The case of Mr. Stefan Bandera
In most libraries of western
Who was that man?
If asked, your new Ukrainians friends will tell you , with an apparent good faith and enthusiasm , that he was a true hero, a patriot, a courageous politician and ideologue that fought the Nazis and contributed to build
Nothing can be more far from the truth than this.
At this stage, most people would cope with this rather flattering portrait.
But let us try to go a bit further:
A quick search on the internet leads to the wikipedia page about Stefan Bandera. And it is mentioned that he is a “controversial” figure, so that the nice portrait of Bandera pictured by your Ukrainian friends is starting to show several important flaws.
When re-asked, your Ukrainian friends might tell you that, in fact, Bandera is considered as a hero by the Ukrainians … and as a war criminal by the Russians, and they will end their answer by telling you that this doesn’t change anything to the fact that Bandera was a true Hero.
Then you might question yourself how is it possible that a war partisan hero might be considered as a criminal by those – the Russians – who above all much valued all resistance to the Nazi troops.
Is, for example, Jean Moulin, the French hero, being considered as a war criminal by
So apparently something is definitely wrong with Mr. Stefan Bandera.
Looking deeper, we will learn that Mr. Stefan Bandera occupied a position as an officer in the SS troops! That is becoming weirder …Who was that man to be a Hero? Was he a spy? Did he infiltrate the deep of the Nazi organization in order to outwit their evil plans? Not really!
Now didn’t the Nazi SS troops commit horrible atrocities against the Ukrainian people? So how can it be that Bandera is considered as a Hero?
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In fact, Bandera was a convinced fascist, a collaborationist and an active Ukrainian Nazi. He took part in the occupation of
What makes the Ukrainians think that Bandera fought the Nazis is the following trick, frequently used by his revisionist biographers:
In the middle of the World War II, in 1942 ( he started apparently to change his strategy at the end of 1941 ) , Bandera decided to “stop” his collaboration with the SS troops because, apparently, he had the feeling to have been “deceived” by the Nazi policy in
It is true that a part of the Ukrainian population welcomed the SS troops as “liberators” from the communism. After they quickly realized that the SS troops were effectively considering to “delivering” massively the Ukrainians, not only from the communism but also from life, the Ukrainians started to realize their unfathomable mistake and engaged a strong collective resistance.
But this is not the story of Bandera.
Bandera was for a long time associated with the repressions and murdering of his fellows compatriots.
What is likely to have happened is that Bandera finally realized that Hitler had no intention to give him the position of “Gauleiter” of Nazi Ukraine and this, for a precise reason: in the mind of the Nazis, all that was speaking Russian had to be eradicated sooner or later, the Slavic people had to be eradicated and that was including this poor Ukraine, so that there could not exist any Nazi Ukraine because the whole of Ukraine had to be razed.
Following his sudden move, Bandera was immediately imprisoned by the Nazis, and they probably had in mind to quickly getting rid of him.
But at the time Bandera decided to stop his “collaboration”, the situation of the Nazi troops on the eastern front had became very different of what it was at the time of the invasion of
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Killing Bandera, who had created opportunely a nationalistic Ukrainian party, would have drawn a considerable amount of Ukrainians “wait-and-see people” or collaborationists against the Nazi occupation troops.
Bandera was imprisoned to the 'VIP' area of Matthausen ( closed to the German troops facilities ) where a SS officer would visit him on a regular basis and would ask him the same question : "Now , mein herren , would you want to return working with the Fuhrer ?" .
Bandera did probably understood at the opportune time the difficulties of Hitler's troops to fight the red army and he did consider that he was too much valuable as a collaborationist, for the Nazis, to be threatened.
And indeed, he was soon freed and re-established as a collaborationist leader. But, instead of restarting his collaboration, Bandera preferred to escape and hide himself, foreseeing probably the fall of the Nazis. (In fact it is reported that, in 1943, Bandera replied to the Nazis that he didn’t wanted to collaborate anymore with a power that had no chance of winning the war. This man even betrayed the Nazis!)
Bandera then survived the end of the war.
He found his place in western
In 1959, Kroutchev finally ordered the assassination of this man who was still representing a danger for the post-war Ukrainian soviet.
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Now, this man, active Nazi collaborationist, SS officer, implied in the mass-murdering and repression of Ukrainian partisans is being considered as a messianic ideologue and a Hero in West Ukraine and had been made officially "Hero of Ukraine" by the president Iouchenko in January 2010 (This have been canceled and judged anti-constitutional since, thanks to the new president of Ukraine, Viktor Ianoukovitch )
There can be no doubt that the history of Bandera has been rewritten by his zealous modern biographers for the need of the ignorant popular masses:
"Stefan Bandera who fought the Nazis , organized the Ukrainian resistance and him who had been savagely murdered by the Soviet regime , was a true mentor of the Ukrainian nation whom he loved amongst all , etc , etc ... "
This is probably what one can read in the official history books distributed in all the schools and libraries of the country.
There is again one last thing to complete the true portrait of Stefan Bandera: Stefan Bandera was an anti-Semitic ideologue and a War criminal that had been directly implied in the deportation and mass-murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in
One other trick of Bandera’s biographers is to try to persuade their readers that Bandera was not really anti-Semitic. This is, again, perfectly untrue.
The organization of Bandera had a long history of Jew-hating and pogroms, starting with Petlura. Bandera had been arrested several times in
In 1941, when the Nazi troops arrived in
For example: in the town of
On a larger scale, we can mention, for example, his implication in the termination of the Jews belonging to the city of
“The extermination of the Jewish community continued with the execution, at the city slaughterhouse, on February 16–17, 1943, of some 600 women, children, and elderly people. During May–August 1943 the remaining Jews were killed and only some 1,500 slave laborers were temporarily spared. Jews who tried to hide in the forests and in the city itself were mostly caught and killed by the Germans, with the cooperation of local Ukrainians belonging mostly to the bands of Stefan Bandera”
(Aharon Weiss, Encyclopaedia Judaica , 2006)
These are only one of the many examples and evidences about what Bandera and his band did. They actively participated in many mass-murders against Jews, Poles and Ukrainians. The Banderas are reported to have murdered at least 100,000 poles during the war.
Up to 1.6 million of Ukrainians Jews have been killed by the Nazis and their collaborators ( The Shoah in Ukraine by M. Kruglov , editions Brandon and Lower ) . It is hard to say , in Western Ukraine , how much have been killed by the Banderas themselves, how much have been killed by the Nazis and how much have been killed by a joint action.
The last trick of the revisionist Biographers of Bandera is to claim that, since he was imprisoned from 1942 to 1944, Bandera cannot be hold responsible of the mass-murders performed by his organizations (OUN, OUN-B, UIA) during this period. This argument is absurd. The criminal acts of these people are completely linked with Bandera, with his ideology and with his directives.
It would be too long to detail here the role of Bandera, the precise chronology of events that led to the formation of his organizations, before the invasion of Ukraine, during the occupation of Ukraine by the Nazis and after the end of the Second World War, our article just want to give quick hint about this man and what he really was.
Then, with all these information, you would have to tell to your new Ukrainians friends:
“NO my friends, you're wrong. I know that Bandera was a murderer, a war criminal, an anti-Semitic ideologue, an active collaborationist who wanted a nazified
But after this, you would have to search again for new Ukrainians friends…
Joseph Litchblau , UKRLAA
