Slandered by history: Stepan Bandera. True biography of Stepan Bandera

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 of modern times 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 integral part 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 into 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 resettlement in Western Ukraine Poles. 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 free time dedicated 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” ─ leader regional organization 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 not lucky. 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 entourage. 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 the Second world war. He met her at 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 the several months that he lived with Soviet power, of course, 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 Soviet Army approached the lands of Western Ukraine. According to the calculations of the German command Ukrainian nationalists were supposed to start a guerrilla 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 search for Bandera as an accomplice fascist 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. Guerrilla warfare in Western Ukraine lasted 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 secure in his conspiracy that his own children for a long time They 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 real reason 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. They'll do it to him plastic surgery, after which Stashinsky will live in South Africa under a fictitious name.

Poisonous jet

Munich, warm October day 1959. Local time 12.50. A young man with a rolled-up newspaper in his hand approached the entrance of a gray five-story building at 7 Kreutmeierstrasse and opened it with a key. front door and disappeared into the entrance doorway. A few minutes later, an elderly man appeared at the same entrance with the remains of sparse hair on his almost bare skull and, holding shopping bags in his right hand, used the left key to open the same door. Entering the entrance, he saw someone coming down the stairs young man with an impassive face, who, passing by him and already holding the door bracket, sharply raised his hand with the newspaper. The elderly gentleman did not have time to get scared, just as he did not have time to raise left hand(he was left-handed) to grab the Walther pistol, which he always had under his right armpit.

There was a barely audible bang - and a stream of instantly evaporated liquid hit the bald gentleman in the face. The young man, who already had one foot on the street, walked out of the entrance and slammed the door behind him. He did not hear the sound of a falling body, did not see the blood-red tomatoes scattering from the bag on the floor. The young man walked towards the city park, where he threw something metal into the stream.

This is how the death sentence was carried out Supreme Court USSR executioner of thousands of Soviet citizens, OUN leader Stepan Bandera.

The young man who carried out the sentence was Soviet agent Bogdan Stashinsky, who had the agent pseudonyms “Oleg” and “Moroz”. He was not new to this business. In October 1957, there, in Munich, Stashinsky liquidated the famous theorist and ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism, Bandera member Lev Rebeta. The method of carrying out the sentence was the same, only this time Bogdan had more perfect weapon: a syringe pistol, it was manufactured by a special KGB laboratory. It contained ampoules of hydrocyanic acid, broken and pushed out by a piston under the influence of a micropowder charge. The coronary vessels of the heart instantly compressed, leading to cardiac arrest. Then the vessels were returned to their original state, and forensic experts could not find any signs of violent death.

OUN noose

Stepan Bandera was guilty of the mass extermination of Soviet citizens - Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, and therefore the death penalty was a fair punishment for him. He was a terrorist by vocation. A few years after graduating from the Higher Polytechnic School, Bandera was arrested. For what? For the murder of the Polish Minister of Internal Affairs Peracki. He was sentenced to death “for atrocities and bullying of the Ukrainian people.” Bandera faced the death penalty. But later it was changed to life imprisonment.

Bandera was released after five years in prison by the Germans who captured Poland. He immediately organizes a fight against Soviet power in Western Ukraine. Then he moves to Germany, where he proclaims himself the leader of the new revolutionary OUN. From now on, every member of the OUN must live by the principle: either you will “get a free and independent Ukraine,” or you will die in the fight for it.

But the Germans did not need “independent Ukraine”. When the Ukrainian legion “Nachtigal” (“Nightingale”), created by Bandera with the help of the Abwehr, burst into Lviv and Bandera proclaimed the restoration of the Ukrainian state, he was immediately arrested. And he was imprisoned. And, even while sitting in a concentration camp, Bandera created the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) of thousands. It was then that Hitler drew attention to him. Bandera was released for sabotage in the rear of the Red Army.

Everyone who opposed “independent Ukraine” and for an alliance with Russia was subject to destruction. The so-called security service of the OUN - SB - was especially zealous. Its militants killed thousands of people. This was usually done using a noose rope. To intimidate the population, sophisticated torture and executions were used - people sawed off their heads, hung them by their feet, and impaled them.

In 1945, in the village of Kravniki, Kalush district, Stanislavsk (Ivano-Frankivsk region), members of the SB gang brutally raped an 18-year-old daughter in front of her mother, and then burned her alive, putting her head in a burning stove, just because she had returned from forced labor. working in Germany, the girl did not give her suitcase with things to the bandits. In 1947, in one of the villages of the Lviv region, in front of a six-year-old boy and his ten-year-old sister, militants from the Security Service strangled the parents with a noose, and then announced: “Live and tell your children about us”... These elderly people live today in Kyiv.

