Stepan Bandera
Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was a Ukrainian far-right leader of the radical militant faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN-B.
Bandera was born in Austria-Hungary, in Galicia, into the family of a priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and grew up in Poland. Involved in nationalist organisations from a young age, he joined the Ukrainian Military Organisation in 1924. In 1931, he became head of propaganda of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, and later became head of the OUN for Poland in 1932. In 1934, he organised the assassination of the Polish interior minister, Bronisław Pieracki, and was sentenced to death after being convicted of terrorism, subsequently commuted to life imprisonment.
Bandera was freed from prison in 1939 following the invasion of Poland, and moved to Kraków. In 1940, he became head of the radical faction of the OUN, the OUN-B. On 22 June 1941, the same day as Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he formed the Ukrainian National Committee. The head of the Committee, Yaroslav Stetsko, announced the creation of a Ukrainian state on 30 June 1941, in German-captured Lviv. The proclamation pledged to work with Nazi Germany. The Germans disapproved of the proclamation, and for his refusal to rescind the decree, Bandera was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp. He was released in September 1944 by the Germans in the hope that he could fight the Soviet advance. Bandera negotiated with the Nazis to create the Ukrainian National Army and the Ukrainian National Committee in March 1945. After the war, Bandera settled with his family in West Germany. In 1959, Bandera was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich.
Bandera remains a highly controversial figure in Ukraine. Many Ukrainians hail him as an example, or as a martyred liberation fighter, while other Ukrainians, particularly in the south and east, condemn him as a fascist, or Nazi collaborator, whose followers, called Banderites, were responsible for massacres of Polish and Jewish civilians during World War II. On 22 January 2010, Viktor Yushchenko, the president of Ukraine, awarded Bandera the posthumous title of Hero of Ukraine, which was widely condemned. The award was annulled in 2011 given that Stepan Bandera was never a Ukrainian citizen. The controversy regarding Bandera's legacy gained further prominence following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Biography
Early life and education
Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was born on 1 January 1909 in Staryi Uhryniv, in the region of Galicia in Austria-Hungary, to Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church priest Andriy Bandera and Myroslava Głodzińska. Bandera had seven siblings: three sisters and four brothers. Bandera's younger brothers included Oleksandr, who earned a doctorate in political economy at the University of Rome, and Vasyl, who finished a degree in philosophy at the University of Lviv.Bandera grew up in a patriotic and religious household. He did not attend primary school due to World War I and was taught at home by his parents. At a young age, Bandera was undersized and slim. He sang in a choir, played guitar and mandolin, enjoyed hiking, jogging, swimming, ice skating, basketball and chess.
After the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in the wake of World War I, Eastern Galicia briefly became part of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. Bandera's father, who joined the Ukrainian Galician Army as a chaplain, was active in the nationalist movement preceding the Polish–Ukrainian War, which was fought between November 1918 to July 1919 and ended with Ukrainian defeat and incorporation of Eastern Galicia into Poland.
Mykola Mikhnovsky's 1900 publication, Independent Ukraine, influenced Bandera greatly. After graduating from a Ukrainian high school in Stryi in 1927, where he was engaged in a number of youth organizations, Bandera planned to attend the Husbandry Academy in Czechoslovakia, but he either did not get a passport or the Academy notified him that it was closed. In 1928, Bandera enrolled in the agronomy program at the Politechnika Lwowska in its branch in Dubliany, but never completed his studies due to his political activities and arrests.
Early activities
Bandera associated himself with a variety of Ukrainian organisations during his time in high school, particularly Plast, Sokil, and Organisation of the Upper Grades of the Ukrainian High Schools. In 1927 Bandera joined Ukrainian Military Organization. In February 1929 he joined Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. Bandera was drawn into national activity by, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian youth movement.During his studies, he devoted his efforts to underground and nationalist activities, for which he was arrested several times. The first time was on 14 November 1928, for illegally celebrating the 10th anniversary of the ZUNR; in 1930 with his brother Andrii; and in 1932-33 as many as six times. Between March and June 1932, he spent three months in prison in connection with the investigation of the assassination of by.
In the early 1930s, in response to attacks perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists, Polish authorities carried out the pacification of Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia against the Ukrainian minority. This resulted in destroyed property and mass detentions, and took place in southeastern voivodeships of the Second Polish Republic.
Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists
Bandera joined OUN in 1929 and quickly climbed through the ranks, thanks to the support of Okhrymovych, becoming in 1930 the head of a section distributing OUN propaganda in Eastern Galicia. A year later, he became director of propaganda for the whole OUN. After Okhrymovych's death and the flight from Poland of his successor Ivan Habrusevych in 1931, he became the leading candidate to become head of the homeland executive. But due to the fact that he was in detention at the time, he was unable to assume this function, and upon his release, he became deputy to Bohdan Kordiuk, who assumed this function. After the failure of the, Kordiuk had to step down and Bandera took over de facto his function, which was sanctioned at a conference in Berlin on 3–6 June 1933.On 29 August 1931, Polish politician Tadeusz Hołówko was assassinated by two members of the OUN Vasyl Bilas and Dmytro Danylyshyn. Both were sentenced to death. Bandera-led OUN propaganda made them martyrs and ordered Ukrainian priests in Lviv and elsewhere to ring bells on the day of their execution.
