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

When I got up to leave, I told him I was flattered that he found my work interesting and would willingly give him all the help I could, but not because the fate of my book might depend on it. I would look through the documents I had to see if there was anything else that might be useful to him. I felt I also had to mention that mistakes had crept into documents signed by him during those unsettled, turbulent days and I could point them out to him. Zhukov readily accepted my offer. He said, repeating what he had said in the first minutes of our meeting, ‘Well, so now we have met. That is all the same something more…’

This remark, repeated at the beginning and end of our meeting (that the fact that our meeting was ‘something more’ than acquaintance only through reading a book), was the only comment in the course of the entire conversation that was vague and open-ended, and that made it eloquent and somehow on a different level from all the rest.

We went down to the car. A last handshake with Marshal Zhukov and the car moved off.

In November 1965, when I saw Georgiy Konstantinovich, he was finishing his long-term project and still in good health, strong, not yet ground down by editors, censors, commissions of the Central Committee and the sundry overseers, overt and covert, of his manuscript who were to keep him under siege. He had as yet no idea of just how much he would have to put up with to steer the book through to publication. He completed his Reminiscences and Reflections in 1965, but no sooner were the first steps taken to have it published than it was blocked.

In the presence of my friend Zoya Mikosha, who was in charge of the photograph section of his book at the publisher’s and visited him on business matters in hospital, Zhukov told the editor, ‘This book is absolutely vital for me.’ He furiously rejected the advice proffered to appeal to the then minister of defence, Andrey Grechko.

Novosti Publishers asked me for a translated copy of my book, which had been published in Italy before it appeared in the USSR, to give to him in hospital. I could not imagine why Zhukov would want the book in Italian but it was explained to me that, for the first time in many years, it included a photograph of him. There had been a complete ban on publishing them. The publisher had prepared a selection of photographs for the Italian edition, all of which were passed by the Soviet censorship, and that made their publication official. They included his photograph, and that was important to him. It is just the way things were in those days.

This proved to be the first photograph of Marshal Zhukov since he fell into disfavour eight years previously that the Soviet censorship had approved for publication abroad, even if no such liberties were allowed to be taken within the USSR. My book, Berlin, May 1945, was about the assault on Berlin, the search for and discovery of Hitler. I inscribed it, ‘Esteemed Georgiy Konstantinovich, Please accept this book about events that are wholly associated with your name.’

When he reappeared from his ‘banishment’ for the first time in eight years, in the praesidium of a solemn commemoration on 9 May 1965 of the twentieth anniversary of victory, the hall greeted him with a tumultuous ovation. That evening he attended a banquet at our House of Writers. Khrushchev, his persecutor-in-chief, had been deposed and it seemed that Zhukov’s exile was at an end.

Evidently, however, the warmth of his reception at that commemoration had not gone down well with the ‘authorities’. Bent on depriving Zhukov of fame during his lifetime, the regime learned its lesson and was less impulsive when it came to celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution on 7 November 1965. Zhukov was expecting an invitation, but it did not come. Nothing, it seemed, had changed. One more blow, for which he was not prepared. He was offended and wounded. His heart, which in the past had borne many burdens less petty than this, reacted badly and he suffered a heart attack.

Just six days before that heart attack, I had my meeting with him. I was probably the last person outside his family to see him so healthy and buoyant, at the best moment in his life for many years, as he was finishing his memoirs. Working on them again, he relived the war; he was happy in his family life and, it seemed to me, had hopes of returning to a role in the functioning of the state.

The merciless years of 1966, 1967 and 1968 passed and it was now the beginning of 1969. Zhukov had taken a battering and was seriously ill. ‘This book is absolutely vital for me.’ To this day I find the tragic resonance of that remark deeply painful.

Subjected to cuts, and with insertions and additions imposed on it, with its emphasis altered, the book finally appeared, but it was only in 1989, fifteen years after Zhukov’s death, that Memories and Reflections began for the first time to appear in a version that was faithful to his manuscript. [1] The first edition in 1969 had over 100 pages missing. The cuts were restored in the tenth edition, published in 1989. The text had restored to it, and printed in italics, what had been excised. The appearance of this edition came as a surprise to me and was profoundly gratifying.

In it Zhukov mentions the press conference of June 1945 (which he had anxiously discussed with me). As if to explain why he replied at that time that nothing was known about Hitler’s whereabouts, he writes that he had wondered whether, after the victory, Hitler had not ‘scuttled off’ somewhere, and said so at the press conference. Somewhat later (in fact, twenty years later), ‘we began to receive additional information confirming that Hitler had committed suicide’. After that statement come the following lines, cut out during his lifetime but now restored and italicized: ‘How the investigation was conducted is described in exhaustive detail by Yelena Rzhevskaya in her book, The End of Hitler, Without Myth or Mystification, Novosti Press Agency, Moscow, 1965. I can add nothing to what Ye. Rzhevskaya writes.’

I had good reason to be moved. His decision to refer to my book and support it in his memoirs was generous. It did not cut out the circumstances Zhukov found embarrassing. To his own detriment he asserted what he had decided was true. But the Soviet guard dogs had pulled it out, and more than twenty years had to pass before it finally saw the light of day.

Zhukov, Hitler, Stalin. In that moment in time, in Berlin in May 1945, they all come together, and the future analyst of Stalin’s personality will not ignore this episode and will try to work out the answers to the riddles Stalin poses. Why did he conceal the fact that Hitler’s body had been discovered and turn it into ‘the secret of the century’? Why did he keep it from Zhukov? And why did Zhukov not pay the search for Hitler the attention it surely merited?

I am writing about things that I know, of historic events I remember as a participant and witness, and in the search for answers I have tried to trace why the conspiracy of silence began and how it was implemented. Fate decreed that I should have a role in preventing Hitler from successfully carrying through his final vanishing act, of becoming ‘the stuff of legend’ the more potently to rouse the passions of those thinking as he did, both at the time and in later days.

It took time for me to overcome obstacles that seemed insurmountable even after Stalin’s death and to make public this secret of the century. I managed not to allow Stalin’s dark, enigmatic plan to take root, concealing from the world that Hitler’s body had been discovered by the Red Army. The way was long.

When, twenty-one years after my meeting with Zhukov, I was preparing a documentary account of it for publication, I had just two notebooks to retype and one or two things to add. But although this was 1986, the censors were totally against allowing the piece to be published: the Party was not going to yield on its stance. Grigoriy Baklanov, then editor-in-chief of Znamya, has written in his memoirs about how much effort he had to put into wresting this story out of the censors’ clutches and publishing it. They were particularly incensed by my report of Zhukov’s harsh remarks about Stalin. ‘Just look at the picture of Stalin she is presenting!’ they squealed.