Elena Rzhevskaya

After the war, Rzhevskaya resided in Moscow where she continued her career as a writer. She was allowed to publish her memoirs in the 1960s. In 2018 Greenhill Books published the first English language edition of her memoirs, with a foreword by the Third Reich historian Roger Moorhouse.

From February 1945, Rzhevskaya worked in Poznań. At the end of April 1945, she was transferred to Berlin. Her troop became a part of the Kuznetsov's 3rd Army, responsible for the attack on the Reichstag.

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".

Elena Kagan was born to a Jewish family in the Belarusian town of Gomel. The family later moved to Moscow. At the time of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, she was studying philosophy at Moscow State University. She wanted to join the battlefront, but she was sent to work in a munition factory and later studied to be a nurse. However, her knowledge of German led her to be transferred to a school for war interpreters. In February, 1942, she joined Lelyushenko's troops and in the following months, she moved together with the army throughout Belarus and Poland to the West.

On the following day of 9 May, they managed to track down Käthe Heusermann, an assistant of Hugo Blaschke, Hitler's personal dentist. Heusermann led them to the Reich Chancellery, where Hitler's medical records, including X-ray images of his teeth were kept. During the interrogation led by Gorbushin, Major Bystrov, and Rzhevskaya as an interpreter, she confirmed that the box contained teeth of Adolf Hitler. The information was subsequently confirmed by Fritz Echtmann, a dental technician who worked in the Blaschke's consulting room since 1938.

Elena Moiseevna Rzhevskaya (Russian: Еле́на Моисе́евна Рже́вская, born Elena Kagan; 27 October 1919 – 25 April 2017) was a writer and former Soviet war interpreter. In April and May, 1945, she participated in the Battle of Berlin. 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. Hitler's corpse was, according to her own words, found by soldier Ivan Churakov on 4 May 1945. Four days later, on 8 May, Colonel Vassily Gorbushin gave her a small box that contained Hitler's dental remains. During the identification of the corpse, the Soviet team worked in top-secret conditions. Rzhevskaya and Gorbushin managed to find in Berlin, Käthe Heusermann, an assistant of Hugo Blaschke, Hitler's personal dentist. Heusermann confirmed the identity of the Nazi leader. The information was, however, suppressed by Joseph Stalin, who later ordered the facts not to be publicized. She was a recipient of the Andrei Sakharov Prize for Writer's Civic Courage.