Soviet spy Helene (“Leen”) Kullman was shot by the Germans on this date in 1943 … or was she?

Kullman (English Wikipedia entry | the much more detailed Estonian) was just out of teaching school when the Germans occupied Estonia. She joined the Red Army and was eventually trained as an intelligence agent, infiltrated by parachute behind German lines in September 1942, and arrested by the Gestapo in January 1943.

This is where things get interesting.

According to the Soviet hagiography that resulted in her decoration as a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1965, Kullman defied her torturers and was shot by them on March 6, 1943: a standard Great Patriotic War martyr.

However, stories in post-Soviet, and heavily anti-Soviet, Estonia have circulated to the effect that Leen Kullman wasn’t killed in 1943 at all — that she cooperated with her captors and ended up dying peacefully in West Germany in 1978. One family member allegedly received a cryptic message in the 1960s, “Leen lives with the man who saved her life, and has two children. I’m not allowed to say more.”

Almost everything about her available online is in Estonian; readers with that particular proficiency might also enjoy this 1965 radio interview with her sister.

On this day..

• 1966: Leftists during the Guatemalan Civil War
• 1855: Manuel da Mota Coquiero, the Beast of Macabu
• 1731: Six malefactors at Tyburn
• 845: The 42 Martyrs of Amorium
• 2014: Amin Abdullah Mohammed Al-Mu'alimi, an American spy in the Arabian peninsula
• 1868: Joseph Eisele, honest, kind-hearted triple murderer
• 1673: The effigy of Charles Alexis dit Dessessards
• 1906: The would-be assassins of General Rafael Reyes
• 1968: Three blacks in Rhodesia, notwithstanding Queen Elizabeth II
• 1900: Ada Chard Williams, the last woman hanged at Newgate
• 1836: The defenders of the Alamo, much remembered
• 1952: Jurgen Stroop, the Warsaw Ghetto's destroyer