1. Stepan Bandera was freed from prison in 1939 following the invasion of Poland, and moved to Krakow.
52 Facts About Stepan Bandera
1. 2.
The Germans disapproved of the proclamation, and for his refusal to rescind the decree, Stepan Bandera was arrested by the Gestapo.
3.
Stepan Bandera was released in September 1944 by the Germans in hope that he could fight the Soviet advance.
4.
Stepan Bandera negotiated with the Nazis to create the Ukrainian National Army and the Ukrainian National Committee in March 1945.
5.
In 1959, Stepan Bandera was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich.
6.
The award was annulled in 2011 given that Stepan Bandera was never a Ukrainian citizen.
7.
The controversy regarding Stepan Bandera's legacy gained further prominence following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
8.
Stepan Bandera did not attend primary school due to World War I and was taught at home by his parents.
9.
Stepan Bandera sang in a choir, played guitar and mandolin, enjoyed hiking, jogging, swimming, ice skating, basketball and chess.
10.
In 1928, Stepan Bandera enrolled in the agronomy program at the Politechnika Lwowska in its branch in Dubliany, but never completed his studies due to his political activities and arrests.
11.
Stepan Bandera associated himself with a variety of Ukrainian organizations during his time in high school, particularly Plast, Sokil, and Organization of the Upper Grades of the Ukrainian High Schools.
12.
Stepan Bandera joined OUN in 1929, and quickly climbed through the ranks, thanks to the support of Okhrymovych, becoming in 1930 the head of a section distributing OUN propaganda in Eastern Galicia.
13.
Stepan Bandera-led OUN propaganda made them martyrs and ordered Ukrainian priests in Lviv and elsewhere to ring bells on the day of their execution.
14.
Stepan Bandera collaborated closely with Richard Yary, who would later side with Stepan Bandera and help him form OUN-B.
15.
Stepan Bandera was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to death.
16.
OUN leaders Andriy Melnyk and Stepan Bandera both served as agents of the Nazi Germany military intelligence Abwehr Second Department.
17.
Stepan Bandera was freed from Brest Prison in Eastern Poland in early September 1939, as a result of the invasion of Poland.
18.
The factions differed in ideology, strategy and tactics: the OUN-M faction led by Melnyk preached a more conservative approach to nation-building, while the OUN-B faction, led by Stepan Bandera, supported a revolutionary approach; however, both factions exhibited similar levels of radical nationalism, fascism, antisemitism, xenophobia and violence.
19.
In spring 1941, Stepan Bandera held meetings with the heads of Germany's intelligence, regarding the formation of "Nachtigall" and "Roland" Battalions.
20.
The Germans barred Stepan Bandera from moving to newly conquered Lviv, limiting his residency to occupied Krakow.
21.
Stepan Bandera was free to move around the city, but could not leave it.
22.
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.
23.
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 Schuschnigg or Stefan Grot-Rowecki and high risk escapees.
24.
Stepan Bandera was not completely cut off from the outside world; his wife visited him regularly and was able to help him keep in touch with his followers.
25.
Stepan Bandera's release was preceded by lengthy talks between the Germans and the UPA in Galicia and Volhynia.
26.
On 28 September 1944, Stepan Bandera was released by the German authorities and moved to house arrest.
27.
Stepan Bandera reacted negatively to the changes taking place within the OUN-B in Ukraine.
28.
Stepan Bandera's opposition was provoked by the 'democratisation' of the OUN-B and, above all, the relegation of the former leadership of the organisation to purely symbolic roles.
29.
On 5 October 1944, SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Gottlob Berger met with Stepan Bandera and offered him the opportunity to join Andrey Vlasov and his Russian Liberation Army, which Stepan Bandera rejected.
30.
Stepan Bandera informed him that he was ready to return to Ukraine, while Stetsko informed him that he still considered himself the Ukrainian prime minister.
31.
Stepan Bandera later denied in conversations with the CIA that he had been involved in the formation of these organisations or any collaboration with Germany after his release.
32.
In February 1945, at a conference of the OUN-B in Vienna, Stepan Bandera was made the leader of the Foreign Units of the OUN.
33.
Stepan Bandera used false identification documents that helped him to conceal his past relationship with the Nazis.
34.
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.
35.
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".
36.
Stepan Bandera reached an agreement with the BND, offering them his service, despite the CIA warning the West Germans against cooperating with him.
37.
On 15 October 1959, Stepan Bandera collapsed outside of Kreittmayrstrasse 7 in Munich and died shortly thereafter.
38.
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.
39.
Historian John-Paul Himka writes that Stepan Bandera remained true to the fascist ideology to the end.
40.
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.
41.
Vesely says that "Stepan Bandera was against closer cooperation with the Nazis and he insisted that the Ukrainian national movement should not be dependent on anyone", thus opposing Rossolinski-Liebe's conclusion that Ukrainian nationalists needed the protection of Nazi Germany and therefore collaborated with them.
42.
Marples says that Stepan Bandera "regarded Russia as the principal enemy of Ukraine, and showed little tolerance for the other two groups inhabiting Ukrainian ethnic territories, Poles and Jews".
43.
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.
44.
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.
45.
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.
46.
The glorification and attempts to rehabilitate Stepan Bandera are growing trends in Ukraine.
47.
Nevertheless, the memory of Stepan Bandera can be found in Ukraine.
48.
Stepan Bandera was named an honorary citizen of a number of western Ukrainian cities.
49.
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.
50.
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.
51.
Stepan Bandera continued to cause friction with countries such as Poland and Israel.
52.
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.