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

Being born into a famous family is both a great fortune and a cross to bear. Each offspring naturally has its own attitude to their own status. Many enjoy it, while others would gladly refuse such a fate. That is probably what the children of bloody dictators would say about themselves.

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

When Yakov turned 15, his father moved him from a mountain village in Georgia to Moscow. Life in the capital was not easy for the young man. He barely spoke Russian, the atmosphere was alien, and he could not relax at home. Stalin was pointedly cold with his son (they say he did not even call him his son), and the slightest misbehavior was followed by harsh punishment. Apparently, this was how the future dictator tempered the child's character.

Such a life led Yakov to attempt suicide. As a result, he ended up in the hospital, where his father never visited him. He only wrote a note to his wife: "Tell Yasha from me that he acted like a hooligan and blackmailer, with whom I have nothing in common and can no longer have anything in common." But later their relationship became relatively normal.

At the very beginning of the war, Yakov, who had just graduated from the artillery academy, was called up to the front. Having called his father before leaving, he heard only a short: "Go and fight!" And just three weeks later, Yakov was captured. There, the Nazis used his name as much as possible for propaganda. Stalin flatly refused to exchange his son for any of the captured Germans, and in 1943, in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Yakov died after throwing himself at the electrified barbed wire.

Francisco Franco was very happy about the birth of his daughter Carmen, but he treated her only slightly more gently than the whole of Spain, which he ruled until his death in 1975. Franco tried to raise a true lady and kept her in an iron fist. In those rare moments when he had free time from building a military career.

However, in one matter the dictator showed surprising flexibility for him. Although Franco wanted to find a worthy husband for his daughter himself, he did not object when Carmen announced her engagement to cardiac surgeon Cristobal Martinez Bordju. Their wedding in 1950 was incredibly lavish.

Many years later, Carmen would say in an interview that although she loved her father very much, she did not like the fact that he was a dictator. She lived in constant fear. She was afraid that one of her father's many opponents could get to her, and these fears were not unfounded. Franco himself hid his daughter for a long time because he was afraid that Hitler could kidnap her.

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

However, a sincere feeling flared up between the spouses, they lived together for 14 years, and had four children. Therefore, when Ciano defected to the group advocating the overthrow of the fascist regime and was sentenced to death, Edda was heartbroken. She begged her father to cancel the sentence, but he was adamant. After the sentence was carried out in the presence of Hitler and Mussolini, the woman renounced her father and fled to Switzerland.

After the war, homesickness forced Edda to return to Italy. She was immediately charged with aiding the fascists and imprisoned. She denied everything, but spent two years in exile anyway. For the rest of her life, Edda tried not to remember whose blood flowed through her veins.

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 French woman, as a result of which a boy, Jean Marie, was born.

During World War II, Jean Marie fought actively on the side of the Resistance, not suspecting 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 work, just to avoid thinking about his origins. His wife, having learned this shocking fact, left Jean Marie.