Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

Introduction: The Documents Speak

This is a book about things I experienced personally. As a Red Army interpreter advancing with the front line of our army the whole way from Moscow in 1941 to Berlin in May 1945, I found myself at the epicentre of historic events that brought the Second World War to a close. As an interpreter at an army staff headquarters, I was a member of a counterintelligence group whose mission was to hunt down Adolf Hitler. I was present as we found his charred body and set about establishing the truth of how he met his end and identifying his remains. It was my task to sort through the documents we found in the underground complex of the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker, where Hitler spent his last days.

In the Chancellery I discovered files containing Martin Bormann’s papers – radio-telegrams from his adjutant in Obersalzberg, Dr Helmut von Hummel, and copies of the telegrams he had sent. These confirmed there had been plans in the second half of April 1945 to move Hitler’s general headquarters to Berchtesgaden, and also that Hitler had eventually refused to go. He decided to remain in the Führerbunker after an offensive he had ordered failed, but also because the Allies had entered Munich, which was no distance from Berchtesgaden. There were files of reports to Bormann from the Kreisleiter, heads of Nazi Party districts in Berlin, about the critical situation.

I sorted through those of Hitler’s papers that remained in the bunker, including a file with monitored radio announcements, one of which reported that Mussolini, after being shot by partisans, had been strung upside down by his heels in a square in Milan alongside his mistress, Clara Petacci. Hitler had underlined that in blue pencil and I guessed (correctly) that this was what prompted him to have his own body destroyed. Here, too, we found drafts of letters Hitler wrote more than a decade previously to his sister, to President Hindenburg and to Franz von Papen.

In Goebbels’ office we found two suitcases with documents, including a find of major importance for future historians: the ten or so notebooks of Goebbels’ handwritten diary, begun before the Nazis came to power and breaking off on 8 July 1941. Here also was the minister of propaganda’s official correspondence, and Magda Goebbels’ files with detailed inventories of their family’s personal property. There were family photographs of Magda and the children, the whole family with Goebbels, and also a portrait photograph of Magda I kept as a souvenir.

We were engaged in a feverish search for Hitler, dead or alive. I had time only to note the contents of the documents passing through my hands and add an explanatory note before sending them off to front headquarters. These brief notes were to come in very useful later when I was working in a secret Soviet archive and could immediately be reminded of the origin and context of each of them.

During the night of 5 May the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were brought in from the Reich Chancellery garden. An autopsy was performed and on 8 May I was entrusted with a burgundy-coloured box containing Hitler’s lower jaw and dentures, which were crucial for identifying his body. In that macabre manner I impinged on German history.

I now became involved in seeking out the people best placed to identify Hitler’s body: his dentists. My signature, as interpreter, is appended to our records of their interrogation and to their identification of Hitler.

For the three months before I was demobilized, our army headquarters was in a small town called Stendal. There I was able to pore over the documents from the Reich Chancellery, from ministries and the apartments of the Nazi leaders. Already, though, interest in such documents was waning, the war was over, we ourselves had become history and nobody, except me, was much interested in them.

I am no professional historian or researcher, I am a writer. I cannot picture myself researching historical events or studying sociological matters unconnected with my own life, so this is a personal memoir backed up by documents. The facts and events it relates are true, and the theme holding everything together is a view of the war from the Soviet side, of the search for Hitler and discovery of his body, of how he was identified and the circumstances of his suicide investigated. In all of that I was personally involved as an interpreter and translator.

What matters most in a book of this kind is veracity. The biggest sensation is true information. The fact that Hitler’s body had been found and identified by the Red Army was hushed up. I wrote about his death in Znamya, No. 2, 1955, but the part dealing with finding the body, the investigation and identification was censored. I was first able to reveal that state secret only in 1961 in my book, Spring in an Army Greatcoat, long after Stalin’s death.

In order to give readers a full picture of these events and to document my eyewitness account, I long fought for access to Soviet archives. The response to all my appeals was, ‘No, and we make no exceptions.’ I even phoned the Communist Party Central Committee, but in the course of a lacklustre conversation was offered no encouragement. On the advice of V. Ilyin I wrote another letter, this time to Mikhail Suslov, a member of the Central Committee Praesidium. I recently came upon a copy of that letter, dated 6 August 1964, among my own papers. It evidently did the trick because, in late September 1964, the doors of a secret archive were opened to me.

A captain in the uniform of the tank corps was assigned to keep an eye on things. He belonged to a ‘Group Studying Experience from the Patriotic War’, and introduced himself as Vladimir Ivanovich. He took his obligation to provide me with the documents I needed very seriously.

Many years later, Vladimir Ivanovich phoned and spoke appreciatively about my latest book (about Rzhev during the war). ‘This is lyrical documentary prose!’ he exclaimed. I asked him for the name of the archive I had worked in, which had been kept secret. ‘The Council of Ministers Archive,’ he said, confirming a guess by Marshal Zhukov. Vladimir Ivanovich also told me I had been admitted on instructions from the Central Committee.

