Stalin's eldest son died a German prisoner after his father refused a swap
When Field Marshal Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad in 1943, the Germans offered to trade him for a captured Red Army lieutenant: Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin's firstborn. Stalin said no. Two months later Yakov was dead at Sachsenhausen, the final chapter of a life spent seeking a father who kept him at arm's length.
Yakov was born on 31 March 1907 in Baji, a Georgian village, and his mother, Kato Svanidze, Stalin's first wife, died when he was nine months old; he was her sole child. His father, then a young revolutionary, left him with her family. Only in 1921, at 14, was he brought to Moscow, speaking no Russian, to live with a father who had become a Bolshevik leader and who was openly hostile, even forbidding him to use the name Stalin. One theory is that the boy reminded Stalin of his late wife.
He was a shy, unhappy young man. In 1928, when Stalin furiously opposed his wish to marry a 16-year-old former classmate, Zoya Gunina, Yakov shot himself in the chest and narrowly survived. Stalin at first barred him from university; he was finally admitted in 1930 and graduated from the Institute of Transport in 1935, then worked as an engineer at a power plant named after his father. At Stalin's insistence he entered the Artillery Academy in 1937. He married Yulia Meltzer, a Jewish dancer from Odessa.
After Germany invaded on 22 June 1941, Stalin made sure Yakov went to the front. Serving as a lieutenant with a howitzer battery near Vitebsk, he fell into German hands on 16 July, amid the fighting for Smolensk. Stalin, who had forbidden soldiers to surrender, treated the capture as disgrace and even suspected betrayal. The Germans dropped leaflets over Soviet lines showing Yakov smiling with his captors, alongside a letter he had written telling his father he was well.
He died on 14 April 1943. Accounts differed at first, and one historian thought suicide possible; German files found by British officers after the war recorded that he ran at the camp's electric fence after quarrelling with British prisoners, and a postmortem found electrocution killed him before a guard fired. Stalin later softened, calling him a real man whom fate had treated unjustly. In 1977, long after his death, the Soviet state gave him a first-class Order of the Patriotic War.
Source: Yakov Dzhugashvili
