"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 Stalin’s dark and murky ambition from taking root – his desire to hide from the world that we had found Hitler’s 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 Guardian

On May 2,1945, Red Army soldiers broke into Hitler’s 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 Hitler’s 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.

Elena’s 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.

“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.”

"Yelena recounts what is akin to a detective story, examining the fragments of Hitler's jaw to match it with dental records and x-rays... anyone reading Yelena's fascinating and honest book will reject the view that in some way and for some reason the U.S. and allies helped Hitler escape.  There was no Western version of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939."

“The Führer had spent the war’s final weeks in a fortified bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery building. Interpreter Elena Rzhevskaya, then 25, helped comb through the warren of underground rooms, interrogating survivors and seeking clues to his fate. Rzhevskaya’s ‘Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter,’ out now for the first time in English, tells their detective story.”

"This is an astonishing first-hand account: a must-read"

"Unadorned, clear-eyed, precise…. a remarkable, filmic story, crisply told."