"Go and fight": how the fate of the children of Stalin, Mussolini and Franco turned out

To be born into the family of a famous person is both a great success and a cross that you have to bear. Each offspring, of course, has its own attitude to its own status. Many people enjoy it, others would gladly give up such a fate. That's probably what the children of bloody dictators would say about themselves.

Yakov Dzhugashvili, son of Joseph Stalin

Ekaterina Svanidze, the first wife of Joseph Stalin, died of typhus six months after the birth of her son in 1907. Despite the fact that Yakov's father was in good health, the boy grew up almost like an orphan. Stalin was always on the road on party business and provided only material support. The child was raised by relatives on the maternal side.

When Yakov turned 15, his father moved him from a mountain Georgian village to Moscow. Life was not easy for the young man in the capital. He hardly spoke Russian, the atmosphere was alien, and it was impossible to relax at home. Stalin was emphatically cold with his son (they say he did not even call him his son), for the slightest trick, severe punishment followed. Obviously, this is how the future dictator tempered the child's character.

Yakov Dzhugashvili (right) with Stalin's security chief Nikolai Vlasik

Such a life led Yakov to attempt suicide. As a result, he ended up in the hospital, where his father never visited him. I only wrote a note to my wife: "Tell Yasha from me that he acted like a bully and a blackmailer, with whom I have nothing more in common and cannot have anything more in common." But in the future, their relationship has relatively normalized.

At the very beginning of the war, Yakov, who had just graduated from the artillery academy, was called to the front. After phoning his father before leaving, he heard from him only a brief: "Go and fight!" And three weeks later Yakov was captured. There, the Nazis used his name to the maximum for propaganda. Stalin flatly refused to exchange his son for one of the captured Germans, and in 1943, in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Yakov died by throwing himself on a live wire fence.

German propaganda leaflet

Carmen Franco, daughter of Francisco Franco

Francisco Franco was very happy about the appearance of his daughter Carmen, but he treated her not much milder than the whole of Spain, which he ruled until his death in 1975. Franco sought to raise a true lady and kept her in a tight grip. In those rare moments when he had free time from building a military career.

However, in one issue, the dictator showed surprising compliance for him. Although Franco wanted to find a decent husband for his daughter on his own, he did not contradict when Carmen announced her engagement to cardiac surgeon Cristobal Martinez Bordew. Their wedding in 1950 was incredibly magnificent. Many years later, in her interview, Carmen will say that, although she loved her father very much, she did not like that he was a dictator at all. Her life was spent in constant fear. She was afraid that one of her father's numerous opponents might get to her, and these fears were not groundless. Franco himself hid his daughter for a long time because he was afraid that Hitler might steal her.

Edda Mussolini, daughter of Benito Mussolini

But Benito Mussolini's daughter did not receive her father's blessing to marry her chosen one, an industrialist of Jewish nationality. Soon, in 1930, the girl, at the insistence of her parent, married Count Galeazzo Ciano, an associate of Mussolini.

However, a sincere feeling broke out between the spouses, they lived together for 14 years, gave birth to four children. Therefore, when Ciano defected to the side of the group that advocated the overthrow of the fascist regime, and he was sentenced to death, Edda was heartbroken. She begged her father to overturn the verdict, but he was adamant. After the sentence was carried out in the presence of Hitler and Mussolini, the woman disowned her parent and fled to Switzerland.

Edda Mussolini with her father as a child

After the end of the war, homesickness forced Edda to return to Italy. She was immediately charged with aiding the fascists and imprisoned. She denied everything, but still spent two years in exile. In the remaining years of her life, Edda tried not to remember whose blood flows in her veins.

Jean Marie Loret, presumably Hitler's son

Hitler and his wife Eva Braun, as is known, had no children. But there is a version that, being a simple soldier on the fields of the First World War, Hitler had a short-term affair with a Frenchwoman, as a result of which a boy Jean Marie was born.

During World War II, Jean Marie actively fought on the side of the Resistance, unaware that he was fighting not just against a bloody dictator, but against his own father. His mother told him this secret on her deathbed. At that moment, the world turned upside down for Jean Marie. He threw himself into his work, just not to think about his origin. The wife, having learned this shocking fact, left Jean Marie.