At first I thought you were implying the dad was a part of Operation Paperclip. But that would require Nazis to have recruited an ethnic Slav for missile work.
Then I wonder if you’re implying dad might have been a Soviet spy targeting the stuff in Huntsville. And that seems more plausible. Under that scenario it is likely that significant parts or all of the refugee story are real, and that can be fashioned into decent cover.
And then it’s also plausible that there is no meaning, and a refugee settling in Huntsville is mere coincidence.
There were plenty of reasons to flee Russia after WWI other than being a member of the White Movement. I mean you had civil war, famine, terror, more terror, etc. Plenty of reasons to fuck off and never look back.
Oh, yeah, Interwar Yugoslavia was full of Russians who weren’t necessarily politically slanted, but took one look at the mess and went “fuck that”. They’re commonly referred to as ‘whites’ because the ‘reds’ are presumed to have stayed in Russia.
I was more saying that jumping from “ethnic Russian” to “Soviet spy” is going the wrong direction. Presumably, someone pro-Soviet would go back when the revolution ended, whereas I can’t help but notice this dude stayed until '41, disappeared just about when the Nazis rolled in, and then reappeared just about when the Soviets were releasing Nazi POWs.
So the idea of apolitical nazi scientists just working on rockets is kinda not true when you look closer, but the real meat is Operation Bloodstone, where nazi officers were brought over snd given immunity to help run anticommunist programs.
Why would it be weird for an ethnic Slav to be born in the capital of the Russian empire? And are you suggesting he was a member of the Nazi party while he was teaching in Yugoslavia?
I’m suggesting he was a member of the Nazi party during the 9 years of his resume that are blank.
He was a teacher in Yugoslavia until 1941 and then I guess he took a nearly decade long sabbatical. Then suddenly he was in Germany . Then suddenly Huntsville.
His son wrote an essay after his mom died about how he wasn’t a Nazi, but his son is also a pathological liar who was responsible for preemptively stirring up an insurrection based on false claims he made about 2020 election security…
The country he was teaching in got invaded by the Axis in 1941. Of course he stopped teaching, the literal biggest war in all of history had come to his doorstep. It should not be that surprising for records to become patchy at that point
I agree that we shouldn’t bother with what his son says, that guy is not going to be a useful source here. It just seems like a huge leap to say “the fascists invaded his home and we don’t know what he did, therefore he must have joined them”. Surely if he was that much of a Nazi, he’d have gone to them instead of waiting until they came to him?
Defeated by the Red Army in the Russian Civil War of 1918–20, the Whites spent the next two decades in exile in Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, and beyond, yearning to liberate Russia from what they saw as the godless rule of Jews and Bolsheviks. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, many Russians sought to join his forces, blind to the fact that he aimed not to liberate Russia but to subjugate it. The Nazi regime, in turn, regarded these Russians with suspicion and enlisted only a fraction of them, mostly as interpreters and civil engineers. The Whites refused to see their homeland as anything but a victim of communism or to admit that Red Army soldiers were defending their country against Nazi aggression.
https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Roots-Nazism-Socialism-1917-1945/dp/0521070058
This book examines the overlooked topic of the influence of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic Russian exiles on Nazism. White émigrés contributed politically, financially, militarily, and ideologically to National Socialism. This work refutes the notion that Nazism developed as a peculiarly German phenomenon: it arose primarily from the cooperation between völkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans and vengeful White émigrés. From 1920–1923, Adolf Hitler collaborated with a conspiratorial far right German-White émigré organization, Aufbau (Reconstruction). Aufbau allied with Nazis to overthrow the German government and Bolshevik rule through terrorism and military-paramilitary schemes. This organization’s warnings of the monstrous ‘Jewish Bolshevik’ peril helped to inspire Hitler to launch an invasion of the Soviet Union and to initiate the mass murder of European Jews. This book uses extensive archival materials from Germany and Russia, including recently declassified documents, and will prove invaluable reading for anyone interested in the international roots of National Socialism.
Unless this book talks about Shpakovsky specifically - and I assume you’d have mentioned it if it did - this is not proof of anything at all. You cannot take, “a lot of Russians joined up with the Nazis after the October Revolution,” to show that one specific guy was a Nazi; this is the ecological fallacy at best, even if we assume that most white emigres did that. Like, it would be absurd to call Alexander Kerensky a Nazi, and yet your logic here does exactly that.
