https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/30/russias-energy-geopolitics-with-china-and-india/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
Russia’s Energy Geopolitics With China And India
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Gridlock Just Ain’t What it Used to be
Thomas Knapp: The 2022 midterm election results “stand as an expression of overwhelming lack of confidence in the major parties,” J.D. Tuccille writes at Reason magazine, “with a resulting breather for the country resulting from the split decision’s ensuing, and quite welcome, gridlock.” Tuccille’s sigh of relief is only partial. While Republicans’ slight majority in the House of … Continue reading Gridlock Just Ain’t What it Used to be → - by Thomas L. Knapp
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The US’ Arms Backlog For Taiwan Caused By Ukraine Can Facilitate The New Détente
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/29/the-us-arms-backlog-for-taiwan-caused-by-ukraine-can-facilitate-the-new-detente/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
#leavingtwitter is Tiresome Performance Art
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Imran Khan’s Interview With PBS Corrected The Weaponized Misperceptions About Him
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/25/imran-khans-interview-with-pbs-corrected-the-weaponized-misperceptions-about-him/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
One Year In Detention: UN Experts Demand Immediate Release Of Kashmiri Activist Khurram Parvez
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/23/one-year-in-detention-un-experts-demand-immediate-release-of-kashmiri-activist-khurram-parvez/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
Thankful 2022
Thomas Knapp: It’s that time of year again. As I write this, the US Thanksgiving holiday approaches and many of us take stock of just what we’re thankful for. I recently ran into a situation that summarizes my biggest “thankful” takeaway from 2022: A crowded Walmart. As in REALLY crowded. Uncomfortably crowded. “Please let me out of … Continue reading Thankful 2022 → - by Thomas L. Knapp
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Analysing Rana Sanaullah’s Speculation That India Wants To Assassinate Imran Khan
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/22/analysing-rana-sanaullahs-speculation-that-india-wants-to-assassinate-imran-khan/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
The US-Chinese-Russian-Indian Interplay In The Global Systemic Transition
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“Respect for Marriage?” Not Really.
Thomas Knapp: On November 16, the Respect for Marriage Act achieved 62 votes for “cloture” in the US Senate, meaning that it will proceed to floor debate and likely — after reconciliation with the House version, which passed in July — become law. That’s a good thing, but let’s not make it more than it is. The … Continue reading “Respect for Marriage?” Not Really. → - by Thomas L. Knapp
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Cryptocurrency: Don’t Blame the Medium for the Scam
https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/17252?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
The New Russian-Indian-Iranian Troika On Afghanistan Balances The Chinese-Pakistani Duopoly
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/17/the-new-russian-indian-iranian-troika-on-afghanistan-balances-the-chinese-pakistani-duopoly/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
Ukraine Tried To Trick NATO Into Starting World War III After It Accidentally Bombed Poland
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/16/ukraine-tried-to-trick-nato-into-starting-world-war-3-after-it-accidentally-bombed-poland/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
And Now We Return to Our Scheduled Programming: Presidential Election Theater
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Imran Khan Is Right: The Establishment Is More To Blame For His Ouster Than The US Is
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/14/imran-khan-is-right-the-establishment-is-more-to-blame-for-his-ouster-than-the-us-is/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
Election 2022: Time for the “Spoiler” Whining
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20 Constructive Critiques Of Russia’s Special Operation
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/12/20-constructive-critiques-of-russias-special-operation/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
If Imran Khan Had Been Assassinated, There’d Have Been A Bloody Civil War In Pakistan – Sheikh Imran N. Hosein
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/11/if-imran-khan-had-been-assassinated-thered-have-been-a-bloody-civil-war-in-pakistan-sheikh-imran-n-hosein/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
Who Does Protectionism Protect? Not You.
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Why’d The US Contradict Kiev’s Claims About Russia Buying Iranian Ballistic Missiles?
