Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

July 9, 2018
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 Käthe 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.