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

The English are now trying everything they can to exploit this stay of their execution. But it will not, we must hope, be long in coming.

Smolensk is under heavy bombardment. Ever closer to Moscow.

Capitulation! That is the watchword.

It was the evening of 2 May 1945.

The war had come to Berlin. Capitulation was not a watchword but a lived reality, only not in the sense that Goebbels and Hitler had intended.

Several hours had passed since the Berlin garrison had given up resistance. The dumping of weapons, which had started at 3.00 p.m., was still going on. The square by the Town Hall was piled high with abandoned machine guns, assault and ordinary rifles. In the streets abandoned German artillery pieces had their barrels pointing at the ground. There was a drizzle.

Under the triumphal arch of the Brandenburg Gate, over which the red flag was flying, straggled German units that had been defeated at the Volga, the Dnieper, the Danube, the Vistula and the Oder. Many of the soldiers were wearing helmets that were now an absurdity. They walked by, exhausted, deceived, their faces blackened; some of them crushed and round-shouldered, some with obvious relief, but most in a state of abject depression and apathy.

The fires had not yet been extinguished. Berlin was on fire. A Russian horseman whipped up a horse and his steaming field kitchen bounced its way over the rubble. Our soldiers were resting on a German tank dug into the roadway, sitting on the turret, on its gun, singing, rolling cigarettes. Time for a smoke. In Berlin the battle was over.

Troops under the command of Marshal Zhukov had captured the capital of Germany.

Everything was a mixture in these streets: the happiness of people freed from captivity, the joy of our joining up with the Allies, amazing meetings. Grim-faced columns of German men leaving the city, stumbling off into captivity. The anguish of women watching them go.

The tragic fusion of victory and defeat, triumph and retribution, an end and a beginning.

In Bydgoszcz, long before that day in Berlin, Major Bystrov had confided to me on that memorable evening that he was setting himself the goal of capturing Goebbels. Goebbels and no one less. He spoke to me about it in confidence several times afterwards. I let it go in one ear and out the other. What nonsense! There we were in Poland, and where on Victory Day we, let alone Goebbels, would be was anyone’s guess. In the event, on Victory Day we were in Berlin, and found Goebbels in the garden of the Reich Chancellery.

Goebbels had given instructions that after his death he, too, was to be burned to ashes. There was not enough petrol. After dousing Goebbels and his wife, who had also committed suicide, those charged with this duty fled before completing the task. A Gold Party Badge with a single-digit number that had fallen off her burnt dress lay near Magda Goebbels, as well as a gold cigarette case with a portrait of Hitler.

On 2 May, when the Berlin garrison ceased resistance, a surrender of weapons took place in the streets. German soldiers were formed into columns and marched off into captivity. In the Reich Chancellery, however, there was intermittent gunfire from SS soldiers who refused to surrender. It was in the evening of this day that Major Bystrov, along with two other officers, discovered Goebbels. It was almost beyond belief, like much that was to follow in this story.

Goebbels was carried out on the leaf of a door to Wilhelmstrasse in front of the Reich Chancellery. It somehow happened by itself that this became the apotheosis of that day. Berlin had fallen. Its Party regional leader, its commissar for the defence of Berlin, the Reich’s Minister of Propaganda, Hitler’s right-hand man was dead. Goebbels was still recognizable, so let the victorious warriors and the people of Berlin take a look at him. In the absence that day of Hitler, the charred body of Goebbels symbolized the collapse of the Third Reich.

The street was smoke-filled, the acrid fumes of battle had not yet cleared, the fires were still raging, not yet burned out. The Reich Chancellery building, dented by shells, pitted by shrapnel, its windows gaps with jagged glass, had nevertheless survived mainly intact. The eagle with a swastika in its talons above the main entrance was also intact. Mangled enemy vehicles had crashed into the wall of the Reich Chancellery or were scattered over the ravine of the street.

Few Berliners could get in to see anything. There were small groups of officers and soldiers. There was filming for the newsreels, and Goebbels was surrounded by a few commanders keen to be in the picture.

I was standing to one side, and from a distance suddenly saw Major Bystrov, standing stock-still, his dark, haggard face almost unrecognizable. Leaning forward, he was staring, transfixed, at the body of Goebbels.

The whole scene, with the blackened body on its platform, in the ragged remnants of its Nazi uniform, with the yellow, noose-like tie which had somehow survived round the bare, black neck, its ends gnawed by fire and now stirring in the wind, seemed like an exhibit from history’s chamber of horrors. When I later read that passage in Goebbels’ diary where he gleefully records the Führer’s approval of his notion of introducing a yellow star to identify Jews, I wondered if there had not been something symbolic about that yellow noose round the neck of its inventor.

Before killing himself, Goebbels slaughtered his own children, closing the circle of murder with poison and fire, the means put to so much use in the concentration camps.

The bulletin read:

On 2 May 1945 at 17.00 hours in the centre of Berlin, a few metres from the entrance to the bomb shelter of the German Reich Chancellery, Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko, Majors Bystrov and Khazin, in the presence of German Berlin residents Wilhelm Lange, chef of the Reich Chancellery, and Karl Schneider, mechanic of the Reich Chancellery garage, discovered the charred bodies of a man and a woman, the body of the man being of low stature, his right foot half bent and shorter than his left, with a charred metal prosthesis, the remnants of a uniform of the Nationalist Socialist Party, a Gold Party Badge, charred…

The Walther pistol found beside them had not been fired.

During the long years of the war we had passed through the ruined, burned lands of the Kalinin and Smolensk regions, of Byelorussia and Poland. We had seen Goebbels’ propaganda in action: the savage devastation of the land, the death camps, the trenches full of murdered people, the ‘new civilization’ in which a man was his brother’s executioner. The path of the war had brought us to the Reich Chancellery.

Now, many years later, I am sometimes asked, ‘Wasn’t it frightening to look at those dead bodies?’ But that was not what I felt. I shuddered, but I was not frightened, and not only because we had seen so many terrible things in four years of war, but rather because those charred remains did not seem human: they seemed satanic.

But the dead children: that was frightening. Six children: five girls and one boy, exterminated by their parents.

‘Whose children are these?’ Major Bystrov asked Vice Admiral Voss. Bystrov had just brought Voss here, to the underground complex. Voss had been entrusted with the mission of reaching Grand Admiral Dönitz in order to hand him the supreme authority Hitler had bequeathed him, and the order to continue the war at all costs. There was to be no question of capitulation!

Together with the remnants of General Mohnke’s group, which had been defending the Reich Chancellery, Voss tried to break through the encirclement in the region of Friedrichstrasse, but was captured. Bystrov drove Vice Admiral Voss through the streets of defeated Berlin. Voss represented the Navy at Hitler’s headquarters. Towards them as they drove wandered dejected columns of prisoners.