Munich resident Stefan Popel
On October 15, 1959, a man was taken to a Munich hospital with his face covered in blood. The victim's neighbors, who called the doctors, knew him as Stefan Popel. When doctors arrived, Popel was still alive. But the doctors did not have time to save him. Popel died on the way to the hospital without regaining consciousness. Doctors could only declare death and establish its cause. Although the victim had a fracture at the base of his skull caused by a fall, the immediate cause of death was cardiac paralysis.
During the examination, a holster with a pistol was found on Popel, this became the reason for calling the police. The arriving police quickly established that the true name of the deceased was Stepan Bandera, and that he was the leader of Ukrainian nationalists. The body was examined again, this time more thoroughly. One of the doctors noticed the smell of bitter almonds coming from the face of the deceased. Vague suspicions were confirmed: Bandera was killed: poisoned with potassium cyanide.
Necessary preface - 1: OUN
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) arose in Western Ukraine in 1929 as a response to the oppression of the Ukrainian population of Galicia by the Polish authorities. According to the treaty of 1921, Poland pledged to give Ukrainians equal rights with Poles, autonomy, a university, and create all conditions for national and cultural development.
In fact, the Polish authorities pursued a policy of forced assimilation, Polishization and Catholicization towards the Galicians. In local government bodies, only Poles were appointed to all positions. Greek Catholic churches and monasteries were closed. In the few schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction, Polish teachers taught. Ukrainian teachers and priests were persecuted. Reading rooms were closed and Ukrainian literature was destroyed.
The Ukrainian population of Galicia responded with mass actions of disobedience (refusal to pay taxes, participate in the census, elections to the Senate and Sejm, serve in the Polish army) and acts of sabotage (arson of military warehouses and government institutions, damage to telephone and telegraph communications, attacks on gendarmes) . In 1920, former military personnel of the UPR and WUNR created the UVO (Ukrainian Military Organization), which became the basis of the OUN created in 1929.
Necessary preface - 2: Stepan Bandera
Bandera was born in 1909 in the family of a Greek Catholic priest, a supporter of Ukrainian independence. Already in the 4th grade of the gymnasium, Bandera became a member of a semi-legal nationalist student organization, took part in organizing boycotts and sabotage of decisions of the Polish authorities. In 1928, Stepan became a member of the UVO, and in 1929 - the OUN.
about the personality of Stepan Bandera, slandered by Soviet historyIn the summer of 2007, my wife and I took a trip to the city of Lviv. We were returning home from Crimea, and decided to drive through Lvov, and further, to Brest, Minsk...
It’s interesting to see - what kind of Western Ukraine is it?
Beyond Ternopil, on the slopes overgrown with thick grass and large trees, villages are scattered, solid, prosperous. Every village has a mandatory church, or even two. On the slopes there are herds of cows, sheep, very large herds. On one slope we saw a cemetery: a chapel and long neat rows of low white stone crosses. We stopped. I decided that this was a burial place from the First World War, but it turned out that soldiers of the UPA, Ukrainian Insurgent Army, from the Galicia division, who died in the battle near Brody during the Second World War, were buried here...
History... our history, says different things about the participants in these events: traitors, Banderaites, nationalists... Here, among these graves, you understand something else: these people, no matter how you treat them, fought for the freedom of Ukraine. Freedom, as they understood it... My mother’s brother, my uncle Gregory, a tank driver, died near the city of Stanislav, now Ivano-Frankivsk, perhaps in battles with these same “Banderaites,” but I don’t dare to quit there is a stone in them. They fought for Ukraine, and in this war they gave up the most precious thing - their lives. “The fighters are sleeping, they have said their thing, and they are forever right!”
Stepan Bandera... This person has been slandered in history, just like Simon Petlyura - vilely, unfairly and undeservedly. They always talk about Bandera with the prefix “traitor,” although he never betrayed anyone. Opposed Soviet power? Yes, he performed! But he didn’t swear allegiance to her, she was as alien to him as the German fascist was to any Soviet person of those years. Once, the author of these lines argued with a Kyiv editor, and when asked who Bandera betrayed, the opponent, without any embarrassment, said: he betrayed Melnik. (Melnik is one of the leaders of the OUN.) Even such an insignificant episode was taken into account by falsifiers of history!
Some authors put Stepan Bandera on the same level as such an odious personality as General Vlasov. But Vlasov, we note, was treated kindly by the Soviet government, had considerable privileges, and most importantly, he swore allegiance to this power. However, when his life was threatened, he easily broke his oath and went over to the side of the enemy. In the Novgorod forests, when his army was surrounded and starving soldiers ate tree bark and fought for a piece of fallen horse meat, a cow was kept at the headquarters for Vlasov so that his Soviet Excellency could eat milk and eat cutlets. This fact is from a TV show about Vlasov; I didn’t remember the name, didn’t write it down, didn’t take screenshots. If the reader believes it, he will believe it; if he doesn’t, he won’t.
Stepan Bandera was sentenced to death by a Polish court, spent many days on death row, but did not bow to the enemy. What he had to experience “with a noose around his neck”, what psychological and mental torment he went through - only God knows. He did not pretend to be a hero, was not proud of his prison past, did not boast of his suffering, and was meanly killed from around the corner by a Russian executioner from the NKVD, Stashinsky. Bandera was a real, unbending fighter for the independence of Ukraine. It is enough to note that the armed formations of the OUN and UPA he led fought against the Polish oppressors, and against the Nazis, and against the Red Army. The valiant army of General Vlasov, let us note between the lines, never acted against the Wehrmacht. Today, by the way, there are still alive those Ukrainians who experienced first-hand the merciless, truly bestial, inhuman cruelty of the Soviet Army and especially the NKVD troops in the western regions of Ukraine. The Krasnopogonniki used truly savage methods in the fight against the Ukrainian insurgent movement: detachments of thugs from the NKVD dressed in the uniform of UPA fighters and committed atrocities in Western Ukraine. Which Soviet propaganda later attributed to the “Banderaites.” It is not surprising that the fight against the occupiers continued until the mid-fifties. The occupiers were everyone who came to these lands without an invitation: Poles, Germans, and Russians. Alas, this is so! And why were this people and its heroes so defamed? Just because they wanted to live on their land according to their own laws?.. “Your own house has its own truth!” said the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko a hundred years before these events.
Stepan Bandera, like Petlyura, is accused of anti-Semitism - and there is no worse crime in the world. Was Bandera an anti-Semite?
“One of the most serious accusations against Bandera is related to the so-called Lviv massacre. It happened in the same 1941, June 30, when Bandera proclaimed the restoration of the Ukrainian state. Information about this event is conflicting. The number of victims is estimated from 3 to 10 thousand. The absolute majority were Jews, as well as communists. “Exactly the same thing happened there as in the Baltics and in the eastern part of Poland, which the Red Army occupied in September 1939. Nowadays in Poland people often try to forget this, but in the early days of the German occupation, Poles joined the ranks of the police in large numbers. The reason was the impression left by almost two years of Soviet occupation,” says historian Jēkabsons. It is difficult to say to what extent the massacre was the Ukrainians’ own initiative, and to what extent it was an event inspired by the Germans. We must remember that a week before this, security officers killed 4,000 political prisoners, mainly Ukrainian nationalists, in Lvov. When the corpses of the victims were exhumed, the picture was similar to that in the courtyard of the Riga Central Prison in the July days of 1941. In addition, the Germans spread rumors that it was the “Jewish Bolsheviks” who committed atrocities against prisoners. This provoked loved ones to thirst for revenge. The consequences were Jewish pogroms. Obviously, the OUN also participated in them. However, anti-Semitism, which is mentioned at times, was not the basis of the ideology of the OUN and UPA. And Bandera himself did not directly take part in the Lvov massacre, and there is no information that he gave any orders there. “If he was somehow guilty of the Lvov events, it was only because he promoted Ukrainian national ideas, to a certain extent inciting people to take revenge,” explains Jēkabsons. There is no consensus among historians in assessing the attitude of Bandera’s followers towards Jews. But it is a fact that Jews later fought in the ranks of the UPA both as militants and as commanders, and especially as medical personnel. It is noteworthy that in the early 50s, when Israel and the Zionists were declared enemies of the USSR, Soviet propaganda broadcast that the UPA and the Zionists were going hand in hand.”
Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary in Galicia (modern Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine), then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the family of a priest. In 1919, Stepan Bandera entered a gymnasium in the city of Striy near Lvov. In 1920 Poland occupied Western Ukraine, and training took place under the supervision of Polish authorities. In 1922, Bandera became a member of the Nationalist Youth Union of Ukraine, and in 1928 he entered the Lviv Higher Polytechnic School with a degree in agronomist.
The situation in western Ukraine was aggravated by repression and terror on the part of the Polish authorities, caused by the disobedience of the Ukrainian population of Galicia and other regions. Thousands of Ukrainians were thrown into prisons and a concentration camp in the Kartuz region (the village of Bereza). In the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded by Yevgeny Konovalets back in 1920, they naturally could not help but notice Stepan Bandera, who was deeply outraged by the actions of pan-Poland, and since 1929 he has led the radical wing of the OUN youth organization. In the early 1930s, Bandera became deputy head of the regional leadership of the OUN. His name is associated with attacks on postal trains, expropriations and robberies of post offices and banks, murders of political opponents and enemies of the national movement of Ukraine.
For the organization, preparation, assassination attempt and liquidation of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Peracki, he, along with other organizers of the terrorist attack, was sentenced to capital punishment at the Warsaw trial in 1936. However, the death penalty is subsequently replaced by life imprisonment.
Bandera was imprisoned until the beginning of World War II, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. On September 13, 1939, thanks to the retreat of parts of the Polish army and the escape of prison guards, he was released and first sent to Lviv, which by that time was already occupied by Soviet troops, and then, illegally crossing the Soviet-German border, to Krakow, Vienna and Rome to coordinate further plans of the OUN. But during the negotiations, serious disagreements arose between Bandera and Melnik.
Bandera formed armed groups from his supporters and on June 30, 1941, at a rally of thousands in Lvov, he proclaimed the act of independence of Ukraine. Bandera's closest ally Yaroslav Stetsko becomes the head of government of the newly created national Ukrainian cabinet of ministers.
