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

Goebbels’ wife told Kunz she had been given the morphine and the syringe by Stumpfegger. He did not know where she had obtained the ampoules of poison. She might have been given them by Hitler who, as we later learned, had been issuing them at the end of April.

‘Kunz returned to the hospital in a very depressed state,’ we were told by Werner Haase, the head of the hospital whom we interrogated after him.

He came into my room, sat on the bed and clutched his head in his hands. When I asked, ‘Are Goebbels and his family dead?’ he replied, ‘Yes.’ To my question as to whether he had been alone, Kunz replied, ‘I was helped by Dr Stumpfegger.’ I was not able to get anything more out of him.

Haase was asked what he knew about how Goebbels and his wife had committed suicide. He replied,

From what I was told by Hitler’s first personal doctor, SS Standartenführer Stumpfegger and Dr Kunz, I know that Goebbels and his wife committed suicide on the evening of 1 May by taking a powerful poison. Which precisely I cannot say.

Vice Admiral Voss, Dr Kunz, Lange the cook, Schneider the garage mechanic, Wilhelm Eckold the head bodyguard of Goebbels, Wilhelm Ziehm, technical administrator of the building of the Reich Chancellery, and many others identified Goebbels.

Although the body was charred, it was readily recognizable by anyone who had met Goebbels or seen him from a distance. He could have been recognized even from the caricatures of him in our Soviet press. He had a very distinctive appearance, his head disproportionately large for his puny body and noticeably squashed at the sides. He had a slanting forehead and his face narrowed markedly to his chin. He limped on his right leg, which was shorter than the left one and intoed. The right leg had not been affected by the fire and retained an orthopaedic boot with a thickened sole and prosthesis.

‘On this charred body there are no visible signs of severe, fatal injuries or disease,’ a medical report noted some days later. ‘When examining the body, a forensic examination revealed the presence of the odour of bitter almonds and fragments of an ampoule were found in the mouth.’

When the chemical analysis results came back a conclusive verdict was given: ‘Chemical analysis of the internal organs and blood established the presence of cyanide compounds. The conclusion is thus unavoidable that the death of this unknown man occurred as a result of poisoning with cyanide compounds.’

The same conclusion was reached regarding the cause of death of Magda Goebbels.

Looking for somewhere to stay late in the evening of 3 May, we found ourselves in the Berlin outskirts. As we were walking down a dark, unfamiliar street, I suddenly heard a nightingale.

Now, when I write about it, I find it hard to explain why I found that so surprising. It had seemed that here in Berlin not only all living things, but even the stones of the city had been drawn into the war and were subject to its laws. But then, all of a sudden – a nightingale, in complete disregard of everything, was irrepressibly getting on with what nightingales get on with. After everything that had happened here, the call of the nightingale in this hushed Berlin street was an amazing reaffirmation that life goes on.

We went into a building and climbed dark stairs. We knocked and, feeling fairly awkward, went into the home of people who had just lived through the disaster of the capitulation of their city. It was a modest apartment. Its owners, an elderly couple in quilted dressing gowns, alarmed by our unexpected arrival, put two rooms at our disposal, but evidently had difficulty for a long time in getting back to sleep themselves: we heard their quiet footsteps in the corridor. I lay down on a divan, and was immersed in the stifling smell of mothballs and laurel leaves, which I had quite forgotten during the war. Four years… When the war began, I was studying literature at university.

There was no curtain on the window, and through it I could see pink sky, lit by the glow of the subsiding fires. After all the days of incessant fighting, the stillness was a blessing, but so unwonted it chilled your heart. Through the strain of those days, the thought that we were in Berlin kept breaking through and banishing sleep.

It was fairly light. A deer’s antlers protruded from the wall opposite. There were freshly cut flowers in a vase on the table. Using a pocket torch, I read a framed saying on the wall: ‘Der Himmel bewahre uns vor Regen und Wind, und vor Kameraden, die keine sind.’ May heaven protect us from wind and from rain, and from friends who are false and bring nothing but pain.

The wall was covered with photographs of a boy: here he was clambering onto a rocking horse, here lying on the beach, his head resting on the outstretched legs of a girl in a striped bathing costume. Here he was, already a soldier, standing in a new, well fitting uniform and holding a heavy combat helmet. Here he was in the group photo of a cheery bunch of soldiers. In the centre of the photo was a bottle. Someone had put a helmet on his bayonet. The caption was, ‘Prosit! ’ Your health!

And on the desk, under the glass top, was the sad announcement that Kurt Bremer was missing without trace on the Eastern Front.

In search of water, I wandered into the kitchen. Our hostess was sitting by the window. On her knees she had a bag of socks she had begun to darn in Hitler’s Germany, and now, making do with the faint light of the dawning day, she was getting on with a job she was used to. Beer mugs lined the kitchen shelf, and at the head of the parade was a familiar porcelain lady holding out a gilded slipper and inviting someone to drink out of it.

I asked the mistress of the house whose shop it was downstairs – we had noticed it in the night as we were climbing up to the apartment – and whether it had been boarded up for a long time. She replied that it was a dry-salter’s shop that she and her husband owned, and that they had closed it two months ago. ‘We made a success of it by honest toil. It wasn’t at all easy for us. And now, you see…’ She sighed quietly. ‘Das Geschäft macht keinen Spaß mehr.’ Business is no fun any more.

In the morning the owner of the apartment asked me whether I thought he would be able to go to a particular street today to see his dentist. I assured him I thought he would. War was one thing, but a toothache was not to be neglected. He told me that actually he did not have a toothache, but two weeks ago had made an appointment for a check-up today. Although he was not in pain, the fall of the capital of the Third Reich could hardly justify missing a dentist’s appointment. He had an indomitable sense of the need to maintain equilibrium and good order, no matter what the rest of the world might get up to.

Through the window we could see the traffic at the crossroads being directed by a girl we knew. Wielding her flags, she allowed cars to pass, while simultaneously finding the time for a quick salute; she stopped service personnel who had helped themselves to Berliners’ bicycles for getting around and took them off them. The commander of the front had given orders that bicycles were not to be confiscated from the townspeople. A whole mountain of misappropriated bicycles had accumulated near her on the pavement.

A soldier pushed a paint tin out of the front door opposite. He dipped a thick brush with a short handle in it, squatted down on his heels, and obliterated the enormous letters of one of Goebbels’ injunctions painted in the roadway: ‘Berlin bleibt deutsch.’ Berlin will remain German.

It is early morning on 4 July 1945 and a rosy mist is rising over Alexanderplatz. It is chilly. In the middle of the square is what looks like a gypsy encampment: the remnants of the defeated Berlin garrison. They are sleeping in the roadway, swathed in army blankets. The wounded are sleeping on stretchers. One or two are already sitting up, huddled with a blanket covering their heads. Nurses wearing dark jackets and white headscarves are making the rounds of the wounded.