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.

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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.

’ Once again thanks for watching.

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Once again thanks for watching.