The approaching twentieth anniversary of the victory prompted people to think back to the war, and that included Vladimir Ivanovich. I could see he was not used to the watchdog role assigned to him and that, as I sat there working alone in a bare office with a portrait of Khrushchev on the wall, I really was an ‘exception’. Vladimir Ivanovich did not keep to his brief of issuing only documents I was able to name. He would have been hard pressed to identify and extract them from the general heap of files, and instead let me see for myself everything that was brought. At the end of each working day I was required to hand in the notebook into which I had copied text and the thoughts that had occurred to me in the process. I had no technology to help me. Each morning the notebook was returned, presumably after being scrutinized. When one was full I was allowed to take it home, and in all I filled up five thick notebooks.

I was again encountering documents from May 1945, many of which bore my signature. They had lain untouched for twenty years and it was a very emotional experience.

Bolstered by these classified documents, the first edition of my book, Berlin, May 1945, was published in Russia in 1965, following an abridged publication in Znamya, No. 5, May 1965. Retitled The End of Hitler, Without Myth or Mystification, the book was translated into Italian, German, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese and many other languages.

Since then, Berlin, May 1945 has been republished twelve times in Russia, with over 1,500,000 copies sold, and each successive edition has been substantially revised and supplemented. The present volume is an updated version of that text, incorporating all the later additions.

As you look back over the years, what you experienced is not erased from memory: rather, certain aspects, certain facets become all the more visible. Your memory, appealed to yet again, takes you back to those days, and for me the story of the historic events at the end of the war would be incomplete without the pages describing its first days, the training course for military interpreters, my almost four years of active service and all the things I witnessed during them. I believe my reader will be interested to know the baggage I brought with me to Berlin.

A military interpreter is in a unique position during the cataclysm of war. He or she is in constant contact with the belligerents on both sides. Through my hands passed documents of every description, from some that were of great importance, to instructions to German soldiers on how to keep themselves warm; from orders and propaganda leaflets, to private letters home. As I was translating these documents, I would note down extracts to remember.

The notebooks I brought home from the front, dog-eared, with pages missing or untidily inserted, with barely legible entries written in the back of a jolting truck, were the raw material of my later tales about the war. Even now I return to them as I reconstruct my journey from Moscow to Berlin.

When my book was finally published it began to snowball, as new revelations came my way. One of the most important contacts coming out of it led to a conversation with Marshal Georgiy Zhukov. I received letters from other participants in the search for Hitler and the discovery and identification of his body, not least Dr Faust Shkaravsky, the pathologist in charge of the autopsy. They contributed new details from their specialist fields, and their letters, along with many others, make up my personal archive. The present edition has greatly benefited from them.

And finally, there are the documents themselves. In that first edition back in 1965 I wrote, ‘The documents in these notes (testimony, papers, diaries, correspondence and so on) are being published for the first time by the present author.’ In order to stick to that principle I only mentioned in passing such previously published documents as Hitler’s personal will and his political testament. The only documents included were those I had sorted through early in May 1945 in the Reich Chancellery and later at army headquarters, as well, of course, as those unearthed in twenty hectic days in the archive in September 1964.

Many valuable discoveries I made in the archive found their way into the book. I published for the first time excerpts from the testimony of Hans Rattenhuber, the head of Hitler’s bodyguard, and parts of the first interrogations at Soviet General Headquarters of Hitler’s adjutant, Otto Günsche, and his valet, Heinz Linge. I published for the first time reports of the interrogation of the doctors who poisoned Goebbels’ children, documents about the discovery of the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun, of Goebbels and his wife, and the official reports of the autopsies.

The Council of Ministers Archive also held such important evidence as the diary of Martin Bormann in an official, typescript translation into Russian (the original having been found in early May lying in a Berlin street), and more detailed reminiscences from Hans Rattenhuber.

One of my most important revelations was the publication of excerpts from Goebbels’ diary, which led to research by German historians who later published his notebooks in numerous volumes from microfilms provided by the archive.

Nowadays texts that I unearthed only after doggedly fighting my way through the obstacles of state secrecy and censorship are widely available and have been translated into many languages, so there is no longer any point in adhering rigidly to the principle of quoting only previously unpublished documents. It seems common sense to draw also on documents already known or published by others.

Authentic documents, especially when we look back at them from a distance, have a special aura, and the very fact that they are documents can lead to giving them more than their due and accepting them uncritically. We need to resist the temptation to consider every document tantamount to fact. They are not all factually true, and even a fact when out of context may not be the whole truth. Context matters. Information can conflict with, contradict, or even invalidate other information. When documents conflict with each other I have sometimes found myself having to referee on the basis of what I know about their background.