Helen Dukas
Helen Dukas (often Helene Dukas) was Albert Einstein’s secretary. She was born on October 17, 1896, in Freiburg, Germany, and died on February 10, 1982, in Princeton, New Jersey, at age 85.
She co-authored Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel and co-edited Albert Einstein: The Human Side with Banesh Hoffmann. Einstein chose Dukas and Otto Nathan as the trustees to hold his literary rights, making them the executors of his literary heritage. They helped assemble The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, using documents donated to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Einstein and Dukas were even watched by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover.
Dukas’s birth name was Helene, the daughter of Leopold Dukas, a German-Jewish merchant. She grew up in Freiburg with six siblings; her mother was Hannchen Liebmann. Through her mother’s connection to Elsa Einstein, Elsa’s sister, Dukas became Einstein’s secretary in 1928. After Elsa’s death in 1936, Dukas took on many household duties for the Einstein family in Princeton, New Jersey, where she lived for the rest of her life. She never married.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:57 (CET).