Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

^{Rzhevskaya with a pair of traffic cops, German and Russian, large and smalclass="underline" ‘The girls directing traffic… were… enlivening Berlin’s crossroads.’}

^{8 May 1945. The post-mortem examination of the body of Josef Goebbels. Dr Faust Shkaravsky, principal forensic medicine specialist of the 1st Byelorussian Front, is third from the left.}

^{Dental assistant Käthe Heusermann’s diagram of Hitler’s teeth, crucial to identification of the body. Heusermann and her colleague Echtmann were later harshly treated in Soviet captivity.}

^{Käthe Heusermann and dental technician Fritz Echtmann with two Russian officers.}

^{In the Tiergarten with a German sFH 15 cm gun (left, top); in the government district (far left, below); at the Bismarck memorial in the Tiergarten (left). ‘Wyktoria Buzińska sewed me a green dress from the lining of a coat, and ornamented it with… a piece of polka-dotted satin… Later, in May, I wore this dress when I was photographed in Berlin at… various… historic settings.’}

^{Yelena Rzhevskaya at Finow, where the remains of Hitler and Goebbels were re-examined by Stalin’s special emissary, an unnamed general.}

^{Yelena Rzhevskaya at a 1986 conference in memory of Marshal Georgiy Zhukov. His driver, Alexander Buchin, is on the right.}

About the Author

Elena Kagan was born in Gomel, Belarus in October 1919. She moved with her family to Moscow in 1922 where she later studied philology at Moscow State University. After serving the war effort as a munitions worker and after finishing a war interpreter’s course Elena joined Gen Dmitry Lelyushenko’s army of resistance in 1942. By February 1945 Elena was working in Poznan before joining the USSR’s 3rd Army’s attack on the Reichstag in late April. Her journey to Berlin began in Rzhev on the Volga, where millions of Red Army soldiers died fighting German forces. She adopted the surname Rzhevskaya to honour the fallen.

Rzhevskaya was the first person to read key documents related to the last days of the Reich including the personal papers of Hitler. She lived in Moscow after the war to work as a writer and won prizes for her fiction and journalism. She was the author of two acclaimed history books and six war novels. She died in April 2017.

Copyright

Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

This edition first published in 2018 by

Greenhill Books,

c/o Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

47 Church Street, Barnsley,

S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

www.greenhillbooks.com

contact@greenhillbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-78438-281-0

eISBN: 978-1-78438-282-7

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-78438-283-4

All rights reserved.

© Estate of Yelena Rzhevskaya, 2018

Translation © Arch Tait, 2018

Foreword © Roger Moorhouse, 2018

The moral rights of Yelena Rzhevskaya, Arch Tait and Roger Moorhouse have been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

CIP data records for this title are available from the British Library

Published by arrangement with ELKOST International literary agency, Barcelona, Spain

The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature