To prepare the 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 Kalushsky district, in the Stanislav region (Galicia), which was part of Austria-Hungary (now the 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 orders, 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 was located in Berlin, at 11 Hauptstrasse under the sign "Union of Ukrainian Elders in Germany." Bandera himself was trained in Danzig, at the intelligence school.

In 1934, on the orders of Stepan Bandera, an employee of the Soviet consulate Alexei Maylov was killed in Lvov. Shortly before the commission of this murder, Major Knauer, a resident of German intelligence in Poland, who was actually an instructor of S. Bandera, showed up in the OUN.

A very important fact is that when Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1934, the Berlin headquarters of the OUN, as a special department, was enrolled in the headquarters of the Gestapo. On the outskirts of Berlin - Wilhelmsdorf - at the expense of German intelligence, barracks were also built, where OUN militants and their officers were trained. Meanwhile, the Polish Minister of the Interior, General Bronisław Pieracki, issued a sharp condemnation of 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 Jarom, the German intelligence agent who oversaw the OUN, to eliminate Peratsky. On June 15, 1934, Peratsky was killed by the people of Stepan Bandera, but this time they were not lucky and the nationalists were captured and convicted. For the murder of Bronislav Peratsky, Stepan Bandera, Nikolai Lebed and Yaroslav Karpinets were sentenced to death by the Warsaw District Court. The rest, including Roman Shukhevych, to significant prison terms.

In the summer of 1936, Stepan Bandera, along with other members of the Regional Executive of the OUN, appeared before a court in Lvov on charges of directing terrorist activities. The court considered, among other things, the circumstances of the murder of Ivan Babiy and Yakov Bachinsky by members of the OUN. In total, at the Warsaw and Lvov trials, Stepan Bandera was sentenced seven times to life imprisonment.

In September 1939, when Germany occupied Poland, Stepan Bandera was released and began to actively cooperate 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 are being taken along the line of 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 passed death sentences on the same OUN members for deviating from the organization's line - Nikolai Stsiborsky, Emelyan Senik, and Yevgeny Shulga, who were executed.

As follows from the memoirs of Yaroslav Stetsk, Stepan Bandera, through the mediation of Richard Yaroy shortly before the war, secretly met with Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. During the meeting, Bandera, according to Stetsko, "presented Ukrainian positions very clearly and clearly, having found 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 be called Nachtigal, in Ukrainian “nightingale”. The regiment carried out special assignments to conduct sabotage operations in the rear of the USSR troops.

However, not only Stepan Bandera communicated with the Nazis, but also persons authorized by him. For example, in the archives of the special services, documents have been preserved that the Bandera people themselves offered their services to the Nazis. In the protocol of interrogation of an Abwehr officer, Lazarek Yu.D. it is said that he was a witness and participant in the negotiations between Abwehr representative Eichern and Bandera's assistant Nikolai Lebed.

“Lebed said that Bandera would provide the necessary personnel for schools of saboteurs, they would also be able to agree to the use of the entire underground of Galicia and Volhynia for sabotage and reconnaissance purposes on the territory of the USSR.”

To prepare a rebellion on the territory of the USSR, as well as to conduct intelligence activities, Stepan Bandera received two and a half million marks from Nazi Germany.

According to the Soviet counterintelligence, the rebellion was planned for the spring of 1941. Why in the spring? After all, the leadership of the OUN should have understood that open action would inevitably end in complete defeat and physical destruction of the entire organization. The answer comes by itself if we remember that the original date of the attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR was May 1941. However, Hitler was forced to transfer part of the troops to the Balkans in order to take control of Yugoslavia. Interestingly, at the same time, the OUN ordered all OUN members who served in the Yugoslav army or police to go over to the side of the Croatian Nazis.

In April 1941, the OUN convened the Great Gathering of Ukrainian nationalists in Krakow, where Stepan Bandera was elected head of the OUN, and Yaroslav Stetsko as his deputy. In connection with the receipt of new instructions for the underground, the activities of the OUN groups on the territory of Ukraine became even more active. Only in April, 38 Soviet party workers died at their hands, dozens of sabotage were carried out in transport, industrial and agricultural enterprises.

During the Great Patriotic War, the Germans had high hopes for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, but Stepan Bandera also allowed himself liberties. He could not 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 force of Ukraine.

The trick with the establishment of statehood was needed in order to show the population its importance. On June 30, 1941, Stepan Bandera in Lvov announced the "revival" of the Ukrainian state.

Residents of the city 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 the clergy were driven to this solemn gathering. The inhabitants of the city 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 was no question of any revival and granting it the status of a state even under the patronage of Nazi Germany. Giving power to the territory that was seized by regular German military formations to Ukrainian nationalists just because they also took part in the hostilities, but mostly did the dirty work of punishing civilians and policemen, would be ridiculous on the part of Germany. Although Bandera meekly served the Nazis. This is evidenced by the main text of the Act of "Revival of the Ukrainian State" of June 30, 1941:

“The newly reborn Ukrainian State will work closely with the National Socialist Greater Germany, which, under the leadership of its Leader Adolf Hitler, creates a 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 Collective Ukrainian State and a new order throughout the world.

Among Ukrainian nationalists and many officials who are 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 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 Lvov. Even before the war, Ukrainian Nazis made “black lists”, as a result, 7 thousand people were killed in the city in 6 days.

Here is what Saul Friedman wrote about the massacre organized by Bandera in Lvov in the book “Pogromist” published in New York. “During the first three days of July 1941, the Nachtigal battalion killed seven thousand Jews in the vicinity of Lvov. Jews - professors, lawyers, doctors - were forced to lick all the stairs of four-story buildings before execution and carry garbage in their mouths from one building to another. Then, forced to pass through the line of warriors with yellow-black armbands, they were stabbed with bayonets.

In early July 1941, Stepan Bandera, together with Yaroslav Stetsko and his associates, were sent to Berlin at the disposal of the Abwehr - 2 to Colonel Erwin Stolze. There, the leadership of Nazi Germany demanded to abandon the Act of "Revival of the Ukrainian State" of June 30, 1941, to which Bandera agreed and called on "the Ukrainian people to help the German army everywhere to smash Moscow and Bolshevism."

During their stay in Berlin, numerous meetings began with representatives of various departments, at which Bandera persistently assured that without their help the German army could not defeat Muscovy. A numerous stream of messages, explanations, dispatches, "declarations" and "memorandums" went to Hitler, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and other Fuhrers of Nazi Germany, in which they either justified themselves 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 succeeded in replacing its commander Dmitry Klyachkivsky with his protege Roman Shukhevych.

Yes, it must be admitted that S. Bandera and a number of OUN members spent some time actually under conditional 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 use S. Bandera further in illegal work in Ukraine. Because he tried to create an image of the enemy of Germany. But most of all they feared that for the massacre organized in Lvov, they would simply destroy him.

