In the pantheon of national heroes of modern Ukraine, Stepan Bandera occupies the honorable place of the most "great" fighter for Ukrainian "independence". Streets are named in his honor, monuments are erected to him, they write about him extremely positively in school textbooks and even try to portray him as an anti-fascist.
Who is this ex-hero of Ukraine and even a contender for the title of "symbol of the nation"? If you look closely at the map of the country, it turns out that not all of Ukraine is making heroes of him. Only in Galicia (Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk regions) is he considered the "leader of the nation." In other regions, Bandera is not a hero, even today under the Nazi regime, the majority is indifferent to him or simply despises him.
Let's look at this man without the rose-colored glasses of modern nationalist propaganda. One of the seven children of a Greek Catholic pastor, Stefan (not Stepan, he was named by that Polish name) was born in Austria-Hungary and grew up as a weak and rickety child with a huge inferiority complex.
He compensated for his very small stature (according to the police dossier, 159 cm) by participating in various nationalist youth organizations such as "Plast" and fostered will by strangling cats. As a result, by the time he entered the agricultural faculty of Lviv Polytechnic, he had already formed as an unusually cruel and merciless person who chose terror as his profession.
Since his youth, he has been an activist of nationalist organizations, a member of the OUN since 1929, whose activities in Poland at that time were limited to terrorist attacks, expropriation of property and political murder.
Since 1932, he leads the regional organization of the OUN, manifests himself as a tough and cruel leader and actively expands terrorist activities against Soviet diplomats, Polish and Ukrainian intelligentsia, police officers and students. So, 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.
Moreover, he personally tried not to participate in the murders, sent his comrades-in-arms and punished severely for lack of performance. One of them, Malyutsu, who received an order to eliminate a certain Migal and did not fulfill it, was severely punished by killing his girlfriend Maria Kovalyuk in revenge. At the trial, Malyutsa testified: “The OUN is an organization that recognizes only individual terror. Her methods and tactics drove us into a corner …"
At this time, the OUN established close contacts with Germany, the headquarters was moved to Berlin. Bandera himself undergoes training at an intelligence school in Danzig, after which he intensifies his terrorist activities and orders his wards to undermine Yaskov's Ukrainian printing house, the editorial office of the Lviv anti-fascist newspaper Sila, and to make an attempt on the life of the writer Krushelnytsky.
After Hitler came to power, the Berlin headquarters of the OUN, as a special department, was enrolled in the Gestapo staff. On the outskirts of Berlin, these funds are being used to train OUN militants and their officers. German intelligence gives the order to eliminate the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland Peratsky, who harshly condemned Germany's plans to seize Danzig, and in June 1934 Bandera's people carry out it.
Even the creator of the OUN, Konovalets, was against this murder. Bandera believed that no compromises and negotiations with the Poles were possible, only terror was effective. Its slogan "Our government must be terrible!" he has been promoting all his life. Colonel of the Abwehr Zrvin Stolze, who communicated Bandera with Nazi intelligence, characterized him as follows: "Bandera is an energetic careerist, fanatic and bandit by nature …"
The high-profile political assassination of Peratsky led to the arrest of almost the entire OUN leadership. Bandera is sentenced to death, but under pressure from Germany, this punishment was changed to life imprisonment. In the trials of 1935-1936 for "fruitful" terrorist activities, he was sentenced seven times in Poland to life imprisonment.
Bandera combined the murders of political associates with elementary criminality. According to the testimony of the same Colonel Stolze, Bandera, in 1940, "having received 2.5 million marks from the Abwehr to finance the created underground, he tried to appropriate them and transferred them to one of the Swiss banks, from where they came from us (that is, the Germans). were seized and returned to Bandera."
After the elimination of the founder of the OUN Konovalets, the ambitious Bandera actually splits the OUN and begins an irreconcilable struggle with Melnik. Although, it would seem, is the time to join forces. After all, Germany had just freed all Bandera from the prisons of captured Poland and helped them prepare for a war against the Soviet Union. But Bandera, just before the war, creates his own group in the OUN and achieves approval by greeting its members with Nazi greetings with a show of hands “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!"
Under the leadership of the Abwehr, he formed the battalions "Nachtigall" and "Roland", which, following the Nazi troops, bursting into Lvov on June 30, 1941, brutally killed several thousand people. With this bloody action in the presence of two Abwehr officers, the creation of a "Ukrainian state" is proclaimed, Bandera calls himself its head and, by his decree, appoints a "government" headed by Stetsko.
