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

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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Vermächtnis (1829), tr. Mildred Fish-Harnack (1902–43).

‘The past is yet to come,’ Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stundenbuch, Book II (1901), p. 308. The verse continues, ‘Und in der Zukunft liegen Leichen.’ ‘And in the future corpses lie.’

The reference is to Studebaker US6 trucks, made in the USA during the Second World War for use by the American forces and, from 1942, also by those of the USSR.

Naturally nobody told us his name at the time. In writings about the war it is sometimes given as Stefanović.

Yakov was shot at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Stalin refused a German proposal to exchange him for Field Marshal Paulus, taken captive at Stalingrad, remarking that ‘You do not exchange a marshal for a soldier.’ Yakov was particularly depressed by Stalin’s statement, broadcast over the camp radio, that ‘there are no Russian prisoners of war, only traitors to the Motherland’. He effectively committed suicide in 1943 by refusing to return to his hut and running into the camp’s death strip, where he was shot by a guard. Website Khronos, quoted in ‘Dzhugashvili (Stalin) Yakov Iosifovich 1908–1943’, Semeinye istorii. http://www.famhist.ru/famhist/elag/00033f25.htm. Accessed 20 October 2017. Tr.

I found Günsche’s testimony in the archive, File 130: ‘Testimony of Hitler’s personal adjutant, SS Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche, 14 May 1945’. First published in my Berlin, May 1945.

There are two typescript texts translated into Russian in the archive: Testimony of Hans Rattenhuber (file 132, pp. 63–91, titled ‘The Truth about the Death of Hitler’; also more detailed memoirs titled ‘Hitler As I Knew Him’ (file 131).

Ivan Klimenko was head of the Smersh counterintelligence department of the 79th Infantry Corps, 3rd Shock Army, 1st Byelorussian Front. Vadim J. Birstein, SMERSH: Stalin’s Secret Weapon, London: Biteback, 2013, p. 303.

Jelena Rshewskaja, Hitlers Ende ohne Mythos, tr. Werner Hantke, Berlin: Deutscher Militärverlag, 1967.

The ‘head of a SMERSH operational group’: Birstein, p. 305.

Bormann’s radio-telegrams to Munich and Obersalzberg were filed in the Council of Ministers Archive folder No. 151.

Bormann evidently poisoned himself during the escape attempt in order to avoid capture. Tr.

File 126: Identification records, vol. 2

Report of the forensic medical examination, in the same folder (File 126, vol. 2), 7 May 1945. Report of the forensic medical examination of the body of the German Führer.

During the Nuremberg Trials Albert Speer confirmed that Germany was considerably behind in atomic energy. ‘We would have needed another one or two years to split the atom.’

Council of Ministers Archive, folder 151.

Birstein reports that during the Battle of Berlin, NKVD operatives arrested Hitler’s pilot, Hans Baur; his adjutant, Otto Günsche; and his valet, Heinz Linge. ‘They were held in NKVD/MVD prisons in Moscow, separately from Smersh prisoners, and brutally interrogated.’ Birstein, p. 308.

Wilfried von Oven, Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende, Buenos Aires: Dürer, 1950.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, London: Macmillan, 1947, p. 207. https://archive.org/stream/TrevorRoperHughTheLastDaysOfHitler/Trevor-Roper%20Hugh%20-%20The%20last%20days%20of%20Hitler_djvu.txtAccessed 8 November 2017. Tr.

Head of the Smersh counterintelligence section of our 3rd Shock Army.

Head of the Smersh counterintelligence directorate of the 1st Byelorussian Front. Birstein, pp. 306–7.

http://feldgrau.info/other/6484-statya-r-belforda-gitler-trup-ili-legenda. Accessed 23 December 2017.

R. Belford’s article: ‘Hitler – a Corpse or a Legend?’, in V. K. Vinogradov, J. F. Pogonyi and N. V. Teptzov, Hitler’s Death, London: Chaucer Press, 2005, p. 277.

Alexey Sidnev, deputy head of the Smersh directorate of the 1st Byelorussian Front. Birstein, p. 304.

The first edition in 1969 had over 100 pages missing. The cuts were restored in the tenth edition, published in 1989.

Many years later Mikhail Pilikhin, a cousin of Zhukov, told me he had been present during a telephone conversation in which Brezhnev promised Zhukov he could be buried in the ground.

The artistic director of the Jewish Theatre, and chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the war. Tr.

Vladimir Kozlov, Gde Gitler? Povtornoe rassledovanie NKVD-MVD SSSR obstoiatel’stv ischeznoveniia Adol’fa Gitlera. Moscow: Modest Kolerov i Tri kvadrata, 2002.

In 2007, preparing her book for translation, Rzhevskaya added references for the archive files. The archive she had worked in has been closed and part of it transferred to the State Archive of the Russian Federation. In 2014 I found these materials among the Molotov Papers, six substantial volumes which duplicate the Stalin Papers. The internal numbering of the folders is retained.

Rzhevskaya heard about Operation Myth back in the 1960s. An editor at a publishing house whom she knew from her days at the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History showed her the manuscript of a book by a Soviet participant in the operation. The book was not passed for publication.

Sadly, Major Boris Bystrov did not live see the book published. He returned to academic life after the war and died in 1963. Rzhevskaya’s archive contains illuminating letters from Faust Shkaravsky (1897–1975), and postcards and letters from Ivan Isaevich Klimenko (1914–98), as well as later interviews. Having worked in counterintelligence until 1970, Klimenko finally allowed himself to speak freely.

The film, The Death of Hitler: The History of a State Secret (in French), can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcDCtElYTT4.