The fact that S. Bandera was kept in a German camp by Ukrainian nationalists is now trying to pass off as the massacre of the Nazis over him, as a fighter against the invaders of Ukraine. But it's not. Bandera freely moved around the camp, left it, received food and money. S. Bandera himself attended the school of OUN agents and sabotage personnel, located not far from the camp. The instructor at this school was a recent officer of the Nachtigel special battalion, Yuri Lopatinsky, through whom S. Bandera communicated with the OUN-UPA operating on the territory of Ukraine.

In 1944, Soviet troops cleared Western Ukraine of the Nazis. Fearing punishment, many members of the OUN-UPA fled with the German troops, moreover, the hatred of local residents for the OUN-UPA in Volhynia and Galicia was so high that they themselves extradited them or killed them. Stepan Bandera, being released from the camp, joined the work as part of the 202nd Abwehr team in Krakow and began to train OUN-UPA sabotage detachments.

Irrefutable proof of this is the testimony of a former Gestapo officer, Lieutenant Siegfried Müller, given by him during the investigation on September 19, 1945.

“On December 27, 1944, I prepared a group of saboteurs to transfer it to the rear of the Red Army with special assignments. Stepan Bandera, in my presence, personally instructed these agents and transmitted through them to the headquarters of the UPA an order to intensify subversive work in the rear of the Red Army and establish regular radio communications with the Abwehrkommando-202.

When the war approached Berlin, Bandera was instructed to form detachments from the remnants of the Ukrainian Nazis and defend Berlin. Bandera created detachments, but he escaped.

After the end of the war, he lived in Munich, 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. Just 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 the direct perpetrator? There is a version that the same Ukrainian nationalists, associates of Stepan Bandera. The Nazis did not like to do the dirty work themselves, they often shifted it to their lackeys.

At that time, we did not have time to clarify and double-check all the circumstances of the execution - the Soviet Union was gone.

That's who in Ukraine V. Yushchenko and his associates erect on the podium. Then who are they? The question is not rhetorical, especially in the light of arming the Georgian army, sending Ukrainian specialists to it who participated in the barbaric destruction of South Ossetia, the destruction of hundreds of civilians.

Vladimir Hanelis, Bat Yam

After the events on the Kiev Maidan, both old and young in different ways - from left to right and right to left - scratch their tongues about the name of Stepan Bandera. Even those who do not speak the language. Often they pronounce - "Bender", "Bendera", apparently taking Stepan Bandera for a native of Bessarabian Bender or a descendant of Ostap Bender.

… The name of the Ukrainian politician, ideologist and theorist of Ukrainian nationalism has become for most of those who eat “noodles” from Russian television plates a “horror story”, “Barmaley”, a kind of bloody cannibal worse than Hitler, Himmler, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky combined.

A few days ago, at some celebration, my table neighbor said that during the war, Bandera himself, together with the Nazis, killed Jews. When I asked how he, sitting in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, could do this, the man pouted in an offended way and turned away ...

An article by BBC correspondent in Moscow Anton Krechetnikov "Four myths about Stepan Bandera" has been published on the Internet. The article is very objective and "cold-blooded". Let me give you a few quotes. In general, hundreds of various books, thousands of magazine and newspaper publications have been published about Stepan Bandera, dozens of documentaries have been shot.

“As for Bandera himself, truth, half-truths and myths are closely intertwined in the idea of ​​him.”

“July 5 (1941 - V.Kh.) Bandera was arrested in Krakow and placed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he spent more than three years in solitary confinement - however, in a special section for "political persons".

“In their propaganda leaflets, the Germans called Bandera an agent of Stalin.”

“September 25, 1944… the German authorities released Bandera, brought him to Berlin and offered cooperation, but he put forward the recognition of the “Rebirth Act” (Ukraine as an independent state – V.Kh.) as an indispensable condition. The agreement was not concluded and until the end of the war, Bandera was in Germany in an indefinite status.

“According to the conclusions of the government commission to study the activities of the OUN and UPA, created in 1997 by order of the President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma, the murder of Jews, Polish intelligentsia and supporters of the Soviet government in the early days of the occupation of Lviv, known as the “massacre of Lviv professors”, was the work of the SD and a nationalist unorganized mob.”

“The division “Galicia”, formed in April 1943 by the German occupation authorities from local volunteers, had nothing to do with the OUN-UPA. Attempts to bring Bandera and his supporters under the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal regarding the SS are designed for ignorant people.

“According to the “Information on the number of dead Soviet citizens at the hands of OUN bandits for the period 1944-1953.” dated April 17, 1973, signed by the chairman of the KGB of Ukraine Vitaliy Fedorchuk, the number of people killed by Bandera was 30,676 people, including 8,250 military and security officials.

As follows from the closed resolution of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU “Issues of the Western Regions of the Ukrainian SSR” dated May 26, 1953, during the same time, the authorities killed 153,000 people, sent 134,000 to the Gulag, and deported 203,000. Every third or fourth family suffered. Both sides showed extreme brutality.

Cases have been recorded when OUN members executed prisoners by tying their legs to bent trees and tearing their bodies apart…

... The authorities hanged partisans and underground fighters in the squares and left the corpses in plain sight in order to seize those who would try to bury them.

According to independent historians, Bandera was a radical nationalist by conviction and a terrorist by methods. If he managed to create and lead the Ukrainian state, it certainly would not be liberal and democratic. Bandera is not the figure that should be raised to the shield if Ukraine dreams of a European future.

On the other hand, Stalin or Dzerzhinsky were even more criminals - at least in terms of the number of victims. If some Russians openly praise them and do not meet with rebuff from society and the state, then why shouldn’t some part of Ukrainians justify Bandera?”

After such a protracted, but, in my opinion, necessary introduction, I offer the readers of MZ an interview with Stepan Bandera, the grandson of Stepan Bandera. I took it to Kyiv in June 2000. Stepan Bandera Jr. lived in Ukraine at that time, was engaged in journalism (he now lives in Canada).

He is young (30 years old), not tall, well-fed, friendly, open, smiling. Well educated - journalist, specialist in public relations and civil law. He is single, a citizen of Canada, lives in Kyiv… The grandson of a man whose name is pronounced in Ukraine, and not only in Ukraine, with admiration or hatred.

– How does a person with that name live and work in Ukraine?

- Interesting! Not so long ago I was supposed to give a lecture at Donetsk University. I ran along the corridors there - I could not find the right audience in any way. He opened the door of one of the offices, turned to the man sitting there. He asked, “Who are you, what is your last name?” I answered - Stepan Bandera. The man twisted his finger at his temple and said: “And I am Simon Petlyura!” I had to show documents... This man was in shock...

The name helps me to open many doors in Ukraine. When I ask you to tell someone that Stepan Bandera called, there was no case that the person did not call back ...

