Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker
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- €11.99
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
"By the will of fate I came to play a part in not letting Hitler achieve his final goal of disappearing and turning into a myth I managed to prevent Stalins dark and murky ambition from taking root his desire to hide from the world that we had found Hitlers corpse" - Elena Rzhevskaya"A telling reminder of the jealousy and rivalries that split the Allies even in their hour of victory, and foreshadowed the Cold War"- Tom Parfitt, The GuardianOn May 2,1945, Red Army soldiers broke into Hitlers bunker. Rzhevskaya, a young military interpreter, was with them. Almost accidentally the Soviet military found the charred remains of Hitler and Eva Braun. They also found key documents: Bormann's notes, the diaries of Goebbels and letters of Magda Goebbels.Rzhevskaya was entrusted with the proof of the Hitlers death: his teeth wrenched from his corpse by a pathologist hours earlier. The teeth were given to Rzhevskaya because they believed male agents were more likely to get drunk on Victory Day, blurt out the secret and lose the evidence. She interrogated Hitler's dentist's assistant who confirmed the teeth were his.Elenas role as an interpreter allowed her to forge a link between the Soviet troops and the Germans. She also witnessed the civilian tragedy perpetrated by the Soviets. The book includes her diary material and later additions, including conversations with Zhukov, letters of pathologist Shkaravsky, who led the autopsy, and a new Preface written by Rzhevskaya for the English language edition.Rzhevskaya writes about the key historical events and everyday life in her own inimitable style. She talks in depth of human suffering, of bittersweet victory, of an author's responsibility, of strange laws of memory and unresolved feeling of guilt.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this newly translated memoir, a version of which was first published in Russia in 1964, Russian lieutenant Rzhevskaya provides a carefully documented account of her experiences serving as a member of the intelligence section of a Soviet army headquarters from 1941 to 1945. Her primary job, helping interrogate German prisoners and translating captured German documents, informs her observations of German attitudes: she remembers a captured pilot who admitted to shooting Russian civilians "for fun" and critiques the Soviet treatment of civilians such as K the Heusermann, an assistant to Hitler's dentist who spent 10 years in a Soviet gulag. She writes with pride of the bravery of the Russian population under Nazi occupation and the Red Army soldiers in their victory. Much of the book recounts the mission to locate and identify Hitler's body after the capture of Berlin in May 1945; she tracked down key witnesses, took their statements, and guarded the dental evidence taken from the body. Her work, validated by other evidence and testimonies, proved that Hitler died by suicide in Berlin, and Stalin and the Soviet government deliberately concealed the evidence from Russians for 20 years. Though this skillfully written work assumes some prior knowledge of the Eastern Front, it will entertain and inform both the general reader and the WWII history expert.
