Helen Dukas, 1896-1982

Helen Dukas was born Helene Dukas, in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Until her fifteenth birthday Helen attended the School for Higher Education for Girls in Freiburg. When her mother died in 1909 she was forced to abandon her education to take care of the family. At the death of her father in 1919 she started working at her first job as a kindergarten teacher. In May 1921 she went to Munich where she worked as a teacher. In 1923 she went to Berlin and took a secretarial position in a publishing house. She never married.

Her father Leopold Dukas, a German-Jewish merchant, came from Sulzburg and her mother, Hannchen Liebmann, came from Hechingen. Hechingen was also the same town that Elsa Einstein, Albert Einstein's second wife, came from. In 1928 Elsa Einstein was looking for a secretary for her husband. Through the acquaintance with the Dukas family Helen applied for the job, and after successful interviews with Elsa and Albert, she got the position on April 13, 1928 and would stay with Albert Einstein until his death in 1955.

In October 1933 she emigrated to the United States with the Einstein family, and in 1936, on Elsa's Einstein death, Helen assumed the additional duties of housekeeper. She became an American citizen on October 1, 1940 when she, Albert Einstein and his stepdaughter Margot swore the oath on the American constitution.

In 1950 Einstein had appointed Helen Dukas and Dr. Otto Nathan, an economist, as executors of his literary heritage. They were granted the literary rights to all of his manuscripts, copyrights, publication rights, royalties, and royalty agreements. She devoted herself to this task with great engagement and thanks to her efforts many documents of Einstein were collected, sorted and catalogued. Helen Dukas and Dr. Nathan collaborated on the compilation of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. The original documents are now housed at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the Albert Einstein Archive.

Helen Dukas also co-authored Einstein: Creator and Rebel and co-edited Albert Einstein: The Human Side with Dr. Banesh Hoffmann. Helen Dukas died on February 10, 1982 in Princeton.