But sometimes people believe that a grandson must, by inheritance, genetically, have the qualities of a grandfather - a leader, a leader ...

– Have you ever wanted to be a leader, a leader?

- Of course, I wanted to. Everyone wants to be a leader when they are young. I saw the respect with which people treat me, and I considered myself an important person. But over the years, life experience comes, you begin to understand everything a little differently ...

- Where were you born? Who are your parents?

– I was born in 1970 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This is the heart of Canada, like Poltava is the heart of Ukraine. Then my parents moved to Toronto. There, after the murder of my grandfather and the trial of his murderer Stashinsky (1), my grandmother lived. My father, Andrey, worked in Toronto.

- The son of Stepan Bandera?

- Yes. My grandfather had three children. The eldest daughter, Natalya, was born in 1941, my father was born in 1947, and the third child, Lesya, was born in 1949 (2). In 1985, Natalya died, a year earlier, her father died ...

In Ukraine, in Stryi, my grandfather's sisters live - Vladimir and Oksana (3).
They spent many years in Soviet prisons, camps, were exiled to Siberia
and returned home only after the declaration of independence of Ukraine.

- Who was your father, Andrei Bandera?

- He was a very interesting person, a public figure, a journalist, published in Toronto in English the newspaper "Gomin Ukrainy" ("Homin of Ukraine"). Father used his name, his authority to unite Ukrainians, to awaken national feelings in them.

Did he talk about his father?

- Very little…

- Why?

- Firstly, my father was a very busy person, he traveled a lot, he was not at home much. Secondly, this is the main thing, he was only twelve years old when Stepan Bandera was killed. But even when the grandfather was alive, the family lived in conditions of strict secrecy. Their communication was limited. My father lived under a false name - Poppel. Under the same surname, he came to Canada. As a child, my father did not know whose son he was ...

- As an adult, you probably read the works of your grandfather, memoirs about him. How do you feel today about his personality, his ideas, his struggles?

- My grandfather is a symbol of his generation, a symbol of his time, a symbol of the struggle for the independence of his country. Such as Nelson Mandela became in South Africa. I regard my grandfather as a representative of a very idealistic, romantic generation of fighters who gave their lives for the freedom of Ukraine.

They fought against Germany and the USSR, a handful of people against giants, against huge war monsters... I respect their idealism, their sacrifice, their idea – no one will come from Washington, Moscow, or Berlin to build an independent Ukrainian state. You need to rely only on your own strength.

- Stepan, but you know very well that for many people the name of your grandfather has become another symbol - a symbol of the cruelty of a bandit who shed a sea of ​​blood ...

- Every totalitarian regime needs the image of a cruel enemy who wants to destroy the state by any means, does not disdain violence and murder. Moscow propaganda created such an image - the image of Bandera, Bandera, Hitler's - the image of a Jew ...

- Since the word “Jew” was mentioned in our conversation, let's talk about this topic. I often read and heard that your grandfather is to blame for the massacres of Ukrainian nationalists over Jews during the war and after it. How do you feel about such statements and what was the attitude towards Jews in your family?

– My grandfather spent most of the war in a German concentration camp. So in the destruction of the Jews, he can not be guilty. You will not find anti-Semitic statements in any of his works, in any of the documents of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Two brothers of my grandfather, Alexander and Vasily, died in Auschwitz (4). Their blood mixed with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Jews who died there - this is very important to me. At the same time, I do not rule out that various things could and have happened during the war.

My father and mother brought me up in the spirit of tolerance, respect for people of any nationality. There was not even a hint of racism or anti-Semitism in our family. In the camps, in the schools of Ukrainian nationalists, in the USA and Canada, everywhere we were told: there were Jewish medical workers in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. This is also written in the Chronicle of the UPA.

But I would like to say something else as well. A fairly well-known person, the Jew Saul Lipman, came to our house in Toronto. He talked, argued with my father. And when my father died, he spoke before the Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes and stated that all Bandera were anti-Semites, that they cut and killed Jews ... I want to say again - I do not exclude anything. Among Bandera, as in all other armies, there were different people. But to say that they all slaughtered and killed Jews is a lie. My mother and I came to Ottawa and protested. A Jew, lawyer Alex Epshtein, helped us a lot in this.

I was very angry with Saul Lipman, but then I realized that you can’t judge the whole nation by the actions of one person.

- Tell me about your mother.

– My mother, Marusya Fedorii, was born in Belgium, in a camp for Ost-Arbeiters. Her father is my grandfather Mykola, lives in Winnipeg, retired. He was born in Western Ukraine, and his grandmother (she died) was born in the territories that now belong to Russia. She is the only one from a large family who did not starve to death during collectivization.

Mom works in Toronto, in the Department of Immigrant Affairs. Sisters - Bogdana and Olenka - live in Montreal.

- In addition to you and your sisters, are there any grandchildren and granddaughters of Stepan Bandera?

- Natalya's children live in Munich - Sofia and Orest.

- Why did you come to Ukraine? What are you doing here?

– Moving to Ukraine is a logical step that stems from my upbringing, my worldview, my views on life. Now I work in the Kiev branch of the Canadian investment firm "Romyer". Or rather, so - I have my own company that cooperates with Romier. I try to attract foreign investors to Ukraine.

- It turns out?

- With difficulties. But we are trying to change the image of Ukraine in the eyes of businessmen. And that's all - Chernobyl, corruption ... By the way, my first partners in Ukraine were local, Ukrainian Jews.

Let's go back to the beginning of our conversation. And yet it is strange for me that the grandson of Stepan Bandera is engaged in business in Ukraine, and not politics ...

– I am not only doing business in Ukraine. I'm also a journalist. I have my own column in the Kievskiye Vedomosti newspaper, I often publish in the popular, serious magazine Peak. As for politics... It is very important for me not to discredit the name of my grandfather. Therefore, I am very careful. And I also know that economics makes politics. So what I am doing now is a good contribution to the policy of independent Ukraine. While I'm not going to join any party...

- Stepan, how did your family react to the personality of the murderer of your grandfather - Stashinsky?

- Stashinsky himself, voluntarily surrendered to the Americans, repented ... People close to our family offered to find him and take revenge. Simply put, kill. But the family has always been against it. The paradox is that if Stashinsky himself had not confessed to the Americans in the murder, then everyone would have believed that Stepan Bandera was killed by Ukrainians from other organizations - “Melnyk’s” or someone else, and the whole world would know that he was killed by a KGB agent. I would like to meet with him and talk - to restore the historical truth. But no one knows where Stashinsky is now and whether he is alive at all ... Maybe he also has a grandson ...

- If you, the grandson of Stepan Bandera, met the grandson of Stashinsky, would you give him a hand?

- Well, I don’t know ... I don’t know ... I probably wouldn’t have filed right away when we met ... But I wouldn’t get into a fight either ... I would like to talk to him, understand what kind of person he is ... There are a lot of obscure things in the Stashinsky case. Maybe someday the KGB archive will be opened and we will find out the whole truth.

- We are talking in your office, on Proreznaya Street, and the archives of the KGB (now this department is called the SBU) are nearby, two steps away, on Vladimirskaya. Didn't go there, didn't you recognize?

– I was told that these archives are now in Moscow. It is very important for me that the Ukrainian state recognizes the OUN-UPA as a belligerent during World War II. So that the surviving old people be recognized as fighters for the independence of Ukraine.

- How do members of Stepan Bandera's family feel about the proposal to transfer his ashes from Munich to Kyiv?

- In different ways ... I think it’s cold for grandfather to lie in German soil ...

Notes:
1) Stashinsky Bogdan (1931) - KGB agent, killer of Ukrainian nationalist leaders Lev Rebet (1957) and Stepan Bandera (1959). On August 12, 1961, he fled to West Berlin with his wife and confessed to his crimes. Sentenced to eight years in prison. After the release, the fate and place of residence are not known.
2) According to reference data: Andrei Stepanovich (1946–1984); Lesya Stepanovna (1947–2011).
3) Sisters of Stepan Bandera: Martha-Maria (1907-1982); Vladimir (1913–2001); Oksana (1917–2008).
4) Stepan Bandera's brothers Alexander (1911-1942) and Vasily (1915-1942) died in Auschwitz under unclear circumstances. Presumably - killed by Volksdeutsche Poles, members of the camp staff; Bogdan (1921–194?), the date and place of death are not known for certain. Presumably - killed by the Germans in Kherson in 1943.

Stepan Andreyevich Bandera is an ideologue of Ukrainian nationalism, one of the main initiators of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1942, the purpose of which was proclaimed the struggle for the independence of Ukraine. He was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Stary Ugryniv, Kalush district (now Ivano-Frankivsk region) in the family of a Greek Catholic priest. After the end of the civil war, this part of Ukraine became part of Poland.

In 1922, Stepan Bandera joined the Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth. In 1928 he entered the agronomic faculty of the Lviv Higher Polytechnic School, which he never graduated from.

In the summer of 1941, after the arrival of the Nazis, Bandera called on "the Ukrainian people to help the German army everywhere to smash Moscow and Bolshevism."

On the same day, Stepan Bandera, without any agreement with the German command, solemnly proclaimed the restoration of the great Ukrainian state. The "Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State", an order on the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the creation of a national government was read out.

The proclamation of Ukraine's independence was not part of Germany's plans, so Bandera was arrested, and fifteen leaders of Ukrainian nationalists were shot.

The Ukrainian Legion, whose ranks began to ferment after the arrest of political leaders, was soon recalled from the front and subsequently performed police functions in the occupied territories.

Stepan Bandera spent a year and a half in prison, after which he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was kept along with other Ukrainian nationalists in privileged conditions. Bandera was allowed to meet with each other, they also received food and money from relatives and the OUN. Often they left the camp in order to contact the "secret" OUN, as well as the Friedental castle (200 meters from the Zelenbau bunker), which housed the OUN's intelligence and sabotage personnel school.

Stepan Bandera was one of the main initiators of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) on October 14, 1942. The goal of the UPA was proclaimed the struggle for the independence of Ukraine. In 1943, an agreement was reached between representatives of the German authorities and the OUN that the UPA would protect railways and bridges from Soviet partisans and support the activities of the German occupation authorities. In return, Germany promised to supply UPA units with weapons and ammunition, and in the event of a victory of the Nazis over the USSR, to allow the creation of a Ukrainian state under the protectorate of Germany. UPA fighters actively participated in the punitive operations of the Nazi troops, destroying, among other things, civilians who sympathized with the Soviet army.

In September 1944, Bandera was released. Until the end of the war, he collaborated with the intelligence department of the Abwehr in the preparation of OUN sabotage groups.

After the war, Bandera continued his activities in the OUN, whose centralized administration was in West Germany. In 1947, at a regular meeting of the OUN, Bandera was appointed its leader and was re-elected to this position twice in 1953 and 1955. He led the terrorist activities of the OUN and UPA on the territory of the USSR. During the Cold War, Ukrainian nationalists were actively used by the secret services of Western countries in the fight against the Soviet Union.

It is alleged that Bandera was poisoned by a KGB agent on October 15, 1959 in Munich. He was buried on October 20, 1959 at the Waldfriedhof cemetery in Munich.

In 1992, for the first time in Ukraine, the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was celebrated, and attempts began to give its participants the status of war veterans. And in 1997-2000, a special government commission (with a permanent working group) was created to develop an official position on the OUN-UPA. The result of her work was the removal from the OUN of responsibility for cooperation with Nazi Germany and the recognition of the UPA as a "third force" and a national liberation movement that fought for the "genuine" independence of Ukraine.

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko on January 22, 2010 announced the posthumous award to Stepan Bandera.

On January 29, 2010, Yushchenko by his decree recognized the members of the UPA as fighters for the independence of Ukraine.

Monuments to the leader of Ukrainian nationalists Stepan Bandera have been erected in Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk regions. Streets in the cities and villages of Western Ukraine are named after him.

The glorification of UPA leader Stepan Bandera is criticized by many veterans of the Great Patriotic War and politicians who accuse Bandera of collaborating with the Nazis. At the same time, part of Ukrainian society, living mainly in the west of the country, considers Bandera and Shukhevych to be national heroes.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources

In connection with the recent increased interest in the history of Ukrainian nationalism, many Russians first learned who Stepan Bandera was. I don’t know if sociological studies were carried out, but I will assume that few people knew about the former Hero of Ukraine before the events on Independence Square. And at the same time, this knowledge is superficial: as a rule, they know about the Bandera people who were hiding in the forests in caches, about their alliance with Nazi Germany, about their modern followers. The personality of Stepan Andreevich himself in the minds of the majority is blurred in the general outline of the tragic events of the 30s-50s.
And today many people, incl. those who are in opposition to the current government consider Bandera to be a kind of principled revolutionary romantic without fear or reproach. There are a lot of myths - from his rejection of anti-Semitism to the fight against Germany during the war years.
I do not pursue the goal of telling the biography of Stepan Bandera, it is hardly possible to do this in a short note. An interested reader may well find books about him on the Internet or in the library.
I want to try to tell you about the most curious facts of Bandera's biography and the most enduring myths about Bandera and give my brief commentary.

