Elena Rzhevskaya
Wartime Interpreter, Novelist, Soviet Era Archivist
27 October, 1919–25 April, 2017
Of all the bizarre incidents of World War II, few rival that of a 25 year-old Russian Jewish woman smuggling a kitschy little box containing Hitler’s jawbones out of defeated Berlin. That woman was Elena Moiseevna Rzhevskaya, an interpreter, wartime operative for the Soviet counter-intelligence agency SMERSH and a prolific writer of both fact and fiction.
Rzhevskaya, who has died aged 97, enjoyed a life of intrigue and revelation. Even the Hitler story had its twists and turns. Elena fought in the battle for Berlin and received her box on 8 May 1945, the day Germany surrendered. Just four days earlier a soldier had almost accidentally unearthed the Fuhrer’s cremated corpse near his secret underground bunker outside the Reich Chancellery. Elena was one of three people who worked on the identification of these remains. She later wrote about how she tracked down Käthe Heusermann, assistant to Hitler’s dentist, who confirmed the teeth were indeed his, judging from some distinctive bridge-work that fire had not destroyed. Rzhevskaya also claimed that forensics proved Hitler and Eva Braun’s bodies showed signs of cyanide poisoning.
SMERSH soon rounded up Nazi acolytes, including Harry Mengershausen, from Hitler’s personal guard, and Otto Gunsche, Hitler’s adjutant, who under interrogation provided background to the dictator’s last days. Hitler, they said, had shot himself on 30 April and his bodily remains, doused with petrol and set alight, were hastily buried in the garden outside the bunker. Meanwhile Rzhevskaya’s unit hid the evidence from the Soviet 5th Army to prevent them from taking credit. “Can you imagine how it felt?” she told The Observer in 1986. “A young woman who had travelled the long military road from the edge of Moscow to Berlin, to stand there knowing I held in my hands decisive proof that we had Hitler’s remains” Reportedly SMERSH trusted the cool-headed and discrete Elena because male agents were likely to get drunk and blurt out the secret.
Armed with this information, Elena rushed back to Moscow, only to have Joseph Stalin suppress the news. According to Rzhevskaya, everybody was ordered to search for Hitler and to ignore Allied newspaper reports about his death. A false investigation started. The Soviet press spread rumours that the Fuhrer had fled to Argentina or was hiding in Franco’s Spain. “Forget what you just heard”, SMERSH officer Vassily Gorbushin warned Rzhevskaya. And SMERSH chief Viktor Abakumov explained Stalin’s edict by saying “We remain under capitalist encirclement”. Fearing persecution Elena kept her silence, but 20 years later revealed long-hidden secrets in “Berlin Notes”, an article for the literary magazine Znamya, in 1965; and then with more detail in her 1967 book, In the Den of Fascism: Memories of a Wartime Interpreter, which Michael Leventhal’s Greenhill Books has translated and will release next year.
Besides spiriting away Hitler’s bones in a red satin box—the type that usually holds cheap jewellery, Elena observed —she was also the first person to read the documents that explain the last days of the Reich. These included Hitler’s personal papers, the writings of Magda Goebbels, and, most crucially, the diaries of Joseph Goebbels. The latter memoirs of the Nazi propaganda chief formed the basis of her groundbreaking book, Goebbels: A Portrait.
Only much later did Elena reveal her Jewish roots. She was born Elena Kagan in Gomel, Belarus, in October 1919. Seven months earlier an anti-Soviet army revolt had sparked a pogrom, the third major assault on Jews after 1903 and 1906. In 1897 Jews made up 55 percent of Gomel’s population; their number included Bundist, Zionist and religious luminaries. In 1939 Gomel’s percentage of Jews fell below 30 percent. By then, however, the Kagans had left the town and lived in Moscow, not far from Solomon Michoel’s famous Jewish Theatre. Elena was studying philosophy at Moscow State University in 1941 when the Nazis tore up their pact with Stalin and overran the western Soviet Union. They immediately forced Gomel’s remaining Jews to don the yellow star. Most died in ghettos. Some of Rzhevskaya’s most searing memoir observations concern meeting Holocaust survivors for the first time.