After 1945, Bandera quickly found a new owner - American intelligence. The Americans completely took over the maintenance of the ZCH (Overseas Units) of the OUN who settled in Munich. They dropped paratroopers-emissaries of the OUN, radio operators, spies and saboteurs into the territory of Western Ukraine, and supplied the underground with weapons. The OUN leaders were ready to take any steps just to take Ukraine away from the “Bolshevik occupiers-Muscovites.”

The security officer turned out to be a traitor

For the liquidation of OUN ideologist Rebeta, agent Stashinsky received from the KGB monetary reward and a valuable gift - a Zenit camera, and for Bandera - the Order of the Red Banner. According to all the rules of the intelligence services, this should have been the end of the agent’s career. He should have settled in Moscow with a good pension and an apartment, but... Stashinsky was allowed to go to his German wife in Berlin.

And then what the Ukrainian security officers feared so much happened. On August 12, 1961, a day before the sectoral borders were closed in Berlin, Stashinsky... fled to the West! They were looking for him... The author of these lines, together with Stashinsky’s curator, was sent to West Berlin to search for the traitorous agent.

As soon as we crossed the sector border, the curator said: “George, if we find Bogdan, leave. I will kill Stashinsky. And myself. I consider myself guilty of not recognizing the traitor.” Bogdan was never found...

In the memory of his supporters and followers, Bandera remains as a national hero and fighter for the liberation of Ukraine from the “Moscow occupiers”, for the creation of a free and “independent Ukraine”. In a number of cities in Ukraine there are his busts, the streets bear his name, and this cannot be ignored. The “leader’s” grandson, also Stepan Bandera, who lives today in Canada, is going to settle in Western Ukraine, where he plans to continue “Banderaism.”

...I don’t know where 70-year-old Stashinsky is now and whether he is alive, under what name he is hiding in the West from Ukrainian nationalists, who also sentenced him to death. But, I think, until the end of his days he will not forget the trusting eyes of the dog - on it, in front of me, he tested the effect of the weapon with which he killed Stepan Bandera...

Stepan Andreevich Bandera, the ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism, is an extraordinary personality. There is no end to the debate as to who should consider him - a defender of the independence of Ukraine or an accomplice of fascism.

Bandera Stepan biography

Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Stary Uhriniv, Kalush district (now Ivano-Frankivsk region) in the family of a Greek Catholic priest. After civil war this part of Ukraine became part of Poland. From a young age, Stepan Bandera was attracted to political activity. In 1922 he joined the Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth. In 1928, he became a student at the agronomy department of the Lvov Higher Polytechnic School (however, he failed to graduate).

After enough short time Having joined the organization of Ukrainian nationalists (OUN), Bandera led the most radical youth group. The goal of the OUN was to create eastern lands Poland an independent Ukrainian state.

Then Bandera's career went on an upward trajectory. In 1933, he, having become the plenipotentiary representative of the OUN in Galicia and Bukovina, actively participated in the fight against the Polish authorities. In acts of retaliation and murders of opponents, Bandera took active participation. For example, he was one of the organizers of the murder of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Peracki.

All the organizers of this crime were arrested by the Polish police in the summer of 1936. The leaders of the conspiracy (including Bandera) were sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment.

After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bandera left the prison walls and soon began actively collaborating with the German military intelligence"Abwehr". And in April forty-one, Stepan Bandera was elected head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Cooperation with the Nazis continued. Shortly before Germany attacked the USSR, Bandera created a Ukrainian legion from members of the OUN. A little later, this legion, called Nachtigal, became part of the Brandenburg-800 regiment. 2.5 million marks received by Bandera from the Nazis were intended for subversive activities and intelligence operations in the territory Soviet Union.

In the summer of 1941, after the arrival of the Nazis, Bandera called for “ Ukrainian people help everywhere German army smash Moscow and Bolshevism." At the end of June forty-one, Nachtigal, together with the Nazis, entered Lviv. On the same day, the restoration of the great Ukrainian power was proclaimed. Bandera ignored the opinion of the German command on this matter. The Act on the Revival of the Ukrainian State was read out, and an order was issued on the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the creation of a national government.

The Nazis immediately took action in response to this “arbitrariness.” Bandera was arrested, and 15 leaders of Ukrainian nationalists were shot. The Nachtigall Legion (in the ranks of which ferment began after the repressions) was recalled from the front. Then he was engaged in performing police functions in the occupied territories. Bandera looked at the world through prison bars for a year and a half, and then another punishment followed - he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. However, he, along with other Ukrainian nationalists, was kept here in privileged conditions. Bandera members could not only meet each other, but also receive food and money from their relatives. More than once they left the camp. The purpose of their “walks” was contacts with the “secret” OUN. The nationalists also visited the Friedenthal castle, where the OUN agent and sabotage school was located.

One of the main initiators

It was Bandera who was one of the main initiators of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (October 14, 1942), the purpose of which was proclaimed to be the struggle for the independence of Ukraine. An agreement was reached between representatives of the German authorities and the OUN that the UPA would protect against Soviet partisans railways and bridges, provide full support to the German occupation forces.

