Dan Snow's History Hit - The Einstein Murders

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Warning: this episode contains discussion of suicide.In August 1944, German soldiers burst into the Florentine villa of Robert Einstein, cousin of the renowned physicist, Albert Einstein. As both a Jew and an Einstein, Robert had already gone into hiding, but his wife, daughters and extended family remained at home. What followed was a 12-hour nightmare that culminated in a brutal war crime.With us is Thomas Harding, author of 'The Einstein Vendetta: Hitler, Mussolini, and a True Story of Murder'. Thomas explains what happened on that fateful day and outlines Robert's arduous, winding path towards some kind of post-war justice.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History. In the early August of 1944, a unit of German soldiers arrived at a villa just outside Florence. This remote house was the home of Einstein, Robert Einstein, cousin to the renowned physicist, the globally recognised Nobel Prize winner, Albert Einstein. Albert was famously a prominent critic of the Nazi regime, and as a result, his entire family had become targets, victims of a vicious vendetta. The soldiers were there to apprehend Robert, but as an Einstein and a Jew, he was very cautious, and he'd gone into hiding with local partisans and was nowhere to be found. was very cautious and he'd gone into hiding with local partisans and was nowhere to be found.

Tragically, however, his wife and six other females of the family were still in the house. The soldiers locked the women in the basement, they vandalised the house, and they interrogated each of them. What ensued was a 12-hour nightmare for the family. In this episode, we're going to delve into this harrowing story. We're going to explore the fate of Robert and his family. We're going to look at how he tried to seek help from his cousin Albert in America. To tell the story, I'm joined by Thomas Harding. He's a journalist, documentary maker, author of The Einstein Vendetta, Hitler, Mussolini, and a True Story of Murder. It's a fascinating tale that tackles the complexities of war crimes investigations and the arduous winding path towards some kind of post-war justice.

As a warning, there is discussion of suicide in this episode. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Thomas, thanks very much for coming on, bud. Oh, it's great to be here, Dan. So, were the Nazis furious that Einstein had escaped? I mean, was that a thing? It's totally a thing. So in the early 1930s, Albert Einstein was, I mean, he must have been

the most famous Jew in the world. He was definitely a critic of the Nazi regime. And by the time you got to Adolf Hitler being elected, pamphlets were being published, endorsed by the Nazis, calling for the murder of the top Jews in the country, including Albert Einstein. They'd have their names and they would say next to their names, hanged. I mean, it was pretty obvious. it was pretty obvious. Albert was famous because of his science, of course. He was a Nobel Prize winner, E equals MC squared. He traveled around the world, but he was very much based in Germany. And then he started thinking increasingly about leaving. He's in Belgium at the time when newspapers around the world report that there's a thousand pound price on his head. This is the front page, Dan, of the Daily Herald in England. And around the world, in Belgium, around the world, about a thousand pounds in 1933 was a lot of money. Hundreds of thousands of pounds today. It must have been totally terrifying for him, alarming, knowing

Albert Einstein, probably a little entertaining, he kind of liked to think of himself as this larger-than-life character. So he persuaded his wife that they should leave. And so they went, first of all, to England. There's some quite funny pictures of him in Norfolk, where he's posing with two women holding rifles, pretending to be under armed guard. He gives a couple of speeches, the Royal Albert Hall, gives a big speech, he goes on a speaking tour, and then they head off across the Atlantic, arriving on the East Coast. And that's where he spends the rest of his life, in the United States. And the Nazis were furious that he'd got away. They were furious that he got away. They were furious that he was a critic of the regime.

And then to make matters even worse, he started publicly in the United States, giving interviews, calling out the Nazi regime, saying how awful they were, how badly they treated the Jews and what a terrible regime it was. And then as we're going into the war years, was. And then as we're going into the war years, he then starts helping the military. And this is all totally widely known. He sells one of his most important manuscripts. He sells to raise money for armaments in the US and he's given lots of accolades in the press. He speaks publicly about the need to overthrow the Nazi regime. People know that he's helping the US military. What probably isn't known publicly is his work for the Manhattan Project. Famously, he was the one who petitioned President Roosevelt to start the atomic program,

which became the Manhattan Project. Of course, that was shrouded in immense secrecy. Did the Germans know that Einstein was involved? I don't know. But what we do know is that there was a price on Albert's head. The Nazis hated him even more, even after the price was on his head because of his help for the US. The FBI under Hoover knew that he was on a blacklist. They had a list of people they thought was at threat of political assassination. So he was really target number one in terms of the kind of political assassinations. And don't forget, the Nazis were killing their so-called enemies, even if they were living overseas. So there was