After serving the war effort as a munitions worker and a nurse, Elena used her knowledge of German in February 1942 to join Gen Dmitry Lelyushenko’s army of resistance. She accompanied troops westwards through Belarus and Poland once Moscow was relieved. By February 1945 Elena was working in Poznan as a member of SMERSH, before joining the USSR’s 3rd Army’s attack on Berlin’s Reichstag in late April. Her journey to Berlin began in Rzhev on the Volga, where thousands of Red Army soldiers died fighting crack SS forces in 1942-3. Still today Russians recall this battle as the ‘slaughterhouse’ or ‘meat-grinder’; hence Elena’s decision to adopt the surname, Rzhevskaya, to honour the fallen.
Elena Rzhevsyaka in Berlin, May 1945. Picture courtesy of Greenhill Books
After the war Rzhevskaya lived in Moscow and resumed studies at the Maxim Gorky Institute, graduating in 1948. She began her writing career with In Kashira Library in 1950 and Special Assignment: The Story of Scouts in 1951. In all she wrote some 22 books with titles that included Spring Coat, There was a War, Berlin, May 1945, Distant Rumble, Gravity, and a series of novellas called Many Years Later. Her book Roads and Days was published in English as a rare example of historiography “revealing the human face of war”; as late as 2011 she released Over the Shoulders of the Twentieth Century. A member of the Russian PEN Centre, Rzhevskaya won renown as a literary and social critic and received numerous awards, including the Russian Writers Union Gold Medal (1987) and the Andrei Sakharov Prize for Writer’s Civic Courage (1996). Updated sections to her memoir feature fascinating musings on Soviet culture, including the post-Communist period, as told in conversation with her granddaughter. Perhaps Elena’s own words offer the perfect epitaph: “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 overcame obstacles to make public this ‘secret of the century’ … and managed to prevent Stalin’s dark and murky ambition from taking root.” She is survived by children and grandchildren. Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish-born British sociologist whose thinking influenced generations across continents, and whose critiques challenge the age of Trump and Putin, died earlier this year, aged 91. Over more than 50 books he scrutinised the nature of modernity, and 20 years after he officially retired from the University of Leeds in 1990, he witnessed in September 2010 the launch of a Bauman Institute at the same institution. More recently Bauman analysed the refugee crisis, with Strangers at Our Door, published 2016. Decrying the rise of populism, he urged listeners to “see the world through the eyes of society's weakest”.
Zygmunt Bauman
Sociologist, Writer, Academic
19 November 1925–9 January 2017
Bauman's biography straddled the interwar, post-war and post-Cold War periods. He witnessed the German invasion of Poland as a teenager, spent several years in Russia, fought the Nazis in Berlin, and then lived under communism in Poland for more than two decades. He lectured in Tel Aviv after being effectively forced out of Poland in 1968, then in Melbourne, and finally, in 1971, settled in northern England. Bauman continued writing to the end—Polity published his last book, Retrotopia, this year. He contributed numerous essays to Jewish Quarterly, including “Making Jewish–Polish History” and “The Twisted Road to Perestroika”, both in 1988; “The War Against Forgetfulness”, 1989; and “Adolf Rudnicki: The Jew and the Polish Writer”, 1991. In 1993 he debated on JQ pages the future of the Jewish people, alongside David Vital, Jacob Neusner and Chaim Bermant.
Bauman wrote in “a very poetic way, full of metaphors, yet accessible”, recalled former colleague and student, Brian Cheyette, an English professor at Reading University. Prime among his ideas was postmodern liquidity, a retreat from stable superstructures towards a looser mechanism that enriched the satisfied few at the expense of the marginalised many. Its by product is liquid fear and uncertainty, like “walking on a minefield”, said Bauman. The title of his 2008 book encapsulated the dilemma: Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?
