True biography of Stepan Bandera. Stepan Bandera - biography, photo, personal life of the Ukrainian nationalist

Photo vfl.ru: “SS Captain” (SS-Hauptsturmführer)
Stepan Bendera (middle) in Nazi-occupied Poland before the attack on the Ukrainian SSR.

In 1943, events called the Volyn tragedy began. According to Polish official sources, in 1943-44 more than sixty thousand Poles and twenty thousand Ukrainians died in Volyn; the main blame for this lies with Ukrainian nationalists operating under the leadership of Stepan Bendera (Bandera and other nicknames).

After the Second World War, Gauleiter of Ukraine Erich Koch, the death penalty was replaced by life imprisonment on the initiative of Stalin (Died at 90 years old (1986). Mokotow prison (Polish: Wizienie mokotowskie) is an active prison located in Warsaw, Poland.) as “a carrier of valuable information."
In fact, the order to Kuznetsov to liquidate Koch at the height of the war was also canceled by Stalin. Information about the recruitment of Koch by USSR counterintelligence was recently declassified. Stalin guaranteed Koch’s life and fulfilled his promise...
After Stalin’s death, Koch admitted that “I saved Stalin by warning him about assassination attempts, and he saved me... By informing the leader of the USSR about Hitler’s plans, I saved millions of lives of soldiers and civilians on both sides of the front... I was forced to carry out orders from the Nazi elite. I did not share the ideology of the NSDLP...”
Next there are inserts (translated from English) from Koch’s memoirs regarding Bendery.

In the spring of 1943, the Germans began the formation of the 14th SS Division from Ukrainian volunteers from the Galicia district and the “Ukrainian Liberation Army” - (Ukrainian UVV) from “eastern Ukrainians”, mainly prisoners of war.
In 1944, the OUN and UPA created the Ukrainian Main Liberation Council (Ukrainian Golovna Vizvolna Rada, UGVR), which, according to the creators, was supposed to become a supra-party superstructure and the basis of the power institutions of “independent Ukraine” under the leadership of Stepan Bendera.
By the fall of 1944, the Germans released S. Bendera and Y. Stetsko with a group of previously detained OUN figures. The German press published numerous articles about the UPA's successes in the fight against the Bolsheviks, calling UPA members "Ukrainian freedom fighters."

In the post-war period, OUN(b) members tried to deny their involvement in the massacres and collaboration with the Germans; some documents were even falsified.

In terms of their cruelty, Bender/Bander can be placed on a par with the most bloodthirsty tyrants. If, by the ill will of fate or an absurd accident, Stepan Bandera came to power in Ukraine instead of Koch, or God forbid, after the Great Patriotic War, the subversive terrorist activities of Bandera gangs would have been successful, the purpose of which was to spread their influence deep into Soviet territories - conducting anti-Soviet propaganda and mobilization into its ranks of a population dissatisfied or agitated against the Soviet regime by order of the Western masters and, as a result, the creation of a real military force capable of crushing the Soviet Union, then rivers of blood would flood the entire Eurasian continent. Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary Kalush district in the Stanislav region (Galicia), which was part of Austria-Hungary (now the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine), in the family of the Greek Catholic parish priest Andrei Bandera, who received a theological education at Lviv University. His mother, Miroslava, also came from the family of a Greek Catholic priest. As he later wrote in his autobiography, “I spent my childhood ... in the house of my parents and grandfathers, grew up in an atmosphere of Ukrainian patriotism and living national-cultural, political and social interests. There was a large library at home, and active participants in the Ukrainian national life of Galicia often came together”...

Stepan Bandera began his “revolutionary” path in 1922, joining the Ukrainian scout organization “Plast”, and in 1928 – the revolutionary Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO). In 1929, he joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) created by Yevgeny Konovalets and soon headed the most radical “youth” group. 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 killed.

At this time, the OUN established close contacts with German foreign intelligence; the organization’s headquarters were located in Berlin, at Hauptstrasse 11, under the guise of the “Union of Ukrainian Elders in Germany.” BANDERA HIMSELF WAS TRAINED AT AN INTELLIGENCE SCHOOL IN DANZIG.

From 1932 to 1933, Bandera was the deputy head of the regional executive (leadership) of the OUN, and was involved in organizing robberies of postal trains and post offices, as well as the murders of political opponents. In 1934, on the orders of Stepan Bandera, an employee of the Soviet consulate, Alexey Mailov, was killed in Lvov. It is interesting that shortly before this, the former resident of German intelligence in Poland, Major Knauer, showed up at the OUN. According to Polish intelligence, on the eve of the murder, the OUN received 40 thousand Reichsmarks from the Abwehr (the military intelligence and counterintelligence body of Nazi Germany).