a real threat against Albert Einstein, a very real threat. Back in the Third Reich, his property and money was all confiscated. So German government bust into his apartment, took everything, confiscated everything he left behind him. But he also left behind family, although where were they? They were in Europe, but not at that point in Germany. Well, this is the thing. So some of his family were in Switzerland. His sister, Maya, who he's very close to, was living in Florence, Firenze, in Italy. She moved there in the 20s with her husband, who was a Swiss guy. Loved it. Absolutely loved Florence. His sons were in Switzerland. His ex-wife, his first wife was in Switzerland. He was with his second wife, Elsa, in America, in Princeton, New Jersey. And then there was a cousin. So his first cousin,

Robert Einstein, who was five years younger than him, just under five years, they had grown up together. So if you go back to the 19th century, when Albert was a child, his father and mother and sister Maya were living in Munich and they were living with the cousins. They all shared the same house. They lived in the same house for 11 years. One of the reasons they were so close was that Albert's father, Herman, was in business with Robert's father, Jacob. And they had this electrification business. They'd go around and they'd bring lights literally to public facilities, restaurants or parks or streets and so on. And they bid for a very large project in the end of the 1880s and it didn't go well and they went bankrupt. And the whole family,

the both families, so this is Herman's family, including his children and Jacob's family and his children, they all moved to just outside of Munich and they tried again and they were still living together. But at that stage, Albert was in high school and his parents wanted him to stay there, but he hated being by himself. And he then ended up going to Switzerland. And that's when he started really getting into all his science work. But the families were still living together in Milan and this small town of Pavia, just outside of Munich. And then again, it goes bankrupt. At that stage, the two families separate. So Robert and Albert's fathers are no longer in business together, but they were still close. So much so that as they're growing older, they were still in communication to each other. They were sending each other birthday letters

and greetings, and they had nicknames for each other. Albert called Robert Booby, little one, little boy. They were very fond of each other. Albert called Robert Bubi, little one, little boy. They were very fond of each other. Robert stays in Italy. He grows up in Italy. He marries Nina, who is from Northern Italy. They have children. He and Nina and the two daughters moved to this villa called Il Focardo outside of Florence, quite close to Albert's sister, Maya, who's still living in Florence. So when the war starts in 1939, Maya's living in Florence with her husband, Robert, and his wife, Nina, is living just outside of Florence in this villa called Il Focardo with his two daughters, and also by that stage, two nieces, because Nina, her brother, is unable to look after these two daughters and they're twins.

And so there's now Nina, Robert, and the four daughters living in this villa called Il Focardo in the beautiful hills south of Florence. Italy's about to join the war, but Mussolini is part of the axis. There's anti-Semitism in dripping through everything he says. What was it like being Jewish in Italy at this point with war just around the corner for Italy? One of the things that surprised me when I was writing this book was that life for the Jews in Italy under the fascist regime, Mussolini's regime really changed. So at the beginning, when Mussolini came to power in the 20s, things really weren't that bad for the Jews. In fact,

I was surprised to learn that Jews were as likely to be members of the Italian fascist party as every other part of society. Some of Mussolini's top members of his cabinet were Jewish. The Minister of Interior, other high, high offices were run by Jews. I mean, look, there's no question about it. Mussolini was anti-Semitic. He had a whole bunch of papers and interviews he gave where his anti-Semitism, as you say, was dripping off him. But really, things were pretty okay for the Jews. And if you ask someone like Robert Einstein, he wouldn't have been that bothered until Mussolini became pals with Hitler at the end of the 1930s. Adolf Hitler came to visit. They had a visit to Florence. Hitler was fascinated by Florence, by the old history, by the works of art,

by the bridges. And it was following that that Mussolini and his regime, with the king's assent, signed what they called the racial laws. They were very much like the Nuremberg laws. Jews couldn't employ non-Jews. Jews couldn't work for the public office. Jews couldn't own a certain amount of land and so on. Italy being Italy, these rules were enforced very sporadically, depending where you were, depending on about your local police. For Robert and Nina and the children, there wasn't much impact. Robert was able to keep his villa. He'd become an Italian citizen. He was able to keep his Italian citizenship. His eldest daughter, Lucia was at university by that stage. She was studying medicine. She could stay at university.