Following this, at the beginning of July, in the zone of Soviet occupation, the NKVD shot Stepan's father Andrei Bandera. Almost all of Bandera’s close relatives were transferred to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
However, the reaction from the fascist authorities followed immediately - already in early July, Bandera and Stetsko were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Berlin, where they were asked to publicly renounce the ideas of a national Ukrainian state and annul the act of independence of Ukraine of June 30.
In the fall of 1941, the Melnikites also tried to proclaim Ukraine independent, but they suffered the same fate as the Banderaites. Most of their leaders were shot by the Gestapo in early 1942.
The atrocities of the fascist invaders on the territory of Ukraine led to more and more people joining partisan detachments to fight the enemy. In the fall of 1942, Bandera’s supporters called for the unification of the scattered armed detachments of Melnik’s followers and other partisan associations of Ukraine under the command of Roman Shukhevych, the former leader of the OUN Nachtigal battalion. On the basis of the OUN, a new paramilitary organization is formed - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The national composition of the UPA was quite heterogeneous (representatives of the Transcaucasian peoples, Kazakhs, Tatars, etc., who found themselves in the German-occupied territories of Ukraine, joined the rebels), and the number of the UPA reached, according to various estimates, up to 100 thousand people. A fierce armed struggle took place between the UPA and the fascist occupiers, red partisans and units of the Polish Home Army in Galicia, Volyn, Kholmshchyna, Polesie
All this time, from the autumn of 1941 to the middle of the second half of 1944, Stepan Bandera was in the German concentration camp Sachsenhausen
After the expulsion of the German invaders from the territory of Ukraine by Soviet troops in 1944, the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists entered a new phase - the war against the Soviet Army, which lasted until the mid-50s
On October 15, 1959, Stepan Andreevich Bandera was shot dead in the entrance of his own house by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky.
Our time reveals many secrets, many yesterday's heroes become demons, and vice versa: recent enemies become the pride and conscience of the nation, the heroes of Russia. Like, for example, Emperor Nicholas the Bloody, it is not clear for what merits he became a saint overnight, or General Denikin, whose hands are up to his elbows in the blood of the Russian people, or Kolchak, a traitor, a traitor recruited by the British General Staff. And only Simon Petliura and Stepan Bandera, defamed by “historians” and slandered by history, remained irreconcilable enemies for Russia. Because they are Ukrainians, and for a Russian person there is no more implacable enemy than the Ukrainian, whom they hypocritically call brother.
This is especially visible today, in the light of the aggression unleashed by the Russian “brothers” in the eastern regions of Ukraine.
November 2014
To prepare a rebellion on the territory of the USSR, Stepan Bandera received two and a half million marks from Nazi Germany.
So, who is Stepan Bandera?
He was born in the village of Ugryniv Stary, Kalush district in Stanislavshchyna (Galicia), part of Austria-Hungary (now Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine), in the family of a Greek Catholic parish priest Andrei Bandera, who received a theological education at Lviv University. As a boy, he joined the Ukrainian scout organization “PLAST”, and a little later the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO).
At the age of 20, Bandera led the most radical “youth” group in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Even then, his hands were stained with the blood of Ukrainians: on his instructions, the village blacksmith Mikhail Beletsky, the professor of philology at the Lviv Ukrainian Gymnasium Ivan Babiy, the university student Yakov Bachinsky and many others were destroyed.
At that time, the OUN established close contacts with Germany; moreover, its headquarters were located in Berlin, at Hauptstrasse 11, under the guise of the “Union of Ukrainian Elders in Germany.” Bandera himself was trained in Danzig, at an intelligence school.
In 1934, on the orders of Stepan Bandera, an employee of the Soviet consulate, Alexei Mailov, was killed in Lvov. Shortly before this murder was committed, the resident of German intelligence in Poland, Major Knauer, who was actually S. Bandera’s instructor, showed up at the OUN.
A very important fact is that with Hitler coming to power in Germany in January 1934, the Berlin headquarters of the OUN, as a special department, was included in the Gestapo headquarters. In the suburbs of Berlin - Wilhelmsdorf - barracks were also built with funds from German intelligence, where OUN militants and their officers were trained. Meanwhile, the Polish Minister of the Interior, General Bronislaw Peracki, sharply condemned Germany's plans to capture Danzig, which, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, was declared a "free city" under the control of the League of Nations. Hitler himself instructed Richard Yarom, a German intelligence agent in charge of the OUN, to eliminate Peratsky. On June 15, 1934, Peratsky was killed by the people of Stepan Bandera, but this time luck did not smile on them and the nationalists were captured and convicted. For the murder of Bronislaw Peratsky, Stepan Bandera, Nikolai Lebed and Yaroslav Karpinets were sentenced to death by the Warsaw District Court. The rest, including Roman Shukhevych, received significant prison terms.
In the summer of 1936, Stepan Bandera, along with other members of the Regional Executive of the OUN, appeared in court in Lvov on charges of leading terrorist activities. The court also considered the circumstances of the murder of Ivan Babii and Yakov Bachinsky by OUN members. In total, at the Warsaw and Lvov trials, Stepan Bandera was sentenced to life imprisonment seven times.
