49 Facts About Stepan Bandera

Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was a Ukrainian far-right leader of the radical, militant wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN-B.

Stepan Bandera was freed from prison in 1939 following the invasion of Poland, and moved to Krakow.

Stepan Bandera prepared the 1941 proclamation of the Ukrainian state, pledging to work with Nazi Germany after Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.

The Germans disapproved of the proclamation, and for his refusal to rescind the decree, Stepan Bandera was arrested by the Gestapo.

Stepan Bandera was released in 1944 by the Germans in hopes that he could fight the Soviet advance.

In 1959, Stepan Bandera was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich.

Stepan Bandera was born on 1 January 1909 in Staryi Uhryniv, Galicia, Austria-Hungary to Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church priest Andriy Bandera and Myroslava into a family that would number eight in total.

Stepan Bandera did not attend primary school due to the First World War and was taught at home by his parents.

Stepan Bandera sang in a choir, played guitar and mandolin, enjoyed hiking, jogging, swimming, ice skating, basketball and chess.

Stepan Bandera's mother moved with her sons to the town of Yahilnytsya in Chortkiv Raion while her husband Andriy was away.

Stepan Bandera became ill on the way and never fully recovered.

Stepan Bandera died from tuberculosis at the age of 31.

In 1928, Stepan Bandera enrolled in the agronomy program at the Politechnika Lwowska in Lwow, but never completed his studies due to his political activities and arrests.

Stepan Bandera had met and associated himself with members of a variety of Ukrainian nationalist organizations throughout his schooling, from Plast, to the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

Stepan Bandera collaboratorated closely with Richard Yary, who would later side with Stepan Bandera and help him form OUN-B.

Stepan Bandera was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to death.

Stepan Bandera was freed from Brest Prison in Eastern Poland in early September 1939, as a result of the invasion of Poland.

The OUN-M faction led by Melnyk preached a more conservative approach to nation-building, while the OUN-B faction, led by Stepan Bandera, supported a revolutionary approach, however in terms of radical nationalism, fascism, anti-semitism, xenophobia and violence both factions didn't contradict each other.

OUN leaders Andriy Melnyk and Stepan Bandera both served as agents of the Nazi Germany military intelligence Abwehr Second Department.

On June 23,1941, one day after the German attack on the Soviet Union, Stepan Bandera sent a letter to Hitler arguing the case for an independent Ukraine.

The Germans barred Stepan Bandera from moving to newly conquered Lviv, limiting his residency to occupied Cracow.

The Germans closed OUN-B offices in Berlin and Vienna, and on 15 September 1941 Stepan Bandera and leading OUN members were arrested by the Gestapo.

In January 1942, Stepan Bandera was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp's special prison cell building for high-profile political prisoners such as Horia Sima, the chancellor of Austria, Kurt von Schuschnigg or Stefan Grot-Rowecki and was kept in special, comparatively comfortable detention.

In September 1944, Stepan Bandera was released by the German authorities and allowed to return to Ukraine in the hope that his partisans would unite with OUN-M and harass the Soviet troops, which by that time had handed the Germans major defeats.

In February 1945, at a conference of the OUN-B in Vienna, Stepan Bandera was made the representative of the leadership of the Foreign Units of the OUN.

Stepan Bandera used false identification documents that helped him to conceal his past relationship with the Nazis.

Stepan Bandera remained the leader of the OUN-B and worked with several anti-communist organizations, such as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, as well as, according to some sources, with the US and British intelligence agencies.

Stepan Bandera was protected by the US-backed Gehlen Organization but he received help from underground organizations of former Nazis who helped Stepan Bandera to cross borders between Allied occupation zones.

One faction of Stepan Bandera's organization, associated with Mykola Lebed, became more closely associated with the CIA.

The US thought Stepan Bandera was too valuable to give up due to his knowledge of the Soviet Union, so the US started blocking his extradition under an operation called "Anyface".

Stepan Bandera reached an agreement with the BND, offering them his service, despite the CIA warning the West Germans against cooperating with him.

Historian John-Paul Himka writes that Stepan Bandera remained true to the fascist ideology to the end.

For Stepan Bandera, Russia was the chief adversary, but he lacked tolerance for Poles and Jews.

Marples considered Rossolinski-Liebe to place too much importance on Stepan Bandera's views, writing that Rossolinski-Liebe struggled to find anything of note written by Stepan Bandera, and had assumed he was influenced by OUN publicist Dmytro Dontsov and OUN journals.

In late 1942, when Stepan Bandera was in a German concentration camp, his organization, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, was involved in a massacre of Poles in Volhynia and, in early 1944, ethnic cleansing spread to Eastern Galicia.

On 10 August 1940 Stepan Bandera wrote a letter to Andriy Melnyk saying that he would accept Melnyk's leadership of the OUN, provided he expelled "traitors" in the leadership.

One of these was Mykola Stsibors'kyi, who Stepan Bandera accused of an absence of "morality and ethics in family life" due to having married a Jewish woman, and especially, a "suspicious" Russian Jewish woman.

On 15 October 1959, Stepan Bandera collapsed outside of Kreittmayrstrasse 7 in Munich and died shortly thereafter.

On 20 October 1959, Stepan Bandera was buried in the Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Munich.

Two years after his death, on 17 November 1961, the German judicial bodies announced that Stepan Bandera's murderer had been a KGB agent named Bohdan Stashynsky who used a cyanide dust spraying gun to murder Stepan Bandera acting on the orders of Soviet KGB head Alexander Shelepin and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

The glorification and attempts to rehabilitate Stepan Bandera are growing trends in Ukraine.

Stepan Bandera continued to cause friction with countries such as Poland and Israel.

Historian Vyacheslav Likhachev told Haaretz that for public consciousness in Ukraine the only important thing about Stepan Bandera was that he fought for Ukrainian independence, and that other details are not important, especially in the context of events from 2014 onwards, where the struggle for Ukrainian independence became more prominent.

Stepan Bandera wrote that these inaccuracies are deconstructed with "relish" by OUN apologists within Ukraine, and this has perpetuated a view within Ukraine that the Western public is not well informed about recent Ukrainian history, and even brainwashed by Soviet and Russian propaganda.

Groups who idolize Stepan Bandera took part in the Euromaidan protests but were a minority element.

President Viktor Yanukovych declared the award illegal, since Stepan Bandera was never a citizen of Ukraine, a stipulation necessary for getting the award.

Stepan Bandera was named an honorary citizen of a number of western Ukrainian cities.

In late 2018, the Lviv Oblast Council decided to declare the year of 2019 to be the year of Stepan Bandera, sparking protests by Israel.

In 2021, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory under the authority of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture, included Stepan Bandera, among other Ukrainian nationalist figures, in Virtual Necropolis, a project intended to commemorate historical figures important for Ukraine.