Soviet resistance operatives Maria Kislyak, Fedor Roudenko and Vasily Bougrimenko hanged on this date in 1943 by Nazi occupation.

Kislyak, an 18-year-old from Kharkov, Ukraine who is esteemed a Hero of the Soviet Union,* is the best-known of them and made herself the poisoned honey in a trap for German officers.

As ferocious Eastern Front fighting raged near her city, Kislyak feigned affection for a German lieutenant and thereby lured him to a woodland rendezvous where her friend Roudenko ambushed him and bludgeoned him to death.

Kislyak endured German torture without admitting anything and was even released since the man’s comrades couldn’t be sure that the local flirt had anything to do with the murder. But when she and her friends pulled the trick a second time, the Germans forced the assassins to reveal themselves by threatening to shoot random hostages en masse.

* One of three women so honored for their service during World War II, all of whom have been featured in these grim annals; the others are Klava Nazarova and Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.

On this day..

• 1485: William de La Marck, the Wild Boar of the Ardennes
• 2013: The Hawalli monster
• Daily Double: Child Rape
• 2011: Ruyati binti Sapubi, migrant worker beheaded on film
• 1759: Catharine Knowland, the last to hang on the Tyburn Tree
• 1862: James Andrews's raiders, for the Great Locomotive Chase
• 1950: Chen Yi, 228 Massacre author
• 1827: Isaac Desha pardoned by Gov. Joseph Desha
• 1953: 32 merciful Soviet soldiers
• 1800: Mario Cavaradossi, Tosca's lover
• 2010: Ronnie Lee Gardner, by musketry
• 1947: Shigematsu Sakaibara, "I obey with pleasure"
• 1975: Prince Faisal ibn Musa'id, royal assassin