In September 1939, when Germany occupied Poland, Stepan Bandera was released and began actively collaborating with the Abwehr, German military intelligence.
Irrefutable evidence of Stepan Bandera's service to the Nazis is the transcript of the interrogation of the head of the Abwehr department of the Berlin district, Colonel Erwin Stolz (May 29, 1945).
“... after the end of the war with Poland, Germany was intensively preparing for a war against the Soviet Union and therefore measures were being taken through the Abwehr to intensify subversive activities. For these purposes, a prominent Ukrainian nationalist, Bandera Stepan, was recruited, who during the war was released from prison, where he was imprisoned by the Polish authorities for participating in a terrorist act against the leaders of the Polish government. The last one in touch was with me.”
In February 1940, Bandera convened an OUN conference in Krakow, at which a tribunal was created that imposed death sentences on the same OUN members for deviating from the line of the organization - Nikolai Sciborsky, Yemelyan Senik, as well as Yevgeny Shulga, which were executed.
As follows from the memoirs of Yaroslav Stetsk, Stepan Bandera, through the mediation of Richard Yary, shortly before the war, secretly met with Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. During the meeting, Bandera, according to Stetsko, “very clearly and clearly presented the Ukrainian positions, finding a certain understanding ... from the admiral, who promised support for the Ukrainian political concept.”
Three months before the attack on the USSR, Stepan Bandera created a Ukrainian legion from members of the OUN, which would later become part of the Brandenburg-800 regiment and would be called “Nachtigal”, in Ukrainian “nightingale”. The regiment carried out special assignments to conduct sabotage operations behind the lines of the USSR troops.
However, not only Stepan Bandera communicated with the Nazis, but also those authorized by him. For example, in the archives of the special services, documents have been preserved that Bandera’s members themselves offered their services to the Nazis. In the interrogation report of Abwehr officer Lazarek Yu.D. it is said that he was a witness and participant in negotiations between Abwehr representative Eichern and Bandera's assistant Nikolai Lebed.
“Lebed said that Bandera’s followers would provide the necessary personnel for saboteur schools and would also be able to agree to the use of the entire underground of Galicia and Volyn for sabotage and reconnaissance purposes on the territory of the USSR.”
To prepare a rebellion on the territory of the USSR, as well as conduct reconnaissance activities, Stepan Bandera received two and a half million marks from Nazi Germany.
According to Soviet counterintelligence, the mutiny was planned for the spring of 1941. Why spring? After all, the leadership of the OUN had to understand that open action would inevitably end in complete defeat and physical destruction of the entire organization. The answer comes naturally if we remember that the original date of Nazi Germany’s attack on the USSR was May 1941. However, Hitler was forced to transfer some troops to the Balkans in order to take control of Yugoslavia. Interestingly, at the same time, the OUN gave the order to all OUN members who served in the army or police of Yugoslavia to go over to the side of the Croatian Nazis.
In April 1941, the OUN convened a Great Gathering of Ukrainian nationalists in Krakow, where Stepan Bandera was elected head of the OUN, and Yaroslav Stetsko was elected his deputy. In connection with the receipt of new instructions for the underground, the actions of OUN groups on the territory of Ukraine intensified even more. In April alone, 38 Soviet party workers died at their hands, and dozens of sabotage were carried out in transport, industrial and agricultural enterprises.
The Germans had high hopes for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during the Great Patriotic War, but Stepan Bandera allowed himself liberties. He couldn’t wait to feel like the head of an independent Ukrainian state, and he, abusing the trust of his masters from Nazi Germany, proclaimed the “independence” of the Ukrainian state. But Hitler had his own plans; he was interested in free living space, i.e. territories and cheap labor of Ukraine.
The trick of establishing statehood was needed in order to show the population its importance. On June 30, 1941, Stepan Bandera in Lviv announced the “rebirth” of the Ukrainian state.
City residents reacted sluggishly to this message. According to the words of the Lvov priest, doctor of theology Father G. Kotelnik, about a hundred people from the intelligentsia and clergy were brought to this solemn gathering. The city residents themselves did not dare to take to the streets and support the proclamation of the Ukrainian state.
The Germans, as mentioned above, had their own selfish interest in Ukraine, and there could be no talk of any revival and granting it state status even under the patronage of Nazi Germany. It would be absurd for Germany to give power in the territory that was captured by regular German military formations to Ukrainian nationalists just because they also took part in hostilities, but mainly did the dirty work of punishing civilians and policemen. Although Bandera resignedly served the Nazis. This is evidenced by the main text of the Act of “Revival of the Ukrainian State” dated June 30, 1941:
“The newly reborn Ukrainian State will closely interact with the National Socialist Greater Germany, which, under the leadership of its Leader Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and the world and helping the Ukrainian people to free themselves from Moscow occupation.
The Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army, which is being created on Ukrainian soil, will continue to fight together with the ALLIED GERMAN ARMY against the Moscow occupation for the Sovereign Conciliar Ukrainian State and a new order throughout the world.”
Among Ukrainian nationalists and many officials at the head of modern Ukraine, the Act of June 30, 1941 is considered the day of independence of Ukraine, and Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and Yaroslav Stetsko are considered Heroes of Ukraine. But what kind of heroes are these and why are their methods better than Hitler’s? Nothing.
For example, after the proclamation of the Act of Independence, supporters of Stepan Bandera staged pogroms in Lviv. Ukrainian Nazis compiled “black lists” even before the war; as a result, 7 thousand people were killed in the city in 6 days.
This is what Saul Friedman wrote about the massacre carried out by Bandera’s followers in Lviv in the book “Pogromist” published in New York. “During the first three days of July 1941, the Nachtigal battalion exterminated seven thousand Jews in the vicinity of Lvov. Before execution, Jews - professors, lawyers, doctors - were forced to lick all the staircases of four-story buildings and carry garbage in their mouths from one building to another. Then, forced to walk through a line of warriors with yellow-blakite armbands, they were bayoneted.”
At the beginning of July 1941, Stepan Bandera, together with Yaroslav Stetsko and his comrades-in-arms, were sent to Berlin at the disposal of Abwehr 2 to Colonel Erwin Stolze. There, the leadership of Nazi Germany demanded that the Act of “Revival of the Ukrainian State” of June 30, 1941 be abandoned, to which Bandera agreed and called on “the Ukrainian people to help the German army everywhere to defeat Moscow and Bolshevism.”
During their stay in Berlin, numerous meetings began with representatives of various departments, at which Bandera’s supporters insistently assured that without their help the German army would not be able to defeat Muscovy. There was a numerous stream of messages, explanations, dispatches, “declarations” and “memoranda” addressed to Hitler, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and other Fuhrers of Nazi Germany, in which they either made excuses or asked for assistance and support.
Stepan Bandera was one of the main initiators of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) on October 14, 1942; he also achieved the replacement of its commander Dmitry Klyachkivsky with his protege Roman Shukhevych.
Yes, it must be admitted that S. Bandera and a number of other “OUN members” spent some time under virtual arrest in the Sachsenhausen camp, and before that he lived at the dacha of the Abwehr intelligence service. The Germans did this with far-reaching goals, intending to continue to use S. Bandera in illegal work in Ukraine. Therefore, they tried to create an image of him as an enemy of Germany. But most of all they feared that for the massacre carried out in Lvov, he would simply be destroyed.
Ukrainian nationalists are now trying to pass off the fact that S. Bandera was kept in a German camp as reprisal by the Nazis against him as a fighter against the occupiers of Ukraine. But that's not true. Bandera's men moved freely around the camp, left it, and received food and money. S. Bandera himself attended the OUN agent and sabotage school, located not far from the camp. The instructor at this school was a recent officer of the special battalion “Nachtigel” Yuri Lopatinsky, through whom S. Bandera communicated with the OUN-UPA, which operated on the territory of Ukraine.
In 1944, Soviet troops cleared Western Ukraine of fascists. Fearing punishment, many members of the OUN-UPA fled with the German troops, and the hatred of local residents for the OUN-UPA in Volyn and Galicia was so high that they themselves handed them over or killed them. 
Stepan Bandera, being released from the camp, joined the 202nd Abwehr team in Krakow and began training OUN-UPA sabotage units.
Irrefutable proof of this is the testimony of a former Gestapo officer, Lieutenant Siegfried Müller, given during the investigation on September 19, 1945.
“On December 27, 1944, I prepared a group of saboteurs to transfer them to the rear of the Red Army on special missions. Stepan Bandera, in my presence, personally instructed these agents and through them transmitted to the UPA headquarters an order to intensify subversive work in the rear of the Red Army and establish regular radio communications with Abwehrkommando 202.”
When the war approached Berlin, Bandera was tasked with forming detachments from the remnants of the Ukrainian Nazis and defending Berlin. Bandera created the detachments, but he himself escaped.
After the end of the war, he lived in Munich and collaborated with the British intelligence services. At the OUN conference in 1947, he was elected head of the wire of the entire OUN organization.
On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bandera was killed in the entrance of his house. Fair retribution took place.
During the Great Patriotic War, hundreds of thousands of people of different nationalities were tortured and killed by the hands of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
The world knows and remembers the monstrous execution by the Germans of several thousand Jews in Khatyn. The fact itself is undeniable, but I would like to clarify one very important point. Who was its direct executor? There is a version that these same Ukrainian nationalists are associates of Stepan Bandera. The Nazis did not like to do the dirty work themselves; they often transferred it to their lackeys.
We did not have time to clarify and double-check all the circumstances of the execution - the Soviet Union was no more.
This is who in Ukraine V. Yushchenko and his associates place on the podium. Then who are they? The question is not rhetorical, especially in light of their arming of the Georgian army and the sending of Ukrainian specialists to it who participated in the barbaric destruction of South Ossetia and the extermination of hundreds of civilians.
On the first day of each new year, torchlight processions take place in the cities and towns of Western Ukraine. People take to the streets to honor the memory of Stepan Bandera, the most controversial figure in modern Ukrainian history. Many consider him a real hero who gave his life for the independence of the country, others consider him a criminal and traitor, because of whom thousands of people died. He himself did not have to kill people, but his supporters, blindly obeying orders, carried out genuine terror in the western regions of Ukraine in the post-war years.
