Those memoirs were augmented and republished in a number of volumes over the years that followed, yet – oddly – have never appeared in English, until now. This new edition has Berlin, May 1945 at its core, but also incorporates material predating that, as well as later additions, such as her account of a meeting with Georgiy Zhukov in 1965. It is worth mentioning perhaps that, while her account of the identification of Hitler’s corpse has been shown to be incontrovertible, a few ancillary aspects of her narrative – such as her discussion of the precise circumstances of Hitler’s suicide – are very much coloured by the Soviet assumptions of the 1960s, and therefore appear rather anachronistic by the standards of modern scholarship. To be fair to Rzhevskaya, she cannot have known this aspect for sure, and as she said, what really mattered – and what she could personally vouchsafe – was that Hitler was dead. Nonetheless, on this point, readers wishing to know more might want to refer to more recent works, such as the Hitler biographies by Ian Kershaw or Volker Ullrich.
Yelena Rzhevskaya wrote with deftness and no little poignancy. Despite the undoubted horrors of her wartime experience, she was a sympathetic guide through that Hades. She had an eye for the telling anecdote, certainly, but she also possessed the sensitivity and lyrical guile to remind her readers of the human bond that they shared with all those that she encountered, whether they be blustering Red Army captains, terrified German ‘squealers’, or forlorn prostitutes. Throughout, she is both thoughtful and thoughtprovoking, philosophical about mankind’s frailties and foibles, and optimistic about its chances. It is a vision that is as seductive as it is enlightening.
With its elegant prose, its memorable vignettes and its profound humanity, Yelena Rzhevskaya’s memoir would be remarkable even without the headline act of her involvement in the identification of Hitler’s corpse. The addition of that material, however, makes this book – quite simply – one of the most important memoirs to emerge from the Second World War.
Introduction: The Documents Speak
This is a book about things I experienced personally. As a Red Army interpreter advancing with the front line of our army the whole way from Moscow in 1941 to Berlin in May 1945, I found myself at the epicentre of historic events that brought the Second World War to a close. As an interpreter at an army staff headquarters, I was a member of a counterintelligence group whose mission was to hunt down Adolf Hitler. I was present as we found his charred body and set about establishing the truth of how he met his end and identifying his remains. It was my task to sort through the documents we found in the underground complex of the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker, where Hitler spent his last days.
In the Chancellery I discovered files containing Martin Bormann’s papers – radio-telegrams from his adjutant in Obersalzberg, Dr Helmut von Hummel, and copies of the telegrams he had sent. These confirmed there had been plans in the second half of April 1945 to move Hitler’s general headquarters to Berchtesgaden, and also that Hitler had eventually refused to go. He decided to remain in the Führerbunker after an offensive he had ordered failed, but also because the Allies had entered Munich, which was no distance from Berchtesgaden. There were files of reports to Bormann from the Kreisleiter, heads of Nazi Party districts in Berlin, about the critical situation.
I sorted through those of Hitler’s papers that remained in the bunker, including a file with monitored radio announcements, one of which reported that Mussolini, after being shot by partisans, had been strung upside down by his heels in a square in Milan alongside his mistress, Clara Petacci. Hitler had underlined that in blue pencil and I guessed (correctly) that this was what prompted him to have his own body destroyed. Here, too, we found drafts of letters Hitler wrote more than a decade previously to his sister, to President Hindenburg and to Franz von Papen.
In Goebbels’ office we found two suitcases with documents, including a find of major importance for future historians: the ten or so notebooks of Goebbels’ handwritten diary, begun before the Nazis came to power and breaking off on 8 July 1941. Here also was the minister of propaganda’s official correspondence, and Magda Goebbels’ files with detailed inventories of their family’s personal property. There were family photographs of Magda and the children, the whole family with Goebbels, and also a portrait photograph of Magda I kept as a souvenir.
We were engaged in a feverish search for Hitler, dead or alive. I had time only to note the contents of the documents passing through my hands and add an explanatory note before sending them off to front headquarters. These brief notes were to come in very useful later when I was working in a secret Soviet archive and could immediately be reminded of the origin and context of each of them.
During the night of 5 May the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were brought in from the Reich Chancellery garden. An autopsy was performed and on 8 May I was entrusted with a burgundy-coloured box containing Hitler’s lower jaw and dentures, which were crucial for identifying his body. In that macabre manner I impinged on German history.
I now became involved in seeking out the people best placed to identify Hitler’s body: his dentists. My signature, as interpreter, is appended to our records of their interrogation and to their identification of Hitler.
For the three months before I was demobilized, our army headquarters was in a small town called Stendal. There I was able to pore over the documents from the Reich Chancellery, from ministries and the apartments of the Nazi leaders. Already, though, interest in such documents was waning, the war was over, we ourselves had become history and nobody, except me, was much interested in them.
I am no professional historian or researcher, I am a writer. I cannot picture myself researching historical events or studying sociological matters unconnected with my own life, so this is a personal memoir backed up by documents. The facts and events it relates are true, and the theme holding everything together is a view of the war from the Soviet side, of the search for Hitler and discovery of his body, of how he was identified and the circumstances of his suicide investigated. In all of that I was personally involved as an interpreter and translator.
What matters most in a book of this kind is veracity. The biggest sensation is true information. The fact that Hitler’s body had been found and identified by the Red Army was hushed up. I wrote about his death in Znamya, No. 2, 1955, but the part dealing with finding the body, the investigation and identification was censored. I was first able to reveal that state secret only in 1961 in my book, Spring in an Army Greatcoat, long after Stalin’s death.
In order to give readers a full picture of these events and to document my eyewitness account, I long fought for access to Soviet archives. The response to all my appeals was, ‘No, and we make no exceptions.’ I even phoned the Communist Party Central Committee, but in the course of a lacklustre conversation was offered no encouragement. On the advice of V. Ilyin I wrote another letter, this time to Mikhail Suslov, a member of the Central Committee Praesidium. I recently came upon a copy of that letter, dated 6 August 1964, among my own papers. It evidently did the trick because, in late September 1964, the doors of a secret archive were opened to me.