In the Soviet-German War, Stalin's son Yakov was captured by the German army, according to human common sense, Stalin should try his best to rescue his son, appease his daughter-in-law and relatives, but stalin did to arrest his daughter-in-law and exile her, and even shot Yakov's uncle and aunt.
Yakov: Relations with Stalin were relatively average
Yakov Zhugashvili was Stalin's eldest son, and his mother was Stalin's first wife, Catherine Svanidze.
Catherine was a devout Georgian girl who made a living as a tailor, but unfortunately, in 1907, Catherine died of illness, leaving only One son, Yakov.
After Catherine's death, Stalin rushed to see his son and entrusted him to his aunt, uncle, aunt and other relatives to raise him.
Because at that time, Stalin was running around for the revolution, and later Stalin was imprisoned for the revolution, so the father and son did not see each other for more than ten years.
It was not until 1921 that Yakov came from Georgia to Stalin's home in the Kremlin, the first meeting between father and son after a 13-year absence.
At that time, Stalin had already married his second wife, Aliluyeva, as well as his daughter Svetlana and son Vasily Dzhugashvili, which led to a relatively average relationship between Yakov and Stalin.
In fact, this is also understandable, after all, the father and son have not seen each other for more than ten years, and it takes time to establish a family relationship, but it was obviously not an appropriate moment: Stalin was busy with work, while Yakov was busy with his studies.
Because Yakov grew up in Georgia and did not know anything about Russian, he had to learn Russian from scratch, and the difficulties in learning were almost imaginable.
However, Yakov progressed quickly, and in 1930 he was admitted to the Engineering College of Railway Transport, and after graduation he was assigned to work at the Gill Automobile Factory.
In school, Yakov was an idol for girls because he was personable and could play chess and soccer, but at that time Yakov did not like anyone.
In 1937, according to Stalin's opinion, Yakov was admitted to the command department of the Artillery Academy and jumped directly from the first grade to the fourth grade.
In a way, Yakov's life followed stalin's demands until he met the ballet dancer Yulia Merzer.
Because Yulia was Jewish, Stalin had always been very opposed to his son's love affair, and the father and son had quarreled over it, but in the end Stalin chose to compromise and reluctantly agreed to the marriage between the two. But perhaps no one expected that this would become the beginning of a tragedy.
At that time, Yakov and Yulia lived happily together, and the two gave birth to a daughter, named Galina. It wasn't long before the two of them had a happy day, and Yakov answered the call to go to the front.
Rushing to the front line was unfortunately captured, and the Germans falsely claimed that Yakov had surrendered
In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Yakov, like thousands of young Soviets, rushed to the front and engaged in a deadly contest with the German army.
Because of the rush of the trip, Yakov did not even have time to meet stalin, he only made a phone call with Stalin, in which Stalin said, "Fight well."
On the way to the front, Yakov also took the time to send Yulia a postcard to report that she was safe, telling her not to worry, saying that she would write a longer letter when she had the opportunity.
But Yakov's long letter never came, because it was not long before he was on the battlefield, and Yakov was captured. In the Battle of Smolensk, the Germans captured more than 400,000 Red Army troops and captured a large amount of equipment, and Yakov was among them.
It is reported that on July 11, 1941, the German army invaded Vitebsk, and three armies of the Red Army fell into the encirclement of the German army, including the 14th Howitzer Regiment of the 44th Tank Division, and Yakov served as the commander of the howitzer company.
At that time, although the Red Army was busy with the breakthrough, the commander of the 44th Tank Division, Vasiliev, did not forget that Stalin's son was in his troops, and Vasiliev ordered the chief of the Special Division that Yakov must be pulled into the car during the retreat.
However, it is not known why this order was not carried out, and on the night of 16 July, the remnants of the tank division broke through, Yakov was not among them, and no one searched for it, until 4 days later, when the troops began to rush to find Yakov.