1) Stepan Bandera has never been in Central, much less in Eastern Ukraine during his life. Stepan Andreevich was born on the first day of the new year 1909 in the village of Stary Ugrinov, which was part of Austria-Hungary. He mostly spent the years of his youth and studies in the cities of Stryi and Lvov, which, together with other Western Ukrainian territories, became part of Poland after the Civil War. In 1932 - 1935. he lived on the territory of modern Poland (including studying in the then German city of Danzig, where he learned the basics of intelligence). In 1936 - 1939 - he was in prison in Warsaw. In 1939, he briefly illegally came to Lviv, when he had already become part of the USSR. However, he stayed there for no more than two months, convinced of the impossibility of ensuring his own safety there. Since then, Bandera has not been to Ukraine. 1939 - 1941 he spent mainly traveling (Germany, Slovakia, Poland, Italy), in 1941 - 1944 he was in a special cell at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After 1944 and until his death in 1959, Bandera lived in Germany (mainly in Munich). Thus, the main Ukrainian nationalist has lived in Western Ukraine for less than half of his life, and has never been to the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, or the Donbass.

2) Bandera from childhood showed a clear penchant for sadism. Stepan Andreevich was small in stature - 157 cm. Perhaps it was his modest physical data that did not allow him to personally kill at least one person during his life. According to V. Belyaev, who was familiar with the Bander family, one of the main hobbies of the young hero was ... strangling cats. He did this in the presence of his peers with one hand. So Stepan Andreevich asserted himself in the company and began his glorious path.

Low Bandera with classmates

3) Greeting slogan "Glory to Ukraine - glory to the heroes". I am sure that most do not know what kind of "heroes" we are talking about. It was first heard with such a response in 1932 (precisely thanks to Bandera) at a rally in memory of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. These were the guys who fought for Austria-Hungary against the Russian Empire in the First World War. As a rule, they do not say that Russian Ukrainians were exterminated in the first place. It was they who ardently supported the regime that created the infamous Terezin and Talerhof camps, where people were exterminated just because they called themselves Russians. Moreover, Russians in Western Ukraine. If you use this slogan, remember that it directly praises the genocide of the Slavic population in Austria-Hungary.

4) Bandera worked for Germany all his life. In 1932, Stepan completed courses at the Danzig intelligence school, then actively collaborated with the Abwehr. It is often remembered that Bandera was in a concentration camp. Was. This was due to the fact that Hitler did not support the unauthorized proclamation of the Ukrainian state. However, during his "imprisonment" Bandera was in separate apartments with special meals, had the opportunity to travel outside the camp for the leadership of the OUNb. It was such a golden cage. In 1944, the Germans, in the face of inevitable defeat, preferred to give the "fighter against the Germans" the opportunity for complete freedom of action. Much is known about the actions of the OUN and UPA against the Red Army and the NKVD. There is much less about the mythical struggle against the Nazis. Try to find at least how many Germans destroyed the OUN.

5) Bandera was a "respectable family man." It is known that Bandera kicked his pregnant wife, suffered from Plyushkin's syndrome (he dragged all sorts of rubbish into the house) and did not feel any regrets about the death of his father and brothers.

In general, Bandera accidentally became a symbol of Ukrainian nationalism. It was not for nothing that his contemporaries and even associates gave him the nickname "Grey" and "Baba". An accident connected with the death of Yevhen Konovalets elevated this man to the rank and order of the Hero of Ukraine. Order, executed in the form of a Soviet five-pointed star...

Well? Glory to heroes?

Igor Nabytovich

Stepan Bandera. Life and activity.

On October 12, 1957, Dr. Lev Rebet, editor of the Ukrainian Samostiynik, one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Abroad (OUN(3)), a longtime political opponent of Bandera and OUN (revolutionary).

A medical examination conducted 48 hours after death determined that death was due to cardiac arrest. On Thursday, October 15, 1959, on the landing of the first floor on Kraitmayr Street, 7, in Munich at 13.05, Stepan Bandera, the conductor (leader) of the OUN, was found still alive, covered in blood. He lived in this house with his family. He was immediately taken to the hospital. The doctor, when examining the already dead Bandera, found a holster with a revolver tied to him, and therefore this incident was immediately reported to the criminal police. The examination found that "death was due to violence by poisoning with potassium cyanide."

The German criminal police immediately took a false trail and throughout the investigation could not establish anything. The Wire (Leadership) of the Foreign Parts of the OUN (ZCH OUN) immediately on the day of the death of its leader made a statement that this murder was political and that it was a continuation of a series of assassination attempts begun by Moscow in 1926 with the murder of Simon Petliura in Paris, and in 1938 - Yevgeny Konovalets in Rotterdam.

In parallel with the investigation conducted by the West German police, the ZCH OUN Provod created its own commission to investigate the murder of the conductor, which consisted of five OUN members from England, Austria, Holland, Canada and West Germany.

... The last dots on the "i" in the death of Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera were put only at the end of 1961 at the world-famous trial in Karlsruhe.

The day before the construction of the Berlin Wall, on August 12, 1961, a young couple of fugitives from the eastern zone turned to the American West Berlin police: Soviet citizen Bogdan Stashinsky and his German wife Inge Pohl. Stashinsky said that he was a KGB officer and, on the orders of this organization, became the killer of politicians in exile, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera ...

A few months before his tragic death, Stepan Bandera wrote “My Biographical Data”, in which he reported some facts from his childhood and youth.

Born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary near Kalush during the Austro-Hungarian rule in Galicia (now Ivano-Frankivsk region).

His father, Andrei Bandera (“bandera” means “banner” in modern language), was a Greek Catholic priest in the same village and came from Stryi, where he was born into a petty-bourgeois family of Mikhail and Rosalia (maiden name - Beletskaya) Bander . Mother, Miroslava, was the daughter of a priest from Ugryniv Stary - Vladimir Glodzinsky and Catherine (before marriage - Kushlyk). Stepan was the second child after his older sister Marta. In addition to him, three brothers and three sisters grew up in the family.

Childhood years in his native village passed in an atmosphere of Ukrainian patriotism. My father had a large library. Often active participants in the national and political life of Galicia visited the house. Mother's brothers were well-known politicians in Galicia. Pavlo

Glodzinsky was one of the founders of the Ukrainian organizations “Maslosoyuz” and “Silsky Gospodar”, and Yaroslav Veselovsky was a member of the Vienna Parliament.

In October-November 1918, Stepan, as he himself writes, "experienced the exciting events of the revival and building of the Ukrainian state."

During the Ukrainian-Polish war, his father, Andrei Bandera, volunteered for the Ukrainian Galician Army, becoming a military chaplain. As part of the UGA, he was in the Naddnipryansk region, fought with the Bolsheviks and the White Guards. He returned to Galicia in the summer of 1920. In the fall of 1919, Stepan Bandera entered the Ukrainian gymnasium in Stryi, from which he graduated in 1927.

Polish teachers tried to introduce the “Polish spirit” into the gymnasium environment, and these intentions caused serious resistance from the students.

