Ivan Mykhaylovych Shepetov

From Steelworker to “Hero of the Soviet Union”

Ivan Shepetov grew up in Kamyanske (present-day Dniprodzerzhynsk, Ukraine) in a working-class family. After leaving school he worked as a turner at the steelworks. In 1918, during the Russian Civil War, he volunteered as a soldier in the Red Army. He initially attended infantry school, then cavalry school, and determinedly worked his way up to the rank of general. He joined the Communist Party, married and had a son. Beginning in 1931 he underwent three-year staff training at the military academy in Moscow. The family lived in various cities, also in Tajikistan and Lithuania. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he succeeded in freeing the division under his command from encirclement on the south front. For this deed he was promoted to major general and awarded the USSR’s highest distinction: “Hero of the Soviet Union.”

Ivan Shepetov was wounded and taken prisoner in May 1942 during the Battle of Kharkiv. The Wehrmacht initially interned him in a reserve hospital in East Prussia, then in a prisoner-of-war camp for officers in Hammelburg, Lower Franconia. In late 1942 the Gestapo arranged for his transfer to a police prison in Nuremberg. Two weeks later, he and seven other Soviet officers were taken from there to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Not long after their arrival there, the SS killed the men by shooting them in the back of the neck in an annex of the camp crematorium.

Several memorial plaques have been dedicated to Ivan Shepetov in Ukraine, and many streets named after him. At the steelworks in Dniprodzerzhynsk, a bronze bust commemorates the murdered general. His son Yuriy visits the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial regularly to keep his father’s memory alive.