is not a secret. He announced this on the national airwaves. And Robert and Nina and the four children, who are now in this villa called Il Focado outside of Florence, they heard stories of all the roundups, not only in Florence, but in the areas around Tuscany. And they were really terrifying. And then they heard the rumors that the Germans were actually coming up to Robert himself.

And so in the early summer of 1944, to give it some timing, Robert went into hiding. He had a big discussion with Nina. And they discuss, should they all leave? But the question by then is, where would they go? It's almost impossible to leave Italy. You know, trying to get areas controlled by the Allies as they were coming up from the south would be almost impossible because you have to go through the German forces, trying to get to the north, to Switzerland, where some people went.

Again, really hard. You'd have to go through the German forces. And then even if you got the Swiss border, no guarantee you'd get into Switzerland. So they decided to stay at the villa, the family, but with Robert hiding. in the woods nearby, just a few hundred meters. There was a hill, they were on a hill, and up the hill there were some woods. So he could stay close enough that they could stay in contact, but away from the villa in case the Germans came to pick him up.

And then ultimately the Germans do come to pick him up and this sets the scene for the central episode, the central crime of the book, which is the killing of Robert's wife and family. I wonder if you could describe what happened there. Yeah, so it's the 3rd of August 1944. It's literally the last hours of the German occupation of Florence. By the end of that night, the Germans would blow up five of the bridges in Florence and then withdraw to the north.

to what became known as the Gothic Line, this militarized kind of zone to the north of Florence, where they kind of dug themselves in to defend themselves against the upcoming Allies' attack. So this is in the last few hours of the German occupation, a small unit of Germans.

arrived at the villa, Il Focado, looking for Robert Einstein, asking for Robert Einstein. And when they learned that he wasn't around because he was in hiding, they held the women and the contadini, the farmers, the people who worked.

the land downstairs in the basement for a while while they trashed the place. And then in the evening, they separated the Contadini, who they sent home, and then the Einstein family they kept. And as you said, there was this horrific... period where they interrogated the women and then finally they killed they murdered nina robert's wife and two daughters who were 18 and 27 this is obviously a horrific crime and it also

It seems hard to fathom. We know about Nazi antisemitism, but they're about to pull out of Florence. Why are they then taking the time to try and hunt down a single individual in all of this? Something else must have been going on. Well, this is the whole thing. So it was extraordinarily rare for Jews to be killed in Italy. What was going on with the Jews were being rounded up.

And then they were deported to concentration camps. There actually was a concentration camp in Italy, but mostly they were sent off to Auschwitz and other concentration camps in German-occupied Poland, where many of them were murdered. Jewish population in Italy were murdered. There are some extraordinary stories of Jews surviving and hiding, of Jews being supported by Italians, of Jews joining the resistance.

But it was incredibly rare for Jews to be actually killed in cold blood by the Germans in Italy. So something, as you say, was going on. On top of that, it was the last few hours of the occupation. Why would German soldiers go out of their way to this incredibly remote? villa you know it's not on any main road you have to go up a one kilometer road which goes literally nowhere except for to the villa so they were clearly hunting for them specifically we know that because they said so

On top of that, you've got the question, which is, wouldn't they be putting themselves at risk by kind of slowing their departure? All their colleagues were like heading north, trying to get away from the Allies' advance. The bombs were literally falling that evening and the Allies were attacking. The next day, you'd have the early forces of the Allies arriving in Florence. I mean, this was a real potential threat for the Germans. So what were they doing?

It definitely begs the question about motivation. And when I asked people in the local area who still remember this, this is very much a traumatic part of the history from this period of time, they all say the same thing. that the Germans were hunting down Robert Einstein specifically because he was a Jew, but even more importantly, because he was the cousin of Albert Einstein. And they used this word, vendetta.

revenge. Vendetta has different meanings in Italian, but the way they were meaning it was revenge, that it was a personal attack, a political assassination. by those high up in the German authorities, because such a political attack would never have happened without the orders from high up. How high up? We don't know.

The people that I spoke to who know a lot about how these things happened suggest it would have been at the very highest level. Does that mean Adolf Hitler? Does that mean Himra? Does that mean Kaltenbrunna? The historians I speak to say almost certainly the decision would have been made in Berlin, not by one of the regional German officers.

And so this is why I call the book The Einstein Vendetta, because that's what the family believes, that's what the locals believe, and that's what many historians believe as well. And this is because of the Nazi regime's loathing of Albert Einstein. who they couldn't reach because he was safely in America. That's right. So Albert Einstein fled Germany. There was actually a price on his head. Not only did they announce that they would pay people to...

kill Einstein. It was on the front pages of all the newspapers in Europe. So you can understand why he would want to flee. He was in Belgium, then he came to England, and there's a famous picture of him. posing quite funnily with a couple of English women with guns, so-called protecting him. Obviously, the whole thing was set up by the newspapers. And then he went...

with his wife to the States. His two sons were either in Switzerland or with him in the States. His sister also joined him, his sister who used to live in Florence, who spent a lot of time with Robert and Nina and the kids. She also went to America. So the nearest, closest relative remaining in German-occupied Europe was Robert Einstein.