What was promised to the Banderaites in return? Supplying UPA units with ammunition and weapons and even the opportunity to create a Ukrainian state in the event of the Nazis’ victory over the USSR, however, under German protectorate. Soldiers of the rebel army took part in punitive operations of the Nazis. Until the end of hostilities, Bandera collaborated with the Abwehr in terms of training sabotage groups.

The war is over, but...

Bandera continued his activities in the OUN (its centralized administration was in West Germany). In 1947 he became its director. In 1953 and 1955 he was re-elected to this position. Stepan Bandera directed terrorist activities OUN and UPA on the territory of the Soviet Union. Later, Ukrainian nationalists were actively used by the intelligence services Western countries in the fight against the USSR.

IN recent years Bandera lived in Munich with his family, taken from East Germany. On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bandera was shot dead in the entrance of his own house by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky.

Time will put everything in its place

In 1992, after the 50th anniversary of the UPA was celebrated, attempts were made in Ukraine to give its participants the status of war veterans. And then, in general, the OUN was relieved of responsibility for cooperation with Nazi Germany and the recognition of the UPA as a national liberation movement that defended the “true” independence of Ukraine.

In January 2010, Stepan Bandera was awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine (posthumously). A decree on this was signed by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, and his second decree recognized members of the UPA as fighters for the independence of Ukraine. Monuments to Stepan Bandera were erected in the Lviv, Ternopil, and Ivano-Frankivsk regions. In many cities and villages of Western Ukraine, streets are named after him.

Many veterans of the Great Patriotic War do not agree with this policy of the Ukrainian authorities. They accuse Bandera's supporters of collaborating with the fascists. However, part of Ukrainian society (living mainly in the west of the country) considers Bandera national hero. Well, time, as they say, will put everything in its place.

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, professor of philology at the Lviv Ukrainian Gymnasium Ivan Babiy, 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, a resident of the OUN showed up German intelligence in Poland, Major Knauer, who was actually S. Bandera’s instructor.

Very important fact- with Hitler coming to power in Germany in January 1934, the Berlin headquarters of the OUN became special department was assigned to 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 Stoltz (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, the prominent Ukrainian nationalist Bandera Stepan was recruited, who during the war was released from prison, where he had been imprisoned by the Polish authorities for participating in 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 the Ukrainian independent 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. territory and cheap labor force 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. To give power in the territory that was captured by regular German military formations to Ukrainian nationalists only because they also took part in the hostilities, but mainly carried out dirty work punishers of civilians and policemen, on the part of Germany would be ridiculous. 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 new order in Europe and the world and helps the Ukrainian people 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 who are at the head modern Ukraine, The Act of June 30, 1941 is considered the independence day 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 go through the ranks of soldiers with yellow-blakit 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 practically under suspended 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 South Ossetia, the destruction of hundreds of civilians.

short biography outlined in this article.

Stepan Bandera short biography

Stepan Bandera— Ukrainian politician, one of the main ideologists and theorists of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, chairman of the OUN-B Wire.

Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 in Stary Ugrin, in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, in the family of a Greek Catholic priest.

From 1919 to 1927 Bandera studied at the Stryi gymnasium. After graduation, in 1928 he entered the agronomic department of the Higher Polytechnic School in Lvov. Stepan Bandera studied there for eight semesters, but never passed the diploma exam due to his political activities.

Since 1930 he became a member of the OUN, deeply imbued with its ideology. In 1932 - 1933, Stepan Andreevich became deputy and head of the Regional Executive, the so-called commandant of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO).

In June 1934, Polish police arrested Stepan Andreevich Bandera and other members of the OUN. During the Warsaw trial they were tried for belonging to the OUN and for organizing political actions. Stepan Andreevich was sentenced to prison in the cities of Kielce, Wronki and Berest, where he alternately served until 1939. Even there he remained a guide for the OUN and maintained contact with the underground.

In connection with the German attack on Poland, the situation in the areas where prisoners were held became so critical that the prison administration hastily evacuated and thus all prisoners were released. In parallel with this, OUN conductor Evgeniy Konovalets dies and the OUN conductor is headed by Andrei Melnik, a colonel. Returning to the ranks of the OUN, Stepan Bandera demanded his release and a change in the organization’s tactics. Such events contributed to the emergence of a serious conflict. Its consequence was the separation from the OUN of a group of people who supported Bandera and the formation of the OUN-B organization in April 1941. He actively fought against Moscow and Soviet power, for which the Soviet government saw him as a dangerous enemy.

As a result of this situation, Stepan Bandera constantly changes his place of residence, moving from place to place. He finally settled in the city of Munich, where his daughter studied. There he spent the last years of his life using a fake passport in the name of Stefan Popel.

October 15, 1959 he was killed by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky, who shot him in the face with a special pistol a stream of potassium cyanide. Five days later he was buried in a Munich cemetery.