At this time, he gives the command to physically destroy members of the OUN group of Melnik, the Nazis decide to stop it. Melnik also writes a slander that "the Banderaites are behaving unworthily and have created their own government without the knowledge of the Fuehrer." After that Bandera and his "government" are subjected to house arrest, and he and Stetsko are sent to Berlin "to give explanations." There they were demanded to end the terror against Melnik's group, to withdraw the act of "proclamation of the state" and released two weeks later.
Bandera's hatred of Melnik and the desire for the title of the only leader of the nation was so great that he continued to destroy competitors, essentially the same as him, Hitler's servants. After several high-profile murders, including the author of the OUN constitution, Sciiborsky, the Germans preferred to subject Bandera to an "honorable arrest" for the second time and send him to Berlin. This somewhat cooled the civil strife, but not for long.
The rapid advance of the Germans to the east by mid-September 1941 was the reason for Hitler to completely abandon the idea of the emergence of a "Ukrainian state", and Bandera was placed in a Berlin prison. In January 1942 he was transferred to honorary isolation in the Zelenbau special block of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was held together with other especially important persons - a Polish general, some princes and other "honorary prisoners". Later, Bulba-Borovets, the creator of the UPA, who was defeated by the Bandera, killing his wife Galina and giving his troops the name of the UPA, joined him in a nearby cell.
In the concentration camp, Bandera, together with his former enemy Bulba-Borovets, did not suffer at all and did not die of hunger. They issued a wall newspaper with the indicative name "Parasha", a couple of times a month they sent prostitutes, received letters, food parcels and money orders from relatives, the OUN and the Red Cross.
Bandera was not very limited in movement. He could leave the camp, walk and travel to Berlin for the Gestapo and Hitler's intelligence. Once, walking around Berlin, Bandera was stopped by the police and immediately released upon showing them a Gestapo identity card. He visited the nearby castle Friedenthal with inspections, where his bandits underwent sabotage and reconnaissance training together with saboteurs of SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, who himself often visited Zelenbau.
Bandera, who had not lost weight or even offended, was released in September 1944, he met with Himmler and received instructions on how to activate the Bandera movement on Soviet territory. An employee of Abwehrkommando-202, M. Müller, testified during interrogation: “The General Directorate of Imperial Security released Stepan BANDERA from prison, who received a dacha near Berlin from the Gestapo 4-D department. In the same month, Stepan BANDERA arrived at the disposal of the Abwehr-team-202 in Krakow …”Such a valuable shot was needed by German intelligence.
He leads his supporters, calls on them to "continue cooperation" with the occupation forces and gives instructions "on the universal and widespread destruction of the Polish population living in the western regions of Ukraine."
Under the leadership of the Germans, he instructed the Abwerstelle teams in Krakow and prepared sabotage groups, but as a result of the rapid advance of the Red Army, he suddenly found himself in the liberated territories in Krakow. According to one of the versions, from where, on the personal instructions of Hitler, the super-saboteur of the Third Reich, Otto Skorzeny, was taken out, as you know, solving the problems of very important persons for the Nazis (like Mussolini).
Until the end of the war, he leads the Bandera underground on Soviet territory from Germany, and after the surrender of Germany, he begins to cooperate with British intelligence and the Gehlen organization, settles in Munich and organizes mass terror in Western Ukraine. At the same time, he did not hide in stinking caches and did not eat what he managed to take away from the local population. He preferred to eat in restaurants, live in Germany, ski in the Alps, and swim in Lake Geneva.
Bandera's malice and hatred poured into the OUN-UPA directive in the summer of 1945: “Let half of the Ukrainian population remain - nothing terrible. The directive was strictly followed. Under his direct leadership and by his order in the western regions of Ukraine, more than 30 thousand civilians became victims of the Bandera terror in 1944-1953.
When this vicious little man was finally eliminated, he turned 50 years old. Of these, he did not work a single day of his vile life, receiving money solely through terrorist activities. Moreover, he actually served first Hitler's intelligence, then American and British. And not a single day did he work for the people, whom he was going to "make happy" with his delusional ideas. For three decades - hundreds of thousands of killed and unsatisfied ambitions of the "little man", and ended up in a strange entrance of a strange house in a foreign country. Until the very last moment, trying to kill his fellow tribesmen with someone else's hands …
And this monster was awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine by the President of Ukraine Yushchenko in 2010! And the cowardly President Yanukovych was afraid to annul this decree, and it was canceled by the Donetsk court. What state, such are its rulers and heroes.
