Enver Mamedov - Early Life

Early Life

Enver Mammadov's mother's maiden name was Ivanov, and he occasionally used it as his pen name during his media career.

After graduating from high school in Baku, Azerbaijan with the "excellent" grades in all subjects (including the Azeri and German languages), in June 1941, Enver Mammadov joined a figher pilot school. After Hitler's invasion of the USSR in 1941, Enver asked to be sent to the front line, but was instead sent to be trained as a military translator at a GRU school. After seeing some action first as a Sr. Sergeant, later as a Sr. Lieutenant, at the Soviet Union's Caucasus Front, Mammadov was sent to work with the USSR Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, where he was posted to the Soviet embassy in Italy as the press secretary. According to Mammadov himself, he was probably selected to that position because he spoke Italian, in addition to German, English, and French.

After the end of the war, Mammadov participated in the Nuremberg Trials, as one of the handlers of the Soviet prosecutors' star witness, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus.

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