So in many ways, things didn't really change, 1938, 1939. But then with the start of the war, 1938, 1939. But then with the start of the war, things definitely did change. 1943, Mussolini is arrested by the Italian state. He's deposed, arrested, and put in jail by the king. And the Germans mount a quite daring raid and they liberate him. And then they make him a puppet in control of the northern part of Italy. By this stage, the Americans are coming up from the south and the Allies are coming up from the south. And because the Germans have now taken over effective control of northern Italy with, without doubt, the collaboration of Mussolini and all his followers, things then massively change for the Jewish population of

Italy. Now you're seeing roundups, you're seeing concentration camps, even in Italy. There is a moment in December 1943, where the Minister of Interior of Italy, under Mussolini, on national Italian radio, tells every police station in the country to round up every Jew and put them in concentration camps. There's this whole myth that it's really the Germans. This was the Italians who did it to the Italian Jews or the Italian non-Jews doing it to the Italian Jews. And a lot of Jews were rounded up. About 20% of the population was rounded up and sent to concentration camps, many of them going to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland. to concentration camps, many of them going to Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. It's Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And do the Germans or the Italians take special aim for Einstein's cousin? Italians take special aim for Einstein's cousin. The Italians don't take special aim for Einstein's cousin, Robert.

I mean, they're aware of who he is. There's various intelligence reports that he's living at Il Focardo, but they kind of leave him to himself. But starting in 1944, Florence is now occupied by the Germans. German units start turning up at his house, asking questions, finding out about who he is, why he is. Clearly, there's some information which has been circulated that he's Jewish for sure, and almost certainly that he's the cousin of the famous scientist, Albert Einstein. Increasingly, as you go into the summer of 1944, as the Allies are coming further and further north, getting closer and closer to Florence, the warnings are circulating amongst the local population that

the Germans are looking for Robert Einstein. So much so that in the first week of August, Robert decides to go into hiding. So if you imagine south of Florence are these hills, and on the other side of the hills is a valley, the Arno Valley, and there's some woods. He's hiding up in the woods, just near this beautiful estate that he owns with his family, Il Focardo, about 300 or 400 yards from the villa. down and they will talk. She'll bring him food. He'll change where he sleeps every night. He's sleeping out in the open. Sometimes he'll sleep in a farmer's barn. Sometimes he'll stay with a friend, but he's moving every day and she doesn't know where he's staying. And she is staying at the house because they talked about this. They felt safe. Einstein, Albert Einstein was Jewish, but as far as they were concerned, Nina had been brought up Christian. She was part of the Valdezian sect of Protestant Christianity, whereas the two daughters followed their mother. They also thought of themselves as Christian, Protestant, and the two nieces were Catholic.

So they thought they were safe. They felt they were safe, whereas Robert, they felt, should go and hide. So he's out in the woods, and the rest of the family is hiding in this villa about 400 yards away. Do the Germans come knocking? The Germans definitely come knocking. So on the 3rd of August, the Germans arrived. We don't know exactly how many, maybe between eight and 15 Germans arrived. There's a captain who's in charge. Now you have to understand, these are the last hours of the German occupation of Florence. The Americans and the British are bombing Florence. The very next day, a unit of New Zealand soldiers would be arriving in Florence. Within 48 hours, the Americans and the British would have Florence.

So this is the very last gasp of the German occupation of Florence. So this is the very last gasp of the German occupation of Florence. And yet this German unit, even though all their comrades are heading north towards what they call the Gothic line, which was this entrenched area north of Florence, where the Germans are going to try and stop the Allies push northwards, this fortified all the way across the whole of Italy, east to west, this fortified line. The Germans are heading up to that to dig in, to wait for the Allies to come up to them. Even though everyone else is rushing that way, this German unit comes out of Florence, down this country lane, up this track in the middle of nowhere, Dan. I mean, if you go there, it's the middle of nowhere, up this track. And they arrive at this villa and

they smash down the door and they start saying, where is Robert Einstein? Where is the guy who owns the villa? Where is the cousin of Albert Einstein? And they don't know. They don't know. The women don't say. There's also Nina's sister there, Seba. So there's seven women in all. And there's also another niece by that stage. So the Germans push them down the corridor, down some stairs, down to the basement and lock the door. Down the basement, the seven women find that the Contadini are there already. These are the people who work the farm. They've been working the farm for generations. Nina is really friendly with them. She and her family and their family spends lots of time together. So she's comforted by the fact that they're there. And they spend the whole day there.