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/10/whyd-the-us-contradict-kievs-claims-about-russia-buying-iranian-ballistic-missiles/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
A Russian-Ukrainian Ceasefire Isn’t As Far-Fetched Of A Scenario As Many Might Think
https://voiceofeast.net/2022/11/09/a-russian-ukrainian-ceasefire-isnt-as-far-fetched-of-a-scenario-as-many-might-think/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
Whither Musk’s Twitter
Kim Petersen: It must be excruciatingly difficult having to decide whether to put some of one’s hundreds-of-billions of dollars, along with potential future profit, at risk to affirm one’s previous public declaration of support for the freedom of speech principle. That is the dilemma that Musk has before him. Musk finds Twitter threatened with an advertiser boycott. […]
The post Whither Musk’s Twitter first appeared on Dissident Voice. - Kim Petersen
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‘Our Vision For Liberation In Palestine’ Conference Held In Istanbul
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History of Fascism in Ukraine Part 2
Hugo Turner: History of Fascism in Ukraine Part 2: The OUN during World War 2 1941-1945
With Special Thanks to T.P. Wilkinson
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists or OUN is the most successful post-war fascist group. During the war the OUN played a major role in helping the Germans carry out the Holocaust, which claimed 1.2 million Jewish lives. They also attempted genocide against the Polish population in Volhynia and Galicia in what is today Western Ukraine. These mass murders were carried out in the most brutal manner imaginable. Jews were beaten to death with iron bars. Poles were chopped up with axes or cut in half with saws. The OUN took a sadistic delight in humiliating their victims and torturing them to death. Russians were sometimes skinned alive. The 2014 CIA coup in Ukraine made the OUN ideology the official ideology of the Ukrainian state. Even Ukraine’s current Jewish president Zelensky, whose family were victims of the mass murder in Ukraine, said of Stepan Bandera “He is a hero for a certain percentage of Ukrainians, and it’s normal, and it’s cool.” Ukrainian history has been falsified to portray the OUN as heroes who battled both the Nazis and the Soviets.
Yet it is not only in the madhouse that is post-Maidan Ukraine that the history of Ukraine has been falsified. Because of the close ties of the OUN to the American, British, German, Polish and other governments the OUN have also been able to make their twisted mythology into the accepted mainstream version of events. The OUN were considered too valuable by the CIA and other intelligence agencies to have their wartime crimes exposed. Equally importantly the OUN became a major source for anti-Soviet propaganda, which then became mainstream history. During the Cold War academia became a major weapon in the battle between capitalism and communism. Today nothing has changed and in the new cold war with Russia Ukraine is currently the most important battleground. Shielding Western publics from the truth about the insanity and cruelty of the Ukrainian fascists the West are supporting is the main goal of the media and academia when it comes to Ukraine. Ukraine is only the most extreme example of the “memory wars” being waged across the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw pact countries of Eastern Europe where pro-western governments seek to turn Nazi collaborators into heroes, demonize the Soviet Union, and destroy all monuments to the role the Soviet Union played in defeating fascism. I will be relying mainly on the brilliant work Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist Fascism, Genocide and Cult by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, the first critical and scholarly account of the history of the OUN. Ironically his book was released just before the start of the 2014 civil war and Ukrainian nationalists did everything they could to prevent the book from being published, waging a public campaign against the author.
In part one of this series I described the origins of Ukrainian nationalism and its transformation into a fascist movement. I explained how present day Ukraine had long been divided with Central and Eastern Ukraine controlled by Russia. Western Ukraine, which was originally part of Poland, became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Poland was dismembered in the 18th century. After World War One it became part of a reborn Poland known as the Second Republic, which had absorbed the short, lived Republic of Western Ukraine. I traced the origins of the OUN and its terrorist campaign within Poland. The OUN engaged in assassinations, massacres, arson and other crimes. This landed the leader of the OUN’s Homeland executive Stepan Bandera in prison although his two trials made him famous. The OUN was controlled by its leaders in exile. After Stepan Bandera escaped from prison, thanks to the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, he tried to seize the leadership of the OUN. This led the organization to split into an OUN/M answering to Andrei Melnyk and an OUN/B answering to Bandera. During the brief two-week window after the German invasion of Poland, but prior to the Soviet invasion, the OUN massacred thousands of Jews and also murdered many of the defeated Polish army who were trying to escape or return home. The OUN leaders then headed for Western Poland. Eastern Poland became Western Ukraine. Once the Soviets arrived they reunified Ukraine and cracked down hard on Polish nationalists as well as on the OUN.