Sure if you also ignore the fact we can’t seem to account for what he actually did during the war or following the war before he suddenly pops up in this middle of nowhere town where the U.S. happened to be hiding other Nazis.
I would be very curious to read this report though if you can find it for me: Berezino district party committee report on the case of Ia. A. Shpakovskii, 24 May 1946
Bc it does seem that he was at least accused of Nazi collaboration at some point.
He does not pop up in the middle of nowhere. As I have already said to you, your own post says he retires there after living in America for over a decade and working in Jacksonville, Florida Alabama (thanks to derfunkatron for the correction)
Being unaccounted for in the middle of fucking WWII is not evidence that someone was an active Nazi
Is there any indication that that report is even about the guy we’re talking about? What does the Ia stand for? Is there some evidence he was in Belarus?
He blanked for nine years then very briefly surfaced in Germany before somehow coincidentally ending up in the same middle of nowhere town in the U.S. where the U.S. government hid other Nazis to avoid trial in exchange for expertise they could offer that they didn’t want falling in the hands of the Soviet Union. Mainly to help further develop nuclear weapons and other atomic technology, but in general anything that they felt could give the U.S. and capitalism an advantage over the soviets and communism.
As I replied to you elsewhere, your own post does not say that he moved to Hunstville in 1951. Additonally, being a WWII refugee with useful skills is not an indicator of Naziism.
Well if you’re saying he was in paperclip, paperclip has been mostly declassified. You can look him up in the rolls here. Not a lot of Russian names on that list, but there might be a few.
Spakovsky or Shpakovskii isn’t in there, but I wouldn’t have expected a sociologist who had been out of work in his field for over a decade to be paper clipped.
No point, he was a white emigre born in Russia and an ethnic slav mystery solved. He was also a Nazi. He started teaching in Yugoslavia and then suddenly stopped in 1941. Then yada, yada, yada it was suddenly 1950 and he popped up in Germany and then Huntsville, Alabama.
Now his son is in the Heritage Foundation, he’s destroying everything, and he looks like he intentionally modeled himself off the nazi villain from Indiana jones
At first I thought you were implying the dad was a part of Operation Paperclip. But that would require Nazis to have recruited an ethnic Slav for missile work.
Then I wonder if you’re implying dad might have been a Soviet spy targeting the stuff in Huntsville. And that seems more plausible. Under that scenario it is likely that significant parts or all of the refugee story are real, and that can be fashioned into decent cover.
And then it’s also plausible that there is no meaning, and a refugee settling in Huntsville is mere coincidence.
“Settled in Yugoslavia after WWI” means White Russian, so not really Soviet agent material.
There were plenty of reasons to flee Russia after WWI other than being a member of the White Movement. I mean you had civil war, famine, terror, more terror, etc. Plenty of reasons to fuck off and never look back.
Oh, yeah, Interwar Yugoslavia was full of Russians who weren’t necessarily politically slanted, but took one look at the mess and went “fuck that”. They’re commonly referred to as ‘whites’ because the ‘reds’ are presumed to have stayed in Russia.
I was more saying that jumping from “ethnic Russian” to “Soviet spy” is going the wrong direction. Presumably, someone pro-Soviet would go back when the revolution ended, whereas I can’t help but notice this dude stayed until '41, disappeared just about when the Nazis rolled in, and then reappeared just about when the Soviets were releasing Nazi POWs.
By the looks of the dates he left Yugoslavia when the Axis attacked, which seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do
So the idea of apolitical nazi scientists just working on rockets is kinda not true when you look closer, but the real meat is Operation Bloodstone, where nazi officers were brought over snd given immunity to help run anticommunist programs.
I went to Paperclip because of the connection to Huntsville specifically with Redstone and NASA.
Oh, I didn’t know about the Huntsville connection.
An ethnic slav? He was born in Saint Petersburg…
And sure, it could just be a coincidental 9 year gap in his resume starting in 1941 and have nothing to do with him being a Nazi
https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/subjects/history/twentieth-century-european-history/russian-roots-nazism-white-emigres-and-making-national-socialism-19171945
Why would it be weird for an ethnic Slav to be born in the capital of the Russian empire? And are you suggesting he was a member of the Nazi party while he was teaching in Yugoslavia?
I’m suggesting he was a member of the Nazi party during the 9 years of his resume that are blank.
