Jelena Grigoryevna Masanik

Jelena Grigoryevna Masanik , bel. : Алена Рыгораўна Мазанік , Russian : Еле́на Григо́рьевна Маза́ник , (born on March 2, 1914 in Minskaya Woblasz ; died on April 7, 1996 ) was a partisan and resistance fighter in Belarus .

Jelena Masanik's parents were farmers. After attending school, she worked as a waitress from 1931 . She married a chauffeur employed by the Interior Ministry of the USSR (NKVD), with whom she had three children. After the German occupation in the course of the German attack on the Soviet Union , she worked in Minsk in a casino for German officers.

In June 1943 she was obliged to work as a servant at Wilhelm Kube . Kube was the target of partisan assassination attempts ; twelve different partisan units had been entrusted with the task. About 70 German soldiers died in a bomb attack in a Minsk theater on July 22, 1943, but Kube had left the theater before the detonation. In another attack on September 6, 1943, 36 officers and officials were killed, but Kube was not present that day.

On August 8, 1943, Tatjana Kalita, who also worked as a servant for Kube, introduced Masanik to the members of a partisan unit tasked with killing Kube. Masanik agreed to carry out an attack on Kube. The partisan Maria Ossipowa supplied Masanik with explosives ; On the night of September 21, 1943, Masanik and her sister assembled the bomb so that it would explode 24 hours later. On the morning of September 22, 1943, she went to work with the bomb in her handbag. Meanwhile, as planned, her sister and the family left Minsk to protect them from reprisals. After Kube and his wife had left the house with the children, Masanik put the bomb under the Kube couple's bed and then left the Kube villa. The bomb exploded at 1:20 a.m. on September 22, 1943, killing Kube; his pregnant wife had slept in a different bed. More than 1,000 people died in a punitive action propagated as retaliation by the German occupiers; they were shot in Minsk and buried in a mass grave they had dug themselves .

On October 12, 1943, Masanik and other conspirators were flown to Moscow , where they were interrogated in the Lubyanka . On October 29, 1943, she was named Hero of the Soviet Union .

Burial place in Minsk

Masanik became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1946 . In 1952 she graduated from the Minsk Pedagogical Institute ; then she worked as the deputy director of the Main Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Belarusian SSR . She died in 1996.

Awards

• Hero of the Soviet Union , 1943

literature

• Janina Cottam: Women in War and Resistance: Selected Biographies of Soviet Women Soldiers , 1998
• Andrej Simonow: Герои Советского Союза и Pоссии , 2017
• Paul Kohl : The Jew, the Nazi and his murderer. Historical novel based on a true story. Emons Verlag, Cologne 2018, ISBN 978-3740803070
• Anatoli Asolski: Das Blut , Grant Publishing House, Moscow 2001

Web links

• warheroes.ru article about Jelena Masanik as heroine of the Soviet Union (Russian)
• awartobewon.com Article about Jelena Masanik (English)