On the night of September 22, 1943, the Minsk underground resistance destroyed Hitler's chief representative in occupied Belarus, Gauleiter Wilhelm Kube. The corresponding order from Moscow had been sent to 12 sabotage groups representing the Soviet military intelligence, the People's State Security Commissariat and the Central Guerrilla Staff. After the operation, Yelena Mazanik, Maria Osipova and Nadezhda Troyan were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. They had carried out a multi-stage operation, during which a bomb was planted in Gauleiter's house and killed the butcher of the Belarussian people.
During World War II, over 800,000 women served in the army and even more wanted to go to the front. Yelena Mazanik and Maria Osipova did not receive any special military training. Nadezhda Troyan interrupted her studies at the Minsk Medical Institute and went to war as a volunteer. On the orders of the Dima special brigade, she carried out intelligence and subversive activities in the enemy's rear. For her and millions of other Belarussian women it was obvious that Hitler's occupants had brought enormous grief with them. The Geheime Feldpolizei (secret field police), gendarmerie and Abwehr's counterintelligence were rampaging. Raids and executions were regular. It was under Wilhelm Kube that mass murders began. People were killed by waste gases in gas chambers. More than 1.4 million people were killed in the 260 death camps set up in Belarus. In Trostenets alone, over 200,000 people died. The number of victims was greater only in Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka.
The female attitude towards war is easier to understand if you think how deeply it affects them. Years later, one survivor recalled, "When you look at that experience through our eyes, it is extremely horrible." Former sniper Tatyana Stepanova once said, "It's easier for a man to survive a war, but I don't know how women can do it. When I remember it now, I am seized with horror. But at the time I could do anything: I slept near the dead, shot people and saw blood. I remember well that on the snow it smelled especially strong... I'm saying it and already feel dizzy... But then it was all right, I could do anything."
Having returned from the front, they felt older among their peers, because they looked at life with other eyes, the eyes that had seen death. Yet most of them found strength to join the peaceful life that was returning and be as useful as they could. Mazanik graduated from a pedagogical institute, worked at the Belarussian State Control Ministry and later became deputy director of the Fundamental Library of the Belarussian Academy of Sciences. Osipova became a member of the Belarussian Supreme Court. Nadezhda Troyan still heads a medical institute in Moscow.
