Jews working for Stalin number among the biggest mass murderers of the 20th Century. Here’s the story of one.
From Wikipedia: Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda (Russian: Ге́нрих Григо́рьевич Яго́да; 7 November 1891–15 March 1938), born Yenokh Gershevich Iyeguda (Russian: Енох Гершевич Иегуда) was a Soviet secret police official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union’s security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936. Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised the arrest, show trial, and execution of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, events that initiated the Great Purge. Yagoda also supervised the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal using slave labor from the GULAG system, during which many laborers died.
Like many Soviet secret policemen of the 1930s, Yagoda himself was ultimately a victim of the Purge. He was demoted from the directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov in 1936 and arrested in 1937. Charged with the crimes of wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism and conspiracy, Yagoda was a defendant at the Trial of the Twenty-One, the last of the major Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Following his confession at the trial, Yagoda was found guilty and shot.
Yagoda was born in Rybinsk[1] into a Jewish family. He joined the Bolshevik movement in the summer of 1917…
On 10 July 1934, two months after Menzhinsky’s death, Joseph Stalin appointed Yagoda People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, a position that included the oversight of both the regular and the secret police, the NKVD. Yagoda worked closely with Andrei Vyshinsky in organizing the first Moscow Show Trial, which resulted in the prosecution and subsequent execution of former Soviet politicians Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev in August 1936 as part of Stalin’s Great Purge. The Red Army high command was not spared and its ranks were thinned by Yagoda, as a precursor to the later and more extensive purge in the Russian military. More than a quarter of a million people were arrested during the 1934–1935 period; the GULAG system was vastly expanded under his stewardship, and slave labor became a major developmental resource in the Soviet economy…
Yagoda is held responsible, through his authority as a Soviet official, for the implementation of Stalin’s policies that caused the deaths of more than 7 million Ukrainians during the Holodomor.[8][9] Yagoda, as an NKVD official, would have been involved with the seizures or blockades of food, tools, etc., and the movement of inhabitants. Though people elsewhere in the Soviet Union died from hunger in 1932 and 1933, the authorities in Ukraine went much further by quarantining and starving the population. On the basis of performances in that famine he was promoted in 1934 to a full-fledged member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
