Stalin's son was a war deserter: German magazine claims dictator's child surrendered to Nazi forces
Via Timothy
- A Soviet archive has yielded up one
of the last secrets of World War Two that dictator Josef Stalin took to
his grave - the fact his son Yakov gave himself up to Nazi forces during
the 1941 invasion of his country.
- The
party line in Stalin’s Russia was always that Yakov Dzhugashvili, the
eldest son of the murderous Communist tyrant, was captured.
Now
a file of the Defence Ministry suggests that he gave himself up because
of his disillusionment with the conduct of the war which saw 1.3
million Red Army men captured, killed or disabled in the first weeks of
the Nazi invasion in June 1941.
Spiegel Magazine has accessed the files and prints the story of Stalin’s son, known as Yasha, in its latest edition.
Stalin
disowned him in 1928 following a dispute about a girl and the defence
ministry archive in Podolsk reveals Stalin writing to his mother in
April 1928:
'Tell Yasha that I think he behaved like a thug and an
extortionist, someone with whom I no longer have anything in common and
with whom I no longer want a relationship. Let him live where and with
whom he wants. J. Stalin.'
Yakov
volunteered for the army in 1937, became a lieutenant in 1940 and was a
commander in the 14th Howitzer Regiment of the 14th Tank Division at
the time Hitler unleashed three million men in Operation Barbarossa on
June 22 1941.
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