Soviet war hero Ios Teper soldiered on in suburbia in his last years Teper, a much decorated Red Army captain, organised Jewish war veterans in Melbourne. DURING some of the most bitter fighting of World War II, Ios Teper walked and fought his way from Stalingrad to Berlin, leading his unit as it blasted its way through barricades and bunkers into Nazi Germany's capital. Somehow the diminutive Red Army soldier survived a conflict that killed 20 million of his countrymen and he lived out the last years of his life in Melbourne's St Kilda. He died a week ago, aged 98. One of a host of extraordinary characters living quietly in the suburbs of Australian cities, Mr Teper would for years wander into the office of Labor MP Michael Danby seeking help with organising the diminishing band of Jewish veterans of what Russians remember as he Great Patriotic War. "He stood a little over five feet tall," Mr Danby said last night. But very few Australians would realise we had living among us such a giant of the Second World War. In 1945, for his bravery and leadership in the battle for Berlin, Mr Teper was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, one of the Soviets' two highest decorations. He started the war as a platoon commander and finished it in the divisional artillery intelligence group as a captain. His highly dangerous role was to lead his unit up to the enemy lines and direct artillery fire on to them. Along the way, Mr Teper was awarded 12 other medals for his bravery during the Battle of Stalingrad, and advancing through Ukraine, Belarus and Poland in the armies of marshals Georgy Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovsky. In the dying days of the war he was seconded into General Vasily Kuznetsov's Third Shock Army. Towards the end he and his soldiers captured a senior German officer who, in return for a promise of safe passage, handed over a cache of Panzerfaust anti-tank rockets -- the German bazooka -- and trained Mr Teper and the soldiers under his command to use them. "And use them they did, breaking through barricades on the streets of Berlin and blasting their way underground through a maze of concrete basement walls into the heart of the Reichstag," Mr Danby said. In the Danby office, Mr Teper would thank the staff with boxes of Russian chocolates and regale them with stories from the war. "There was the time he stood for three days chest-deep in freezing water to monitor the German front line, the hand-to-hand fighting in Berlin, and the story of how, while calling in co-ordinates to the Soviet artillery, his armoured personnel carrier was struck three times, concussing him," Mr Danby said. But each time he stood back up and continued his task. Mr Teper's father was murdered by the Nazis and two of his brothers died fighting. At the height of Stalin's post-war anti-Jewish campaign, the hero was summarily discharged from the army. "With the fall of communism, thanks to a special quota arranged by the Hawke government, Ios Teper and his wife, along with thousands of other Russian and Ukrainian Jews, were able to migrate to Australia, and settled in Melbourne," Mr Danby said. Mr Teper's son, Joseph, marked his father's passing with a description of how he "walked fighting from Stalingrad to Berlin, invincible and victorious, and it was like a spirit of the Maccabees guided him." He added: "Here in Melbourne he did titanic work to collect and keep forever memories of each veteran for future generations. He was loved, respected and admired in the community. He could not sit quietly when somebody needed his help.