Since 1932, Bandera was assistant chief of OUN and around that time controlled several "warrior units" in Poland in places such as the Free City of Danzig, Drohobycz, Lwów, Stanisławów, Brzezany, and Truskawiec. Bandera collaborated closely with Richard Yary, who would later side with Bandera and help him form OUN-B.
On Bandera's orders OUN began a campaign of terrorist acts, such as attacks on post-offices, bomb-throwing at Polish exhibitions and murders of policemen to mass campaigns against Polish tobacco and alcohol monopolies and against the denationalization of Ukrainian youth. In 1934, Bandera was arrested in Lwów and tried twice: first, concerning involvement in a plot to assassinate the minister of internal affairs, Bronisław Pieracki, and second at a general trial of OUN executives. He was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to death. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
After the trials, Bandera became renowned and admired among Ukrainians in Poland as a symbol of a revolutionary who fought for Ukrainian independence. While in prison, Bandera was "to some extent detached from OUN discourses" but not completely isolated from the global political debates of the late 1930s thanks to Ukrainian and other newspaper subscriptions delivered to his cell.
World War II
Before World War II the territory of today's Ukraine was split between Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania and Czechoslovakia. Prior to the 1939 invasion of Poland, German military intelligence recruited OUN members into the Bergbauernhilfe unit and smuggled Ukrainian nationalists into Poland in order to erode Polish defences by conducting a terror campaign directed at Polish farmers and Jews. OUN leaders Andriy Melnyk and Bandera both served as agents of the Nazi Germany military intelligence Abwehr Second Department. Their goal was to run diversion activities after Germany's attack on the Soviet Union. This information is part of the testimony that Abwehr Colonel Erwin Stolze gave on 25 December 1945 and submitted to the Nuremberg trials, with a request to be admitted as evidence.Bandera was freed from Brest Prison in Eastern Poland in early September 1939, as a result of the invasion of Poland. There are differing accounts of the circumstances of his release. Soon thereafter Eastern Poland was occupied by the Soviet Union. Upon release from prison, Bandera moved first to Lviv, but after realising it would be occupied by the Soviets, Bandera together with other OUN members, moved to Kraków, the capital of Germany's occupational General Government. where, according to Tadeusz Piotrowski, he established close connections with the German Abwehr and Wehrmacht. There, he also came in contact with the leader of the OUN, Andriy Atanasovych Melnyk. In 1940, the political differences and expectations between the two leaders caused the OUN to split into two factions, OUN-B and OUN-M, each one claiming legitimacy.
The factions differed in ideology, strategy and tactics: the OUN-M faction led by Melnyk preached a more conservative approach to nation-building, while the OUN-B faction, led by Bandera, supported a revolutionary approach; however, both factions exhibited similar levels of radical nationalism, fascism, antisemitism, xenophobia and violence. The vast majority of young OUN members joined Bandera's faction. OUN-B was devoted to the independence of Ukraine, as a single-party fascist totalitarian state free of national minorities. It was later implicated in the Holocaust.
Before the independence proclamation of 30 June 1941, Bandera oversaw the formation of so-called "Mobile Groups", which were small groups of OUN-B members who would travel from General Government to Western Ukraine and, after a German advance to Eastern Ukraine, encourage support for the OUN-B and establish local authorities run by OUN-B activists. In total, approximately 7,000 people participated in these mobile groups, and they found followers among a wide circle of intellectuals, such as Ivan Bahriany, Vasyl Barka, Hryhorii Vashchenko and many others.
In spring 1941, Bandera held meetings with the heads of Germany's intelligence, regarding the formation of "Nachtigall" and "Roland" Battalions. In the spring of that year, the OUN received 2.5 million marks for subversive activities inside the Soviet Union. Gestapo and Abwehr officials protected Bandera's followers, as both organisations intended to use them for their own purposes.
On 30 June 1941, with the arrival of Nazi troops in Ukraine, the OUN-B unilaterally declared an independent Ukrainian state. The proclamation pledged a cooperation of the new Ukrainian state with Nazi Germany under the leadership of Hitler. The declaration was accompanied by violent pogroms. There is no evidence that Bandera actively supported or participated in the Lviv pogroms or acts of violence against Jewish and Polish civilians, but he was well informed about the violence and was "unable or unwilling to instruct Ukrainian nationalist military troops to protect vulnerable minorities under their control". As German historian Olaf Glöckner writes, Bandera "failed to manage this problem inside his forces, just like Symon Petljura failed 25 years before him."