With Hitler coming to power in Germany in January 1934, the Berlin headquarters of the OUN, as a special department, was included in the Gestapo headquarters. In the suburbs of Berlin - Wilhelmsdorf - barracks were built with funds from German intelligence, where OUN militants were trained. That same year, the Polish Minister of the Interior, General Bronislaw Peracki, strongly condemned German plans to seize Danzig, which, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, had been declared a “free city” under the administration of the League of Nations. Hitler himself instructed Richard Yarom, a German intelligence agent in charge of the OUN, to eliminate Peratsky. On June 15, 1934, Peratsky was killed by the people of Stepan Bandera, but this time luck did not smile on them and the nationalists were captured and convicted. For the murder of Bronislaw Peratsky, Stepan Bandera, Nikolai Lebed and Yaroslav Karpinets were sentenced to death by the Warsaw District Court, the rest, including Roman Shukhevych, received from 7 to 15 years in prison. However, under pressure from the German leadership, the death penalty was replaced with life imprisonment.

In the summer of 1936, Stepan Bandera, along with other members of the Regional Executive of the OUN, appeared in court in Lvov on charges of leading the terrorist activities of the OUN-UVO. In particular, the court considered the circumstances of the murder by members of the OUN of the gymnasium director Ivan Babii and student Yakov Bachinsky, accused by nationalists of having connections with the Polish police. At this trial, Bandera already openly acted as a regional leader of the OUN. In total, at the Warsaw and Lvov trials, Stepan Bandera was sentenced to life imprisonment seven times.

In September 1939, when Germany occupied Poland, Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Abwehr, was released. Irrefutable proof of Stepan Bandera's collaboration with the Nazis is the transcript of the interrogation of the head of the Abwehr department of the Berlin district, Colonel Erwin Stolze (May 29, 1945):

“... after the end of the war with Poland, Germany was intensively preparing for a war against the Soviet Union and therefore measures were being taken through the Abwehr to intensify subversive activities, since those activities that were carried out through MELNIK and other agents seemed insufficient. For these purposes, a prominent Ukrainian nationalist, Bandera Stepan, was recruited, who during the war was released from prison, where he had been imprisoned by the Polish authorities for participating in a terrorist act against the leaders of the Polish government. The last one in touch was with me.”

After the murder of Yevgeny Konovalets in Italy in 1938 by NKVD officers, OUN meetings took place, at which Yevgeny Konovalets’ successor Andrei Melnik was proclaimed (his supporters declared him the head of PUN - Seeing Ukrainian Nationalists). Stepan Bandera did not agree with this decision. After the Nazis released Stepan Bandera from prison, a split in the OUN became inevitable. Having read the works of the ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism Dmitry Dontsov in a Polish prison, Stepan Bandera believed that the OUN was not “revolutionary” enough in its essence and only he, Stepan Bandera, was able to correct the situation.

In February 1940, Stepan Bandera convened an OUN conference in Krakow, at which a tribunal was created that handed down death sentences to Melnik's supporters. The confrontation with the Melnikovites took the form of an armed struggle: Bandera killed several members of the “Melnikovsky” OUN Provod: Nikolai Stsiborsky and Yemelyan Senik, as well as a prominent “Melnikovsky” member, Yevgeny Shulga.

As follows from the memoirs of Yaroslav Stetsko, Stepan Bandera, through the mediation of Richard Yary, shortly before the war secretly met with Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. During the meeting, Stepan Bandera, according to Yaroslav Stetsko, “very clearly and clearly presented the Ukrainian positions, finding a certain understanding from the admiral, who promised support for the Ukrainian political concept, believing that only with its implementation is a German victory over Russia possible.” Stepan Bandera himself indicated that at the meeting with Canaris, the conditions for training Ukrainian volunteer units under the Wehrmacht were mainly discussed.

Three months before the attack on the USSR, Stepan Bandera created the Ukrainian Legion named after Konovalets from members of the OUN; a little later the legion became part of the Brandenburg-800 regiment and became known as “Nachtigal”. The Brandenburg-800 regiment was created as part of the Wehrmacht - it was special forces designed to conduct sabotage operations behind enemy lines.

Negotiations with the Nazis were conducted not only by Stepan Bandera himself, but also by persons authorized by him. For example, in the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) documents have been preserved confirming that Bandera’s supporters themselves offered their services to the Nazis. In the protocol of interrogation of Abwehr officer Yu.D. Lazarek says that he was a witness and participant in negotiations between Abwehr representative Eichern and Bandera’s assistant Nikolai Lebed: “Lebed said that Bandera’s followers would provide the necessary personnel for schools of saboteurs, and would also be able to agree to the use of the entire underground of Galicia and Volyn for sabotage and reconnaissance purposes in territory of the USSR."