He was a teacher in Yugoslavia until 1941 and then I guess he took a nearly decade long sabbatical. Then suddenly he was in Germany . Then suddenly Huntsville.
His son wrote an essay after his mom died about how he wasn’t a Nazi, but his son is also a pathological liar who was responsible for preemptively stirring up an insurrection based on false claims he made about 2020 election security…
The country he was teaching in got invaded by the Axis in 1941. Of course he stopped teaching, the literal biggest war in all of history had come to his doorstep. It should not be that surprising for records to become patchy at that point
I agree that we shouldn’t bother with what his son says, that guy is not going to be a useful source here. It just seems like a huge leap to say “the fascists invaded his home and we don’t know what he did, therefore he must have joined them”. Surely if he was that much of a Nazi, he’d have gone to them instead of waiting until they came to him?
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/russia-hitler-white-russian-emigres-and-german-soviet-war
https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Roots-Nazism-Socialism-1917-1945/dp/0521070058 This book examines the overlooked topic of the influence of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic Russian exiles on Nazism. White émigrés contributed politically, financially, militarily, and ideologically to National Socialism. This work refutes the notion that Nazism developed as a peculiarly German phenomenon: it arose primarily from the cooperation between völkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans and vengeful White émigrés. From 1920–1923, Adolf Hitler collaborated with a conspiratorial far right German-White émigré organization, Aufbau (Reconstruction). Aufbau allied with Nazis to overthrow the German government and Bolshevik rule through terrorism and military-paramilitary schemes. This organization’s warnings of the monstrous ‘Jewish Bolshevik’ peril helped to inspire Hitler to launch an invasion of the Soviet Union and to initiate the mass murder of European Jews. This book uses extensive archival materials from Germany and Russia, including recently declassified documents, and will prove invaluable reading for anyone interested in the international roots of National Socialism.
Unless this book talks about Shpakovsky specifically - and I assume you’d have mentioned it if it did - this is not proof of anything at all. You cannot take, “a lot of Russians joined up with the Nazis after the October Revolution,” to show that one specific guy was a Nazi; this is the ecological fallacy at best, even if we assume that most white emigres did that. Like, it would be absurd to call Alexander Kerensky a Nazi, and yet your logic here does exactly that.
Sure if you also ignore the fact we can’t seem to account for what he actually did during the war or following the war before he suddenly pops up in this middle of nowhere town where the U.S. happened to be hiding other Nazis.
I would be very curious to read this report though if you can find it for me: Berezino district party committee report on the case of Ia. A. Shpakovskii, 24 May 1946
Bc it does seem that he was at least accused of Nazi collaboration at some point.
He does not pop up in the middle of nowhere. As I have already said to you, your own post says he retires there after living in America for over a decade and working in Jacksonville,
FloridaAlabama (thanks to derfunkatron for the correction)Being unaccounted for in the middle of fucking WWII is not evidence that someone was an active Nazi
Is there any indication that that report is even about the guy we’re talking about? What does the Ia stand for? Is there some evidence he was in Belarus?
He blanked for nine years then very briefly surfaced in Germany before somehow coincidentally ending up in the same middle of nowhere town in the U.S. where the U.S. government hid other Nazis to avoid trial in exchange for expertise they could offer that they didn’t want falling in the hands of the Soviet Union. Mainly to help further develop nuclear weapons and other atomic technology, but in general anything that they felt could give the U.S. and capitalism an advantage over the soviets and communism.
As I replied to you elsewhere, your own post does not say that he moved to Hunstville in 1951. Additonally, being a WWII refugee with useful skills is not an indicator of Naziism.
Well if you’re saying he was in paperclip, paperclip has been mostly declassified. You can look him up in the rolls here. Not a lot of Russian names on that list, but there might be a few.
Spakovsky or Shpakovskii isn’t in there, but I wouldn’t have expected a sociologist who had been out of work in his field for over a decade to be paper clipped.
Uh, yes, the capital of Russia? Your point?
No point, he was a white emigre born in Russia and an ethnic slav mystery solved. He was also a Nazi. He started teaching in Yugoslavia and then suddenly stopped in 1941. Then yada, yada, yada it was suddenly 1950 and he popped up in Germany and then Huntsville, Alabama.
Now his son is in the Heritage Foundation, he’s destroying everything, and he looks like he intentionally modeled himself off the nazi villain from Indiana jones