Albert Einstein

Regarding Albert Einstein as the person of the century chosen by Time magazine, Dec. 27: At the risk of being called a broken record and a bore, I’ll say it one more time--just think of all the Einsteins snuffed by the Nazi regime.

Beyond the evil and the cruelty of the Holocaust one cries over the horrible waste of this vast human intelligence. The loss to all areas of arts and sciences. To medicine and to music, you name it. And all the children who were doomed never to be born. Who’s to say, who’s to estimate the gravity and the size of the loss. And the world had Einstein because he left his place of birth, Germany, to breathe the clean air of our U.S.

BATYA DAGAN

Los Angeles

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Admittedly Einstein, Roosevelt, Churchill and Gandhi had a great positive influence on the 20th century and Hitler had a great negative influence on it. But Lenin, who almost single-handedly fostered the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, influenced the century in an equally great way. It is very likely that if not for Lenin, there would be no Hitler, Stalin or Mao, as the world experienced them. Most likely, Hitler would not have come to power if he had not received a huge financial backing from German industrialists and bankers deadly afraid of Bolshevism.

Leninism was the driving force in Mao’s establishing the communist totalitarian regime in China. Two enormous countries, Russia, the largest in area, and China, the largest in population, were transformed in great measure due to Lenin.

MARCEL GAWARTIN

Ladera Heights