And upstairs, through the floorboards, they can hear stamping around, smashing of glasses, an accordion being played, ping pong. At some stage, somebody licks off a gun. It sounds like they're having a party upstairs. This goes on the whole day until about seven in the evening and they're dragged upstairs. And the Contadini, the farm workers are all sent home. And then the seven women are put upstairs to a bedroom on the first floor and the door is locked again. And they have to wait. They don't know what's happening. What does happen?

So one by one, they're interviewed, they're interrogated. They say they don't know what's happening. What does happen? So one by one, they're interviewed, they're interrogated. They say they don't know where Robert is. And so they tell Nina, they don't believe her. So they say, we're going to go out with you. So they escort her out into the tracks, into the woods. And she starts calling Roberto, Roberto, calling for her husband. Now they've already agreed that if something like this might happen, he won't reveal himself. So he stays in his woods. He's actually at this stage, he's with some partisans who are keeping him company. So we know all this because we have these witness statements later on. So we've got these incredible firsthand statements from later on. And Nina keeps calling, Roberto, Roberto. He doesn't answer. She's walking up and down.

It's now dark by now and there's a full moon so they can see where they're going. And after about half an hour, they give up and they come back. And the captain now is getting incredibly cross because his job is to get Robert Einstein. There's no way he's going to find him. He starts putting pressure on the daughters. One is Lucha, she's 27. The other one, Chi-Chi, she's 18. They're quite young, impressionable, but they don't know where their father is. And eventually he takes matters into his own hand and he kills them. He shoots them with a machine gun in the living room, in the Sala Rossa. This living room has red walls on it. And cold-bloodedly, he murders them. The Germans then set fire to the house. They pushed the rest of the family out, the other four women out of the house, who then run to one of the local farm workers, the Contadini's house. You know, absolutely terrified, of course. And at that stage, Robert, he's also had a machine gun.

He comes to find them. He wants to know what's happened. What's happened to his wife and his two daughters? He's beside himself. He says he wants to go to the villa. They hold him back because the Germans are still there. It'd be a suicide. He says he wants to commit suicide and they hold him back. This goes backwards and forwards and eventually they go back in the house and they spend the evening in the house. And sometime in the middle of the night, Robert leaves. Leaves a note saying that he's going to turn himself over to the Germans, hoping that they'll kill him because he knows that his wife and daughter have been murdered. He doesn't, does he? And he ends up, well, the British arrive and he ends up seeking justice

through them. It's an appalling thing. When I was writing these passages, I found it incredibly hard to write. And yeah, the British arrive, they want to, you know, what's going on. Then an American investigator turns up from a newly formed war crimes team. This is now, we're now into the end of August, beginning of September. And they start interviewing him and the others. And they take down the testimonies. We have all their testimonies. And at the time, there was these war crimes investigations to the atrocities. The Germans, they were committing these appalling atrocities around Tuscany.

One of them, probably the worst or one of the worst was at the Santana de Sistema. It's a top of a hillside near the coast to the west of 560 civilians. So young women, men, pregnant women, children, elderly men and women were just absolutely just mown down with machine guns by the Germans. They claimed that there was some anti-German partisan activity, but later it turned out they were just trying to cause chaos. It was a terror activity. There was another one at the Feccecchia Marshes just outside of Florence. There was all these appalling atrocities as the Germans were withdrawing and they were heading north to the Gothic line. Meanwhile, Robert is

desperate for justice and it's going nowhere. The Germans have left. The Americans and the British, they're focused on stabilizing the area, pushing the Germans north. They want to take Italy. They want to move from Italy to France. Their focus really isn't on war crimes. They do have war crimes commissions, but it's very difficult to mount any proper investigative case. There's no forensics skills, fingerprints experts, no one's really collecting samples. They're really hampered. There's some lawyers at work, but they don't really have war crimes investigators. I was just interesting. I was just reading a book by a war crimes investigator in Ukraine, and she was describing the how-tos of being a war crimes investigator. How do you interview people? How do you collect evidence? And there's a real

art to it. And clearly, these methods hadn't quite been learned yet. And so the war moved on and Robert was beside himself because clearly he wasn't going to get justice. was beside himself because clearly he wasn't going to get justice. In 1945, in April, Mussolini is found. He's hung near Milan. The Germans in Italy capitulate. The end of the war comes in May, 1945. And two months later, by this stage, Robert has put his affairs in order. He commits suicide. He can't deal with the guilt. He feels totally overwhelmed with guilt. He feels that he should have taken care of his wife and his two daughters. He feels totally responsible for that. And he just can't deal with it. And poor guy. I mean, he's absolutely terrible. He kills himself. He takes an overdose of sleeping pills in July 1945. Do we know if Albert Einstein ever felt any guilt? Did he ever refer to this episode?

It's a really good question. I mean, the archives are quite thin on some of this. We do know that the chief investigator for the U.S. War Crimes Commission wrote to Albert. We've got a copy of that letter. It's really powerful. We also have another letter from Robert who writes to his cousin asking for help. Now, at that stage, Albert was very well connected. You know, he knew top levels of the Roosevelt administration.

He'd catalyzed the Manhattan Project. And even though he hadn't been that involved over the years, he definitely had. If he'd wanted to, he could have pulled the levers of power. And there was some suggestion that he did actually trigger the American response in Italy. So we have three bits of evidence. One is some of the local partisans later testified that one of the American soldiers who turned up when they discovered that Robert had died, then called in and let the authority, the American authorities know that Robert had died. So clearly he was under instructions to find out.

Robert had died. So clearly he was under instructions to find out. The second thing is that we have letters from Maya, Albert's sister, to Robert's surviving family in the months that follow saying how distraught she was and definitely make it clear that her brother knew about what happened. We also know that Albert got very upset and was very affected by people around him who were close to him who died. We've got letters which show that, very moving letters. So if you put all that together, I think it's highly likely that Albert was extremely disturbed, upset, and probably, almost certainly, tried to do something about it, tried to contact friends of his to try and get involved. Despite the death of Einstein, did the US pursue the war crimes investigation? Yeah, very much so. The US pursued the investigation and they got nowhere. And in

early 1946, they handed the file to the Italians. And Dan, it was very different, the post-war situation in Italy than it was in Germany. I'm much more familiar with Germany and what happened after the war. I don't know about you, but there was no denazification process. In fact, there was an amnesty. The parliament passed an amnesty for everyone. They were very worried about not only the partisans who committed crimes, not only the fascists who committed crimes, but the soldiers, the Italian soldiers in Greece and Yugoslavia and Ethiopia were responsible for some appalling things. And no one wanted to deal with any of that. So there was an amnesty for everything. So for the next 50 years, there was almost no investigation to war crimes. There was a very small number of trials just after the war, which the British ran and the Americans ran and a handful of Germans,

senior Germans were put in jail. Many of them escaped justice. But there was no systematic evaluation of what had happened during Mussolini's period, how war crimes took place. Certainly not what happened with the Einstein family, not Sant'Anna di Stistema, not the Pecicchio Marshes, these appalling massacres. But then in the 1990s, that all changed. When a magistrate who was investigating a war crime went to the archive, the storage area, and he saw a huge cupboard. And he was like,

what's this cupboard? And it was weird because it was turned away. So the doors were against the wall. And he asked a janitor, what's inside there? And the guy said, oh, there's old papers. I don't know. And he turned it around and he opened the doors and there were over 620 files of war crimes for over 2000 crimes, which had never been properly investigated. These were the files that the Americans had sent over and the Italians had just put them in the drawer. Effectively, they put them in the cupboard. When the media heard about this, they were outraged. And there was a journalist from the Espresso magazine who called this the wardrobe of shame. And this became a whole new movement

of people who wanted to find out what happened during the war, what happened with the war crimes. And it triggered various war crimes that took place in the early 2000s. The first one was the Santana de Sesema trial where 10 Germans were found guilty. Nothing happened to them.

The Germans refused to extradite them. They said they had to be tried in Germany. And of course, they never were. The same thing happened at the Pacheco Marshes trial. They were found guilty, sentenced to life in prison. Nothing happened to them. Incredibly frustrating, but at least for the victims, the victims felt that some sort of justice had happened because the crime had been acknowledged and the perpetrators had been identified. When it came to the Einstein murders of 1944, there were no trials. But the Italian and the German prosecutors both went to great lengths to try and find out who the suspects were. There's three possible suspects. I won't go into everything right now, but it's really interesting to see how the mechanics of war crimes investigations started during the Second World War and in the aftermath, but they kept going and developed over the next decades.

Even to this day, there are Nazis and members of the fascist parties who are still being tracked down and war crime investigations continue and trials continue. Well, that's a remarkable decades-long process. Tragedy has taken so long for those victims to get anywhere near justice. Thank you very much, Thomas Harding, for coming on this podcast. The name of the book is? The Einstein Vendetta. Hitler, Mussolini, and a True Story of Murder. The Einstein Vendetta. Extraordinary tale. Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks, Dan. Reallyetta. Extraordinary tale. Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks, Dan. Really always a pleasure to be here.