History 22 Oct 2020 Boris Egorov
Global Look Press Stalin treated his firstborn son like any other Soviet soldier. When he went to war, Yakov Dzhugashvili did not get a hard job at the headquarters, but he threw himself straight into the thick of the action in the front line.
“I am ashamed in front of my father that I will stay alive,” Yakov Dzhugashvili, son of Joseph Stalin, told the Germans during the interrogation. The Soviet supreme leader, who had a very negative attitude towards the Red Army soldiers who surrendered, faced one of the most difficult situations of his life – the enemy had captured his own son.
Difficult relationships
Yakov was Stalin’s son from his first marriage to Ekaterine (Kato) Svanidze. Because his mother died soon after giving birth to him, and his father spent all his time either in revolutionary struggle or in exile, the child was raised by an aunt.
In 1921, at the age of 14, Yakov Dzhugashvili (who used Stalin’s real last name) moved from Georgia to Moscow, where he met his father for the first time. The relations between the two, who in principle did not know anything about each other, were difficult.
Yakov Dzhugashvili (R).
Archive photo
Stalin was categorically against Yakov’s first marriage and this provoked a large line between father and son. To this came Dzhugashvili’s personal tragedy – the death of his infant daughter. In the end, he tried to shoot himself, but was unsuccessful and only survived thanks to the efforts of the Kremlin doctors.
The Soviet leader’s eldest son did not always oppose his father in everything. A turbine engineer by profession, at his father’s insistence Yakov enrolled in the Red Army Artillery Academy. In May 1941, a month before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Senior Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili was appointed commander of an artillery battery.
Captivity
When the war began, the Soviet leader did nothing to protect his son from the war. The latter went to the front line as a regular commander of the Red Army in the presence of his father’s simple words of farewell: “Go and fight”.
But Yakov did not stop fighting for long. In early July 1941, units from his 20th Army surrendered in Belarus, and on July 16, in an attempt to break out and reach his own side, Senior Lieutenant Dzhugashvili was captured.
Archive photo
The Germans very quickly realized who had fallen into their hands – Yakov was betrayed by several of his military officials. The Nazis had no intention of arranging a public execution of the son of their arch-enemy. On the contrary, it was in their interest to attract Dzhugashvili to their side, use him in their propaganda campaigns and play “Stalin” Junior against Stalin Senior.
Yakov was treated with kindness and courtesy. During his interrogation, the Germans asked not only about military issues but also about his political views. They argued for Stalin’s methods of running the state, pointing out his son’s mistakes from his father, and emphasizing the shortcomings of Bolshevik ideology. However, they did not get anywhere in their attempts to “soften” the prisoners of war, and Dzhugashvili refused to cooperate with the Germans in any way.
At the same time, the Third Reich propaganda machine ensured that the news of the capture of the son of the almighty Stalin became widely known in the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that Dzhugashvili emphasized in his interrogations that he had been taken prisoner against his will, the Germans explicitly declared that his surrender had been entirely voluntary. Initially, Stalin himself believed this version of events.
A soldier for a field marshal
As a result of information filtered through to the Kremlin about the circumstances of his son’s imprisonment and details of his conduct in captivity, Stalin soon changed his mind about Yakov and no longer regarded him as a traitor and a coward.
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Several rescue missions were arranged to get Dzhugashvili out of German hands. Spanish communists forced to flee Spain in the wake of the defeat in the civil war and now living in the Soviet Union were even recruited for the operations because of their valuable experience of guerrilla and party wars. But all attempts to free Yakov came to naught.
After the Battle of Stalingrad, the Germans used the mediation of the Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte and the Red Cross to offer Stalin an exchange of his son for Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus and several dozen high-ranking sixth army officers held in Soviet captivity. Hitler promised the German people to take the generals home.
Today we can only speculate as to what Stalin thought of such an exchange. The established view in the post-war Soviet Union was that the Soviet leader responded quickly to the German proposal: “I will not exchange a soldier for a field marshal.” However, there is no documentary confirmation that he actually uttered this phrase.
The daughter of the supreme leader, Svetlana Alliluyeva, recalled that shortly after these events, the winter of 1943-44, her upset and upset father referred to the failed affair: “The Germans proposed to exchange Yasha for some of their people … Where should I start? negotiate with them? No, war is war. “
Yakov Dzhugashvili during his interrogation after his capture.
Getty pictures
Marshal Zhukov wrote in his memoirs and thoughts that once, when they were out and about, he had asked Stalin about his older son. He thoughtfully replied, “Yakov will not come out of captivity. The fascists will shoot him …” After a pause, he added, “No, Yakov prefers death to betraying the motherland.”
It is true that Dzhugashvili continued to be defiant, and what had begun as a good treatment on the part of the Germans quickly became extremely harsh. The result was that they could not use him either for propaganda purposes or to get a prisoner to change, but lost all interest in him.
On April 14, 1943, Yakov threw himself at the electrified barbed wire in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and was immediately shot by a guard. Whether he wanted to commit suicide or flee, or whether his death was organized by the Germans themselves, it is still a mystery to this day.
Source: sn.dk