To carry out subversive activities and intelligence activities on the territory of the USSR, Stepan Bandera received two and a half million Reichsmarks from Nazi Germany.

On March 10, 1940, Bandera’s OUN headquarters decided to transfer leading personnel to Volyn and Galicia to organize a rebellion. According to Soviet counterintelligence, the rebellion was planned for the spring of 1941. Why spring? The leadership of the OUN had to understand that open action would inevitably end in complete defeat and physical destruction of the entire organization. The answer comes naturally if we remember that the original date of Nazi Germany’s attack on the USSR was May 1941. However, Hitler was forced to transfer some troops to the Balkans in order to take control of Yugoslavia. At the same time, the OUN leadership gave an order: all OUN members who served in the army or police of Yugoslavia should go over to the side of the Croatian Nazis.

In April 1941, the revolutionary Wire of the OUN convened a Great Gathering of Ukrainian nationalists in Krakow, where Stepan Bandera was elected head of the OUN, and Yaroslav Stetsko was elected his deputy. In connection with the receipt of new instructions for the underground, the actions of OUN groups on the territory of Ukraine intensified even more. In April alone, they killed 38 Soviet party workers and carried out dozens of acts of sabotage in transport, industrial and agricultural enterprises.

After the last Gathering, the OUN finally split into OUN-(M) (Melnik’s supporters) and OUN-(B) (Bandera’s supporters), which was also called OUN-(R) (OUN-revolutionaries). Here is what the Nazis thought about this (from the transcript of the interrogation of the head of the Abwehr department of the Berlin district, Colonel Erwin Stolze (May 29, 1945)): “Despite the fact that during my meeting with Melnik and Bandera, both of them promised to take all measures to reconciliation. I have personally come to the conclusion that this reconciliation will not take place due to the significant differences between them:
“If Melnik is a calm, intelligent person, then Bandera is a careerist, a fanatic and a bandit.”

During the Great Patriotic War, the Germans pinned greater hopes on the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists of Bandera OUN-(B) than on the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists Melnik OUM-(M) and the Polesie Sich of Bulba Borovets, who also sought to gain power in Ukraine under a German protectorate. Stepan Bandera sought to become the head of the Ukrainian state as soon as possible and, having abused the trust of his masters from Nazi Germany, decided to proclaim the “independence” of the Ukrainian state from the Moscow occupation, independently creating a government and appointing Yaroslav Stetsko as prime minister.

The Volyn massacre is the bestial essence of the OUN-UPA.

Bandera’s trick of establishing Ukraine as an independent state was necessary in order to show the population his importance; there were personal ambitions here. On June 30, 1941, Bandera’s ally Yaroslav Stetsko from the city hall in Lviv announced the decision of the leadership of the OUN (B) Provod on the “revival of the Ukrainian state.”

Residents of Lvov reacted sluggishly to information about the revival of Ukrainian statehood. According to the Lvov priest, Doctor of Theology Father Gavril Kotelnik, about a hundred people from the intelligentsia and clergy were rounded up. The city residents themselves did not dare to take to the streets and support the proclamation of the revival of the Ukrainian state. The decision to revive the Ukrainian state was approved by a group of people who were forcibly rounded up to participate in this event.

“The newly reborn Ukrainian State will closely interact with the National Socialist Greater Germany, which, under the leadership of its Leader Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and the world and helping the Ukrainian people to 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 a Sovereign Conciliar Ukrainian State and a new order throughout the world.

Let the Ukrainian Sovereign Conciliar Power live! Let the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists live! May the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian People STEPAN BANDERA live! GLORY TO UKRAINE!

Among Ukrainian nationalists and a number of officials at the head of modern Ukraine, this document is considered the Act of Independence of Ukraine, and Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and Yaroslav Stetsko are considered Heroes of Ukraine.

Simultaneously with the proclamation of the Act, supporters of Stepan Bandera staged a pogrom in Lvov. Ukrainian nationalists acted according to blacklists compiled before the war. As a result, 7 thousand people were killed in the city in 6 days. Saul Friedman wrote about the massacre carried out by Bandera’s followers in Lvov in his book “The Pogromist,” published in New York: “During the first three days of July 1941, the Nachtigal battalion destroyed seven thousand Jews in the vicinity of Lvov. Before execution, Jews - professors, lawyers, doctors - were forced to lick all the staircases of four-story buildings and carry garbage in their mouths from one building to another. Then, forced to walk through a line of warriors with yellow-blakite armbands, they were bayoneted.”

