The Jew Who Found Hitler’s Teeth — And Carried Them Around In A Box For Days

Image by Liubov Summ

By Daniel J. Solomon September 7, 2017

The memoir of a Soviet military translator who helped identify Adolf Hitler’s body from the remains of his burned teeth is finally having her famous memoir about that experience published in English.

Elena Rzhevskaya’s book, “Berlin, May 1945,” chronicles her effort in the post-war Nazi capital to get a positive identification on Hitler’s remains, found in a bunker by Soviet troops.

As an officer in the Soviet army, Rzhevskaya found Hitler’s dental assistant and got her to draw a sketch of Hitler’s teeth – which allowed Soviet authorities to match that record with an autopsy and certify that they had found Hitler’s body.

Rzhevskaya died at 97 this past April, according to her granddaughter Liubov Summ, who lives in Moscow and spoke to the Times of Israel.

“She carried the box under her arm. It smelled lightly of perfume. She saw her own reflection in a big mirror and thought, ‘My God, am I standing here holding in my hands the only thing that is left of Hitler?’”

The memoir was originally published in 1965, and has since been published into multiple languages – though not Hebrew and until now not in English.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO