Why Stalin stole Hitler’s TEETH
... and banished the dentist who identified them to the gulags. Just one of the revelations from an intrepid Russian interpreter in the last days of the Third Reich
PiCTUrE a small burgundy-red jewellery box — the kind that snaps shut and has a silky red lining. Now, open that box, and feel a bit sick. Because what it contains is not a necklace or brooch, but a set of terrible old teeth: Hitler’s teeth.
or are they Hitler’s teeth? This is what Elena rzhevskaya, a russian interpreter working for the Soviet army, was instructed to find out when she was entrusted with that box on May 9, 1945 and set off across the ruins of Berlin in search of Hitler’s dentist, who she hoped would be able to verify them.
‘God Almighty, is this happening to me?’ she remembers thinking, ‘ . . . Standing here at the moment Germany surrenders, with a box in my hands containing the indisputable remnants of Adolf Hitler?’
Yes, it was happening to her. But those remnants were not yet ‘indisputable’ — some, most notably Stalin, wanted to prolong the myth that Hitler was not dead, to continue the tension amongst the Allies. As she explains, ‘if Hitler was alive, Nazism was not yet vanquished and the world was still in danger.’
i read this utterly gripping book by the coast in Sussex; the contrast between the glorious, shimmering sea and the horror of the petrol-doused, burnt bodies in the hellish courtyard of the reich Chancellery could not have been more stark. Those bodies, wrapped in grey blankets, were removed for forensic examination by the russians where they found that all that had survived intact was the set of teeth and dentures.
ElENA, carrying the teeth, was driven through the rubble of the ruined city in search of Hitler’s dentist. The signposts had been destroyed. They asked for directions from German boys, who then clambered into the car to guide them, having no idea of the historic adventure in which they were bit-players.
Amid this chaos, it seemed a miracle that they found 35-year-old dental assistant Käthe Heusermann, who knew exactly where the X-rays of Hitler’s teeth would be: in the dentist’s room in the bunker beneath the Chancellery.
So back they drove, then groped their way through the maze of underground corridors with a torch until, finally, they found Hitler’s dental records. Käthe compared the records with the teeth in the red box and confirmed that they were indeed Hitler’s teeth.
Käthe would pay a heavy price for that helpful act. She would be held in solitary confinement in a russian prison for six years, before being dispatched in a cattle truck to Siberia for a further four years of forced labour.
The trumped-up charge against her? That, by being a dentist to Nazis, she had ‘prolonged the war and helped the bourgeois German state’.
‘The burden of guilt will never leave me,’ Elena writes, ‘for inflicting such suffering on Käthe.’ But if she had not found Käthe, Stalin’s plan would have been successful:
Hitler’s whereabouts might have remained a myth and a mystery to this day.
As it was, Stalin instantly made the information about the teeth top secret. He ensured that the TASS news agency kept on reporting rumours that Hitler had been seen landing in Argentina dressed as a woman, or been spotted in Spain with Franco.
‘Stalin,’ Elena writes, ‘had no sense of responsibility to the historical record, to the people of the USSR, or to the world. Reality was reality only to the extent that it suited his pragmatic ends.’
That macabre episode is the culmination of Elena Rzhevskaya’s unforgettable memoir, full of deeply moving and intimate descriptions of the people and scenes she encountered as she travelled with the Russian army from Moscow in early 1942 all the way to Berlin in 1945.
Her job was to interpret interrogations of German prisoners of war and read the diaries found in their pockets. We travel with her through the snowy wastes of Russia, and are billeted with her in villages traumatised by the brief German occupation before their enforced winter retreat.
Reaching a newly liberated Poland in early 1945, we hear with her the wonderful sound of Polish children allowed to raise their voices and sing after years of being forced to keep their voices down.
YOU smell fields ploughed, at last in freedom, by Polish peasants. This story is strangely delicious and uplifting to read. Even when Elena’s journey westward begins in early 1942, there’s a strong sense that the Russians are winning. Slowly but surely they close in on Berlin.
There’s some justice about the fact that the final act of the Third Reich was not a shoot-out but the doublesuicide of the Führer and his wife-ofone-day Eva Braun. Eva apparently insisted on Hitler marrying her as the condition for their suicide — and ‘the bride wore black.’ Elena was the first to read the documents found in the bunker: the ones for Hitler were all in a huge font, because his eyesight was so bad. In the document describing Mussolini’s death on April 28, Hitler had underlined ‘hung upside down’. It was to avoid that fate that he demanded the garage man provide eight cans of petrol for the burning of his and Eva’s bodies. Appallingly, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, also living in the bunker, was so profoundly evil that his end required not only his and his wife’s suicide but that they should put all six of their children to death first. A few days after that horrific event, Elena was interpreting in the hospital of the Reich Chancellery when the doctor who administered the fatal doses to the children gave his testimony. Goebbels had said to him, ‘Doctor, I shall be very grateful if you will help my wife put the children to death.’ After which Magda Goebbels had played patience for an hour, waiting for the doctor to prepare the morphine which would be given to the children before the cyanide ampoules were emptied into their sleeping mouths. It’s fascinating to live all this through the eyes of a brilliantly observant and eloquent Russian woman. She portrays the Russians as the goodies and the Nazis as the baddies: it’s as simple as that, in her eyes. I couldn’t, though, banish the shadow of Antony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall, 1945, which chronicled the mass-rapes of German women by Russian troops during those weeks. Elena gives us only one tiny glimpse of that: when she first meets Käthe and introduces herself as a Russian, Käthe bursts into tears, as ‘she had already suffered from encountering Russian soldiers’. Elena lived on in the Soviet Union for decades, and died in 2017. She knew she was lucky (as the teller of an unwanted truth) to avoid the punishment meted out to Käthe. She was vastly relieved to hear that Käthe eventually got out of the USSR aged 45 and lived another 40 years — but her fiancé had longsince thought she must be dead and married someone else. This is an astonishing first-hand account: a must-read.