Stepan Bandera was born in Stary Ugrinov in 1909. In the documents about the place of his birth there is a record of a no longer existing state ─ the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, which was then an integral part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Stepan Bandera is destined to absorb the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism from childhood. His father, Greek Catholic priest Andrei Bandera, firmly believed in the realization of the then unrealizable dream of Ukraine gaining independence.
During the First World War, Galicia became a gigantic battlefield. My father, having been submitted to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, went to fight at the front. After the defeat of the Austrians in the war, he became a member of the parliament of the independent Western Ukrainian People's Republic and joined the Ukrainian militia ─ the Galician Army, the predecessor of future armed formations of Ukrainian nationalists. Stepan Bandera met the end of the war with relatives in the city of Stryi near Lvov. Western Ukraine came under Polish rule and my father, who served as a chaplain in the Galician army that fought against the Poles, had to hide from the occupation authorities for some time.
At the age of twelve, Stepan Bandera joined an underground organization of Ukrainian schoolchildren. Thus began his journey into politics and the struggle for independence, which lasted almost 40 years, most of which he would have to spend in captivity or in an illegal position. He can safely be called a fanatic or obsessed with an idea. Even as a child, he began to prepare himself for future difficult trials.
Stepan Bandera often went with scouts on long forest hikes, played sports, and in winter he hardened himself in the cold by dousing himself with water. He overdid it a little. From hypothermia he will develop rheumatism in his legs, from which he will suffer greatly throughout his life. In the post-war years, Poland began to pursue a policy of forced assimilation in Ukrainian territories, supporting the resettlement of Poles in Western Ukraine. So the Polish authorities became the main enemy for Ukrainian nationalists.
In 1927, Stepan Bandera joined the Ukrainian Military Organization, and 2 years later he found himself in the newly organized Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). While studying at the Lviv Polytechnic to become an agronomist, he devoted all his free time to underground activities. Throughout his life, Bandera had many nicknames ─ Fox, Gray, Kruk, Baba, Rykh. In those years, he wrote a lot for illegal newspapers, signing the pseudonym Matvey Gordon.
The life of an underground worker is the same in all countries and at any time. Secret meetings, posting leaflets, distributing illegal newspapers, propaganda among the masses, organizing strikes and boycotts of elections - he had to do all this. The active young nationalist was quickly noticed. In 1933, he was appointed “regional guide” ─ head of the regional organization of the OUN.
Stepan Bandera nationality
The political struggle gradually became radicalized. Ukrainians began to take up arms. In 1932, Stepan Bandera was trained in sabotage methods at a German intelligence school in Danzig. Thus began his collaboration with the German authorities, who in those years were trying to cultivate an internal enemy for neighboring unfriendly Poland. In 1933, the OUN decided to eliminate the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland, Bronislaw Peracki.
The organization of the operation was personally led by Stepan Bandera. In mid-June 1934, in Warsaw, the Polish minister was shot by OUN member Grigory Matseiko. He managed to successfully leave both the crime scene and Poland, but the organizer of the action was unlucky. They were all arrested, including Stepan Bandera. A court in Warsaw found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. During the trial, Bandera was removed from the courtroom several times for shouting “Long live Ukraine.” The death penalty was replaced with life imprisonment. In prison, Stepan Bandera showed himself to be a very restless prisoner, constantly participating in protest hunger strikes. From there, he continued to lead the activities of the OUN in Western Ukraine.
In addition to Poland, the gaze of Ukrainian nationalists often turned to the east. In the early 1930s, famine broke out in Soviet Ukraine due to crop failures. Ukrainians often call those events the “Holodomor,” still considering it artificially inspired by Stalin’s circle. Stepan Bandera shared the same views. He decided to take revenge on the Soviet authorities for the “mockery” of the Ukrainian people.
In the fall of 1933, the secretary of the USSR Consulate in Lvov, Alexey Mailov, died at the hands of a sent one. With this event, the war of Bandera and the OUN against the USSR began. The release of the prisoner was helped by the outbreak of World War II. He met her at the Brest Fortress. The Poles housed a maximum security prison within its walls. As Soviet troops approached, moving to the West according to the Molotov-Ribbentropp plan, the prison guards fled. Stepan Bandera immediately headed home to Lviv. These were several months that he lived under Soviet rule, naturally, in an illegal situation. If the NKVD had arrested him then, he would have rotted in Kolyma or even been immediately shot in the basement, but Bandera managed to secretly cross the border and get out into the territory occupied by Germany.
Bandera movement
Poland disappeared from the map of Europe. Western Ukraine was divided between Germany and the USSR. The enemy for Bandera has changed. Germany took Poland's place. While he was in prison, big changes took place in the OUN. The former leader, Evgen Konovalets, was blown up by a bomb in Rotterdam. Andrey Melnik laid claim to unconditional leadership. Their meeting took place in Italy. Stepan Bandera demanded that Melnik stop all contacts with Germany. He refused. The OUN split into two parts. Bandera headed the OUN (Bandera movement).
Actually, after a quarrel between the two OUN leaders, the definition of “Bandera” came into play. He still had to begin cooperation with Nazi Germany. He met the German attack on the USSR in Krakow, while under vigilant police surveillance. He was strongly discouraged from visiting his native places. The German troops that entered Lvov at the end of June 1941 included 2 battalions staffed by his supporters. On the same day, one of the leaders of the OUN (b) Yaroslav Stetsko read out the “Act of Revival of the Ukrainian State” in Lviv. The Germans had absolutely no need for an independent Ukraine. They had plans that were not their own. They did not recognize any “independence”, and all its guardians were quickly arrested.
Stepan Bandera with his wife and daughters were placed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he soon met Andrei Melnik, who always relied on Germany. In the concentration camp, Stepan Bandera had some privileges compared to other prisoners. He was fed a little better and was sometimes allowed to meet his family. The Germans have always been very calculating.
Andrey Melnik in old age
Bandera was remembered in 1944, when the Soviet Army approached the lands of Western Ukraine. According to the calculations of the German command, Ukrainian nationalists were supposed to start a partisan war in the liberated areas. Bandera made Germany’s recognition of the “Act of Revival of the Ukrainian State” a mandatory condition for further cooperation. He never managed to achieve this.
Back in 1942, in Galicia, without the participation of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the UPA began to form, which became the core of the resistance and received assistance from the Germans in the form of weapons. Stepan Bandera from Germany tried to lead the “abroad” nationalist formations.
Within the OUN, especially among its members hiding in the forests of Ukraine, opposition grew, accusing it of being out of touch with real life and dogmatism.
Stepan Bandera met the end of the war in the part of Germany occupied by the British. The British intelligence services quickly found him. In turn, the Americans continued to look for Bandera as an accomplice of Nazi Germany and he had to hide from them for a couple of years.
Since then, the only enemy for Ukrainian nationalists has been the Soviet Union. The guerrilla war in Western Ukraine continued until the mid-50s.
Many years after the destruction of the main forces of “Bandera,” former UPA fighters were found in villages hiding in the cellars of relatives. Such tenacity was only demonstrated by Japanese soldiers who did not recognize surrender, and who continued to be captured in the jungles of the Philippines until the 70s.
Murder of Stepan Bandera
The recognized leader of the nationalist movement inevitably became a target for the Soviet intelligence services. In 1947, an assassination attempt was made by Yaroslav Moroz, and a year later by Vladimir Stelmashchuk. In 1952, German citizens Leguda and Lehmann were convicted of preparing a murder. A year later, Stepan Libgolts tried to get to Bandera. The OUN's own security service and the German police were on alert, exposing the agents. The OUN leader lived with his family under the surname Poppel in Munich. He was so reliably hidden that his own children for a long time believed that Poppel was their real name.
In October 1959, KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky found out Stepan Bandera and the address of his house. 2 years earlier, he successfully eliminated another OUN leader, Lev Rebet. For the new murder, Stashinsky used a special syringe pistol loaded with potassium cyanide. He was waiting for Bandera at the entrance of the house with a newspaper bundle in which a weapon was hidden. Poppel-Bandera returned home for lunch. Stashinsky fired a shot in his face and disappeared. The true cause of death was determined only by an autopsy. Initially, doctors suspected a heart attack.
Stepan Bandera was buried in the Waldfriedhof cemetery in front of a huge crowd of Ukrainian emigrants. Stashinsky would flee to the West in 1961 from the GDR with his German wife. He frankly admits to the murders of Rebet and Bandera. After 6 years, he will be released early from prison and disappear. He will undergo plastic surgery, after which Stashinsky will live in South Africa under an assumed name.
BANDERA, STEPAN ANDREEVICH(1909–1959) – leader of the Ukrainian national liberation movement in the first half and mid-20th century.
Born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary in Galicia (modern Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine), which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My father received a theological education at Lviv University and served as a priest in the Greek Catholic Church. According to the recollections of Stepan Bandera himself, an atmosphere of national patriotism and the revival of Ukrainian culture reigned in their house. Representatives of the intelligentsia, Ukrainian business circles, and public figures often gathered at my father’s place. In 1918–1920, Andrei Bandera was a deputy of the Rada of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic.
In 1919, Stepan Bandera entered a gymnasium in the city of Striy near Lvov. In 1920 Poland occupied Western Ukraine, and training took place under the supervision of Polish authorities.
In 1921, Stepan’s mother, Miroslava Bandera, died of tuberculosis.
In 1922, Bandera became a member of the Nationalist Youth Union of Ukraine, and in 1928 he entered the Lviv Higher Polytechnic School with a degree in agronomist.
The situation in western Ukraine was aggravated by repression and terror on the part of the Polish authorities, caused by the disobedience of the Ukrainian population of Galicia and other regions. Thousands of Ukrainians were thrown into prisons and a concentration camp in the Kartuz region (the village of Bereza). In the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded by Yevgeny Konovalets back in 1920, they naturally could not help but notice Stepan Bandera, who was deeply outraged by the actions of pan-Poland, and since 1929 he has led the radical wing of the OUN youth organization. In the early 1930s, Bandera became deputy head of the regional leadership of the OUN. His name is associated with attacks on postal trains, expropriations and robberies of post offices and banks, murders of political opponents and enemies of the national movement of Ukraine.
