Yelena Mazanik (2 March 1914 - 7 April 1996) was a Belarusian partisan responsible for the assassination of Wilhelm Kube, General-Kommissar of Nazi-occupied Belarus (at the time a part of the Russian Governate).
Kube's assassination[]
On 8 August 1943, Mazanik, who was working as a maid in Kube's house, was introduced to partisans Nadezhda Troyan and Mariya Osipova, two members of a squadron tasked with assassinating Kube. While planning the killing, Mazanik refused to operate a plan to kill Kube by poisoning him with arsenic, as there were children in the house who could ingest the poison. Troyan and Mazanik also made plans to evacuate Mazanik's family from Minsk because they would inevitably face reprisals if Mazanik was caught.
On 21 September, Mazanik and her sister Valentina set a time bomb which Osipova had supplied them with to go off in 24 hours. Valentina and the rest of her family then left for a partisan-controlled part of the forest while Mazanik entered Kube's house and placed the bomb under his bed before going out after her family. On 22 September, the bomb detonated 40 minutes early, killing Kube. As Mazanik had been evacuated, the Nazis could not apprehend her, and instead settled for killing 1000 inhabitants of Minsk as collective punishment on the city.
Mazanik, Troyan and Osipova were flown out of Belarus by Soviet intelligence operatives who had ordered the partisans to kill Kube on the night of 12 October and interrogated on the mission. All three were later awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union award.