The foreign enemy and, no less, the domestic enemy, were an essential component of the system Stalin created. He loathed the idea of detente, and there would be less pressure for it if Hitler was still alive and secretly hiding somewhere. If Hitler was alive, Nazism was not yet vanquished and the world was still in danger. Stalin saw that as tactically important in the imminent discussions with the Allies about the nature of the postwar world. So in Potsdam, when he was asked whether anything was known about Hitler, he was evasive. With a knack for dealing unceremoniously with inconvenient facts that by rights belonged to history and hence to the people, Stalin sat on the truth.
History abhors the arbitrary removal from its narrative of this or that particular event, no matter what the motivation. It is a great theatre producer, and trying to correct its productions only spoils them.
Was Stalin wise? Was there some advantage he derived from keeping his secret? Hardly. The political and moral damage, however, was immense. At the end of the war, and for some time after it, the approval rating (as people would say nowadays) of the Red Army throughout the world was extremely high. If, when Stalin was asked about Hitler at the Potsdam Conference, he had announced he was ready to provide proof that Hitler had been found, imagine the impact! A total triumph for Stalin! For the Red Army! And his work at the conference would have benefited from that far more than it did from galvanizing a corpse. But I wonder now, as I write, whether Stalin was already sensing a growing tension between himself and his Allies, and concealing a truth that was their common achievement was perhaps his first move in the approaching Cold War. So he threw that question at ‘played-out’ Zhukov: ‘Well, where is Hitler?’
When I was demobilized and, five months later, left Germany for good, as it then seemed, the Allies continued to work, trying to reach a definite conclusion. In late October and early November (by which time I was already back in Moscow), they were trying to bring together all the loose ends and appealed to the Soviet side for assistance. On 31 October, as a goodwill gesture, the record of the interrogation of Hanna Reitsch was sent by US intelligence to Major General Sidnev,[1] Following that, on 1 November, Brigadier General Ford sent a circular to Brigadier General Conrad (USA), Major General Sidnev (USSR) and Colonel Poulu (France), proposing that the next meeting of the Intelligence Committee should discuss the various claims about Hitler’s death.
First paragraph of that text: ‘The only conclusive proof of Hitler’s death would be the finding and definite identification of the body.’
It was, however, just this conclusive proof that was being denied, concealed both from the Allies and from Russians themselves. Brigadier General Ford continues, ‘In the absence of this proof, the only positive proof consists of the detailed accounts of particular witnesses who were either acquainted with his intentions or were eyewitnesses to his fate.’
As we have seen, there really was no shortage of such witnesses. Analysing the testimony of those witnesses who fell into the hands of the Allies, and the information that had leaked from our side, the British intelligence officer summarizes:
It is impossible to suppose that the accounts of the various eyewitnesses are a fabricated story. They were all too busy planning their own escapes to… have any inclination to memorize a fictional charade that they would maintain for five months in isolation from each other under detailed and persistent cross-examination.
However, the evidence about the last days and death of Hitler is ‘not yet complete’, and Brigadier General Ford appeals to his colleagues on the quadripartite Intelligence Committee for information about the where-abouts of, and a request to be allowed to interrogate, Günsche and Rattenhuber (who are in captivity ‘according to the Russian communique of 7 May’), Traudl Junge (Gertraud but called Gertruda in our records) and Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, who had been seriously injured and, according to unconfirmed reports, was in hospital, again in the Russian sector.
At the end of this message to his colleagues is the most important point:
A rumour came from the Russian side that a body had been found that was identified, or was believed to have been identified, as Hitler’s body from the teeth. Could they perhaps report the results of that investigation to establish the extent to which that can be relied on?
There was no response.
Evidently it had not proved possible to conceal the facts completely, and perhaps nobody had tried all that hard. The main thing was to keep everybody guessing. ‘Nothing for sure.’ ‘Hitler vanished without trace’. That provided a foundation for legends and myths about him: just what Hitler wanted. A romantic aura was created around his image, while the truth that we knew was simple and prosaic. But it was the truth.
Hitler wanted to remain an enigma, to become myth, a new phoenix ready to be reborn in someone else’s lunatic dreams of power and violence.
Back then, in May 1945, I supposed our adventure was over and that I would soon be home. I did go home, but not soon by any means, only on 10 October 1945, four years to the day after I had gone off to the war. During those first postwar months I was again to encounter the documents from the Reich Chancellery. First, at front headquarters I was instructed to translate the Goebbels diaries, but things did not work out. There was nothing of operational value in his old diaries, and the historical value of documents from a war now ended, as I have said, declined rapidly. I was sent off back to Stendal, where the headquarters of our 3rd Shock Army was stationed.
The German town of Stendal was my last stop in a war that had lasted four years and that, no doubt, is why I so remember it. We moved there when the demarcation line was drawn on the map of Germany and Stendal, though situated to the west of Berlin, fell within the Russian zone. The Americans had been there in the morning, and we moved in at noon.
The city was intact and vibrant with life. We settled in a quiet street with detached houses covered in vines. From early morning middle-aged German housewives were busy in the orchards by the houses. Their hair in old-fashioned buns and the low hems of their skirts made them resemble their peers to the east.
German children played in the square, and never ceased to amaze us: they never cried and did not make a lot of noise when they were playing at war. In the square, old women dressed in black sat all day long on a bench. They had probably been brought together long ago by widowhood, and would not have been very young even at the time of the First World War. Sometimes they began to gossip excitedly about something, trying to outdo each other as they wagged fingers in black cotton gloves.
From time to time a black hearse would appear, drawn slowly, smoothly, contemplatively by two horses. What we knew about horses was that they were used for pulling artillery or galloped with a courier in the saddle, or died in battle, or were eaten. There had been none available for other purposes for years.
These black, gleaming, well-fed horses wearing a solemn funeral caparison and a fluffy pom-pom above their withers, with a black-clad driver wearing a bowler hat, sitting on the box of the glazed and lacquered hearse, were the custodians of the majesty and sacramental nature of death, of the death that is called ‘natural’. Not death in battle, or from wounds, or the agonies of captivity, but the death of someone who has passed away ‘naturally’, the kind of death that used to happen so long ago that we had forgotten during the war that it was possible.
1
Alexey Sidnev, deputy head of the Smersh directorate of the 1st Byelorussian Front. Birstein, p. 304.