The defeat of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen led to the self-dissolution of the Streltsy Rada (July 1920, Prague), and in September of the same year, the Ukrainian Military Organization was created in Vienna, headed by Yevgeny Konovalets. Under the leadership of the UVO, student resistance groups were created in the Polonized Ukrainian gymnasiums. Although students of the seventh and eighth grades usually became members of these groups, Stepan Bandera took an active part in them already in the fifth grade. In addition, he was a member of the 5th Kuren of Ukrainian Scouts (scouts), and after graduating from the gymnasium he moved to the Kuren of Senior Scouts “Chervona Kalina”.

In 1927, Bandera intended to go to study at the Ukrainian Academy of Economics in Podebrady (Czecho-Slovakia), but could not get a passport to travel abroad. Therefore, he stayed at home, “engaged in housekeeping and cultural and educational activities in his native village (he worked in the Prosvita reading room, led the amateur theatrical circle and choir, founded the Lug sports association, participated in organizing a cooperative). At the same time, he carried out organizational and educational work through the underground UVO in neighboring villages” (“My biographical data”).

In September 1928, Bandera moved to Lviv and entered the agronomic department of the Higher Polytechnic School. He continued his studies until 1934 (from the autumn of 1928 to the middle of 1930 he lived in Dublyany, where there was a branch of the Lviv Polytechnic). He spent his holidays in the village with his father (his mother died in the spring of 1922).

He never received a degree in agricultural engineering: political activities and arrest prevented him.

In 1929, the process of unification of all nationalist organizations that acted separately into a single Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was completed. Yevgeny Konovalets was elected as the leader of the OUN, who at the same time continued to lead the UVO. The leadership of the two organizations made it possible to gradually and painlessly turn the UVO into one of the referents of the OUN, although due to the fact that the UVO was very popular among the people, its nominal independence was preserved.

Bandera became a member of the OUN from the beginning of its existence. Having already experience of revolutionary activity, he began to direct the distribution of underground literature, which was printed outside of Poland, in particular, the press organs Rozbudova Nazi, Surma, Nationalist, banned by the Polish authorities, and also published underground in Galicia, Bulletin of the Craiova Ekzekutivi OUN”, “Yunatsvo”, “Yunak”. In 1931, after the tragic death of centurion Julian Golovinsky, whom

Konovalets sent to Western Ukraine to complete the difficult process of uniting the OUN and the UVO, Stepan Okhrimovich became the regional conductor of the OUN in the Ukrainian lands occupied by Poland. Okhrimovich knew Bandera from the time of his studies at the gymnasium. He introduced him to the Regional Executive (executive body) of the OUN, entrusting him with the leadership of the entire OUN propaganda referent in Western Ukraine.

Okhrimovich believed that Bandera, despite his youth, would cope with this task. Stepan Bandera really raised the propaganda work of the OUN to a high level. He put the need to spread the ideas of the OUN not only among the Ukrainian intelligentsia, student youth, but also among the broadest masses of the Ukrainian people as the basis for the propaganda activities of the OUN.

Mass actions began, which pursued the goal of awakening the national and political activity of the people. Requiem services, festive demonstrations during the construction of symbolic graves for fighters for the freedom of Ukraine, honoring the fallen heroes on national holidays, antimonopoly and school actions intensified the national liberation struggle in Western Ukraine. The antimonopoly action was a refusal of Ukrainians to buy vodka and tobacco, the production of which was a state monopoly. The OUN called: “Get vodka and tobacco out of Ukrainian villages and cities, because every penny spent on them increases the funds of the Polish occupiers who use them against the Ukrainian people.” The school action, which was prepared by Bandera as a referent of the OUN EC, was held in 1933, when he was already the regional conductor of the OUN. The action consisted in the fact that schoolchildren threw the Polish state emblems out of the school premises, mocked the Polish flag, refused to answer teachers in Polish, demanded that Polish teachers go to Poland. On November 30, 1932, there was an attack on the post office in Jagiellonian Township. At the same time, Vasyl Bilas and Dmytro Danylyshyn were arrested and then hanged in the courtyard of the Lvov prison. Under the leadership of Bandera, a mass publication of OUN literature about this process was organized. During the execution of Bilas and Danylyshyn, mournful bells rang in all the villages of Western Ukraine, saluting the heroes. In 1932, Bandera became the deputy regional conductor, and from January 1933 he began to act as the regional conductor of the OUN. The Conference of the OUN Wire in Prague at the beginning of June of the same 1933 formally approved Stepan Bandera at the age of 24 as a regional conductor.

Serious work began to eliminate the long-standing conflict that arose in the process of uniting the OUN and the UVO, expanding the organizational structure of the OUN, and organizing underground training of personnel.

Under the leadership of Bandera, the OUN moves away from expropriation actions and begins a series of punitive actions against representatives of the Polish occupation authorities.

The three most famous political assassinations of that time received wide publicity around the world, once again made it possible to put the Ukrainian problem in the center of attention of the world community. On October 21 of the same year, 18-year-old student of the Lviv University Mykola Lemyk entered the USSR consulate, killed a KGB officer A. Maylov, saying that he had come to avenge the artificial famine that the Russian Bolsheviks staged in Ukraine.

This political assassination was personally directed by Stepan Bandera. OUN combat assistant Roman Shukhevych (“Dzvin”) drew up a plan for the embassy and developed a plan for the assassination.

Lemyk voluntarily surrendered to the police, and the trial of him made it possible for the whole world to declare that the famine in Ukraine is a real fact that the Soviet and Polish press and official authorities are hushing up.

Another political assassination was committed by Grigory Matseyko (“Gonta”) on June 16, 1934. The Minister of the Interior of Poland, Peracki, became his victim. The resolution on the murder of Peratsky was adopted at a special OUN conference in April 1933 in Berlin, in which Andrei Melnyk and others took part from the Wire of Ukrainian Nationalists, and Stepan Bandera, acting regional conductor, from the OUN CE. This murder was an act of revenge for the “pacification” in Galicia in 1930. Then the Polish authorities pacified the Galicians with mass beatings, destroying and burning Ukrainian reading rooms and economic institutions. On October 30, the centurion Yulian Golovinsky, chairman of the OUN EC and the regional commandant of the UVO, who was betrayed by the provocateur Roman Baranovsky, was brutally tortured. The leader of the "pacification" was Vice Minister of the Interior Peratsky. He also led similar “pacification” operations in Polissya and Volhynia in 1932, and was the author of the plan for the “destruction of Russia”4.

The assassination plan was developed by Roman Shukhevych, put into action by Mykola Lebed (“Marko”), the general leadership was carried out by Stepan Bandera (“Baba”, “Fox”).

