Abdurrahman Fatalibeyli

Abdurrahman Fatalibeyli (birth surname Dudanginski, (, ) or Abo Alioglu Fatalibeyli-Dudanginsky Або Алиевич Дудангинский / Əbo Əliyeviç Düdənginski), born Abo Dudanginski (12 June 1908 – 22 November 1954), was a Soviet army major who defected to the German forces during World War II.

Life

Soviet Union Fatalibeyli was born in the village of Dudanga (near present-day Sharur, Nakhchivan). He studied in various public and military schools in Baku. He moved to Leningrad, where he joined the Communist Party to enter the Military Engineering School and studied there for three years.

In 1936, Fatalibeyli was expelled from the party due to having lied about his social origins and having reported himself to be of peasant stock. He later participated in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939, receiving the Order of the Red Star. He became major in 1941, but was captured When the Caucasus Campaign began in August 1942, he participated in the 804th Infantry Battalion "Aslan" of the Azerbaijani Legion (literally "Lion Battalion") helped by Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, Mufti of Jerusalem, and several Moslem collaborators, such as Alikhan Kantemir (North Caucasus), Dr. Szynkiewicz, mufti of the Ostland zone occupied by the Germans (Poland and occupied areas of the USSR), and Mohammed Al Gazani, Muslim poet and one of the chiefs of the anti-Soviet Moslem Union.

In November 1943, a broadcast of radio DNB (Deutsche Nachrichten Büro) announced that the first battalion of Azerbaijanis, which had actively fought against the Bolshevism during more than one year, "proved their valor, and were included in German Storm Troops and decorated by the German Army." It was also announced that a conference about Azerbaijan had taken place in Berlin on 7 November under the command of major Dudanginski. A dispatch dated 16 November 1943, mentioned specifically that this conference had been followed "by the Mufti of Jerusalem" and "the representatives of the peoples of the Caucasus, the Ural and Turkestan."

More than 700 Azeris participated in the battle of Berlin in 1945. Abo surrendered to Allied forces, and began to work for American intelligence. After the war, Fatalibeyli was cleared by the U.S. War Department's Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Cold War By 1948, he had been invited to Egypt and was a military adviser to the Arabs during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

In 1953 he began working for CIA-funded Radio Liberty in Munich, becoming chief of the Azerbaijani desk. In September 1954, the body of , a Belarusian writer, was found in the Isar River near Munich. Two months later (on 24 November), Fatalibeyli was found garroted in the apartment of Mikhail Izmailov. Although never conclusively proved, KGB involvement was suspected in both cases. The last living contemporary witness, Beschir Alizade, working with Fatalibeyli at Radio Liberty, died on 16 January 2016 in Neu-Ulm. To protect himself from the KGB, he changed his name from formerly "Mirhashim Alijev" to Beshir Alizade. The family only found out about this in 2021 when his son Aydin visited the family in Azerbaijan.