However, Germany had its own plans for Ukraine; it was interested in free living space: territory and cheap labor. It would be reckless for Germany to give power in the territory that was captured by regular German military formations to Ukrainian nationalists just because, although they took part in hostilities, they mainly did the dirty work of punitive forces and policemen. Therefore, from the point of view of the German leadership, there could be no talk of any revival and granting Ukraine state status, even under the patronage of Nazi Germany.

Having been bypassed by a younger competitor, Andrei Melnik wrote a letter to Hitler and Governor General Frank that “Bandera’s people are behaving unworthily and have created their own government without the knowledge of the Fuhrer.” After which Hitler ordered the arrest of Stepan Bandera and his “government”. At the beginning of July 1941, Stepan Bandera was arrested in Krakow and, together with Yaroslav Stetsko and his comrades, was sent to Berlin at the disposal of the Abwehr - to Colonel Erwin Stolze. After Stepan Bandera arrived in Berlin, the leadership of Nazi Germany demanded that he renounce the Act of “Revival of the Ukrainian State.” Stepan Bandera agreed and called on “the Ukrainian people to help the German army everywhere to defeat Moscow and Bolshevism.” On July 15, 1941, Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko were released from arrest. Yaroslav Stetsko in his memoirs described what was happening as an “honorable arrest.” Yes, it’s really an honor: “From the wilderness to the court,” to the “supposed capital of the world.” After his release from arrest in Berlin, Stepan Bandera lived in a dacha owned by the Abwehr.

During their stay in Berlin, Bandera’s followers repeatedly met with representatives of various departments, assuring that without their help the German army could not defeat Moscow. An endless stream of messages, explanations, dispatches, “declarations” and “memoranda” with justifications and requests for assistance and support were sent to Hitler, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and other leaders of Nazi Germany. In his letters, Stepan Bandera proved his loyalty to the Fuhrer and the German army and tried to convince him of the urgent need for the OUN-B for Germany.

Stepan Bandera’s labors were not in vain, and the German leadership took the next step: Andrei Melnik was allowed to continue to openly curry favor with Berlin, and Stepan Bandera was ordered to portray an enemy of the Germans so that he could, hiding behind anti-Nazi slogans, restrain the Ukrainian masses from a real, irreconcilable fight against Nazi invaders, from the struggle for the freedom of Ukraine.

With the emergence of new plans, Stepan Bandera is transported from the Abwehr dacha to a privileged block of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After the massacre carried out by Bandera’s supporters in June 1941 in Lvov, Stepan Bandera could have been killed by his own people, and Nazi Germany still needed him. This gave rise to the legend that Bandera did not collaborate with the Germans and even fought with them, but documents say otherwise.

In the concentration camp, Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko and another 300 Banderaites were kept separately in the Cellenbau bunker, where they were kept in good conditions. Bandera's members were allowed to meet, they received food and money from relatives and the OUN-B. They often left the camp in order to contact “conspiratorial” OUN-UPA fighters, and also visited Friedenthal Castle (200 meters from the Cellenbau bunker), which housed a school for OUN intelligence and sabotage personnel. The instructor at this school was a former officer of the Nachtigal special battalion, Yuri Lopatinsky, through whom Stepan Bandera communicated with the OUN-UPA. Stepan Bandera was one of the main initiators of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) on October 14, 1942, and he also achieved the replacement of its main commander Dmitry Klyachkivsky with his protege Roman Shukhevych.

In 1944, Soviet troops cleared Western Ukraine of fascists. Fearing punishment, many members of the OUN-UPA fled with the German troops. The hatred of the residents of Volyn and Galicia for the OUN-UPA was so great that they handed them over to Soviet troops or killed them themselves. In order to activate the OUN members and support their spirit, the Nazis decided to release Stepan Bandera and his supporters from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This happened on September 25, 1944. After leaving the camp, Stepan Bandera immediately joined the 202nd “Schutzmannschaft” Abwehr team in Krakow and began training OUN-UPA sabotage detachments. Irrefutable proof of this is the testimony of a former Gestapo and Abwehr employee, Lieutenant Siegfried Müller, given 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 through them conveyed to the UPA headquarters an order to intensify subversive work in the rear of the Red Army and establish regular radio communications with Abwehrkommando-202.

Stepan Bandera himself did not participate in practical work in the rear of the Red Army; his task was to organize activities. However, the ABWER was repeatedly deployed “to control reconnaissance and sabotage groups and coordinate their actions on the spot.”

The following fact is interesting. Anyone who fell into the clutches of Hitler's punitive machine, even if the Nazis later became convinced of his innocence, never returned to freedom. This was common Nazi practice. The unprecedented attitude of the Nazis towards Bandera is proven by their direct mutual cooperation.

