Yakov Dzhugashvili captured by the Germans, 1941
Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s elder son, served in the Red Army during the Second World War, and was captured, or surrendered, in the initial stages of the German invasion of the USSR. There are still many contradictory legends in circulation about the death of Yakov Dzhugashvili, as there are about all the important events in his life.
Yakov, born in 1907, was the son of Stalin’s first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze. His mother died a few months later, and he was raised by his maternal uncle, who urged him to acquire higher education. He travelled to Moscow, learned Russian (his native language was Georgian) and eventually graduated from a military academy.
Yakov and his father Stalin never got along. Allegedly once Stalin referred to Yakov as a “mere cobbler.” Their relationship came to a breaking point in 1925, when Yakov began living with the daughter of an Orthodox priest, Zoya Gunina. The outraged Stalin, however, refused to accept the young woman, who had formerly been a classmate of Yakov. As a result of the permanent conflicts, the deeply hurt young man attempted suicide. The bullet pierced his lung but missed his heart. This prompted the dictator to make the sarcastic remark: “You couldn’t even do this properly.”
Dzhugashvili was captured on 16 July 1941 during the Battle of Smolensk. It is unclear if Yakov was captured or surrendered. In February 2013 Der Spiegel printed evidence that it interpreted as indicating that Yakov surrendered. A letter written by Dzhugashvili’s brigade commissar to the Red Army’s political director, quoted by Spiegel, states that after Dzhugashvili’s battery had been bombed by the Germans, he and another soldier initially put on civilian clothing and escaped, but then at some point Dzhugashvili stayed behind, saying that he wanted to stay and rest.
From other sources, it appears that the retreating Yakov Dzhugashvili was handed over to the Germans by his father’s unhappy subjects, the Russian muzhiks, who hated the kolkhoz system and the Soviet power in general. In the first hours of capture the panic-stricken young man got rid of his officer’s insignia and hid among the masses of POW’s. Unfortunately for him he was recognized by one of his former comrades who immediately turned him in. Soon afterwards the unshaven artillery officer, was interrogated by the Abwehr’s most trained Russian experts. All his words were carefully written down, although only part of these documents have been made public. In any case, from the records of the first interrogations we can conclude that Yakov Dzhugashvili did not abase himself in front of the Germans.
<
Yasha was Stalin’s eldest son.
After a while, however, the cornered artillery officer inevitably became more open. He had a very bad opinion of his own division, and even about other units of the red Army, which had been insufficiently prepared for the war. He told his captors that the Red commanders behaved improperly in peacetime and often even during combat. He added that the rich peasants, the kulaks, who had formerly been “the protectors of tsarism and the bourgeoise”, dominated the Soviet system. When answering questions about his family it turned out just how loose his ties were with his father. He gave the year of the death of his stepmother, Nadezhda Alluluyeva, as 1934 rather than 1932, nor could he say exactly how old his younger brother Vasily was.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com
http://diktiospartakos.blogspot.gr/2015/10/yakov-dzhugashvili.html
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου