Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

Shortly before the war, the newsreels showed footage of the last manoeuvres conducted by Tukhachevsky. They showed a tank–air assault for the first time. It makes an impressive spectacle, and was observed by military attachés and other foreign experts, among whom was General Guderian. After Tukhachevsky’s arrest, his theory, introducing new methods of warfare, was labelled as ‘wrecking’ and banned. Tank corps were disbanded and the tanks dispersed to army groupings. As the war developed, mechanized and tank corps and tank armies had to be reconstituted. The generals of the Wehrmacht, meanwhile, were assiduously adopting new methods, not a few of which had been demonstrated during Tukhachevsky’s exercises.

Stalin’s support enabled Germany to ratchet up its aggression in the West, but boomeranged back on the USSR. Hitler exploited the neutrality of the USSR to assault the Western countries with all his military might. He did not, however, place much reliance on the long-term stability of that neutrality and, just three months after concluding the non-aggression pact with Russia, announced to his generals on 23 November 1939, ‘We shall be able to attack Russia only after we are free in the West.’ With Russia obsessively on his mind, he was eager to achieve his goals in the West.

On 10 May 1940 Hitler moved against France. 136 German divisions were opposed to 135 French, British and Belgian divisions. Although the latter had the same number of tanks as the Germans, together with the powerful defences of the Maginot Line and the Belgian forts, the German Army with its dive bombers, massed introduction of tanks into battles, with its parachuting of troops, brought an entirely new dimension to its offensive which stunned and crushed the enemy. After six weeks, France surrendered.

The surrounded British troops, barely able to resist the onslaught of the German tank armies, especially of Guderian’s tanks, held Dunkirk and evacuated from the coast across the Channel to England, evading destruction. This was a proud and tragic time when the British showed their fortitude, but what do we Russians know about it? Shamefully little or nothing at all. What do we know about Britain which, deprived of its defeated allies, stood fast and alone in the war against Nazism?

Goebbels, like Hitler, underestimated the resilience of the British and their refusal to acknowledge the defeat they had suffered. The next phase was to be Hitler’s ‘Operation Sea Lion’, the invasion of the British Isles, but then the Führer took a decision not even his closest colleagues expected. The plan to invade the British Isles was abandoned and the immediate military priority became the drive to the east, an attack on Soviet Russia.

Why did Hitler decide to attack us before he had finished the war with Britain?

The war we unwisely embarked on against Finland flaunted very convincingly the weakness of the Soviet army after Stalin’s depredations. I heard the view that these events were directly connected expressed by Marshal Zhukov.

I even think now that the war might have been avoided and history could have taken a very different turn. After invading Russia on 22 June 1941, Hitler told Goebbels it had not been an easy decision to make, and perhaps it was just as well, he said, that the German intelligence service had not given him an accurate picture, because otherwise he might not have dared to do it. And if Stalin had not so trashed the Red Army? If it had not acquitted itself so dismally in the Finnish campaign?

Stalin set the army up. In reality we were defeated. The whole of 1941 was one long defeat. During that first phase of the war more than 3 million Russians were taken prisoner, and that is only according to German data. Those are the ones who were brought to the Nazi camps and put on lists of names, but how many never got that far, killed by the cold, by starvation, by Nazi brutality, executed. That is an enormous number of losses, despite the most amazing self-sacrifice. It is like an unbelievable force of nature, something very humbling.

I was very sensitive to the life of the people during the war. I had so much contact with the population and ordinary soldiers. Just the way they lived their lives was therapeutic. It helped to straighten everything out after the depravity of the later 1930s.

We really were liberators, of the whole world, when we arrived in Poland, and further on when people were coming out of the concentration camps to us: Jews herded there from other countries to be exterminated, the last few who had survived; and the French prisoners of war, and the British, the slave labourers, from every imaginable country, like that Belgian. I realized then that I was taking part not only in Russia’s Patriotic War, but in a Second World War.

Many years later, Martin Smith, a British film-maker, sought me out in Moscow and I gave a long interview for the World at War documentary series. This was for the last episode, and I talked about the discovery and identification of Hitler’s body. Six months or so later, I found myself in London. We landed just as Princess Anne was getting married to her horse-riding companion. In the hotel lobby, while we were registering, the newlyweds and those accompanying them escaped from the television cameras into the palace and, at some moment when I was distracted, getting my key from the receptionist at the desk, something completely different appeared on the screen, which riveted my attention. It was a black-andwhite chronicle of the war. Dunkirk, tragic shots…

This was another episode from the World at War series. In the summer it premiered simultaneously in seven countries, and every week, on Tuesdays, the episodes were shown in Britain. A week later, in the evening when the next two episodes were being shown, the streets of London were empty.

The war at sea. A real chronicle of the war. I had barely heard anything about all this, but now, to be actually seeing it…

At my request, the organizers of our trip contacted Thames Television, and we were immediately invited to the studio. We were a whole group of journalists. A beautiful woman in a velvet jacket, light, vivacious, Martin Smith’s assistant (he himself, she explained, was currently with his wife, who was giving birth) – read out a message on his behalf: ‘We welcome…’ I heard my name.

She invited us all up to the stage. We stood there with our glasses filled with wine, toasted our friendly meeting in the studio, and were photographed. The film for which I had been interviewed was not yet ready, so we were shown the ‘Dutch episode’.

A large part of the film consisted of black-and-white newsreel shots. Only three scenes were close-ups, in succession. They had been shot on colour film, which was not available during the war. They were from the present. The first speaker had been the mayor of Amsterdam at the time the Germans invaded. He was summoned by the occupiers’ Burgomeister who asked, ‘Do you have Jews in the municipality?’ He replied, ‘No, we have no Jews here.’ ‘In doing that I was guilty of my first betrayal,’ he says, looking intently at the black-and-white past, or rather, inside himself. ‘I allowed myself to accept their differentiation of human beings.’

Then on the screen there is a simple Jewish woman, with a big, expressive face. When she was being taken to the ghetto with her two children, a baby and a three-year-old, and her sick brother, the German who came for them was crying. ‘I never saw another German soldier cry.’ She could have kept quiet about that. She had lived through just too much monstrous brutality: her baby and brother died in the ghetto, but it was clear how important it was to her to mention that soldier. Perhaps there had only been one, but one there had been.