The exiled OUN leaders in German-occupied Poland, known as the General Government, along with tens of thousands of their supporters who had fled the Soviets, were busy working closely with the Germans, who had been their sponsors for decades, to plan the invasion of the Soviet Union. Stepan Bandera and the other OUN/B leaders wrote down their plans in the months before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It was known as the “Struggles and Activities” plan. It called for the OUN/B to activate its networks to give a welcome the Nazis and form militias for elimination of Jews, Poles, and all non-Ukrainians as well as any Ukrainians who opposed the OUN. The OUN/B came up with a bunch of fascist anti-communist and anti-Semitic slogans with which to blanket the country. The OUN/B and OUN/M were both working closely with the Abwehr, German military intelligence, who provided military training, police training, and political training. 800 OUN/B members joined special task forces who were to follow the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union and mobilize Ukrainians to support their planned Nazi puppet Government. 800 other OUN/B members joined the Nachtigall battalion, which was controlled by the Abwehr. The OUN/B also had a network of 20,000 active members in Soviet western Ukraine along with 1.5 million supporters that could be mobilized. The OUN/B planned to declare an “independent” Ukrainian state with Stepan Bandera as its Providnyk or fascist dictator. Hitler however had other plans for Ukraine. Hitler viewed Ukrainians as sub-human Slavs, like the Russians, who would have to be massacred or enslaved to make way for German settlers. Ukraine’s rich black soil would feed the German Reich. Hitler thought Ukraine would be for Germany what India was for the British or America was for the U.S. who wiped out the Native Americans. The OUN did have a major Nazi ally in the form of Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Rosenberg saw the potential of an OUN-controlled Ukraine as a valuable ally.
This was the situation on the eve of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on 22 June 1941. The war would lead to the death of 27 million people in the Soviet Union. 5.2 million civilians would die in Ukraine. 2.3 Million Ukrainians would be deported to German slave labour camps. Of Ukraine’s 2.7 million Jews 1.6 million would be killed. 700 cities and town were destroyed in Ukraine along with 28,000 villages. The impact of the OUN on the success of the Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews was dramatic. In areas that had been long subjected to OUN propaganda in Western Ukraine local Jews had much less chance of survival. In Ternopil in Western Ukraine 97% of the Jews were killed. In contrast, in Kharkov in eastern Ukraine 91% of the Jews managed to survive.
The OUN/B had been warned in advance of the invasion date and had smuggled the “Struggles and Activities” plan into Ukraine with its blueprint for the coming genocide. OUN activists spread out across the countryside setting up militias, and local governments. On 25 June 1941, the OUN/B tried to stage an uprising in Lvov but it was crushed by the Soviets. Sometimes the OUN/B forces would attack the retreating Red Army. However they usually waited until after the Red Army retreated before entering an area. On 30 June 1941, the Wehrmacht entered the city including the Ukrainian Nachtigall battalion whom locals greeted with flowers, calling them the Stepan Bandera battalion. The Nachtigall battalion seized control of the radio station and began broadcasting Nazi and OUN propaganda. That morning the Germans and the OUN discovered that the Soviet secret police the NKVD had massacred its political prisoners when the German invasion began to prevent them from collaborating with the Germans. Many were doubtless OUN members killed before they could carry out horrific crimes, like Roman Shukhevych’s brother. This happened in a number of areas and was used by the OUN to scapegoat the Jewish population for the killings. They were falsely accused of being NKVD informants and blamed for the victims’ deaths. This would be the pattern across western Ukraine and where there had been no recent executions those executed in the terror years earlier were dug up to enflame the masses. Thus already on 30 June 1941 small-scale massacres of the Jews of Lvov began. That night at 8 PM Yaroslav Stetsko held a ceremony in which he declared a new Ukrainian state under the leadership of Stepan Bandera. The day would be celebrated by OUN exiles until today as a national holiday. With Stetsko were the Metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church in Lvov Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, clergyman and Nachtigall battalion member Ivan Hryn’okh and two officers in the German Abwehr Hans Koch and Wilhelm Ernst zu Eikern. Metropolitan Sheptys’kyi endorsed the idea of a Ukrainian state led by Bandera but paid lip service to the idea of tolerance for minorities. His church would later be implicated in inciting genocide against both the Jews and Polish Catholics. The German Abwehr officers welcomed the celebration but warned that it was not time to declare independence and that only Hitler could decide.