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actually managed to get to robert einstein is it fair to say that after what had happened to him he was just completely broken i mean you can imagine it must have been absolutely horrific he felt torn up about it. We know from contemporary accounts that he was really, really broken, beset by guilt, catatonic. We have accounts from the local priest who describes visiting him.

frequently and just sitting next to him, sometimes holding his hand. And Robert would just stare out the window without saying anything. Eventually, after a few months, he decides to actually get out the house and walk around the garden some. But that's only after one of the partisans had encouraged him to stay alive. I mean, he said he wanted to kill himself within hours. And he was really encouraged to stay alive by a partisan he met who said...

You've lost your two daughters, but your two nieces have survived. You know, your responsibility is to look after them. And so I think he took that really seriously. I should say there's a third niece who was also living with them at the time of the attack. So you had, I know it's a bit complicated, I apologize. So there were these two daughters, Lorenzo and Paola, who were adopted by the family, but later on a third niece.

who also was called Anna Maria, came to join them. So he committed to looking after his three nieces. And then a year after the murder of his wife and two daughters, he must have felt that he'd done enough. He must have felt enough time had passed. Anna Maria had left by that stage and he'd said that he would look after her going to university. The other two nieces were back at school, felt that they were on their way.

had committed to passing over his property, all his assets to those two nieces. So he must have felt like... He's done his bit. And also, I think by all accounts, he was still totally broken. And so a year after, just a little under a year after the murder of Nina and the two daughters, Robert killed himself. And he was effectively the fourth victim.

of the Nazi atrocity. Now the second part or the latter part of your book then looks at the aftermath of the crime and attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice or even at least to find out who they were. was much done in the immediate aftermath of the actual killings. This is what I was really interested to discover is how...

The war crimes investigations took place after the war. Now, what did they look like? I knew a little bit about Germany. My great uncle had been a war crimes investigator. He had tracked down the commandant of Auschwitz. So I'd really studied. the Belsen trials, the Nuremberg trials, other trials. But I didn't know anything about what happened in Italy. And it's a really fascinating period of history.

In the immediate aftermath, the Americans actually were the ones who mounted an investigation. So in September 1944, just a few weeks after the murders. a war crimes commission arrived at Il Focado, the villa that the family lived. And they interviewed Robert, they interviewed the nieces and collected some information. And that's about all they did. They didn't really do much more than that. It was even remarkable that they were looking into this.

case there were so many other war crimes where many many more victims were murdered for example the santana de sistema which is not far from florence 560. women, children, and men. All civilians were murdered by the Nazis. And these were the two first cases for the War Crimes Commission, the Einstein case and the Santana del Sistema. case and it is remarkable that they even focus on the Einstein case given

that there were three victims. I'm not going to use the word only, but there's a much more number of victims. But it does speak to how important the case was to the Americans. And it does suggest perhaps that the American authorities were paying particular attention to this family and this wouldn't be that surprising would it Albert Einstein was probably the most famous Jew in the world. He was one of the leading anti-Nazi voices during the Nazi times. He had publicly...

spoken out against the Nazi regime in America, and he was known publicly to be supporting the American military. Whether the Germans knew about his work on the Manhattan Project. Probably not. It was very secret, but maybe there have been some kind of whispers. In any case, you would imagine that the Americans would be really concerned about.

His family, whether Albert actually asked for help, we don't know. There is one piece of paper that has emerged, which is interesting. The Italian journalist found the cover page of the file, the investigation file that this war. Crimes Commission compiled with all the interviews was sent over with the Italians. They closed the case in 1946.

And they sent it back to the Italians, but there was a cover page. And on that was mentioned the OSS, the Office for Strategic Services. We don't quite know what that's about, but it does. give yet another sign that the American establishment, the authorities, had particular interest in Albert Einstein's family.

initially but the case was closed the americans decided that the italian authority should deal with it the italians received the document and then they just put it in the drawer they did absolutely nothing with it and that's where it sat for

Almost 50 years. Now, this really fits a pattern with quite a few other Holocaust stories that we've talked about on this podcast. There seems to be this many decades-long gap, and then these crimes all start being investigated again, perhaps like in the 1990s, the early... What do you think explains that change that happened around then? Well, I mean, this is incredibly controversial in Italy. This has very much fitted a pattern. In 1994, a magistrate was working in the Ministry of Justice.

And he was investigating a war crime from the Nazi period. And very, very few people had been actually taken to court. Very few people had been sentenced to prison time or to death. And he was investigating a particularly appalling atrocity. And he went down into this archive space, this closet, this storage area, and he was rooting around the papers. And then he saw this cupboard.

And he was perplexed by it because the doors were not facing out. The doors were facing the wall, like somebody had turned the cupboard against the wall. And he asked the janitor what was inside. And the janitor said, oh, some old papers. So he moved the cupboard around and had a look. he found over 600 files with more than 2,000 war crimes detailed within. This became a major scandal in Italy. This was 1994.

And a journalist from the magazine called Espresso dubbed it The Wardrobe of Shame, which is a compelling name. And it became a massive story in Italy. And it actually prompted an investigation. by the parliament into why was it that no one had looked into these cases? Why were there so many cases that had gone uninvestigated? Why have they been put away into this cupboard and never looked at?

As often happens, and this I think is fascinating, they couldn't find agreement. So the commission which was set up was split. And there was a divided history. So on the one hand, with a more conservative group who said, look, it was just a cock up. It was a mistake. It was a clerical error. Nothing to see here. And the other group, the more liberal group, said, absolutely not. This is a systemic issue. It's about institutional avoidance, amnesia.

is very much reflective of, and they gave a number of reasons. One was Italy wanting to befriend Germany after the war for economic reasons. Two, because... Many of the people who had been involved or associated with the fascism were still involved with. the government, and then three, because they just didn't want to look into any of the war crimes that took place in the war, because Italy itself was responsible.

for war crimes in Yugoslavia, in Greece, in Ethiopia, which no one wanted to deal with. In fact, at the end of the war, all the politicians came together and they declared an amnesty. So no one would be investigated. I mean, I don't know of any other country where this happened. Obviously, very different from what happened in Germany with the denotification process.

So those are the reasons why, and still to this day, it's a real source of contention. There's no consensus about this period of history, and it continues to separate the population very much about what happened during the war.

Specifically in the Einstein case, there were then several investigations that took place in Italy and Germany. And you've studied them all and you've written about them in the book. Do you think it was feasible they would ever actually be able to... identify and bring a culprit to trial. I do. And so after the Wardrobe of Shame, there was a series of investigations in Germany, as you say, in Italy. There was also efforts made in America.

to try and track down what was happening. I tried to play my bit. And sadly, I think if they'd done things earlier, they would have actually had a chance. By the time I got to this, there was almost no chance because... Almost all the people who possibly could have been alive during the time of the war crimes were dead or incredibly old and infirm and therefore...

unable to be prosecuted. The Italians had a series of successful prosecutions of war criminals in the early 2000s. One was for the Fezzacchio Marsh's massacre. where hundreds of people were murdered, I think 160 or something. Then you've got the Santana de Sistema massacre. Ten Germans were found guilty of that in absentia. They never appeared in court. And then the Germans refused to extradite them. And there's this pattern then of these court cases, which were successfully prosecuted in Italy.

But the Germans refusing to hand over the suspects or the accused or those found guilty, they argued, the Germans argued that Germans have to be... tried in Germany according to the Constitution, and that never happened. They came up with all sorts of reasons why that never happened. More recently, there have been some elderly Germans, former...

prison guards, bookkeepers, secretaries who've been prosecuted in Germany successfully by the German courts. So that could have happened, but it was all way too late. so i think yes absolutely i think there was a period of time maybe in the 90s where this could have happened there was some evidence that i found which could have

helped maybe with the investigation. In fact, two of the prosecutors, one in Germany and one in Italy, who were the people responsible, both said to me, if they'd known about this evidence earlier, that could have been helpful. By the time I looked into it, it was all too late, which is devastating because I do believe, and speaking to survivors of various war crimes in Italy, knowing the truth is vital.

not only for the society in terms of knowing what happened, but also for the victims or the families of the victims in terms of their efforts to try and... tried to accommodate to the appalling crimes that took place. So I think it's a real, real shame that more efforts weren't made earlier on. Actually, on that note, I suppose we should talk about the fact that one of Einstein's nieces was herself very involved in the attempt to try and find out who had done this.

At least two of them were, Paola and Lorenzo were very involved. Lorenzo was specifically the one who was the face of it, but I think Paola also was very involved. Anna Maria III, not as much, although she also gave interviews to the German police and the Italian police and tried to do what she could. She was less public about it. Lorenzo, though, was really fiercely involved.

and lobbied and cajoled and berated the Italian prosecutor trying to get him to act. She said that she knew who actually it was. The prosecutor, she said she recognized him in a photograph, and the prosecutor really just didn't. investigated it, didn't think that she had the capacity anymore as an elderly woman to be able to recognize somebody, thought it unlikely that this person would be the person, but she was very disappointed at the end.

that the prosecutor didn't do more. Although she said that, at least for herself, she was happy. she was satisfied that she knew who it was. So that gave her some aspect of relief. So you can see there these kind of parallel things, aren't there? There's kind of justice for the victims or the families of the victims, but also justice for society. And they don't always line up, do they?

which is interesting. Yeah, but she died not seeing any justice. The daughter of one of the nieces has actually filed a civil claim now against the Italian government. You'd think it'd be against the German government. It's very convoluted, but... After years of going backwards and forwards between Italy and Germany about who was going to pay, who was going to compensate, an agreement was made between the Germans and Italians. So now a fund has been set up by the Italian government.

