The Mystery of Olga Chekhova

by Antony Beevor

  19. Berlin and Moscow 1945

  On I February 1945, Olga Chekhova returned to Berlin by train from another acting engagement in Prague. It was the same day that forward units of Marshal Zhukov’s ist Belorussian Front crossed the frozen Oder to seize bridgeheads on the west bank. The Red Army was within sixty miles of Berlin. The news caused horror in the Nazi capital. As far as the propaganda ministry was concerned, the Mongol hordes were at the gates.

  Olga’s chief concern was for her family - her daughter, Ada, and her granddaughter, Vera. But she had also become extremely fond of another young officer called Albert Sumser. Bert Sumser, like a couple of her previous lovers, was a good deal younger than her: sixteen years in this case. A trainer of the Olympic athletics team, he had met her at a party in Wannsee, which was close to Potsdam, where he was serving as a signals officer. Sumser had no idea who she was, but he had been the only man to stand up when she entered the room, and they began to talk. She gave him her card and invited him to call. He ‘did not even dare to think about making an advance towards this beautiful woman’, and arrived at the dacha bringing, ‘instead of red roses’, a brace of wild duck he had shot. With food in such short supply, the very practical Olga Chekhova had greatly appreciated the gesture, as well as his good manners. Then, in the early spring of 1945, when he fell ill, she walked all the way to his barracks in Potsdam with some food for him. It was a round trip of nearly twelve miles on foot through the Königswald pine forest, because by then there was no fuel for the car. Their relationship, ‘all based on her initiative’, was no doubt made more intense by the dangers and difficulties of the moment.

  Olga apparently refused several offers of evacuation. She had decided to stay with her daughter and granddaughter out at the dacha in Gross Glienecke. Ada’s husband, a gynaecologist called Wilhelm Rust, had been called up as a Luftwaffe doctor. He was away in the north, attached to the headquarters of General Stumpff, who later signed the final surrender to Marshal Zhukov with Field Marshal Keitel. Their daughter, Vera (who had also, with remorseless predictability, been christened Olga), was only four years old. When Zhukov finally launched the great offensive against Berlin in April, all that Olga and Ada knew of Wilhelm Rust’s whereabouts was that his field hospital had been withdrawn northwards towards Lübeck, on the Baltic coast.

  Within the family, they had discussed whether Wilhelm should desert and whether they could hide him successfully out at Gross Glienecke, but the pitiless execution of deserters by the SS and Feldgendarmerie made them decide against the idea. To make matters worse, the Luftwaffe airfield at Gatow was only a mile away. Olga later told her SMERSh interviewers in Moscow, ‘We agreed that he would surrender at the first opportunity and refer to me, and I could give all the guarantees for him.’ Lübeck was expected to fall to the Red Army and Olga Chekhova’s ‘guarantees’ on his behalf could have come only from her intercession with the Soviet authorities. It was a highly significant indication of the influence she knew she wielded in Moscow.

  The potential problem there, which she probably did not realize at the time, lay with the barriers of secrecy between the different departments and organizations of Soviet intelligence. Beria was her principal protector as a result of Mariya Garikovna and Lev, yet he and his deputy, Merkulov, whom she had seen in November 1940, did not even inform their own First Department of the NKVD about the identity of certain agents. And they certainly did not tell SMERSh, the Soviet counter-intelligence force attached to the Red Army.

  SMERSh was headed by Beria’s former deputy, Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, who had been promoted by Stalin to provide a counterbalance to Beria’s power. On 14 February, exactly two weeks after Olga Chekhova’s return to Berlin, Abakumov became the first Soviet officer to enter the Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s secret headquarters in East Prussia. His very detailed report was addressed to Stalin, but a copy was also sent to Beria, a man far too dangerous to alienate.

  While the population of Berlin, especially the women, felt they were now living on the edge of a volcano, Muscovites longed for the peace which finally seemed within their grasp.

