Elena Rzhevskaya

According to her memoirs, called in English Memories of a War-time Interpreter, she was a member of the Soviet unit searching for Adolf Hitler in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery.

Rzhevskaya and Gorbushin managed to find in Berlin, Käthe Heusermann, an assistant of Hugo Blaschke, Hitler's personal dentist.

Shortly before their departure from Berlin, on 4 May, a group of Soviet soldiers led by SMERSH commander Ivan Klimenko visited the garden of the Chancellery, where the burned corpse of Goebbels had been found on 2 May.

[7] According to Rzhevskaya, near the bunker entrance, Soviet Private Ivan Churakov found a shell hole filled with unusually fresh soil.

[2][8] The secret transport took place over the night of 5 and 6 May, allegedly in order to prevent commander of the city Nikolai Berzarin and his 5th Shock Army from claiming a stake in the findings.

[10] According to Rzhevskaya, the burnt corpses were wrapped in sheets and lifted over the fence of the Chancellery garden and into two large crates (apparently for ammunition) on a Soviet truck early on 6 May.

[10] Hitler's dental remains – said to be found loose in the oral cavity while somehow clamping down on the tongue[12] – were supposedly removed during the alleged autopsy conducted on 8 May.

[14][15] On 8 May, Gorbushin gave a casket containing the dental remains to Rzhevskaya and told her to keep an eye on it, as she would be less likely than the male officers to get drunk and lose them.

[2][7][16] According to Rzhevskaya, the casket (sometimes translated as a cigar box)[2] was "second-hand [and dark red] with a soft lining and covered with satin, the kind of thing made to hold a bottle of perfume or cheap jewellery.

During the interrogation led by Gorbushin, Major Bystrov, and Rzhevskaya as an interpreter, she confirmed that the box contained teeth of Adolf Hitler.

The Soviet press repeatedly reported that Hitler fled to Argentina or was in hiding under the protection of the Spanish dictator Franco.

[2] Käthe Heusermann was deported to the Soviet Union in July, 1945, and after interrogation in Lubyanka and Lefortovo prisons, she was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.

According to the decision of the court: "... by her participation in Hitler's dental treatment, she voluntarily helped a bourgeois state prolong the war".

In 2018 Greenhill Books published the first English language edition of her memoirs, with a foreword by the Third Reich historian Roger Moorhouse.