How vengeful Hitler put a price on Einstein's head and made his family pay

Thomas Harding looks at what happens when the personal becomes political in a warning from history for today

- Thomas Harding

Since his election to office, we have seen US president Donald Trump make the personal the political in a spectacularly cruel way. Almost on a daily basis, he has carried out reprisals against his political opponents. He signed an executive order stripping federal security clearance from law firms who previously worked against him. He cut military aid to Ukraine after Volodymyr Zelensky dared to contradict him in the White House. He also revoked the security detail for high-profile critics like General Mark A Milley, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.

Trump’s strategy of relentless political payback has created a pervasive fear in the American political and business universe, which has led to self-censorship and an unwillingness to challenge.

Trump has put academics in his sights too, telling Columbia University that if they failed to place one of their academic departments into “receivership” they would lose $400m in federal funding. He has put Robert Kennedy Jnr, an anti-vaxxer who for years was sneered at by the scientific community, in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump’s administration has since cut billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health.

Matters have grown so drastic that, on 31 March, 1,900 leading researchers accused the Trump administration in an open letter of conducting a “wholesale assault on US science”.

In these contemporary times, attacks against experts are not isolated to the US. Similar campaigns can be seen in Russia, Turkey and Hungary. But history tells us that it doesn’t take much imagination for political retribution to turn violent with terrible consequences. In 1989, Iran’s ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwah calling for the murder of the author Salman Rushdie.