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

The organizers gave me a catalogue of the exhibition inscribed ‘To Yelena Moiseyevna Rzhevskaya, without whom this exhibition, and many other things besides, would simply have been impossible.’ That was flattering, of course, but I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to the organizers for just one document they found. It is listed in the catalogue together with many others.

November 1951.

F. Echtmann, K. Heusermann, H. Mengershausen, H. Rattenhuber and O. Voss are condemned by resolution of a Special Council of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as ‘witnesses of Hitler’s death’.

That document is the last full stop in the saga of the death of Hitler. Here we see it publicly admitted, and the names of the people who suffered as witnesses to it. International jurisprudence had been unaware of the possibility of such a crime, but it was evidently found needful and this shameful case devised in order the better to keep a secret Stalin found expedient.

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1. 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.

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

1. 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.

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

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

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

1. 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.

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

My mother called me to the phone one morning at nine o’clock. Not usually renowned for the acuity of her hearing, she added unexpectedly, ‘Sounds like an army person.’

‘Yelena Moiseyevna? This is Zhukov.’

The voice was ebullient but without military affectation. I found that straightforward ‘Zhukov’, not bolstered by his title and risking confusion with the many other less distinguished Zhukovs who shared his name, very winning.

‘Good morning, Georgiy Konstantinovich,’ hoping I had got his patronymic right because I had never before had occasion to use it.

‘I would like to meet you. Can you come tomorrow at 1600?’ I did not hear the time clearly. ‘At four in the afternoon,’ he repeated, making allowances for a non-army person on the other end of the line.

‘I can.’

He was writing my address down. I started giving directions: it was a building behind an iron fence. ‘They will find it!’ he interrupted me. ‘Write it in your notebook: tomorrow at 1600 hours.’

Hearing that I was meeting Zhukov the next day, Viktor Nekrasov became very excited. ‘I’m coming with you! I’ll pretend to be your secretary. Everything about this is interesting: what Zhukov is going to talk to you about, or the way he kicks me out of the car.’

In the evening I called Anna Mirkina at Novosti Press Agency (who was editing Zhukov’s memoirs). On his instructions she had contacted me in advance. When she heard I was planning to take Nekrasov with me she was very alarmed.

‘That is out of the question! For all my admiration of Nekrasov, it is out of the question! You must understand, this is very serious, Zhukov is traumatized, he is not meeting anyone. Every new person he meets is another trauma. You must understand… I am telling you this in confidence: he is under surveillance as someone who knows all the secrets. He is an elderly man, sixty-nine years old. He is a difficult person.’

The next day, it was 2 November, about twenty minutes before the agreed time, the phone rang and a pleasant female voice said, ‘I’m phoning on Georgiy Konstantinovich’s instructions. The car will be with you in fifteen minutes’ time. The number plate is 34–27.’

When I went down I found a big, black, unusual looking car with a yellow headlight under the radiator, parked by the pavement outside our fence. The driver opened the door and looked out. ‘We’ve just gone off to look for you.’ At this the people he had referred to as ‘we’ came back: a little girl and an elderly lady with a kindly, round face, very modestly dressed in a dark spring raincoat and with a coloured woollen headscarf.

We shook hands and the woman introduced herself: Klavdiya Yevgenievna. She introduced the little girl: ‘And this is Masha, Georgiy Konstantinovich’s daughter.’

The old black ZIS (‘Stalin used to be driven around in one of these,’ the driver told me on the return trip) moved off. In its worn interior, the many kilometres it had covered creaked and groaned and clattered, and I had the feeling that I was not just driving down Leningrad Prospekt to the ring road, but deep into the past, turning back the clock of history.

The driver I was sitting next to was a small man in a shabby blue raincoat and a khaki-coloured felt hat with a thin ribbon round the crown and a broad unbent brim, the edges of which hung down in places, giving it a dilapidated look. The only evidence that this was a former member of the armed forces was that his civilian-style trousers were sewn from cavalry twill, and the foot on the accelerator was in a battered black half-boot. He was subdued. There was none of the assertiveness or temperament usual in people of his profession. He seemed very intense, and there was something quite touching about him, as if he were a craftsman, or just in the wrong job. That was not far from the truth: he used to be the driver of the minister of defence, but now drove the ex-minister’s wife from their dacha to her job and his daughter to school and music lessons.

The little girl was fresh-faced, grey-eyed, and Masha seemed just the right name for her. It was clear she had her new front teeth, and they seemed large, as if waiting for her to grow into them. Masha was in second grade and attending a special school for English language on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. It was only a twenty-five minute drive from the dacha . ‘All the same, the air is clean,’ the elderly lady said in defence of living out there.

I thought I detected a certain reserve in the way she talked to Masha, and at first took her for a nanny, when in fact she was Zhukov’s mother-in-law. For her, though, Masha was primarily ‘Georgiy Konstantinovich’s daughter’, and only after that her granddaughter.

I was pleasantly surprised by the modest, likeable people surrounding Marshal Zhukov. There was no sense of superiority. I don’t know what I had been expecting. In this untaxing company I was approaching the goal of my journey.

I had never seen Zhukov at the front during the war, but just his name, and even more, his appearance at the front, promised reliability, steadfastness in any critical situation, and in battle – victory. I remember one time we had intercepted some German mail. I was going through the sack of unsent soldiers’ letters. There was despair in them as they hastened to say goodbye to their families: Zhukov had turned up on their sector of the front.

During the war nothing could tarnish the heroic image of Marshal Zhukov, although even then, and particularly after the war ended, I heard a lot about his rudeness, his cruelty, and outbursts of often unjustified rage. I heard he was callous about the cost in lives. I was not entirely without prejudice towards him myself. Mark Gallai, a Hero of the Soviet Union and the first pilot to shoot down a German aircraft over Moscow, told me, ‘If it had not been for Rokossovsky, we would never have known a different style of command was possible, but this does not mean Zhukov was anything other than a really big commander, and we owe more to him than to anyone else.’