Mariya Borisovna Sokovtsova, later known as Mariya Osipova (December 27th, 1908 - February 5th, 1999) was a Soviet partisan during World War II who, along with three other women, plotted to murder high-ranking Nazi official Wilhelm Kube, resulting in her being named a Hero of the Soviet Union.
Biography[]
Mariya Sokovtsova was born in December 1908 to a peasant family in Belarus. In 1928, she became a member of the Communist Party and graduated from the Agricultural School of Minsk in 1935. She then went on to attend law school and later became an assistant in a law firm. She also got married to Yakov Osipov, changing her name to Mariya Osipova.
When Nazi Germany invaded Belarus, Osipova helped to establish a resistance group operating out of the law school she used to attend. While initially they only helped Jews to hide from persecution and freed Soviet prisoners of war, by late 1941 they had begun conducting sabotage missions against the German army. Osipova served as a messenger between her partisan unit and at least five others.
During this time, another resistance member named Nadezhda Troyan was tasked with killing Wilhelm Kube, overseer of the Minsk Ghetto where Jews were imprisoned. Valentina Shchutskoi mentioned that her sister, Yelena Mazanik, worked in Kube's house as a maid and could be persuaded to help them. After the method of death was decided on, Osipova provided Mazanik with a bomb, which she planted under Kube's bed, and then left into a partisan-controlled forest along with her family, Troyan and her family and most of Mazanik's family to prevent the Germans from killing them. Ultimately, the plan succeeded and Mazanik was extracted to Moscow. All three women (Mazanik, Troyan and Osipova) were named Heroes of the Soviet Union.
After the war, Osipova returned to Minsk to help reconstruct it. She died in 1999 at the age of 90.