On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Among the first territories occupied was Belarus, officially the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, which had been under Russian control for almost 150 years. Within a week, German forces captured the capital, Minsk, and immediately began implementing genocidal policies.
Jews were among the first targeted, confined to ghettos marked by extreme overcrowding, severe food shortages, and starvation. Hitler also intended to exterminate the Slavs, the region's dominant ethnic group, whom the Germans viewed as racially inferior. The local population faced mass murder, shootings, starvation, and forced deportations.
These measures aimed not only to decimate the population but also to clear the way for German colonization, in line with Hitler's vision of living space in the east. Some Belarusians could not bear to see what was happening to their country and people, and they joined the resistance. One of them was Yelena Mazanik.
Yelena Grigoryevna Mazanik was born on March 2, 1914, into a Belarusian peasant family in the village of Poddegtyarny, located in the Minsk Governorate, then part of the Russian Empire. She completed six grades of school, which was common for rural children at the time, before leaving in 1931 to work as a waitress.
She soon married Boris Antonovich Tarletsky, a chauffeur employed by the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which functioned as the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union. In 1935, Mazanik gave birth to her first son, but the child tragically died at the age of one and a half. After this loss, she changed jobs and began working at the gym of the Belarusian Council of People's Commissars.
In 1939, she faced another tragedy when she gave birth prematurely to a second son who also did not survive. That same year, Mazanik returned to her earlier position as a waitress.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Two years later, on Sunday, June 22, 1941, Germany launched its massive assault on the Soviet Union, opening one of the deadliest fronts of the war. For Nazi Germany, this was not an ordinary military operation.
The war against the Soviet Union was a war of annihilation between German fascism and Soviet communism, and a racial war between German Aryans and those they deemed subhuman Slavs and Jews. Following the invasion, the Nazi regime unleashed a campaign of unprecedented brutality. As the German military advanced, Nazi forces, including the SS and the Einsatzgruppen, mobile death squads, systematically targeted civilians, particularly Jews, communists, and other groups deemed undesirable by Nazi ideology.
Entire villages were wiped out in mass executions, and millions of Soviet prisoners of war were subjected to starvation, forced labor, and summary execution. In July 1941, Wilhelm Kube was appointed General Commissar, meaning Commissioner General, for White Ruthenia, today's Belarus, with his headquarters in Minsk. In this role, Kube oversaw the extermination of the area's large Jewish population.
Over the following months, as German occupation policies grew increasingly brutal, Mazanik became involved in the underground resistance. Using the pseudonym Galina, she infiltrated the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, but later moved on to working as a waitress at a dining hall and casino for German officers. In June 1943, Yelena Mazanik was recruited to work as a maid in Wilhelm Kube's mansion.
At that time, partisan groups in the Minsk area were already preparing to assassinate him. Authorization from Moscow had been secured, and local underground fighters were determined to remove one of the highest-ranking Nazi officials in occupied Belarus. On July 22, 1943, a bomb detonated inside a theater in Minsk, killing around 70 German soldiers. However, Kube had left the building just minutes before the explosion.
A second attempt on September 6, 1943, targeted a banquet for German officers, successfully killing 36 high-ranking officials. But once again, Kube was absent for unknown reasons. Further efforts to ambush him along a road he frequently traveled also failed. Kube's movements were heavily guarded, and eliminating him on the streets proved impossible.
As the partisans searched for a more effective method, Mazanik's new position within Kube's household offered an unexpected opportunity. On August 8, 1943, Tatyana Khalitova, another maid who had worked for Kube, introduced Mazanik to members of the partisan network tasked with the assassination. The network also included Nadezhda Drozdova, operating under the pseudonym Khanskaya, and a partisan named Artur from the Dzerzhinsky detachment.
During a series of secret meetings, Mazanik agreed to carry out the mission. Initially, there was discussion about poisoning Kube, but she opposed the plan, fearing that children living in the mansion might accidentally consume poisoned food. It was decided instead to use an explosive device.
Before proceeding, her sister Valentina Shutskaya helped verify the identities of key contacts, including Maria Osipova and Nikolai Pobayev, ensuring no German infiltration had compromised the operation. Because German reprisals were expected after the assassination, plans were made to evacuate Mazanik's family to partisan-controlled areas once the act was completed.
The device, a small mine fitted with a chemical fuse set to detonate after 24 hours, was smuggled to Mazanik through her sister, hidden inside a basket of cranberries. After receiving the explosive, concerns quickly arose. The partisans feared that the dampness of their forest hideout had rendered the mine ineffective, as they heard no sound after activating the fuse. To resolve this, Mazanik and her comrades carefully dried the device in an oven, turning it repeatedly and shaking it in an effort to engage the mechanism. Once convinced it was operational, Mazanik prepared to carry out the mission.
On the morning of September 21, 1943, Mazanik, carrying the live mine concealed under a handkerchief in her handbag, made her way back to Kube's residence. Upon entry, she was stopped and searched by German guards. One officer began to lift the handkerchief, but Mazanik quickly scolded him for his dirty fingers and explained that the package was a birthday present for Anita, Wilhelm Kube's wife. Her quick thinking allowed her to pass without discovery.
Once inside, Mazanik initially hid the bomb inside a garbage pail before transferring it to the bathroom, keeping it concealed under her dress. At 10:00 a.m. that morning, Wilhelm Kube left for work while his older children attended school and Anita Kube went shopping with their youngest child. With the mansion nearly empty, Mazanik seized her chance. She slipped into Kube's bedroom and placed the explosive device under his bed, carefully positioning it between the mattress and the bedsprings.
Shortly after completing the task, she encountered a German officer, but another maid diverted his attention, allowing Mazanik to feign a toothache and leave the mansion without arousing suspicion. Meanwhile, her sister Valentina and the rest of the family were finalizing their escape from Minsk, traveling toward the safety of partisan-held territories.
At 1:20 a.m. on September 22, 1943, the bomb detonated 40 minutes earlier than planned. Because Kube had already gone to bed, the explosion blew him to pieces, killing him instantly. His pregnant wife, who had been sleeping in a separate bed, survived unharmed.
Following the successful assassination, Mazanik joined the partisans in the forests and evaded Nazi capture. However, the repercussions were swift and brutal. In a devastating act of collective punishment, over 1,000 Minsk residents were forced to dig their own mass grave before being executed by German forces.
Late at night on October 12, 1943, Mazanik and the other conspirators were secretly flown out of Belarus to Moscow. After reporting on the mission and undergoing brief interrogations, they were officially recognized for their actions. On October 29, 1943, Yelena Mazanik, along with Nadezhda Drozdova and Maria Osipova, was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union for her role in the assassination of Wilhelm Kube.
The Second World War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. In the following year, Mazanik joined the Communist Party before graduating from the Minsk Pedagogical Institute in 1952. She later worked as the deputy director of the main library of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. Despite losing contact with her husband, whether intentionally or due to the events of the war, she did not remarry.
When Yelena Mazanik died on April 7, 1996, in Minsk, Belarus, she was 82 years old. More than 2 million Belarusians were killed during the Second World War, accounting for approximately 25 percent of the total population, the highest proportion of any country involved in the war. It is estimated that around 800,000 Jews, or 90 percent of the Jewish population of Belarus, were murdered during the Holocaust, countless of them at the hands of Nazi war criminals such as Wilhelm Kube.