After some searching, commissar Gorokhov found a Red Army soldier Lapridze who had broken out with Yakov, and Laprisze said that they had changed into the clothes of ordinary people on the evening of July 15, buried their documents in the soil, and successfully reached a relatively safe place.
Then Yakov wanted to rest for a while, and Laprisse continued to walk forward, only to meet Gorokhov and the others. Curiously, Gorokhov decided that Yakov had returned to the team and took him back.
But in August, Yakov's good friend, Colonel Sapekin, wrote to Yakov's brother Vasily, saying that "the division commander left them alone", boarded the tank and left the battlefield, in fact, the division commander's tank passed by Yakov, but no one wanted to take Yakov, so Yakov "mysteriously disappeared".
It is difficult to say which of these two claims is more true, but in any case, It is certain that Yakov was captured at the Battle of Smolensk.
Yakov understood the peculiarities of his identity, so he tried to hide his identity after being captured, but soon after being betrayed by traitors, the Germans realized that they had captured an "important person".
At first, the Germans tried to exchange Yakov for German prisoners, and the Germans offered to exchange Yakov for the captured German Marshal Boris. But Stalin adamantly refused, saying that all the people there were my sons and leaving behind a famous saying: "I will not exchange a marshal for a soldier." ”
Seeing that this was not possible, the Germans immediately had another plan, this time they planned to use Yakov to carry out anti-plots and disintegrate the morale of the Red Army.
On the one hand, the Germans threw a large number of leaflets to the Soviet Union through aircraft, claiming that Yakov had surrendered as a prisoner, hoping that other Soviet Red Army would also take this as an "example" to surrender as soon as possible; on the other hand, they deceived Yakov's voice and edited the recording, portraying Yakov as a "defector" and broadcast it repeatedly on the radio, and also published their forged materials in the press, trying to disintegrate the military spirit of the Soviet Red Army through the propaganda and public opinion offensive.
The Soviets also tried to rescue Yakov, but the rescue operation not only found nothing, but also led to the exposure of many intelligence personnel, which made Stalin furious, so Stalin made a cruel decision.
In order to stabilize the hearts and minds of the army, Stalin "laid down a fierce hand"
The German propaganda offensive once made Stalin very passive, because although due to the stubborn resistance of the Soviet army, for the first time in World War II, the German army was forced to stop the attack in the main direction and turn to the defense, the Soviet army was also seriously injured.
In the Battle of Smolensk, more than 210,000 Soviet troops were killed and missing, losing more than 1,300 tanks, more than 9,800 artillery pieces and more than 900 aircraft, resulting in the Soviet army being unable to form a complete defense system in the subsequent German typhoon operation, and was once again defeated.
Therefore, for Stalin, the first thing he had to do at that time was to stabilize the army's morale and enable the Red Army to continue to fight heroically.
In order to achieve this, Stalin was faced with almost only one way: to carry out Order No. 270.
The so-called Order No. 270 was issued by Stalin to encourage Soviet soldiers to fight to the death, which stated that officers who were afraid to fight could be shot or demoted to soldiers, and replaced by brave soldiers.
Soldiers and officers who retreat without permission are considered deserters, both deserters and surrendered soldiers are punished as treason, and their families are punished with "treason" and may be executed or exiled.
This order forced the Red Army to fight heroically, because even if they could escape from the front, their families would remain in the Soviet Union, and they would have to fight bloody battles for their families.
If Stalin were to save his son now, it would mean that the German conspiracy would succeed, Order 270 would become a piece of scrap paper, and the fighting spirit of the Red Army would be wiped out.
Therefore, Stalin decisively ordered Yulia to be thrown into Gubyshev's prison and executed Yakov's uncle and aunt as a sign of his determination to carry out Order 270.
This immediately stabilized the morale of the army, and the Red Army understood that Stalin would not be an exception to his own son, so his orders were faithfully carried out.
Thus, the Red Army fought more heroically on the battlefield: soon after Yakov was captured, the Red Army stubbornly resisted the German offensive and successfully defended Moscow; the soldiers and civilians of Leningrad were besieged by the German army for three years and were stubborn and unyielding, and never let the German army occupy Leningrad; in Stalingrad, the Red Army finally won the war at any cost and without hesitation.