  ‘We are already dreaming of the Crimea,’ Aunt Olya’s friend Sofya wrote to Vova Knipper on 2 April. ‘Lyova is going there very soon for about two weeks. He needs rest. He has been working a lot. Yesterday his last piece for the Symphony Orchestra was performed. He conducted it himself.’ Lev had returned to Moscow from his role as a commissar in the Balkans, where no doubt his excellent German had been used once again in the hunt for Fascist spies.

  His sister at Gross Glienecke, meanwhile, was preparing for the storm to come. Like many Berliners, they began to bury their silver and any other valuables in the garden, and prepared for a siege with food and drinking water in jars in their cellar. Because Olga spoke Russian, neighbours, including the Afghan ambassador and Carl Raddatz and his wife, began to inquire whether they could join her and her companions when the Red Army arrived, as she would be the only person able to communicate with the conquerors.

  The great onslaught began on the Oder front before dawn on 16 April. Out at Gross Glienecke, beyond the western edge of Berlin, the three generations of Chekhovas could not hear the massive bombardment, but throughout the eastern suburbs of the city the vibration was so great that walls shook, pictures fell from their hooks and telephones rang on their own.

  Goebbels and his wife, Magda, made a last visit to their lakeside villa at Schwanenwerder. While Magda carried out an inventory of the house to which she knew she would never return, Goebbels destroyed his correspondence and personal memorabilia. That was when he showed a colleague who had come to say goodbye the signed photograph of Lida Baarova, which he had kept hidden in his desk since 1938. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘that’s a woman of perfect beauty.’ He then threw her picture into the flames.

  On Friday 20April, Goebbels attended Hitler’s birthday in the bomb-damaged Reichschancellery, the last reception of the Nazi regime. It was a beautiful day, Führer weather, according to Nazi superstition. But the anniversary was also well known to the US Air Force, whose Flying Fortresses appeared over the city in a penultimate raid. Along with all the other dignitaries of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party, Goring appeared, having just dynamited his characteristically vulgar country house, Karinhall. Ribbentrop was also there, arrogant and ill at ease. The occasion was a little like the final gathering of a corrupt stock-company going into liquidation. The directors were longing to slip away. The only question in their minds was whether the founder, to whom they owed everything, would fly out of the city or stay to shoot himself.

  These were the men with whom Olga Chekhova had been associated in their heyday. This again begs the question whether she had been an ‘adventuress’, as Aunt Olya believed, or a dedicated agent of the Soviet Union. As is so often the case, neither alternative tells the whole truth. Olga Chekhova had accepted the invitations to Nazi receptions, partly to safeguard her career and partly out of curiosity. She was neither a Nazi nor a Communist. As one White Russian acquaintance testified, when interrogated by SMERSh later, her politics belonged to the pre-Nazi era. Like her mother, she despised Hitler and his entourage, but she knew that she had to work with them. She genuinely loathed their anti-Semitism and had helped a Jewish actor called Kaufmann and his family. The simple answer is that Olga Chekhova, ever since the collapse of her marriage to Misha Chekhov, had been a determined survivor, prepared to make whatever compromises were necessary. She had a number of failings, particularly her relationship with the truth, yet she remained a brave and resourceful woman whose main priority was to protect her family and close friends.

  Also on 20 April, Olga Chekhova walked all the way to Potsdam again to Bert Sumser’s barracks. ‘I have to talk to you,’ she said to him. ‘What do you want to do after the war? Or do you want to die? I want to save you. Come and stay with me. I will hide you.’ Sumser decided to follow her. He escaped from the barracks on an army motorcycle, just as his unit was marched off to defend Potsdam from the So
viet armies about to encircle Berlin. Hitler gave the very weak division, under General Helmuth Reymann, the preposterously inflated title of Army Group Spree. It did little to help them as the Soviet 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies advanced from the south-east.

  Olga was also concerned at that stage about her sister, Ada, and her daughter, Marina Ried, who were living further out from the city. Yet they were the first to be liberated by the Red Army. ‘My darling, darling Auntie Olya!’ Ada wrote on 26 April, presumably just after the Red Army arrived. ‘I am writing to you at this first opportunity. We are alive and in good health—miracles do happen. I still know nothing about Olga and Olechka - they are in Glienecke. I am living with Marina and her husband near Berlin - all that we had in the city has been destroyed by bombs. Mama died two years ago.’ This breathless letter continued and then finished: ‘I’m so excited, I can hardly write.’ How Ada managed to send the letter is unknown. Perhaps she persuaded an impressionable young Soviet officer that it must be all right to send a letter to the widow of the great Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.

