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

‘To the extent that I have used them,’ I said dryly, clamming up. My prejudice had returned.

‘And you have nothing else left?’

‘Bits and pieces from Goebbels’ diaries.’

‘Photographs?’

‘I have none. There are some in my book – in the Italian edition.’

He was not interested in published photographs.

What he was asking me was extremely modest, and I would have been more than willing to assist him, but that tone stopped me in my tracks. The trust that was in the course of being established had been violated, and after that the conversation limped along. I found it offensive to seem to be helping him out of fear for my book. By that time it had already been translated and the facts published in it had been acknowledged to be indisputable. I had written only about what the main identification witnesses, Hitler’s dental technician and his dentist’s assistant had publicly stated: that they had identified Hitler’s dead body from his teeth. That was exactly what I had written, and it confirmed that we had found Hitler. This testimony, the photograph of Echtmann in the court under oath, their reminiscences had all been published in the West.

‘Oh, they write all sorts of stuff over there,’ Zhukov grunted. But after that he repeated that he entirely believed me, having read my book, and had no doubt Hitler had been found.

Zhukov did not smoke and neither did I, so there would have been no way to discharge the tension in our conversation had it not been for Masha. She ran in from the garden, without taking off her coat and bringing in a lapdog in her arms. She sat down at our table, pulling a chair closer, put the dog in her lap and started tickling it.

‘Stop it,’ Zhukov said. She ignored his command and we carried on talking. Zhukov again told Masha to stop. ‘You can see how dirty she is.’

Her father had told her twice to put the dog down: Masha continued imperturbably to do as she pleased. And he, before whom everybody had quailed – both on our own side and the enemy’s; he to whom everyone from generals to soldiers unquestioningly submitted; he, with his reputation for ruthlessness and a will of steel, was powerless to get a vivacious eightyear-old girl to do as she was told. That truly proved a more intractable proposition than commanding the obedience of an army of many millions.

Shortly after the birth of his daughter, Zhukov’s public life had ground to a halt, and the only living evidence that time was passing was this little person growing into her life. His wife went off to work in the teeming city and he was left here. We can imagine, without exaggeration, that in his isolation he raised this daughter born so late to him, tending the small, life-enhancing shoot of her life. His daughter helped him, unaware of how much she was doing. She was now the most important person in his present mini-garrison, which had formerly been so vast. Masha sat with us for some time more, still occupying herself with the dog, and then went off.

‘I don’t suppose you have that document I sent to Stalin?’ he asked. At the very beginning of our conversation I had mentioned there was a document in the archive where he informed Stalin of the discovery of the bodies of Goebbels and his family. It had been sent to Stalin over the signatures of Marshal Zhukov and General Telegin (as a member of the military council of the front).

‘That I do have.’ Still offended by the tone he had adopted earlier, I answered curtly and reluctantly. As I write this now, I can see that I was being insensitive, not fully taking in a situation that was complicated and abnormal. Marshal Zhukov was appealing to me for documents he needed for his work and to which he had no access, even though some of them bore his signature. That was something that would be painful even for a person whose self-esteem was not so vulnerable. Nevertheless, Zhukov behaved straightforwardly and naturally. He asked me all about the archive I had worked in. I think I forgot to tell him the reason there were no references to the archive in my book was because the documents had not been declassified and, in any case, at that time I had not even known the name of the archive.

Zhukov guessed it was probably the archive of the Council of Ministers, but said there was also a Kremlin archive. His comments about that were based on impressions from further back. ‘There are serious files in there, about important matters, and some that are curious, or even a bit spicy,’ he added with a smile, which made his face suddenly fresh and youthful. He asked some more questions about me and my service in the army.

‘I was there, in the Reich Chancellery, in the garden, on the day it was captured. And for a second time on 4 May. They did not let me down there,’ he said, with an honesty that compares favourably with that of other authors of memoirs. ‘Down there was not without risk.’ Yes, in the underground complex isolated shots did ring out.

‘In the garden I saw that round, what would you call it…?’

‘Hitler’s bunker?’

‘That’s it.’

‘It was probably then they reported to you that Goebbels and his wife had been found near the exit. I’m going by the message you signed and sent to Stalin about it.’

He remembered receiving the report about Goebbels. ‘It was reported to me, on 2 May, I think, or on the 1st, that a certain number of tanks had broken out of the Berlin encirclement in a particular direction. I ordered that they should be pursued. I believed Hitler might be escaping with those tanks.’

He also remembered that a few days later he had a report that Hitler’s jaw had been found. I told him these were distorted rumours about what had actually happened. There was no separate finding of a jaw. The forensic medical examination established at the autopsy of Hitler that the main evidence for identifying the body was surviving jaws and dentures, and that was the route the identification process took.

‘We, at any rate, were waiting very eagerly for an official announcement, and some people were even hoping to be made a Hero of the Soviet Union, which General Berzarin, the commandant of Berlin, had promised to arrange for the first person to find Hitler.’

‘That was nothing to award that title for,’ Georgiy Konstantinovich grunted. And that was fair. The search had not taken place under fire, no one had given their life. In part it was luck, but more important was the genuine success and determination of a few people to gather comprehensive evidence for the investigation; and that we managed to do despite the obstacles put in our way. But then the discovery of Hitler’s body was turned into an undisclosable secret by order of Stalin. It was only many years later that I was able to make that secret public, at first as part of my book Spring in a Greatcoat.

Back then, though, in May 1945, the newspapers of the Allied occupation troops came out with headlines, ‘Russians Find Hitler’s Body’, ‘Heroic Search in Ruins of Burning Berlin Crowned with Success’. This was put out by Reuters, but in the absence of confirmation by our press, they abandoned it, perhaps believing they must have been misled by their informants. Who, after all, would keep quiet about a success like that?

I said that, back then, there was a feeling that front headquarters did not seem to be showing any great interest in the hunt. Zhukov did not disagree. Indeed, indirectly, he confirmed it by saying he had been informed about ‘the jaw’ being found. For some reason that had not prompted him to demand that he be fully informed about everything.

When, in besieged Berlin on the night of 30 April, the Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, General Krebs, appeared with a request for an armistice and a written message from Goebbels about the suicide of Hitler, this was reported to Marshal Zhukov and he called Stalin. In his book he gave this, already mentioned, account of the conversation: