On 8 May 1945, Yelena Rzhevskaya was handed a small box covered in red satin.
The box had once held perfume but now inside – so she said – were Adolf Hitler’s teeth.
Yelena later claimed this marked the beginning of the search for Hitler’s dental records and, with it, official confirmation that the Soviet Red Army had found the burnt corpse of the German leader.
According to her memoir, the hunt took the young war interpreter on a car ride through Berlin in the dying days of the Second World War.
And, Yelena said, what happened became a secret she had to keep for 20 years. Her granddaughter, Lyubov Summ, talks to Jane Wilkinson.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there.
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(Photo: Teeth said by experts to be Adolf Hitler's teeth, Moscow, 2000. Credit: Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)