OUN leaders' expectation that the Nazi regime would post-factum recognize an independent fascist Ukraine as an Axis ally proved to be wrong. German authorities requested that the declaration be withdrawn, but Stetsko and Bandera refused. The Germans barred Bandera from moving to newly conquered Lviv, limiting his residency to occupied Kraków. On 5 July, Bandera was brought to Berlin, where he was placed in honourable captivity. On 12 July, the prime minister of the newly formed Ukrainian National Government, Yaroslav Stetsko, was arrested and taken to Berlin. Although released from custody on 14 July, both were required to stay in Berlin. Bandera was free to move around the city, but could not leave it. The Germans closed OUN-B offices in Berlin and Vienna, and on 15 September 1941 Bandera and leading OUN members were arrested by the Gestapo.
By the end of 1941, relations between Nazi Germany and the OUN-B had soured to the point where a Nazi document dated 25 November 1941 stated that "the Bandera Movement is preparing a revolt in the Reichskommissariat which has as its ultimate aim the establishment of an independent Ukraine. All functionaries of the Bandera Movement must be arrested at once and, after thorough interrogation, are to be liquidated".
In January 1942, Bandera was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp's special prison cell building for high-profile political prisoners such as Horia Sima, the chancellor of Austria, Kurt Schuschnigg or Stefan Grot-Rowecki and high-risk escapees. Bandera was not completely cut off from the outside world; his wife visited him regularly and was able to help him keep in touch with his followers. In April 1944, Bandera and his deputy Yaroslav Stetsko were approached by a Reich Security Main Office official to discuss plans for diversions and sabotage against the Soviet Army.
Bandera's release was preceded by lengthy talks between the Germans and the UPA in Galicia and Volhynia. Local talks and agreements took place as early as the end of 1943, talks at the central level of the OUN-B began in March 1944 and ended with the conclusion of an informal agreement in August or September 1944. The talks from the OUN-B Provid side were led mainly by Ivan Hrynokh. Meanwhile, in July 1944, the formation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council took place, which was intended as a supra-party organisation that constituted the civilian body overseeing the UPA and was intended as the supreme authority in Ukraine. In reality, only members or sympathizers of the OUN-B took part in its formation. became president of the UHVR, but real power rested in the hands of the General Secretariat, headed by Roman Shukhevych. At the congress, decisions were made to stop any open collaboration with the Germans, creating a government alongside them was excluded, only taking supplies from them was considered. It was planned to carry out partisan fighting in the rear of the approaching Soviet army. A decision was also taken to move away from radically nationalist rhetoric towards greater democratisation. A UHVR foreign mission led by Mykola Lebed was sent to establish contact with Western governments.
On 28 September 1944, Bandera was released by the German authorities and moved to house arrest. Shortly after, the Germans released some 300 OUN members, including Stetsko and Melnyk. The release of OUN members was one of the few successes of Lebed's mission on behalf of the UHVR, which failed to establish contacts with the Western Allies. Bandera reacted negatively to the changes taking place within the OUN-B in Ukraine. His opposition was provoked by the 'democratisation' of the OUN-B and, above all, the relegation of the former leadership of the organisation to purely symbolic roles. On 5 October 1944, SS-Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger met with Bandera and offered him the opportunity to join Andrey Vlasov and his Russian Liberation Army, which Bandera rejected. In December 1944, the Abwehr moved Bandera and Stetsko to Kraków in order to prepare the Ukrainian unit to be parachuted to the rear of the Soviet army. From there, they sent Yurii Lopatynskyi as a courier to Shukhevych. Bandera informed him that he was ready to return to Ukraine, while Stetsko informed him that he still considered himself the Ukrainian prime minister.
Lopatynskyi arrived to Shukhevych in early January 1945. At a meeting of the Provid on 5 and 6 February 1945, it was decided that Bandera's return to Ukraine was pointless, and that it might be more beneficial for him to remain in the West, where, as a former Nazi prisoner, he could organize support of international opinion. Bandera was re-elected as leader of the whole OUN. Roman Shukhevych resigned as the leader of the OUN and became the leader of OUN in Ukraine and Bandera's deputy. The leaders of the OUN in Ukraine also came to the conclusion that the German-Soviet war would soon end in a Soviet victory, and a decision was made to continue the fight against the Soviets with smaller units, in order to maintain the will to fight among the population. It was also decided to hold talks with the Polish underground to conclude an anti-Soviet alliance. At that point, the cooperation with Germans basically ceased with the loss of direct contact and the front moving further west.
In January, Bandera was in Lehnin, west of Berlin. Later he went to Weimar, where he took part in the formation of the Ukrainian National Committee as one of the leaders alongside Pavlo Shandruk, Volodymyr Kubijovyč, Andriy Melnyk, Oleksandr Semenko and Pavlo Skoropadsky. In March, the UNK appointed Shandrukh as commander of the newly formed Ukrainian National Army, which was to fight the Soviets alongside the Germans; the Waffen-SS Galizien division was incorporated. Bandera later denied in conversations with the CIA that he had been involved in the formation of these organisations or any collaboration with Germany after his release. In February 1945, at a conference of the OUN-B in Vienna, Bandera was made the leader of the Foreign Units of the OUN. It was there that he openly criticised for the first time the changes that had taken place in the OUN-B in Ukraine. With the Red Army approaching, Bandera left Vienna and travelled to Innsbruck via Prague.