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

I reported the message received about Hitler’s suicide… I asked for his instructions.

J. V. Stalin replied, ‘The game’s up for the scum! Pity we couldn’t have taken him alive. Where’s Hitler’s body?’

‘As reported by General Krebs, Hitler’s body was burned on a bonfire.’

‘Tell Sokolovsky,’ the supreme commander said, ‘to conduct no negotiations except on unconditional surrender, neither with Krebs nor with other Hitlerites. If nothing out of the ordinary happens, do not call until morning. I want to rest a bit before the [May Day] parade.’ For some reason, no instructions to investigate the circumstances of Hitler’s suicide or to obtain confirmation of it followed. Neither were there any later.

It was only after everything had been completed and the main German participants in the identification and the ‘material evidence’ had been sent to Moscow that the supreme commander-in-chief asked Marshal Zhukov, ‘Where is Hitler?’ Zhukov did not have the answer. If that question had been addressed to him earlier, he would, of course, have demanded the information from all the services under his command and would have been aware of what was happening. As no questions followed, he may erroneously have believed that the supreme commander-in-chief was satisfied with that first report of Hitler’s suicide, and that that was the end of the matter.

TASS reports began appearing in our newspapers that Hitler might have landed in Argentina dressed as a woman, or might be hiding with Franco. The question of whether he was alive or had committed suicide, let alone whether he had been found, was removed from the military sphere to the sphere of international politics, and Zhukov might have stood back deliberately, taking the view that this was outside his remit. In May 1945 Marshal Zhukov was snowed under by the sheer volume of urgent matters needing his attention in the changed situation, many of them quite new to him. There was a massive redefinition of his responsibilities because, not only was he the commander-in-chief of the Soviet occupation forces, he was also commander-in-chief of the Soviet military administration. This meant he was expected to oversee every sphere, from the diplomatic, military and political to the economic. A new day had dawned, bringing complex new problems and concerns and relegating the defeated Führer to one of yesterday’s worries. That, at least, is how I imagine the situation. Information about the course of the investigation was going directly to Stalin, and I was able to explain exactly how that had come about.

So why did Stalin ask him in July, ‘Where is Hitler?’, when the investigation had long been completed? That Stalin could conceal the truth about Hitler from him was an absurdity that Zhukov did not want to consider. He would have preferred to believe that Stalin did not know either, and it was that belief he wanted to bolster by talking to me. That was his main question, and my explanation differed from what he wanted to hear. Nevertheless, he felt obliged to repeat that he believed me implicitly and now no longer doubted that Hitler had been found. An already fraught situation was, however, made worse by another circumstance, and he let me know that he now faced a dilemma. After the victory in Berlin, at a press conference of Soviet and foreign correspondents he responded to a question by saying that we knew nothing about Hitler’s whereabouts. If he confirmed now, twenty years later, that Hitler had by then been found, he would put himself in an intolerably false position. To appear on the world stage, however, with the admission that Stalin had hoodwinked him and concealed the discovery of Hitler’s body would, I think, have struck him as no less intolerable.

Asking about Hitler, had Stalin been lording it over him? Who, if not Zhukov, should have known of the achievement of his troops who had captured Berlin: that they had discovered and identified Hitler’s body? So why not goad the celebrated ‘Stalin’s military commander’ with a question he was incapable of answering? Stalin was no longer dependent on Zhukov: the war was over, and he was preparing to despatch him from Moscow.

That is what I thought then, but as I write about it now, I wonder whether Stalin had a more pragmatic reason for asking that question. It was the eve of the Potsdam Conference, where he would have to fight his corner in drawing up the postwar world order. Perhaps the reason for his question was to check whether the cloak of secrecy he had thrown over the fact that Hitler was dead might have proved imperfect and that information might have leaked out in the army.

The fact that Zhukov did not know would have satisfied Stalin on that point. He needed to galvanize the corpse of Hitler. Hitler still alive guaranteed the continuation of tension and danger without which Soviet politics could not function at home or in the world at large. It seems to me that now I am closer to clarifying why Stalin behaved as he did. Back then I did not delve any further into all the murkiness, and proposed two explanations.

One Zhukov had rejected and cast aside. ‘To the other he did not object: he saw a certain amount of sense in it,’ I wrote. Now here is something curious. I have been asked a lot of questions about this account, both by readers, journalists and historians, but no one has ever asked, ‘What was the “certain sense” Zhukov saw?’

The second hypothesis I put forward was as follows:

Maybe Stalin wanted to keep the world in a state of tension. Remember the TASS report in the newspapers at that time that Hitler had landed in Argentina dressed as a woman. Later the claims he was hiding with Franco. That felt like kite-flying, a probing of the possibility of striking at Franco.

Zhukov ‘did not object’. He ‘saw a certain amount of sense in it.’ He remained silent, consenting.

Our conversation ranged broadly. I sensed that Zhukov felt a need to speak out about important things, things he would not retract. The content of the conversation, the degree of openness with which Zhukov talked to me, a person he was meeting for the first time, amazed me. Perhaps he was anticipating that a time would come when I would write about our conversation. When I think back, it seems to me that is the explanation.

Zhukov described Stalin’s personality very trenchantly and boldly (which, even twenty-one years later, made the censor very, very cross), but without prejudice. He had nothing but contempt for Khrushchev’s caricature of Stalin as conducting military operations around the globe. Zhukov said that at the beginning of the war Stalin really did not know anything. His only military experience was of the Civil War. ‘But he got the right idea after Stalingrad.’

I asked Zhukov if Stalin had any personal charm. He said, ‘No,’ and shook his head emphatically. ‘Quite the reverse. He was intimidating. Do you know the kind of eyes, what kind of expression he had? Scornful. He could sometimes be in a good mood, but that was unusual. If he had scored some success in international affairs, or military, then he might even sing, sometimes. He was not without a sense of humour, but rarely showed it. People went to him as if they were going to something dreadful. Yes, when he summoned people, they went as if in dread.’

‘But without him, it would have been difficult in the war… He was strong-willed.’ I am quoting Zhukov verbatim.

The situation really was desperate. You yourself have no idea how desperate. We had absolutely nothing, ‘no steel, no powder’. And yet, it came from somewhere. It was taken from virtually anywhere. It was like a miracle.

Here he cited the example of Stalin’s harsh, menacing, relentless insistence (we were talking about the issue of tank production), and I could feel that Zhukov had been impressed. But then he got round to talking about how Stalin had annihilated the most talented military commanders. ‘We entered the war as an army without a head. There was no one. Of course, that is something for which he can never be forgiven.’ Losing his measured tone, he began talking emphatically about documents Khrushchev had given him to read.