We don't know where that money came from, but some people guess it might have originally come from Germany. Officially, it comes from the European Commission. It's not really clear where it comes from, but some of the lawyers involved do think that maybe it came from Germany. That money now is available for people for the first time to make a claim against what happened for these war crimes, not just for...

the stealing of their assets, but also for emotional damage, for the consequences, long-term consequences, which is a new thing. And the daughter of one of the nieces has actually filed a claim. It's currently in the courts. works out, maybe that would be some form of justice because that would be the first time that courts would have actually...

affirmed that it was the Germans who were responsible. Even though German prosecutors have said that publicly, it would be the first time that a court has affirmed that. And that actually having some financial compensation, I think, goes some way to...

It doesn't make things better, but it goes some way to acknowledging the crime. And hopefully that will have some positive impact. That actually also ties into a point that you make very near the end of the book where you...

say that actually perhaps we can get a bit too hung up on who the individual perpetrators are, because we need to remember there was a whole kind of state apparatus behind this, ordering this to happen. You know, it's not just about the people on the ground, is it? It's about the whole society, the whole state.

I mean, isn't that interesting? I think because of all these true crime podcasts and TV series, I think we've become obsessed with trying to... put our finger exactly who it was, how did it happen, which of course is of interest, but maybe it also loses track of the wider issue of the system. what underpinned this, not just the ideology, but also the people involved and the organizations involved.

And so for me, this story is an opportunity to really understand more about, yes, these individuals were killed and murdered and it is terrible and tragic. But why did it happen? What were the forces at stake? What was the ideology? What was this Nazism which kind of permeated down all the way down to a unit of German soldiers in Florence? It motivated them. to carry out this appalling, appalling atrocity.

And what about the system of war crimes prosecutions, which clearly failed to some extent? What went wrong there? Why was justice not seen? So I think this story is an opportunity to ask bigger questions. At first, I was very eager to... out who exactly was the person involved. And then I realized, actually, hold on a second. Maybe it's okay not to know the actual answers. I've come up with three names at the end, which I suggest in the book and which have been discussed by other people.

But maybe that's actually not the most important thing. The most important thing is that Germany was responsible for this murder. What actually happened? What was underpinning it? Why were they so keen to carry out revenge, a vendetta against Albert Einstein? What does that say? That people are willing to carry out political assassinations against a family member. And if you think about what's going on politically now around the world about...

The personalization of politics, the weaponization of ideology, you know, raises some really serious concerns.

Right at the end of the book, you do something quite interesting, which is you focus on the lives of the people who are murdered and you kind of centre their stories rather than their murders. I mean, do you think sometimes perhaps books about Holocaust and other tragedies... focused too much on the tragic deaths and not enough on the lives they were leading before that i mean the answer is yes especially as a storyteller i'm very aware that it's quite compelling it's quite easy to dwell on the

perpetrators, to get fixated on the crime, to think about the sensational aspects of a story. I mean, for obvious reasons, right? And this is as old as time. I mean, if you go back... You know, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years, you could see the same thing. If you look at the newspapers, people are obsessed with murders. They're obsessed with sexual assaults.

And they will often fixate on, you know, whether it be Jack the Ripper or whoever it is, they'll fixate on that. So I was very aware of that when I was writing this story. And I really wanted to, as you say, to center the lives of those who actually... were the victims. Initially, parts of the story has been told, but very rarely have the four victims really been at the center of the story. And I thought that was important.

And so that's why at the end of the book, I really tried to make that effort and tried to really humanize it. Because for me, it's very real. You know, it's very real what happened. These people feel very real to me. You know, I've met people who grew up with them. I was lucky to come into this just at a time where there were some people who still were alive, many of whom have since died, who actually played with the girls in the garden at Il Focado, the villa.

you know, who remember Robert driving the car into town, who remember Nina and what she was like. So, you know, it feels very real to me. And I wanted to share that so that people don't forget. And it becomes a story about... for individuals who really had the most horrendous things happen to them. That was the best-selling historical author Thomas Harding. The Einstein vendetta, Hitler, Mussolini and a murder that haunts history.

is out now, published by Michael Joseph. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.