During the Second World War, one of the most influential people within Germany was Heinrich
Himmler. Himmler rose to the position of the Reichsfuhrer-SS, leading the feared and notorious
SS who were involved in military matters, as well as administering and guarding the
concentration camps. However, the man referred to in the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin as
‘My Himmler,’ was Lavrenti Beria. Beria was the longest lived and most influential
of Stalin’s Chief of the Secret Police, and he had a huge amount of power during the
Second World War. He was responsible for a number of purges and atrocities during the
conflict, and like Himmler was responsible also for a system of camps known as gulags
and was also in charge of overseeing punishment and executions. So join us today as we look
at ‘The BRUTAL Execution Of Lavrentiy Beria, - Stalin’s Himmler. Remember to support
our channel, please make sure to subscribe.
Lavrentiy Beria came from humble beginnings, his mother being very religious and his father
being a landowner. However he rose to become one of the most evil and influential parts
of Stalin’s government. Beria allegedly joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917, but in
1920 was working for Mussavatists in Azerbaijan. The Red Army in late April 1920 then captured
the city, but Beria managed to just escape execution as there was not enough time to
arrange his death. He was imprisoned but had began a career in the state security sector,
and by 1922 he became the deputy head of the Georgian Branch of the OGPU, an intelligence
service. In 1924 he was involved in suppressing a Nationalistic uprising in Georgia and 10,000
people were executed because of these actions. This helped Beria’s reputation as a feared
individual, and one not to be crossed. He was a close ally of Stalin and helped his
rise to power, and he was involved in destroying Turkish and Iranian intelligence networks
and spies in the Caucasus’.
In 1931 he was appointed to the position of the First Secretary of the Communist Party
of Georgia, and became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union 3 years later. He began to attack other members and ordered executions to gain favour
in Stalin’s eyes, and he caught his attention after faking a conspiracy. Beria told Stalin
that he had personally stopped an assassination attempt on him, and with this he became very
trusted. He was involved in a number of Stalin’s purges, running them and executing a huge
number of people. He was loyal to Stalin, and was willing to crush anyone who wasn’t
loyal to him and the cause of Communism.
However it was as the head of the NKVD that Beria is mostly remembered. He initially started
as a deputy in August 1938, however later became the head himself. Nikolia Yezhov had
initially been chosen as the leader of the Soviet Secret Police, but it was claimed that
he was strangled by Lavrentiy Beria himself. Beria then purged the NKVD ensuring that those
with positions in power were loyal to him, and not Yehzov. In the 1930s, Beria was responsible
for a number of purges, sending thousands of politicians, writes, scientists and even
peasants to prison, to be tortured barbarically or straight to a shooting range to be executed.
It was said that, ‘In this days everyone lived in fear. Everyone expected that at any
moment there would be a knock on the door in the middle of the night that would prove
fatal.’ Beria instilled a reign of terror onto the people of the Soviet Union, and wished
to mercilessly crush and dissenters.
For decades he had been involved in murders an killings, and was the main force behind
the creation and expansion of huge networks of forced labour camps across Soviet territory,
known as Gulags. There were over 500 camps set up, and these saw horrific treatment and
punishment inside of them. Many sent to the Gulags would be killed by the conditions,
and it was said by a former prisoner ‘The Gulags existed before Beria, but he was the
one who built them on a mass scale, industrialising them, Human life had no value for him.’
Stalin knew what a brutal man he was, referring to him as mentioned earlier in a conference
with President Roosevelt as, ‘Our Himmler,’ comparing Beria to the man who oversaw the
Holocaust, the SS and the mass murder of millions during the Second World War.
As World War 2 hit the Soviet Union, Beria was an integral part of Stalin’s policies
and treatment of his own people. An agreement had been drawn up known as the Molotov Ribbentrop
Pact between the Soviets and Nazi Germany that stated that Poland would be carved up
between the two nations after it was invaded. Stalin would send his forces in from the East
to take Poland after Hitler sent his in, and the Russian Red Army were ruthless and brutal.
The remaining Polish Army was rounded up and sent to camps, however one event Beria would
be remembered for in infamy was the Katyn Massacre. This was a series of executions
by the Soviet Union, where 22000 members of the Polish military as well as other civilians
such as doctors and priests were executed en mass.
Beria proposed to Stalin that all captive members of the Polish officer corps should
be killed, and Stalin approved this. It was Beria who sanctioned this, and this was a
huge criminal act which was only discovered when the mass graves were located. There was
a cover up of the massacre arranged by the NKVD, but Beria continued his reign of terror.
In 1941, he arranged a huge purge of the Red Army this time, in which 500 of his own NKVD
agents and operatives were executed, along with 30,000 members of the Red Army. Executing
your own soldiers at the time wasn’t the most clever move for the Soviet Union, as
the NAzi’s would break their non-aggression pact and invader the Soviet Union during Operation
Barbarossa, which saw huge losses initially for the Red Army.
