Bruskina was the first woman, for whom data is available, to be executed during the Nazi occupation of Soviet territory.

Bruskina was the first woman, for whom data is available, to be executed during the Nazi occupation of Soviet territory.

Masha Brúskina (1924, Minsk, Belarus RSS - 26 October 1941, Minsk, Belarus RSS) was a 17-year-old Soviet Jewish-partisan woman who was captured and executed by Germans along with two other partisans (16-year-old Volodya Scherbatsévich and World War I veteran Kirill Trus) in October 1941 during the Nazi occupation of Belarus.

Born into a Jewish family, she moved with her family to the Minsk ghetto when the Germans invaded Belarus in 1941.

A member of the Communist Party, she joined the resistance, acting both as a nurse for wounded Red Army soldiers and by creating false documents.

On October 14 she was arrested after being denounced by a sick person.

She was tortured, but did not inform on any member of the resistance.

Gustav Freiherr von Bechtolsheim (1889-1969), commander of the 707 infantry division, sentenced her to death.

Before being executed in front of the doors of a yeast factory, she was forced to parade through the streets with a sign around her neck, in Russian and German, with the following inscription: "We are partisans and have shot German troops.

She and her two comrades were hanged in public on October 26, 1941, the sequence of her death was photographed numerous times by the Germans.

  These photographs were exhibited during the Nuremberg Trials.