Stepan Bandera was never able to defend his thesis at Lvov University - in 1934, for the organization, preparation, assassination attempt and liquidation of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland Bronislaw Peratsky, he, along with other organizers of the terrorist attack, was sentenced to capital punishment at the Warsaw trial in 1936. However, the death penalty is subsequently replaced by life imprisonment.
In 1938, the head of the OUN, Yevgeny Konovalets, died at the hands of a Soviet intelligence officer, future Minister of State Security Pavel Sudoplatov. At a congress in Rome in August 1939, one of the leaders of the national movement of Ukraine, Colonel Andrei Melnik, was elected his successor in the OUN.
Meanwhile, Bandera was imprisoned until the beginning of World War II, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. On September 13, 1939, thanks to the retreat of parts of the Polish army and the escape of prison guards, he was released and first went to Lvov, which by that time it was already occupied by Soviet troops, and then, illegally crossing the Soviet-German border, to Krakow, Vienna and Rome to coordinate further plans of the OUN. But during the negotiations, serious disagreements arose between Bandera and Melnik.
At the same time, widespread arrests of supporters of Stepan Bender were taking place in Volyn and Galicia. Suspicions of betrayal fall on Melnik and his people. Bandera returned to Krakow, and in February 1940 his supporters at a conference accused Melnik and his faction of aiding Nazi Germany, which, in fact, was in no way going to recognize the sovereignty of Ukraine. The decisions of the Rome conference of 1939 are annulled, and Stepan Bandera is proclaimed the leader of the OUN. Thus, there was a split into Bandera and Melnik. Soon the factional confrontation escalated into a fierce armed struggle between the two factions.
Bandera formed armed groups from his supporters and on June 30, 1941, at a rally of thousands in Lvov, he proclaimed the act of independence of Ukraine. Bandera's closest ally Yaroslav Stetsko becomes the head of government of the newly created national Ukrainian cabinet of ministers.
Following this, at the beginning of July, in the zone of Soviet occupation, the NKVD shot Stepan's father Andrei Bandera. Almost all of Bandera's close relatives were transferred to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
However, the reaction from the fascist authorities followed immediately - already in early July, Bandera and Stetsko were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Berlin, where they were asked to publicly renounce the ideas of a national Ukrainian state and annul the act of independence of Ukraine of June 30.
In the fall of 1941, the Melnikites also tried to proclaim Ukraine independent, but they suffered the same fate as the Banderaites. Most of their leaders were shot by the Gestapo in early 1942.
The atrocities of the fascist invaders on the territory of Ukraine led to more and more people joining partisan detachments to fight the enemy. In the fall of 1942, Bandera’s supporters called for the unification of the scattered armed detachments of Melnik’s followers and other partisan associations of Ukraine under the command of Roman Shukhevych, the former leader of the OUN Nachtigal battalion. On the basis of the OUN, a new paramilitary organization is formed - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The national composition of the UPA was quite heterogeneous (representatives of the Transcaucasian peoples, Kazakhs, Tatars, etc., who found themselves in the German-occupied territories of Ukraine, joined the rebels), and the number of the UPA reached, according to various estimates, up to 100 thousand people. A fierce armed struggle took place between the UPA and the fascist occupiers, red partisans and units of the Polish Home Army in Galicia, Volyn, Kholmshchyna, Polesie.
After the expulsion of the German invaders from the territory of Ukraine by Soviet troops in 1944, the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists entered a new phase - the war against the Soviet Army, which lasted until the mid-50s. The years 1946–1948 were especially fierce, when, according to information from various sources, in total over these years there were more than four thousand bloody battles between Ukrainian rebels and the Soviet Army on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR.
All this time, from the autumn of 1941 to the middle of the second half of 1944, Stepan Bandera was in the German concentration camp Sachsenhausen. At the end of 1944, the fascist leadership changed its policy towards Ukrainian nationalists and released Bandera and some OUN members from prison. In 1945 and until the end of the war, Bandera collaborated with the Abwehr intelligence department in training OUN sabotage groups.
Stepan Bandera continued his activities in the OUN, whose centralized administration after the end of the Great Patriotic War was located in West Germany. In 1947, at the next meeting of the OUN, Bandera was appointed head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and was re-elected to this position twice in 1953 and 1955.
In the last years of his life, Bandera lived in Munich with his family, who had been taken from Soviet-occupied East Germany. On October 15, 1959, Stepan Andreevich Bandera was shot dead in the entrance of his own house by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky.
After the collapse of the USSR, for modern Ukrainian nationalists the name of Stepan Bandera became a symbol of the struggle for the independence of Ukraine against Polish oppression, fascist Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism. In 2005, the Ukrainian government declared Bandera a national hero, and in 2007 a bronze monument was erected to him in Lviv. In 2005, the Ukrainian government declared Bandera a national hero, and in 2007 a bronze monument was erected to him in Lviv, but in January 2011 the court invalidated the decree of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko of January 20, 2010 conferring the title “Hero of Ukraine” on S. Bandera.