The purges were talked about by officers, and they came up with a euphemism for this,
‘having a coffee with Beria,’ and he was known as Stalin’s most wicked henchman.
He actively was involved in mass murders, but he was also known for committing rape
on the streets of Moscow, prowling the streets in his car looking for women to assault. He
was a terrible and brutal man, and today many of his true crimes are still classified in
Soviet Archives. Inside of the military, he became the Marshal of the Soviet Union, the
highest rank and had also been involved in overseeing the soviet attempts to build an
atomic bomb, forcing workers from the Gulags to work in the Uranium mines.
However after the war, it was with the downfall of Stalin, that Beria’s downfall also came.
Stalin was approaching 70, and there was a struggle for power and a debate as to who
would succeed him after he died. He resigned from being the NKVD’s chief in January 1946,
but was still in control as the Deputy Prime Minister, but with Stalin’s death things
all changed. In March 1953, Stalin died from a cerebral haemorrage, and some men pointed
the finger at Beria, accusing him of poisoning the former leader. Beria was allegedly mocking
Stalin as he died from his illness, but when Stalin died there was a deadly race for the
top job of the Soviet Union. Beria seemed in a great position, for years he as the Chief
of the NKVD had been keeping tabs and eyes on his rivals, creating a dossier of dirt
on them, and this meant he could manipulate any of the men, however this didn’t actually
play out.
With Stalin dead, Beria sought to come to an agreement with an old Ally Georgi Malenkov,
and became powerful as in control of the ministry of state security and internal affairs, which
placed him in control of the secret and normal policy, and also gave him a small private
army. He began to talk about an easing of Stalin’s policies, and many feared Beria
as much as Stalin, and they believed Beria would make a power play. However Beria’s
own downfall was orchestrated by Nikita Khrushchev, the Secretary to the Party Central Committee
who quietly and discreetly secured the support of other powerful figures in the government,
including Malenkov and other army generals.
Kruschev organised a meeting launching an attack on Beria, and Beria taken aback was
confused by what was happening, and Kruschev accused him of being in league with the British,
being paid off by British intelligence services, and said he was no true communist. Khruschev
then said that soon Beria would meet his downfall. A motion was put in the dismiss, Beria from
his position, and he soon realised what would happen. From behind his desk, Malenkov his
former ally turned against him, pressing a button below his desk and this was a signal
for Georgy Zhukov to order a group of armed soldiers into the room and to seize and arrest
Beria.
Beria’s men were guarding the Kremlin at the time, and he was imprisoned there in a
small cell until nightfall when he was then smuggled out in the boot of a car. He was
then taken to a Moscow guardhouse and then the bunker of the Moscow Military District’s
Headquarters. Action was taken to prevent Beria from being seized and secured, and Beria
was tried by a special session of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union on the 23rd December
1953. He had no defence counsel, and no right to appeal, and it was obvious what would happen.
He was accused of treason, allegedly trying to negotiate peace with Hitler during World
War 2, terrorism in regards to his purge of the Red Army in 1941 and Counter revolutionary
actions during the Russian Civil War. Along with 6 other defendants, Beria was tried and
was sentenced to death. The 6 others were then dragged out of the court room and were
shot straight away however Beria was not.
He was separated from the others and was dragged kicking and screaming. He knew that this death
was about to come, and surrounded by other Soviet officials, he knew that his time was
coming to an end. The man who was compared to Himmler, and the one who had the blood
of thousands on his hands, screaming and crying in his final moments. He was on his knees,
collapsing in tears begging for mercy and begging to be spared his life. He was then
shot through the head by Pavel Batitsky, who had been selected to perform the execution.
He was then cremated, but there is some belief by others that it was a body double who stood
trial, and that Beria was executed months before he was supposedly shot dead on the
23rd December 1953 at the age of 54.
So Lavrentiy Beria was a brutal and savage man who met his end begging for his life whilst
a gun was pointed at his head. He was known as the horrific chief of the NKVD, and the
man who carried out Stalin’s purges with brutality and efficiency. After his death,
more rumours emerged about his life and it was claimed that he was also a serial killer,
and was known for abducting girls of the street, abusing them and murdering them. Some were
buried allegedly in his wife’s rose garden, and it was said that a torture chamber existed
in the basement of Beria’s home in Moscow, and that there was probably an underground
passage leading to a number of burial sites of these young women.
Allegedly this was known but the US too, however Lavrentiy Beria was executed following power
plays by other politicians following the death of Stalin. He really should have seen what
was coming, but in a different world he could very easily have been the one who succeeded
Stalin as the man at the top of the Soviet Union. It’s clear that his brutal ways and
leadership over the NKVD could have secured him the top job, however things weren’t
to be for the evil and brutal man, Stalin referred to as ‘my himmler.’
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