  Stalin had ordered Marshal Zhukov and Marshal Konev to encircle the city. This was to prevent both the Nazi leaders from escaping and the Americans from slipping into the city from the south-west. Packed into her little air-raid shelter, the first that Olga Chekhova and her companions would have heard was the battle on 26 April for Gatow airfield, just the other side of a thin barrier of pine trees. There, a mixture of Luftwaffe cadets and elderly Volkssturm militia depressed the barrels of the 88mm anti-aircraft guns to minimum elevation and took on the Soviet tanks advancing through the chaos of wrecked and burned-out aircraft. Their resistance lasted most of the day.

  The Soviet troops were from the 47th Army, which had advanced north ofBerlin via Oranienburg and then swept south to meet up with the 3rd Guards Tank Army near Potsdam. On that evening and the following day, Soviet soldiers fanned out, searching the area for German stragglers. Their faces were masked by the dirt of the last ten days of fighting.

  Olga Chekhova’s version of their arrival is characteristically melodramatic. The Katyusha rocket launchers have fallen silent. Only isolated shots can be heard. A Red Army soldier suddenly appears in the doorway to their cellar. There is blood on his forehead. He staggers, and they realize that he is mortally wounded. He points his sub-machine-gun at them, but just as he looks as if he is about to fire, he falls dead at their feet. Her cinematic instincts clearly got the better of her. The dead soldier’s comrades burst in. One of them says accusingly: ‘You killed Kolya!’ Then they march Olga and her family off to the Soviet kommandatura. ‘The sentence was execution,’ she wrote. ‘Just like a film.’ But to judge by the general state of affairs at this time, if the soldiers had for a moment believed that their comrade had been killed, they would have immediately gunned down every occupant of the house. And a local kommandatura would not have been set up and operational before the neighbourhood had been secured.

  Albert Sumser’s version is more convincing. They were sitting in the house, waiting for the first Russians. He was next to Olga and had her little dog, Kuki, on his lap. The first soldiers, surprised to find that Olga spoke Russian, appear to have called a woman commissar. He remembered her black, greasy hair and enormous breasts, and above all her fury. She screamed at Olga that she was a traitor to the Motherland, then grabbed her by the throat, shouting threats. She was fortunately interrupted by the arrival of a colonel, who demanded to know what was happening. Olga immediately told him who she was. The colonel promptly turned on the woman commissar and began yelling at her, telling her she was stupid and ignorant if she had never heard of Chekhov. He ordered her out and told two of the soldiers to stay there and guard the house. No doubt he reported his discovery to higher command, and word was passed to SMERSh counter-intelligence.

  The next evening, a staff car containing two Soviet officers pulled up under the tall pine trees outside the house. Olga Chekhova was told to pack a few things and to accompany them. She said goodbye to her daughter, granddaughter and Bert Sumser, who, although of military age, had not been taken away as a prisoner. The two officers were escorting her to the headquarters of Marshal Zhukov’s ist Belorussian Front. This was in the former military engineers school at Karlshorst, on the other side of Berlin, and a wide detour was necessary to avoid the fighting which still continued in and around the centre of the city.

  At Karlshorst, she was interrogated on the following day, 29April, by Colonel Shkurin of SMERSh. It was a strangely restrained and truncated interrogation, almost as if the interrogator had received instructions to do little more than go through the motions. This, it must be remembered, was at a time when White Russians found in Berlin were either executed on the spot or rounded up, ready to be turned into ‘camp dust’ in the Gulag. The next morning, 30 April, Colonel Shkurin’s protocol was sealed in an envelope with a covering letter from Lieutenant-General Aleksandr Anatolievich Vadis, the head of SMERSh attached to the 1st Belorussian Front. Two days later, Vadis, harried by telephone calls and signals from Moscow, was in charge of the hunt for Hitler’s corpse in the Reichschancellery.

