The unsolved case of the Einstein family murder

Telegraph

05-04-2025

Thomas Harding writes at the start of The Einstein Vendetta that Italians have two words for memory: ricordo – that which is subjective, personal and emotional – and memoria – that which is objective, collective and cerebral. Harding is particularly good on the first count: this narrative will tug at your heartstrings in some places and prompt righteous outrage in others.
The Einstein in question is Albert's first cousin Robert, whose wife Nina and daughters Luce and Cici were murdered by the Nazis at their Tuscan villa Il Forcado in August 1944. Robert himself, fearful of being captured because of his surname and Jewish background, had been hiding out in nearby woods, and didn't break cover even when Nina, coerced by German soldiers who had overtaken the villa, went out into the countryside and called for him. The couple had hoped that the Nazis would eventually give up and move on, both because Nina and the girls were not themselves Jewish and because British forces were advancing rapidly on the area.
Instead, the Nazis machine-gunned Nina and the girls before torching the villa and leaving a sign proclaiming the family, without evidence, 'guilty of espionage' and 'in constant touch with the enemy'. For Robert, the grief and guilt were unbearable: he took a fatal overdose of sleeping tablets the following July on what would have been his and Nina's 32nd wedding anniversary.
Harding, whose previous books include a biography of his great-uncle, Nazi-hunter Hanns Alexander, tells all this with verve and compassion. He captures beautifully the general atmosphere of wartime Tuscany, the fear the women must have felt in their last hours, and the inhuman toll the executions took on Robert: a partisan fighter and a priest had to talk him out of shooting himself in the immediate aftermath by emphasising his duty towards his adopted nieces Lorenza and Paola Mazzetti, also present that fateful day but mercifully spared.
Harding is also excellent on the investigations of the case, both at the time by U.S. Army Major Milton Wexler and then in the early part of this century by Italian and German researchers. The details of this 'slow, hard work. Real shoe-leather work' could in other hands be dry and dusty, but Harding makes them riveting: archival files pored over in search of vital clues, witnesses undone by failing memory, and always the hope that some small cosmic order will be restored by finding the man who ordered the shootings and on which basis. Three suspects – Clemens Theis, August Schmitz and Johann Riss – are identified, but there's no certainty as to which one of them (if any) it actually was: and now they're all dead, the truth may never be known.
Where the book falters is not in this lack of a neat resolution, but in Harding's attempts to assign greater significance to the narrative than there is. He theorises that Robert may have been targeted because of Albert's criticism of the Nazi regime and help for the American war effort, but there's no concrete evidence for this, nor indeed for much else when it comes to Albert's connections with the story. Reduced to repeated supposition about Albert's reactions – 'must have been struck by', 'presumably he took some form of action', 'there is no record of how he responded' – and without proof of the titular vendetta against the world's most famous scientist, the book's entire raison d'être feels built on sand, with the Einstein name the only thing which makes this incident stand out among myriad other Nazi abominations. As the Florentine paper La Nazione del Popolo said at the time, 'the tragedy was lost in the din of cannon, tanks, aeroplanes, and the jubilation of the arrival of the Allies.'
Harding also rather skates over the effect the murders had on the nieces Lorenza and Paola, who inherited Il Forcado, even though their stories are fascinating. Lorenza, who became a celebrated author and filmmaker, remained 'obsessed' with the case, still demanding action from, and making suggestions to, investigators well into her nineties. In contrast, the psychotherapist Paola took an altogether more accepting stance. 'It can't be overcome. One wonders: why do you live? To hate, or to love? The only response to cruelty is to live differently. The meaning of life is to take a path where you don't accept evil.'
Harding's failure to properly examine these contrasting but equally compelling attitudes is a microcosm for the book's merits and flaws alike. He's good on the how, what, when, where and who – but he never really gets to the heart of the why.