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

It was the first time in my life I had been in a plane. The propellers thundered and I never noticed the aircraft leaving the ground. I was immediately distracted and captivated by the indescribable sight of Berlin beneath us. However devastated it might have appeared from the ground, from above this vast, immense, dead city was a truly monstrous sight. Blackened grey hulks of city blocks, buildings that looked like opened boxes. Our allies’ air forces had bombed the city night and day, systematically wrecking building after building, and appeared to have contrived to drop a bomb in every last one.

And then Berlin, which a moment before had been so close beneath us, was out of sight. The plane gained altitude and the ground, disappearing from under my feet, suddenly lurched towards me. I do not know what that was or how to convey it. It felt as if the force of gravity had suddenly caught up with an inept runaway. I was plunged into a depth of despair such as I had never experienced during the war. I can’t do this, I can’t! Throw me out, let me get back down to the ground!

The Douglas cargo aircraft had two bench-like metal seats solidly attached opposite each other to the sides of the aircraft. Not including me, there were four passengers, all pilots. They took off their leather coats, turned a suitcase on its end, and were soon furiously playing cards. The plane was empty: there was no cargo. The light cardboard box with my doll in it skated up and down its empty floor. I didn’t care. There I was, all my insignia jangling, with my officer’s belt and shoulder straps, as helpless as a kitten and very miserable. The airmen solicitously laid me on an iron bench, magnanimously spread their coats under me and assured me I would feel better lying down.

And no doubt I should have felt better, lying behind their calm, warm backs, but we were tossed around the sky, jerked sideways, and fell precipitously down into some celestial underworld. It was, after all, not flying weather and the aerodrome in Moscow had been closed for a reason. But no prohibitions or weather forecasts deter the aircrews of Marshal Zhukov who was, for some reason, returning them urgently to Moscow. And so I came, however remotely, into contact of a sort with the commander-in-chief who, by commanding them to fly, enabled me to be taken along with them. I little dreamed at the time that I would meet the marshal himself twenty years on. That, too, would be in autumn.

We did, despite the weather, land on the Leningrad Highway, which was where the aerodrome was at the time. I set foot unsteadily on the soil of my home town, of my own street. But had I returned? Even today I feel I have not exhausted everything that needs to be said about what I experienced in the war. Such close personal contact with history is something infinite, because there are so many different facets. From the distance of all these years they sometimes reveal themselves more distinctly, and the reality of what happened is all the more poignant.

It had been in the second half of May 1945 that I was summoned from Finow to front headquarters to translate those diaries of Goebbels we had found. In the same room a special container was being made for sending Hitler’s teeth to Moscow. They were evidently being taken back by the general Stalin had sent to check that the body we had found really was that of Hitler.

The notebooks of Goebbels’ diaries that we had found came to an end on 8 July 1941. I found translating it slow work because his handwriting was difficult to decipher. Headquarters decided the diaries were of no immediate operational interest, my work came to a halt, and then it was time to return to my army. I knew, however, that Käthe Heusermann was still somewhere here at front headquarters and wanted to see her. Finding her proved very straightforward: she was only one stair landing away. There was a sentry posted there, who told me which door I needed. Käthe was very pleased to see me. Fritz Echtmann was there with her. He had lost weight, although that might have seemed impossible, given how thin he had been already.

He was not well and Käthe, worried, was trying to look after him. She asked quietly whether I might be able to get more suitable food for him. I did, of course, mention his condition and interceded, but whether it did any good I have no idea. Throughout the war no attention at all had been paid to that kind of ailment.

Käthe came to life in my presence, probably feeling a bit more secure. She raised her foot and deftly prodded the window frame with the toe of her shoe. To her delight the window yielded and opened wide, giving us a breath of fresh air. Perhaps until now she had not been allowed to open it. Käthe and I went out and down into the garden. The sentry did not react.

I liked everything about her: the lightness with which she walked on high heels, her voice, her womanly stoicism even in her present unclear situation. Käthe was just somebody people liked, I sensed; she was a splendid person. For many years she had supported Dr Bruck. Käthe got food vouchers for him in the Reich Chancellery. Helping a Jew was very dangerous for anyone, but for Käthe Heusermann who, with Dr Blaschke, attended Hitler and was in and out of the Reich Chancellery, in Berchtesgaden, and at the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia, it could, as Dr Bruck pointed out to me, have been fatal. Käthe herself never once spoke about that. We talked eagerly about all our problems as women, which needed urgent attention now that peace had come. ‘I’ll take you to my hairdresser,’ she said, ‘as soon as I get home.’

She did not get back home, and after that meeting at front headquarters I heard no more about her for twenty years.

I was working myself into the ground in the Council of Ministers’ secret archive. Getting into it at all came as a great shock and I had nearly given up. For many years it seemed hopeless. The answer was always the same: there is no access to these materials and no exceptions are likely to be made. On the crest of a wave of national pride, however, as the twentieth anniversary of victory approached, a miracle occurred and the doors opened before me. It was September 1964 and I was allowed to work in the archive for twenty days.

A document retrieved from the depths of bygone times often has an increased impact, and here we had official materials, notes, records and protocols, some of which bore my signature as a military interpreter, some that were in my own handwriting on inferior wartime paper, yellowed with the patina of time. And then there were documents I was seeing for the first time. Taken together they were a significant, eloquent, authentic component of those events.

Again I saw before me those files, folders, bundles of letters, diaries, and also the final notebook of Goebbels’ diary. There were Soviet documents and records that nobody had looked at since 1945. It was my destiny to make sense of them. My appetite for work, while I was digging through them for Berlin, May 1945, was way above normal.

A few words about documents in general. There can be all sorts: aggressive, reticent, biased, or candid and naive, but often in their nakedness the words have an aesthetic dimension. For me they reanimated what I had experienced, threw bridges back to the past, and armed my memory.

This morning, too, Vladimir Ivanovich put a new pile of folders on my table. The one on top seemed rather thin. I pulled it over and opened it. Inside were delivery notes for items the staff at front headquarters were sending to the Smersh directorate in Moscow: a table lamp, an adding machine, a stapler with instructions in German and my translation. I was about to close this irrelevant folder and move it aside when I mechanically turned over another sheet. It was like an electric shock. Two of Hitler’s tunics and his cap were being sent to the directorate, along with two other seemingly inanimate items: K. Heusermann and F. Echtmann.