(JEWISH GROUP) With Albert Einstein out of reach, the Nazis went after his family
As the Allies battled their way up the Italian peninsula in the summer of 1944, behind German lines reprisal killings became sickeningly common. In answer to partisan attacks, Italian civilians — men, women and children — were shot by German soldiers “in cold blood, looking the innocent in the eyes,” as one war crimes prosecutor later put it.
To those who committed these atrocities, their victims — more than 2,000 — had no names. But one incident from that murderous period, described in Thomas Harding’s new book, “The Einstein Vendetta,” stands out, because the three people killed were targeted precisely on account of the name they bore.
Harding tries, with missionary zeal, to uncover the facts of this crime. Best known for “The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History,” a 2015 book about his grandmother’s childhood home outside Berlin, the author has set himself a difficult task here. So much valuable information has been lost to time. Still, Harding skillfully and suspensefully recounts the events, their aftermath and the struggles of other earnest investigators over the decades to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Albert Einstein, the renowned theoretical physicist, grew up in the 1880s in a household that included his first cousin, Robert, four years younger. Their fathers were brothers and partners in an electrical engineering business in Munich and later in Milan. Albert called Robert “Bubi,” little boy. Whereas Albert studied in Switzerland and later settled in Berlin, Robert Einstein, trained as an engineer in Italy, married an Italian Christian woman named Nina Mazzetti, and they had two daughters. In 1937, Robert moved his family to the Villa Il Focardo, an elegant stucco house down a narrow lane, deep in the Tuscan countryside.
With Albert Einstein out of reach, the Nazis went after his family
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