Apollonian
Guest Columnist
How Hitler’s nephews landed in Soviet captivity
Link: https://www.rbth.com/history/333453-how-hitlers-nephews-ussr
Feb 25 2021
Boris Egorov
Hitler offered to exchange one of them for Stalin’s son, who fell into German hands at the very start of the war. The Soviet leader flatly refused.
Heinz Hitler
The self-appointed Fuhrer of the German Nation, Adolf Hitler, had a rather strained relationship with his half-brother, Alois Hitler Jr. On the other hand, he had great affection for the latter’s son Heinrich (Heinz).
A die-hard National Socialist, Heinz Hitler dreamed of following in his famous uncle’s footsteps. With his assistance, Heinz enrolled in the National Political Institute of Education (Napola) in Ballenstedt, an elite academy for future leaders of the Nazi Party and the SS. That, however, was the only favor. Hitler wanted Heinz to achieve everything by himself, without pulling strings.
In 1941, 21-year-old Heinz, a subaltern officer of the 23rd Potsdam Artillery Regiment, took part in the invasion of the USSR, for which he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class.
German POWs near Moscow.
Boris Vdovenko/МАММ/МDF/russiainphoto.ru
However, the younger Hitler’s tour of duty was short-lived. On Jan. 10, 1942, during a major Red Army counteroffensive at Moscow, he was captured in the Vyazma region.
Very little is known about the subsequent fate of the young Nazi. Identified as a relative of the Soviet Union’s enemy number one, Heinz Hitler was taken to Moscow’s Butyrka prison, where he died on Feb. 21. This was not known in Germany, where he was listed as missing in action.
Leo Rudolf Raubal Jr.
Archive photo
More fortunate was another relative of the Fuhrer, the son of his half-sister Angela Raubal, Leo Rudolf Raubal Jr.
Unlike Heinz, Leo, despite being a member of the Nazi Party since 1932, maintained an arm’s-length relationship with politics. Nevertheless, Uncle Adolf considered him his favorite nephew and often spent time with him.
Shortly after the outbreak of WWII, 32-year-old Leo, a manager at a steel plant in the Austrian city of Linz, was drafted into the military, joining the Luftwaffe as a lieutenant in the engineering corps.
Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus and his staff taken prisoner in Stalingrad.
Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus and his staff taken prisoner in Stalingrad.
Global Look Press
In late 1942, Raubal found himself at Stalingrad together with the 6th Army, severed from the main German forces. Its commander, Friedrich Paulus, suggested that the wounded Leo be airlifted home. Hitler, however, refused, stating that as an officer he should stay with his men.
On Jan. 23, 1943, he was captured by Soviet troops. At first, nothing was known about his family ties. It was Leo himself who first voiced it, and his words were corroborated by other captured officers.
Lieutenant Raubal was taken to Moscow for interrogation. There, he gave detailed information about his uncle’s relatives, habits, daily routine and interests, including the lowdown on Hitler’s inner circle, highlighting the degree of influence each had on the Fuhrer. This information proved very useful after the war, when some of them were captured by the Soviet Union.
The first son of Josef Stalin, Yakov Dzhugashvili. [see below]
Global Look Press
Through intermediaries, Hitler offered to exchange his beloved nephew for artillery battery commander Yakov Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin’s son, who had been in German captivity since July 1941. The Soviet leader flatly refused.
In 1949, despite no evidence of guilt, Leo Raubal was convicted as a war criminal and sentenced to 25 years in the Gulag for supporting Hitler’s criminal aggressive policy and involvement in the crimes of the 6th Army on Soviet soil.
In 1955, following a petition from West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, thousands of German war criminals were released from Soviet captivity. Among them was Raubal. He returned to his native Linz, where he worked as a chemistry teacher until his death in 1977.
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Stalin's son Yakov Dzhugashvili captured by the Germans, 1941
Link: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/stalins-eldest-son-yakov-dzhugashvili-1941/
Yakov Dzhugashvili captured by 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.
Yasha was Stalin’s eldest son.
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 prisoners of war. 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.
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.
“The fool – he couldn’t even shoot himself!”
Stalin found out about his son’ capture when he received a package from the Germans that included a picture of his son. “The fool – he couldn’t even shot himself!” an angry Stalin complained to his younger son, Vasily. The rumor was that Stalin blamed Yakov for “surrendering like a coward” to the enemy. The Nazi German propaganda machine immediately showered the Soviet trenches with leaflets. These stated that, with the exceptions of “commissars and Jews”, they promised good treatment for those Red soldiers and commanders who surrendered unarmed.
Several leaflets featured a photograph of Yakov Dzhugashvili, smiling at the Wehrmacht officers surrounding him. Printed on the back of one of the propaganda publications was a copy letter he had written to his father. It had been extracted from him by the Germans immediately after his capture, and via diplomatic channels had been forwarded to its addressee:
“Dear Father! I have been taken prisoner. I am in good health. I will soon be sent to a camp for officers in Germany. I am being treated well. I wish you god health. Greeting to everyone. Yasha”.
Later in the war the Germans offered to trade him for a German officer held prisoner, some say Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, who had recently surrendered at Stalingrad, but Stalin adamantly refused such a deal, denying that he had a son who had been taken prisoner. (A story later circulated that Stalin had alleged that he would not trade a field marshal for an ordinary soldier.)
Over the next months the German secret services could obtain little new information from Stalin’s elder son, who was temporarily guarded in a villa in Berlin. Joseph Goebbels and his colleagues initially hope, however, that they could make a puppet of him and involve him in the Russian-language radio propaganda broadcasts. When their plan failed, Yakov Dzhugashvili, whose nerves by that time had obviously deteriorated, was taken on the orders of Himmler to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, after spending time in several temporary officers’ camps.
It was there that the Stalin’s elder son was shot dead, late in the evening of April 14, 1943, in circumstances that to this day remain unclear. According to one widespread version the prisoner unexpectedly started to walk out of the camp and deliberately, or accidentally, touched the barbed wire fence. Then one of the guards shot at him.
New declassified files show that Dzhugashvili was shot by a guard for refusing to obey orders. While Dzhugashvili was walking around the camp he was ordered back to the barracks under the threat of being shot. Dzhugashvili refused and shouted, “Shoot!” The guard shot him in the head.
Yakov Dzhugashvili shot dead by the camp guard.
It is conceivable that he committed suicide: he had had suicidal tendencies since his youth. Whatever the case, he was finding it hard to cope with the pressures exerted on him by visitors arriving from Berlin with cameras and tape-records. He even got into fight with his English fellow prisoners, who treated him disparagingly and on several occasions hurt him physically. Apparently, he had been involved in one such confrontation on the day he was killed. Either way, this was seen by Stalin as a more honorable death, and Stalin’s attitude towards his son softened slightly.