After the war , British officers in charge of captured German archives came upon the papers depicting Dzhugashvili ’s death at Sachsenhausen . The German records indicated that he was shot while attempting to flee after an argument with the British prisoners . The British Foreign Office briefly considered presenting these papers to Stalin at the Potsdam Conference as a gesture of condolence . They scrapped the idea because neither the British nor the Americans had informed the Soviets that they had captured key German archives , and sharing those papers with Stalin would have prompted the Soviets to inquire about the source of these records
Potsdam Conference
Potsdam Conference
Yakov Dzhugashvili