Moreover, Stalin's move also broke the minds of the Germans, who realized after Yulia's arrest that Yakov's use value was very limited, and could only play a certain role in propaganda, and this role was completely dismantled by Stalin's "determination".
This also made the Germans realize that there was little use in keeping Yakov, and if it had not been so, perhaps there would have been no subsequent tragedy.
One would argue that Stalin was able to do this because he had little affection for Yakov and that things might have been different if he had been replaced by Vasily. But perhaps this is not the case, for Aliluyeva once recalled that when Stalin learned of Yakov's death, he did not speak for a long time, but silently lit his pipe and sighed a long time later.
Obviously, Stalin still had feelings for the eldest son, in fact, this can also be seen from his concessions on the issue of Yakov's feelings, after all, Yakov is his eldest son, flesh and bone, how can there be no emotion?
However, in Stalin's mind, there was something more important than his son, that is, the state.
Yakov, who died tragically, was posthumously awarded the Order of Defense of the First Class
Although Yakov was captured as soon as he went to the battlefield, he refused to surrender, never participated in anti-Soviet propaganda, nor did he smear Stalin or the Soviet Union, and he was also a hero of the Soviet Union.
Documents declassified in 1980 show that the British knew about Yaakov's tragic death as early as 1945, but they feared that it would cause Stalin's "senseless grief" and pointed the finger at Britain, so they "put the archives on the shelf" until 37 years after Yakov's sacrifice for the country, and the truth was revealed to the world.
Documents show that after Yakov's capture, he was held in several prisoner-of-war camps until 1943, when the German army suffered a crushing defeat at Stalingrad, but Yakov was still reluctant to participate in anti-Soviet propaganda, so Yakov was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
It was a "notorious" concentration camp even among the Nazis, and according to sources, in 1941 alone, it shot and killed 1,800 Soviet prisoners of war.
Later, because Nazi doctors used prisoners of war to conduct human experiments, the "mortality rate" of the concentration camp went all the way up, and it is said that there were more than 200,000 Soviet prisoners of war in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but by the end of the war, less than half of the survivors had survived.
Yakov was imprisoned in the exclusive cell of a "precious prisoner of war", where he suffered: in addition to the Germans trying to destroy his body and will by all means, he was ashamed of the defeat of the Red Army, ashamed of his failure to swear to die to carry out his father's orders.
In Yakov's cell, there were 5 prisoners of war, 2 Soviets, 3 British, although Germany was their common enemy, Yakov often quarreled with British prisoners of war, because Yakov often said that when the war was over, the Soviet Red Army would eliminate all the British nobles, because these people were "Hitler's puppets".
In April 1943, the British prisoner of war Cushing again provoked a dispute with Yakov, in which Yakov's spirit did not know why it completely collapsed, he refused to return to the cell, asked the concentration camp guard to receive him, and listened to his advice to the British prisoners of war.
Yakov's demands, of course, were not met, and Yakov, who had collapsed, pounced on the barbed wire fence that had been energized by the concentration camp.
The sentry of the concentration camp wrote in the report that Yakov had climbed on the barbed wire and shouted at him, asking him to "not be timid, shoot", so the soldiers fired a shot at him in the head, and then Yakov suffered another electric shock and eventually died.
In this way, Yakov ended his short life, but he never betrayed his homeland or tarnished his reputation and Stalin's reputation, so the Soviet side later posthumously awarded Yakov the Patriotic War Medal of the First Class.
In this case, it was clear that no one was the winner, for Stalin, and even more so for Yulia.
It was not until the news of Yakov's death that Yulia was released from Gubyshev prison, and when she came out, she was already full of white hair, but she still could not meet her daughter Galina, and she never received an apology from Stalin—although Stalin almost ruined her life, perhaps, the person who was hurt the most in this matter was not the dead Yakov, but Yulia who was still alive.