By the summer of 1944, Rome had fallen and the Allies were pushing up through Italy. While withdrawing northwards, the Germans massacred civilians, partly out of a sense of betrayal by former friends—Italy had ended its alliance with Germany less than a year before—and partly as reprisals for attacks by partisans.
Robert Einstein, a Jew and a cousin of Albert, the Nobel-prizewinning physicist, knew his life was in danger. In late July a unit of the Hermann Goering Division, one of the most powerful in the Wehrmacht, had come looking for him at his Tuscan estate, but he was out working in the fields. Robert decided that he should separate from his wife, Nina, and their two adult daughters, Luce and Cici. As Protestant Christians, they thought they would be safe if the Germans returned.
They were wrong. On August 3rd several heavily armed Germans smashed into the house. Their captain said he had orders for Robert’s arrest. Fourteen hours later, Robert, who was hiding in the woods 300 metres away, heard gunfire.
Robert was overcome with grief and blamed himself for the deaths of his loved ones. Almost a year later he killed himself, but not before he had been interviewed by an American army major assisting in an investigation into war crimes committed by the retreating Germans. Major Milton Wexler may have assumed that he had been sent to look into the Einstein murders because of the name.
Thomas Harding’s book points to Italians’ suffering in this period—“The Einstein murders were listed as number 2,550 of 5,884 in the ‘Atlas of Nazi and Fascist Massacres in Italy’,” the author observes—but its focus is specific. Mr Harding hopes to find the perpetrators of the triple murder and describes the efforts of both Italian and German prosecutors to do so. Doggedly pursuing his own investigation, Mr Harding interviews surviving witnesses and Einstein family members.
Most of all, he seeks to find out whether the killings were the result of a vendetta. As a world-famous Jew, revered physicist and vocal critic of Nazism, Albert had long been an assassination target, but he had moved to America in 1933 and was out of reach. In 1939 Albert had warned President Franklin Roosevelt of the possibility that the Nazis could develop an atomic bomb, which led to the Manhattan Project. Though Hitler could not kill Albert, whom he loathed, he could kill Robert. Did the Führer personally order the hit?
Mr Harding cannot prove it, but some of his sources have no doubt. The murders were not random acts of cruelty, they argue, but deliberate acts of vengeance.