When Soviet troops approached Berlin, Bandera was instructed to form detachments from the remnants of the Ukrainian Nazis for its defense. Bandera created the detachments, but he himself escaped. After the end of the war, he lived in Munich and collaborated with the British intelligence services. At the OUN conference in 1947, he was elected head of the Wire of the entire OUN, which actually meant the unification of the OUN-(B) and OUN-(M). Quite a happy ending for the former “prisoner” of Sachsenhausen. Being in absolute safety and leading the OUN and UPA organizations, Stepan Bandera shed a lot of human blood with his hands.

On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bendera was killed in the entrance of his house. He was met on the stairs by a man who shot him in the face from a special pistol with a stream of soluble poison (potassium cyanide). It was only in this century that the details of the liquidation were made public. This was one of the last operations of this kind by the USSR KGB.

During the Great Patriotic War, more than 3 million civilians were brutally tortured and killed by the hands of members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
Open source materials.
Bender/Bandera was never a citizen of Ukraine.
His dream was to become the Gauleiter of Ukraine like Erich Koch or any other country occupied by the Nazis...

In the history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement of the 20th century, there is hardly a person who has earned such a controversial assessment of his activities as Stepan Andreevich Bandera. If for some he is a hero who laid down his life for the fatherland, then for others he is a traitor and accomplice of the enemy. Avoiding any bias, we will turn only to the facts related to his life.

The village priest's son

The biography of Stepan Bandera originates in the kingdom of Galicia, which was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There, on January 1, 1909, a son named Stepan was born into the family of a Ukrainian priest of the Greek Catholic Church in the village of Stary Ugrinov. He was the second child in the family; in total, his father (Andrei Mikhailovich) and mother (Miroslava Vladimirovna) had eight children. The house where Stepan Bandera was born has survived to this day.

Nationalist sentiments in Galicia

In those years, Ukrainians living in Galicia were discriminated against by the Austro-Hungarian government, which supported the Poles, who made up the majority of the region’s population. This caused a backlash and became the reason for the widespread spread of nationalist sentiments among Ukrainians.

One of the most active participants in the Ukrainian nationalist movement of that time was Andrei Mikhailovich Bandera, Stepan’s father, in whose house relatives and friends who also shared his views often gathered. Among them one could often see Pavel Glodzinsky, a well-known entrepreneur and founder of the Maslotrest union in those years, a member of the Austro-Hungarian parliament Yaroslav Veselovsky and many other prominent figures. There is no doubt that the entire future fate of Stepan Bandera largely depended on these circumstances.

Years of the First World War

The indelible impression of Stepan’s childhood was the battles of the First World War, which he witnessed, as the front repeatedly passed through the village of Stary Ugrinov. One day, their house was partially destroyed by a shell explosion, but, fortunately, no one from the family was injured.

The defeat of Austria-Hungary and its subsequent collapse gave impetus to the intensification of the national liberation movement among the Ukrainian part of the population, which was joined by Stepan’s father, who became a member of the parliament of the self-proclaimed Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (WUNR) in those years, and then a chaplain (military priest) ) in the ranks of her army.

Studying at the gymnasium and first political experience

When Stepan was ten years old, he entered the classical gymnasium of the city of Stryi, where he settled with his father’s parents. Despite the fact that almost all the gymnasium students were children from families belonging to the Ukrainian community, local authorities tried to introduce the “Polish spirit” into this educational institution, which became the cause of constant conflicts with the students’ parents.

The schoolchildren themselves did not stand aside, actively joining the ranks of the underground youth organization “Plast”, created on the principles of nationalism and being part of the international scout movement. In 1922, thirteen-year-old Stepan Bandera became a member, whose nationality (he was Ukrainian) opened the door for him to this illegal organization.

Creation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

The defeat of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic in the war with Poland (1918-1919) led to the occupation of all of Eastern Galicia by Polish troops and the almost complete loss of civil rights of Ukrainians living on its territory. Their language was deprived of official status, all positions in local government were provided exclusively to Poles. In addition, a stream of Polish immigrants rushed to Galicia, whom the authorities provided with housing and land, while infringing on the rights of local residents.

The response of Ukrainian nationalists was the organization of armed units on the territory of Czechoslovakia, which carried out raids on the territory of Galicia and carried out military operations directed against the Polish authorities. In 1929, on their basis, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was created, which subsequently became widely known for its underground activities aimed at overthrowing the Polish dictatorship.

Head of the regional branch of the OUN

One of its first members was Stepan Bandera, whose life story is inextricably linked with the national liberation struggle of his people. At this stage, his duties included distributing illegal literature among the population, working in the monthly magazine “Pride of the Nation,” and also working in the propaganda department of the OUN. The police, suppressing the activities of this organization, repeatedly arrested Bandera, but each time he managed to be released again.

