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    Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker
    Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker
    Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker
    Audiobook18 hours

    Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter: From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

    Written by Elena Rzhevskaya

    Narrated by Angele Masters

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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 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.

    Editor's Note

    Fascinating forgotten history…

    This memoir from Rzhevskaya, a female lieutenant for Russian forces during World War II, is a fascinating forgotten history. “Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter” details Rzhevskaya’s attitudes and feelings about Germany and Russia, providing a hardly heard perspective to these two world powers. The book also details how she went about making sure Hitler really was dead.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Productions
    Release dateNov 23, 2021
    ISBN9781094431024
    Author

    Elena Rzhevskaya

    Elena Kagan was born in Gomel, Belarus in October 1919. She moved with her family to Moscow in 1922 where she later studied philology at Moscow State University. After serving the war effort as a munitions worker and after finishing a war interpreter's course Elena joined Gen Dmitry Lelyushenko's army of resistance in 1942. By February 1945 Elena was working in Poznan before joining the USSR's 3rd Army's attack on the Reichstag in late April. Her journey to Berlin began in Rzhev on the Volga, where millions of Red Army soldiers died fighting German forces. She adopted the surname Rzhevskaya to honour the fallen.Rzhevskaya was the first person to read key documents related to the last days of the Reich including the personal papers of Hitler. She lived in Moscow after the war to work as a writer and won prizes for her fiction and journalism. She was the author of two acclaimed history books and six war novels. She died in April 2017.

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    Reviews for Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

    4.5/5

    59 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Narrator has an annoying pitch and stretchy pronunciation.
      Could be better with another more reserved voice.
    • 2/5
      I couldn’t make it past the second chapter; it was monotonous.
    • 4/5
      It seems unusual to find memoirs by people in the "lesser" professions such as the secretaries, interpreters, and others, but the contacts and documents that "Elena R." had access to during the Russian army drive to and in Berlin and later classified is a bit like the "fly on the wall" perspective. The writing of the later chapters and the epilogue adds to the clarity or reasons for the content, so I expect to revisit this book again. Do give this book a try.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Wasn’t Hitler so the entire story is a LIE!!
      Anyone who has done the slightest amount of research knows all about Operation Paperclip, where the US helped Hitler, Goebbels, Dr Mengale and over 1600 German scientists escape to South America, mainly Argentina and Venezuela while they hid out, had plastic surgeries and emerged reinvented.. Many believe that Walt Disney WAS Hitler.. His daughter, until very recently, is Angela Merkle PM of Germany..
      Stop believing everything you read, see or hear!! We have been lied to about all major events, for decades, possibly centuries..
      If you believe that the Bolshevik wars were not set up by the Nazis, or that the Titanic was just an accident, you really need to do research of your own!!

      2 people found this helpful