On December 20, 1933, the Polish magazine “Revolt of the Young” wrote in the article “Five to twelve”: “... The mysterious OUN - the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - is stronger than all legal Ukrainian parties combined. It dominates the youth, it forms public opinion, it acts at a terrible pace to draw the masses into the cycle of revolution ... Today it is already clear that time is working against us. Every headman in Lesser Poland and even in Volhynia can name several villages that until recently were completely passive, but today they are striving for a fight, ready for anti-state actions. And this means that the strength of the enemy has increased, and the Polish state has lost a lot.” This powerful and mysterious OUN was led by a little-known young intelligent student, Stepan Bandera.

On June 14, the day before the assassination of General Peratsky, the Polish police arrested Bandera along with his fellow engineer Bogdan Pidgain (“Bull”), the second (together with Shukhevych) combat assistant of the OUN CE, when they tried to cross the Czech-Polish border. After the death of Peratsky, the arrest of Yaroslav Karpynets, a chemistry student at the Jagiellonian University, and a search of his apartment in Krakow, when a number of items were found that confirmed his involvement in the manufacture of a bomb left by Matseyko at the scene of the assassination, an investigation began: the police recorded the contacts of Bandera and Pidgayny with Karpinets in Krakow. Several other members of the organization who were involved in the murder of the minister were arrested, including Lebed and his fiancee, future wife, Daria Gnatkivska.

The investigation dragged on for a long time, and perhaps the suspects could not have been brought to trial, but about two thousand OUN documents fell into the hands of the police - the so-called “Senyk archive”, which was located in Czechoslovakia. These documents enabled the Polish police to identify a large number of members and leaders of the OUN. Two years of interrogations, physical and mental torture. Bandera was kept in solitary confinement, shackled. But even under these conditions, he was looking for opportunities to contact friends, support them, tried to find out the reasons for the failure. During the meal, his hands were unchained, and during this time he managed to write notes to friends on the bottom of the plate.

From November 18, 1935 to January 13, 1936, a trial took place in Warsaw over twelve members of the OUN, accused of complicity in the murder of the Minister of the Interior of Poland, Bronislaw Peratsky. Together with Bandera, Daria Gnatkivskaya, Yaroslav Karpinets, Yakov Chorniy, Evgeny Kachmarsky, Roman Mygal, Ekaterina Zaritskaya, Yaroslav Rak, Mykola Lebed were judged. The indictment consisted of 102 typewritten pages. The accused refused to speak Polish, greeted them with a greeting: “Glory to Ukraine!”, turned the trial hall into a platform for propagating OUN ideas. On January 13, 1936, the verdict was announced: Bandera, Lebed, Karpinets were sentenced to death, the rest - from 7 to 15 years in prison.

The process caused a worldwide outcry, the Polish government did not dare to carry out the sentence and began negotiations with legal Ukrainian political parties on the “normalization” of Ukrainian-Polish relations. Bandera and his friends the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment.

This made it possible to organize another trial against Bandera and members of the Regional Executive of the OUN, this time in Lvov, in the case of several terrorist acts committed by the OUN. At the Lvov trial, which began on May 25, 1936, there were already 21 defendants in the dock. Here Bandera openly acted as a regional conductor of the OUN.

At the Warsaw and Lvov trials, Stepan Bandera was sentenced together to seven life sentences. Several attempts to prepare his escape from prison were unsuccessful. Bandera stayed behind bars until 1939 - until the occupation of Poland by the Germans.

Already at this time, the NKVD was interested in the OUN, in particular Bandera. On June 26, 1936, when Bandera testified at the Lvov trial, the Moscow diplomat Svetnyala listened attentively to his words in the hall. Bandera, explaining the purpose and methods of the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists against Russian Bolshevism, said: “The OUN opposes Bolshevism because Bolshevism is a system with which Moscow enslaved the Ukrainian nation, destroying Ukrainian statehood ...

Bolshevism is fighting the Ukrainian people in the Eastern Ukrainian lands with the methods of physical destruction, namely, mass executions in the dungeons of the GPU, the destruction of millions of people by starvation and constant exile to Siberia, to Solovki ... The Bolsheviks use physical methods, therefore we use physical methods in the fight against them ... ”

After the capture of Poland by the Germans, new invaders came to Western Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainian political prisoners have been released from Polish prisons, among them Stepan Bandera.

At the end of September 1939, he clandestinely arrived in Lviv, where for several weeks he worked on developing a strategy for the future struggle.

The main thing is the creation of a dense OUN network throughout Ukraine, the establishment of its large-scale activities. A plan of action was thought out in case of mass repressions and deportations by the Soviet invaders of the population of Western Ukraine.

By order of the OUN Wire, Bandera crossed the border, to Krakow. Here he married Yaroslav Oparivskaya. The “revolutionaries” in the OUN, whose leader was Stepan Bandera, believed that Ukraine should, on its own, not relying on anyone's mercy, not being an obedient tool in the hands of others, to win independence in the struggle.

The events that took place in the summer of 1941, before and after the Act of Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood, showed that Bandera was completely right in that Ukraine should not expect mercy from Hitler.

In preparation for the fight against the Moscow-Bolshevik occupiers, the OUN-revolutionary decided to use internal disagreements between some military circles of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party to organize Ukrainian training groups under the German army. The northern Ukrainian legion “Nachtigal” (“Nightingale”) was created under the leadership of Roman Shukhevych and the southern legion “Roland”. The preconditions for their creation were that these formations were intended only to fight against the Bolsheviks and were not considered integral parts of the German army; on their uniforms, the warriors of these legions had to wear a trident and go into battle under blue and yellow banners.

The leadership of the OUN (r) planned that with the arrival in Ukraine, these legions should become the embryo of an independent national army. On June 30, 1941, immediately after the flight of the Bolsheviks, the National Assembly in Lvov proclaimed the Act of the Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood. Chairman of the National Assembly Yaroslav Stetsko was authorized to create a Provisional Government to organize the Ukrainian power structures.

Hitler instructed Himmler to urgently eliminate the "Bandera sabotage", the creation of an independent Ukrainian state was by no means part of the Nazis' plans.

An SD team and a special group of the Gestapo immediately arrived in Lvov to “eliminate the conspiracy of Ukrainian separatists”. An ultimatum was presented to Prime Minister Stetsko: to invalidate the Act of the Renewal of the Ukrainian State. After a decisive refusal, Stetsko and several other members of the government were arrested. OUN conductor Bandera was arrested in Krakow.

Hundreds of Ukrainian patriots were thrown into concentration camps and prisons by the Nazis. Mass terror began. In the Auschwitz concentration camp, the brothers of Stepan Bandera, Oleksa and Vasyl, were brutally tortured.

When the arrests began, both Ukrainian legions, “Nachtigal” and “Roland”, refused to obey the German military command and were disbanded, their commanders were arrested.

Bandera stayed in the concentration camp until the end of 1944.