Zygmunt Bauman PICTURE M.OLIVA SOTO
Zygmunt Bauman knew firsthand the shortcomings of totalitarianism when he lived under Polish communism during 1947–68. Critics accused him of abetting a pernicious system, despite his endorsement of a humanistic Marxism after the Khrushchev thaw. While never a believing Jew, he was keenly aware of his Jewish identity. Not least when he fell victim to the antisemitic purges in 1968 that followed Warsaw's fury at Israel's military victory in 1967. Revisiting Israel in 2013 he reprised his opposition to occupation, and wistfully recalled how Rabin's “tragically brief government [raised] the hope that the nation was about to come to its senses, stop the rot and follow the road out of the impasse—yet was brought to an end by a Jewish bullet”.
Not unlike Hannah Arendt's “banality of evil” thesis, Bauman's seminal Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) explained how “bloodless” bureaucratic institutionalisation made genocide not only possible but even “reasonable”. The Nazis, he argued, harnessed civilisation's rules to overwhelm innate morality. He called the Shoah “a legitimate resident in the house of modernity” and said mass murder becomes possible when society distances the privileged from the consequences of their actions—or inactions.
Bauman's disillusionment with Marxism as practised did not sway him towards endorsing Western “virtues”. In his 2004 book Wasted Lives he described how neo-liberalism and globalised capitalism turned individuals into surplus. Seduction by shopping, he half-joked, masked governments’ failure to deliver on their promises. In both doctrinaire Marxism and corporate liberalism, the glue of social empathy had come unstuck. It was a refreshingly human-centred, if sometimes despairing, viewpoint, as potent psychologically as politically, and steeped in historiography.
In person, Bauman was far from gloomy. He had a ready sense of humour, a love of cooking, music, literature and cinema. His home was a “still point of a turning wheel, open and hospitable—Leeds won't be the same without him”, recalled Cheyette. And he generously encouraged younger scholars, such as the Indian-born Australian political anthropologist, Irfan Ahmad. They bonded at a 2010 Istanbul conference, “Philosophers Bridge the Bosphorus”. Writing for Al Jazeera, Ahmad recalled Zygmunt joking over their shared vice, smoking, which prompted “laughter whose echo I [still] hear”.
Zygmunt Bauman was born in Poznan in 1925 to an assimilated Jewish family and was 13 when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. The Baumans fled to Russia on the last train bound for Moscow, and Zygmunt later joined the Fourth Division of the Polish army in exile in Russia. He was wounded while serving in an artillery unit yet still fought in the final battle of Berlin. “His first education was the war”, observed Cheyette, though later the Frankfurt School was a major influence. Soviet forces captured Warsaw in January 1945 and in 1947 Poland became a Communist republic. By then Bauman was working for the Communist Party's “internal army” which was mandated to “suppress terrorism”. In 2007 a Polish magazine accused him of having colluded with state authorities to hunt down opponents; he swore that he did little more than write propaganda pamphlets.
In 1948 Bauman married Janina Lewinson, who had survived the Warsaw Ghetto. They met as fellow students at the Warsaw Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She later became a journalist, diarist and historical writer (A Dream of Belonging, 1988). Zygmunt was expelled from the army in 1953 when his father applied to immigrate to Israel—the two men always held opposing views on Zionism—and he returned to finish his MA in 1954. From then till 1968 he lectured at Warsaw University. His first published work (in Polish in 1960) came after a spell at the London School of Economics and described the English labour movement. Bauman won the Amalfi European Prize in 1990 and Adorno Prize in 1998. Ahmad called him “one of the brightest writers of our time, a public intellectual who defied the narrow grooves of disciplines, [and whose] sociology beautifully wove together politics, philosophy, poetry, novels and more to theorise our (in) human condition”.
Janina died in 2009; and Zygmunt is survived by their daughters Anna, Lydia and Irena, and his partner, Aleksandra Kanea.— JQ