  The package containing the documents on Olga Chekhova was handed to her chief escort officer. It was addressed to Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, the chief of SMERSh, who had received the Order of Kutuzov ist Class on 21 April and would soon be promoted to Colonel General, even though the only shots he had ever heard fired had been those of execution squads. Olga Chekhova and her escort were then taken by staff car, probably an American Willys, and driven eastwards to Poznan, captured after a brutal siege in late February. There, an aircraft sent from Moscow awaited her.

  Twenty-five years after leaving the Belorussky station, Olga Chekhova found herselfback in Moscow. According to Soviet intelligence sources, she was taken ‘for a 72-hour rendezvous’ to an NKVD safe-house in central Moscow. Abakumov’s habit of taking ’actresses, cheating wives, secretaries and foreign visitors’ to safe-houses for his illicit affairs compromised these secret locations and was well known within the NKVD. This weakness later featured on the list of charges against him under the category of ignoring ‘Communist moral principles’.

  General Ivan Serov, the NKVD chief in Berlin, when attacked by Abakumov later—almost certainly on Stalin’s orders - wrote a letter of denunciation to Stalin on 2 February 1948, describing Abakumov’s behaviour during the battle for Moscow in late 1941: ‘Let Abakumov tell the Central Committee about his cowardly behaviour during the hardest period of the war when the Germans were near to Moscow. He went round like a wet hen, moaned and sighed about what would happen to him and did not do anything. His cowardly behaviour influenced the subordinates of the department. His obsequious servant Ivanov, who was responsible for his household, was sent to us to measure up for boots to be made for running away from Moscow. The generals who stayed in Moscow witnessed Abakumov’s behaviour. Let Abakumov refute the evidence that during the desperate days of the war, he went to Moscow and chose girls of easy virtue and brought them to the Hotel Moskva.’

  In May 1945, Abakumov was thirty-seven years old. ‘The very ideal of a Chekist’, he was tall and quite good-looking, with sensual lips and ‘a shock of black hair’. Like Beria, he was a sex addict, although he resorted less to rape. And also like Beria, he was a sadist who thoroughly enjoyed torturing his victims. Solzhenitsyn recorded that in order not to spoil the Persian carpet in his office, ‘a dirty runner bespattered with blood was rolled out’ before the unfortunate prisoner was brought in.

  Abakumov was also obsessed with stage and film stars, which was perhaps part of the reason for his interest in Olga Chekhova, even though, at forty-seven, she was ten years older than him. He later arrested General V. V. Kryukov, a dashing cavalry commander and close friend of Marshal Zhukov, tortured him personally, and then had his wife, Russia’s most famous singer, Lydia Ruslanova, dragged in. She spurned him and Abakumov sent her straight to a Gulag labour camp.

  There is no clear indication whether Olga Ch
ekhova slept with Abakumov, either under duress or because she considered it a necessary insurance. Perhaps nothing happened between them at all. But if Abakumov did sleep with Olga Chekhova and he had known of Beria’s patronage, he would very probably have sought his agreement first. Abakumov would not have risked antagonizing Beria at this stage. Olga Chekhova’s two subsequent letters to him, released by the KGB along with the other papers, are far from conclusive on the issue, despite the fact that she asks in one of them, ‘When are we going to meet?’ and they were both addressed to ‘Dearest Vladimir Semyonovich’. Even the ‘Dearest’ is inconclusive, since it may have been an actress’s professional effus iveness, and the fact that she called him Vladimir instead of Viktor apparently reflects Abakumov’s habit of using a nom de guerre even in unmilitary situations.

  Olga Chekhova’s account of her time in Moscow is significantly evasive and flat, though she could have made a wonderfully melodramatic story, as she had of her adventures in Nazi Germany. She claims that she was lodged with the wife of a Red Army officer still listed as missing in Germany. In her version, charming officers who spoke several languages visited her constantly, played chess with her, chatted and then took her off for interrogation sessions in the Kremlin, the only purpose of which was to fill in details about Hitler’s circle.