The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (29 page)

When the Americans eventually arrived, Vadim was again able to make use of his great talent for languages. He worked for them as an interpreter, helping with the repatriation of displaced persons. In the meantime, his own family in Moscow had been informed officially that he must be dead. Kachalov, his father, refused to believe this and wrote begging for help to Stalin, who had always admired his theatrical genius.

In October 1944, with the Red Army on the border of East Prussia, the Western Allies close to the lower Rhine and German cities being bombed by day and by night, it was a welcome relief for actors to work away from the capital.

Olga Chekhova found herself filming in the ski resort of Kitzbühel in the Austrian Tyrol. There she encountered Julius Schaub, Hitler’s personal adjutant, when he came over to join her at dinner in the hotel dining room. Schaub, she found, was almost totally deaf, having been with Hitler in the conference room at the
Wolfsschanze
when Stauffenberg’s bomb went off. Schaub revealed a grim fascination in the experience, for he regaled Olga and her companions with all the grisly details of the explosion. He described how Hitler’s arm and leg were burned and his clothes were literally hanging in tatters. She also heard that supplies of canned foods and weapons were being delivered to the Berghof above Berchtesgaden, but whether Schaub or somebody else told her this is not clear.

Olga Chekhova tried to pretend after the war that her outspoken comments to Goebbels on the invasion of the Soviet Union had led to her being blacklisted. Yet she made no fewer than eight films between 1942 and 1944 and she still received the odd invitation from Goebbels. In one of her movies,
Mit den Augen einer Frau,
she even managed to obtain another film role for her daughter, Ada, with whom she had acted in
Der Favorit der Kaiserin
in 1935. But with the relentless Allied bombing of the Berlin area, fewer films were made at Babelsberg. Prague, still virtually untouched by the war and with its shops full of luxuries unobtainable in Berlin, had become the new ‘Mecca of the film-world’.

She also travelled to different cities within Germany for guest performances at theatres. In Cologne, however, her hotel was hit in a British bombing raid and burned down. She claimed that she had had to take the train back to Berlin still wearing her stage costume.

A major preoccupation of actors in Berlin appears to have been their cars and the impossibility of obtaining fuel. Olga Chekhova’s former lover and close friend Carl Raddatz was reduced to a wood-burning contraption. She herself was furious with Goebbels for having refused her a supplementary ration for her Fiat Topolino. The maximum allowance was just fifteen litres a month, and buying fuel on the black market was very dangerous, since it was usually stolen from the Wehrmacht and therefore the offence could carry the death penalty. By the end of 1944, she was reduced to the S-Bahn suburban train and walking, sometimes up to six miles at a time.

Olga Chekhova had continued with one sort of war work, without any pressure from the propaganda ministry. She used to sing for the wounded soldiers in the Tübingen military hospital. Goebbels still had his favourites, and ‘the charming Olga Chekhova’, as he had so often described her in his diaries, was no longer one of them, especially after the way her mother, the formidable Baba, had snubbed him publicly in a theatre. The propaganda minister’s favourite actress during the war was yet another foreigner, the Hungarian star Marika Rokk. This time, however, Magda Goebbels approved of her too. Marika Rökk was a brilliant all-rounder, famous for her song and dance routines. Soviet intelligence sources, however, claim that she was spying for them. ‘When our troops reached Germany,’ wrote Beria’s son, ‘she moved to Austria, where she set up her own movie company, not without support.’

And yet the odd invitation from Goebbels still came from time to time. To celebrate the five hundredth performance of the play
Aimee,
Goebbels invited the cast to his country house at Lanke, where they feasted on roast venison—a
‘Wunder’
at that stage of the war, with rations so drastically reduced. The guests found that Goebbels was entertaining alone. His wife and children were away on what Berliners called a ’bombing-holiday’ in Austria. Olga Chekhova asked Goebbels whether he planned to extend the house, which by Nazi standards was surprisingly small and unpretentious. ‘The land does not belong to me,’ he replied, ‘but to the local town, and in any case for whom should I carry on building? If I am no longer alive, should my children take on the burden of the hatred directed at me?’ The future of their children in the event of a Nazi downfall was a subject which preoccupied him more and more, yet he publicly berated as cowards and traitors anybody who mentioned the possibility of defeat.

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
Wolfs
schanze, 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 Soviet 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.