In 1929, Bandera headed the radical wing of the OUN, and soon became the leader of the entire regional branch. With his participation, numerous expropriations, or, more simply put, robberies of banks, postal trains, post offices, as well as the murders of a number of political figures who were enemies of the nationalist movement were organized and successfully carried out. He improved his skills as an illegal underground worker by completing a training course at a German intelligence school in Danzig in 1932.

Death sentence, prison and... unexpected freedom

Back in 1928, he became a student at the Lvov Higher Polytechnic School, majoring in agronomy, but was never able to defend his diploma. In 1934, for organizing the murder of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland B. Peratsky, Stepan, along with other participants in the attempt, was arrested and sentenced to death by a court decision. Later, capital punishment was replaced by life imprisonment.

Stepan Andreevich Bandera was released completely unexpectedly. This happened in September 1939, when, after the retreat of the Polish army, the guards of the prison in which he was kept fled. Having made his way illegally to Rome, he met with the new head of the OUN, Andrei Melnikov, who replaced Yevgeny Konovalets, who was killed by NKVD officers, in this post. Despite the commonality of interests, serious disagreements arose between them from the first day, as a result of which the organization itself soon split into two opposing groups: Bandera and Melnik.

A political failure that resulted in a new arrest

Having united his supporters, Stepan Andreevich formed combat units from them, and at a rally held on June 30, 1941 in Lvov, he proclaimed the independence of Ukraine. The reaction of the occupation authorities, who in no way intended to recognize the sovereignty of Ukraine, followed immediately. Bandera and the head of the government he formed, Yaroslav Stetsko, were arrested and taken to Berlin.

In the capital of the Third Reich, they were forced to publicly renounce the idea of ​​Ukrainian sovereignty and annul the act of creating an independent state promulgated at the Lviv rally. The same failure befell the Melnikites - the attempt to proclaim the independence of Ukraine failed, after which the leadership of both groups ended up in prison.

During this period, Stepan Bandera suffered a misfortune, news of which came from the zone of Soviet occupation: NKVD officers shot his father, Andrei Mikhailovich, and all his relatives were arrested and sent to camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Stepan Andreevich himself ended up a prisoner of the German concentration camp Sachsenhausen, where he stayed until the end of 1944.

Creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army

Due to the atrocities committed by the Germans on the territory of Ukraine, thousands of its residents joined partisan detachments and fought the enemy. In the fall of 1942, Bandera’s supporters who were at large called on Melnik’s members, as well as members of numerous scattered partisan detachments, to unite in order to carry out joint military operations.

As a result, on the basis of the former Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, a formation was created called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and reached 100 thousand people. This army fought in the territories of Polesie, Volyn, Kholm region and Galicia, trying to expel the Germans, Poles, and Russians from there. She left a dark memory of herself with innumerable crimes committed against civilians and captured soldiers.

After the fascists were expelled from Ukraine in 1944, the activities of the UPA took on a different character - units of the Red Army became its opponents, which it resisted until the mid-1950s. Particularly heated battles took place in 1946-1948. In general, during the post-war period, more than 4 thousand armed clashes were recorded between UPA units and Soviet troops.

Cooperation with the Abwehr and post-war activities

Despite the fact that the nationalists who fought both the Germans and the Red Army were called Bandera, Stepan Andreevich himself did not participate in the battles, since, as mentioned above, he was in a concentration camp until the end of 1944. He received his freedom only after the German command decided to use the imprisoned OUN members for their own purposes.

At the final stage of the war, Stepan Bandera's biography was tainted by collaboration with the fascists, against whom his comrades were waging a merciless struggle at that time. It is known that, having accepted the offer of the Abwehr leadership, he was engaged in preparing sabotage groups for several months remaining until the end of the war. Formed from among prisoners of war, they were intended to be sent to liberated territories, among which was Ukraine.

Stepan Bandera continued his activities as the leader of the OUN after the end of World War II. While in West Germany, he was re-elected to this post twice - in 1953 and 1955. Stepan Andreevich spent the last years of his life in Munich, where he managed to take his family, who had previously been in East Germany.

Family of Stepan Bandera

His wife Yaroslava Vasilievna, like himself, grew up in the family of a priest, and from an early age was brought up in the spirit of patriotism and the ideas of creating an independent Ukrainian state. The entire biography of Stepan Bandera is connected with her, starting from the period of his studies at the Lvov Higher Polytechnic School, where they met. Being her closest comrade in the struggle during the years of her husband’s stay in the concentration camp, Yaroslava Vasilyevna maintained his connection with the OUN. In 1939, she spent several months in a Polish prison for her activities.