Feeling the power of the UPA in their own skin, the Germans began to look for an ally against Moscow in the OUN-UPA. In December 1944, Bandera and several other members of the revolutionary OUN were released. They were offered negotiations on possible cooperation. Bandera's first condition for negotiations was the recognition of the Act of the Resumption of Ukrainian Statehood and the creation of the Ukrainian army as separate, independent from the German, armed forces of an independent state. The Nazis did not agree to recognize the independence of Ukraine and sought to create a pro-German puppet government and Ukrainian military formations as part of the German army.

Bandera resolutely rejected these proposals.

All subsequent years of S. Bandera's life up to the tragic death - the time of struggle and great work outside Ukraine for its benefit in the semi-legal conditions of a foreign environment.

After August 1943, from the III Extraordinary Great Gathering of the OUN, at which the leadership passed to the OUN Lead Bureau, and until the February 1945 conference, Roman Shukhevych (“Tour”) was the chairman of the Organization. The February conference elected a new Bureau of the Wire (Bandera, Shukhevych, Stetsko). Stepan Bandera again became the head of the OUN (r), and Roman Shukhevych became his deputy and chairman of the Provod in Ukraine. The OUN conductor decided that due to the Moscow-Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine and the unfavorable international situation, the OUN conductor should constantly stay abroad. Bandera, after whom the national liberation movement against the occupation of Ukraine was named, was dangerous for Moscow. A powerful ideological and punitive machine was set in motion. In February 1946, speaking on behalf of the Ukrainian SSR at a session of the UN General Assembly in London, the poet Mykola Bazhan demanded that Western states extradite a large number of Ukrainian politicians in exile, and primarily Stepan Bandera.

During 1946-1947, the American military police hunted for Bandera in the American occupation zone of Germany. In the last 15 years of his life, Stepan Bandera (“Veslyar”) published a large number of theoretical works that analyzed the political situation in the world, in the USSR, in Ukraine, and determined the paths for further struggle. These articles have not lost their significance in our time. As a warning to the current builders of “independent” Ukraine, in the close embrace of the northern neighbor, the words of S. Bandera from the article “Word to Ukrainian Nationalist Revolutionaries Abroad” (“Vizvolniy Shlyah” (“Vizvolniy Shlyah”), London.- 1948.- NoNo 10, 11, 12) : “The main goal and the main principle of all Ukrainian politics is and should be the restoration of the Ukrainian Independent Consolidated State by eliminating the Bolshevik occupation and dismembering the Russian empire into independent national states. Only then can these independent national states unite into blocs or unions based on the principle of geopolitical, economic, defense and cultural interests on the grounds presented above. The concepts of evolutionary restructuring or the transformation of the USSR into a union of free states, but also united, in the same composition, with a predominant or central position of Russia - such concepts contradict the idea of ​​the liberation of Ukraine, they must be completely eliminated from Ukrainian politics.

The Ukrainian people will be able to achieve an independent state only through struggle and labor. A favorable development of the international situation can greatly help the expansion and success of our liberation struggle, but it can only play an auxiliary, albeit very useful, role. Without the active struggle of the Ukrainian people, the most favorable situations will never give us state independence, but only the replacement of one enslavement by another. Russia, with its deeply rooted, and in the modern era, the most red-hot predatory imperialism, in every situation, in every state, with all its might, with all its fierceness, will rush to Ukraine in order to keep it within its empire or enslave it again. Both the liberation and the defense of the independence of Ukraine can basically rely only on their own Ukrainian forces, on their own struggle and constant readiness for self-defense.

The murder of S. Bandera was the final link in a 15-year chain of permanent hunting for the leader of Ukrainian nationalists.

In 1965, a 700-page book was published in Munich - “Moscow Bandera's murderers before the trial”, which collected a large number of facts and documents about the political assassination of Bandera, the responses of the world community about the trial of Stashinsky in Karlsruhe, a detailed description of the process itself. The book describes a number of attempts to assassinate Bandera. And how many of them remained unknown?

In 1947, the assassination attempt on Bandera was prepared by order of the MGB Yaroslav Moroz, who had the task of committing the murder in such a way that it looked like an emigrant settling of scores. The assassination attempt was uncovered by the OUN Security Service.

At the beginning of 1948, MGB agent Vladimir Stelmashchuk (“Zhabski”, “Kowalchuk”), the captain of the underground Polish Home Army, arrived in West Germany from Poland. Stelmashchuk managed to get to Bandera's place of residence, but realizing that the OUN had become aware of his intelligence activities, he disappeared from the FRG.

In 1950, the Security Council of the OUN found out that the KGB base in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, was preparing an assassination attempt on Bandera.

The next year, information about Bandera began to collect an agent of the MGB, a German from Volhynia Stepan Liebgolts. Later, the KGB used it in a provocation related to the escape of Bandera's killer, Stashinsky, to the West. In March 1959, in Munich, a certain Vintsik was arrested by the German criminal police, allegedly an employee of some Czech company, who was intensively looking for the address of the school where Stepan Bandera's son Andrei studied. ZCH OUN had information that in the same year, the KGB, using the experience of the destruction of Petlyura, was preparing to assassinate a young Pole, whose relatives were allegedly destroyed by Bandera in Galicia. And, finally, Bogdan Stashinsky, a native of the village of Borshovychi near Lvov. Even before the murder of Rebet, Stashinsky met a German woman, Inge Pohl, whom he married in early 1960. Inge Pohl obviously played a big role in opening Stashinsky's eyes to the communist Soviet reality. Realizing that the KGB, covering their tracks, would destroy him, Stashinsky, the day before the funeral of his little son, fled with his wife to the American zone of West Berlin.

After his engagement to Inge Pohl in April 1959, Stashinsky was summoned to Moscow and ordered to kill Bandera at the “highest authority”. But then, in May, having left for Munich and tracked down the OUN guide, at the last minute Stashinsky could not control himself and ran away.

On October 2, 1959, 13 days before Bandera's death, the Security Council of the OUN abroad became aware of Moscow's decision to kill the conductor. But they didn’t save him ... When Bandera was returning home at 1 pm on October 15, Stashinsky approached him on the steps of the stairs and shot him in the face with hydrocyanic acid from a two-channel “pistol” wrapped in newspaper ...

Once upon a time, Ukrainian lads captured by the Tatars, turned into Janissaries, exterminated their brothers. Now the Ukrainian Stashinsky, lackey of the Moscow-Bolshevik occupiers, destroyed the Ukrainian guide with his own hands...

The news of Stashinsky's escape to the West was a bombshell of great political power. The trial of him in Karlsruhe showed that the orders for political assassinations were issued by the first leaders of the USSR, members of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

... On a quiet fashionable street, Liverpool Road, 200, almost in the center of London, the Stepan Bandera Museum stores personal belongings of the OUN conductor, clothes with traces of his blood, a death mask. The museum is designed in such a way that it can only be entered from inside the premises. The time will come - and the exhibits of this museum will be transferred to Ukraine, for which he fought all his life and for which her great son died.