Stepan Bandera's children - son Andrei (b. 1944), as well as daughters Natalya (b. 1941) and Lesya (b. 1947) - were brought up in the same spirit as himself. Having become adults and living in different countries of the world, they, nevertheless, remained patriots of Ukraine. Since their father, for purposes of conspiracy, lived after the war under the pseudonym Popel, the children learned their real name only after his death.

Liquidation planned by the KGB

In the second half of the 1940s, Bandera worked closely with British intelligence, in particular, selecting agents for it from among Ukrainian emigrants. In this regard, the Soviet intelligence services were tasked with eliminating him. The first time the murder of Stepan Bandera was planned to be committed in 1947, but then the UNO security service managed to prevent the attempt. The Soviet secret services made the next attempt a year later, also unsuccessfully. Finally, already in 1959, KGB agent Bogdan Stashevsky, who had previously committed the murder of another UNO leader, Lev Rebet, managed to complete the task.

Having ambushed Bandera on the landing, he shot him in the face from a silent syringe pistol with a charge of potassium cyanide, from which he died instantly. Stashevsky himself quietly fled the crime scene. At the moment of the shot, Stepan Andreevich was climbing the stairs, and the result of the fall of his already unconscious body was a crack at the base of the skull, which was erroneously recognized as the cause of death. This gave reason to consider the incident an accident. Only a detailed investigation conducted by German criminologists helped establish the fact of the murder.

Stepan Bandera - hero or traitor?

If in the Soviet period official propaganda clearly classified him as an enemy, and other assessments of Bandera’s activities were not allowed, today one can hear a variety of, sometimes diametrically opposed, opinions. Thus, according to a survey conducted in 2014 among residents of Western Ukraine, 75% of respondents reported their positive attitude towards him. For them, he is still a symbol of the struggle for the country's sovereignty. At the same time, residents of Russia, Poland and South-Eastern Ukraine see him as an accomplice of the fascists, a traitor and a terrorist. The crimes committed by Bandera’s supporters in his name are too memorable.

According to a number of historians, this diversity of opinions is partly explained by the fact that until now an objective and substantiated biography of Stepan Bandera has not been compiled, and most publications are clearly ideologically ordered. In particular, a number of negative episodes of activity previously attributed to him were subsequently refuted. In short, a comprehensive assessment of this personality will still require deep and serious research.

Name: Stepan Bandera

Age: 50 years

Place of Birth: village Stary Ugrinov, Ivano-Frankivsk region, Ukraine

A place of death: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Activity: politician, ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism

Family status: Was married to Yaroslava Oparovskaya

Stepan Bandera - biography

Stepan Bandera is a Ukrainian politician who went down in history as a theorist and ideologist of nationalism in Ukraine.

Childhood years, Bandera family

Despite the fact that many facts of his biography are unknown and shrouded in some mystery, most of the fate of this man is known, since he himself wrote his autobiography. From it we know that Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909. His homeland was the village of Stary Ugrinov, which is located in the kingdom of Galicia.

The father of the future politician was a clergyman. The family was large: eight children. In this family, Stepan was the second child born. But this large family did not have their own home, so they were forced to live in the house that their father’s position made possible. The house in which they lived for a long time belonged to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

Parents have always tried to instill patriotism in their children and instill in them a love for their homeland. It was customary for the family to honor religion. Stepan was always an obedient boy who loved and respected his parents. Even in his early years he always prayed. This always happened in the morning and evening, and every year these prayers became longer and longer.

Already in his childhood, Stepan Bandera wanted to fight and defend his homeland. He always wanted Ukraine to be free, so already in his childhood he tried to teach himself not to feel pain. So, he conducted tests on himself in order to strengthen himself and his body. Such tests included not only dousing with cold and ice water, but also being pricked with needles, as well as beatings with heavy metal chains. Because of this, he soon developed rheumatism of the joints, the pain of which tormented him all his life.

Stepan Bandera - Education

Even in his childhood, Stepan was greatly influenced by the books that were in their house, as well as by those prominent politicians of the time who visited this library. Among them were Yaroslav Veselovsky, Pavel Glodzinsky, and others.

But at first the child did not go to school, but received his primary education at home. Some sciences were taught by Ukrainian teachers who came to their homes, and some subjects were explained by Father Andrei Mikhailovich Bandera himself. But in 1919, when the First World War was already underway, and the boy’s father participated in the liberation movement, the child was sent to a gymnasium. This educational institution was located in the city of Stryi. There he spent eight whole years.

Even though he was poor compared to other high school students, he was very active and played sports. In addition, he was interested in music and even sang in the choir. Stepan Bandera tried to participate in all events that were held for young people.

After graduating from high school, he moved to Lviv, entering the Polytechnic Institute, choosing the faculty of agronomy. At the same time, he begins to rapidly develop his secret activities in the underground organization.

Career of Stepan Bandera

A new page in the biography of Stepan Andreevich Bander began in the gymnasium, where he was not only interested in sports and music, led clubs and was responsible for the economic part, but at the same time, at the same time, secretly became a participant in the military organization of Ukraine.

In Lvov, he is not only already a member of this organization, but also becomes a correspondent for a satire magazine. In 1932, active participant Stepan Bandera began to move up the career ladder in the secret organization and took the post of deputy regional guide, and a year later he performed the duties of the regional guide himself.

During this time, Stepan Bander was arrested five times for his underground activities, but was released each time. In 1932, he organized a protest against the execution of militants of his secret organization. After this, in 1933, he was entrusted with leading the operation to liquidate the USSR consul, who was in Lvov. That same year, he used schoolchildren for his protest.

But he was also responsible for many murders related to politics. He organized terrorist attacks that killed many people who had something to do with politics, as well as their families. For all the crimes he had already committed, he was arrested in July 1936. But even in prison, he was able to organize a hunger strike that lasted 16 days and which forced the government to make concessions to him.

After Germany's attack on Poland, Stepan Bandera is freed. But already in 1941 he was arrested by the German authorities. First he was in prison, and then spent a year and a half in a concentration camp, where he was under constant surveillance. But still he did not agree to cooperate in Germany. After that, he lived in this country, although he closely followed all the events that took place in Ukraine. In 1945, he took over the leadership of the underground society OUN.

Stepan Bandera was killed in October 1959 in Munich, where he then lived. His killer was KGB agent Stashevsky.

Stepan Bandera - biography of personal life

He met his wife Yaroslava Vasilievna in Lvov when he was studying at the Polytechnic Institute. This is a happy page in the biography of the Ukrainian nationalist.

short biography outlined in this article.

Stepan Bandera short biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Due to the recent increased interest in the history of Ukrainian nationalism, many Russians learned for the first time who Stepan Bandera was. I don’t know if sociological research was 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: they know, as a rule, about the Banderaites hiding in caches in the forests, 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. A lot of myths arise - from his rejection of anti-Semitism to the fight against Germany during the war.
I do not pursue the goal of telling the biography of Stepan Bandera; this is hardly possible to do 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 interesting facts of Bandera’s biography and the most persistent myths about Bandera and give my brief comment.

1) Stepan Bandera has never been to Central, much less Eastern, Ukraine during his life. Stepan Andreevich was born on New Year's Day 1909 in the village of Stary Ugrinov, which was part of Austria-Hungary. He spent most of his youth and studies in the cities of Stryi and Lviv, 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 while studying in the then German city of Danzig, where he learned the basics of intelligence). From 1936 to 1939 he was imprisoned in Warsaw. In 1939, he briefly came illegally to Lviv, when it had already become part of the USSR. However, he stayed there for no more than two months, having become convinced that it was impossible to ensure his own safety there. Since then, Bandera has not been to Ukraine. 1939 - 1941 He spent most of his time traveling (Germany, Slovakia, Poland, Italy), and from 1941 to 1944 he was in a special cell in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After 1944 and until his death in 1959, Bandera lived in Germany (mainly in Munich). Thus, the main Ukrainian nationalist lived in Western Ukraine for less than half of his life, and never visited either the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, or the Donbass.

2) From childhood, Bandera showed a clear tendency towards sadism. Stepan Andreevich was small in stature - 157 cm. Perhaps it was his modest physical characteristics that prevented him from killing at least one person personally 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. This is how Stepan Andreevich asserted himself in the company and began his glorious path.

Short Bandera with classmates

3) The greeting slogan is “Glory to Ukraine - glory to the heroes.” I am sure that most people do not know what “heroes” we are talking about. He first made such a comment 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. The fact that Russian Ukrainians were exterminated first of all is usually not said. It was they who ardently supported the regime that created the notorious Terezin and Talerhof camps, where they exterminated people just for calling themselves Russian. Moreover, Russians in Western Ukraine. If you utter 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 food, and 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 fascists. Try to find at least how many Germans the OUN destroyed.

5) Bandera was a "respectable family man." It is known that Bandera kicked his pregnant wife, suffered from Plyushkin 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 quite by accident became a symbol of Ukrainian nationalism. It was not for nothing that his contemporaries and even comrades gave him the nicknames “Grey” and “Baba”. An accident associated with the death of Yevgen Konovalets elevated this man to the title and Order of Hero of Ukraine. The order, executed in the form of a Soviet five-pointed star...

Well? Glory to heroes?