Hitler had already decided against an “independent” Ukraine, which was why Stepan Bandera had been forbidden from returning to Ukraine. According to OUN mythology and to the OUN’s western apologists Stepan Bandera was immediately sent to a concentration camp because of Stetsko’s premature declaration of independence. Actually he and Stetsko were placed in “honourable confinement” which initially meant simply that he was confined to Berlin where he could roam freely and was even allowed to carry a pistol for self-defence. It was the later OUN/B murders of leaders of the OUN/M carried out in broad daylight that then provoked a mild German crackdown on the OUN/B. I will return to this topic later. Even when Bandera was sent to a concentration camp he was incarcerated in a special section reserved for prisoners who might prove useful later, like the leader of the Romanian Iron Guard or Stalin’s son. Bandera was given special privileges and needless to say was not treated like the other inmates in a concentration camp. He was not gassed, enslaved, shot, tortured, experimented on or starved to death. On the contrary he was allowed conjugal visits from his wife who served as his go between to the OUN. Bandera received weekly care packages, and was not even confined to a cell.
To return to Lvov by 1 July 1941 the OUN/B and the Germans had whipped the populace up into a fury directed at the city’s Jews. An angry mob rounded up thousands of Jews and brought them to the prisons where the NKVD’s victims had been found. The Jewish men were made to move the rotting corpses while they were brutally beaten to death. Jewish women were made to wash the rotting corpses and kiss their hands before being beaten to death, often after being raped. Others were shot by German military units. The OUN/B had formed a Ukrainian militia to conduct the executions on the day they arrived. They would soon be transformed into the Ukrainian police on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS. They would answer to the SS but remained loyal to Stetsko. It was in their role as auxiliary police recruits that the OUN/B would play a major part in the Holocaust. It was their role to round up the victims, to enforce all the anti-Jewish laws. They often also acted as executioners. Much of the killing in Lvov was carried out by angry mobs fired up by OUN propaganda. They loved to humiliate their victims before killing them. Women were stripped naked and often raped in the streets. Jews were forced to clean up broken glass, with their bare hands and clean streets in front of jeering crowds, whipping them with steel cables. Jews were forced to sing communist songs before being shot or they were forced to shout Slava Ukraini before being beaten to death. Everywhere there were Nazi and Ukrainian flags and the walls were plastered with genocidal OUN slogans. The pogrom would last until 3 July 1941. On 2 July, the Germans took thousands of Jews out to the forest for a mass execution. Ukrainian peasants streamed in from the countryside with carts to carry the loot they planned to steal from their victims. Greed is often a major motivator in genocide. At the high end it involved German corporate takeovers of Jewish-owned business, often financed by American investors. In the Soviet Union there were no big businesses. Yet genocidal Ukrainians and other collaborators or German soldiers were able to loot their victims’ personal property. Robbery and extortion were a constant in these Ukrainian pogroms. Always the victims were threatened into turning over their valuables then murdered anyway. Banderites became synonymous with bandits in the view of their potential victims. Around 8,000 Jews were killed in a couple days during the first Lvov Pogrom but the Nazis and the OUN were just getting started. During the Lvov Pogrom the OUN/B also supplied a death list of Polish professors, their families and hundreds of their students. The professors were shot along with some of their family members and 100 Polish students. A month later to please the OUN/B, angry about Germany’s refusal to recognize Ukraine’s independence and the arrests of Bandera and Stetsko, the Germans gave them permission to hold a second Lvov Pogrom from 25-28 July 1941, known as the Petliura days in honour of the mass murdering Symon Petliura. Petliura was infamous for his army’s massacres of Jews during the Russian Civil War, which I discussed in Part 1.
All across the countryside the same pattern was repeated. The OUN/B held Independence Day ceremonies, destroyed all communist symbols, put up Ukrainian flags and Nazi Swastikas and then launched pogroms. There were up to 140 Pogroms in Western Ukraine in July 1941 and they claimed 35,000 to 39,000 victims. The biggest pogroms besides Lvov were in Ternopil and Zolochiv. During this period the OUN/B were not merely carrying out German orders but were enthusiastically carrying out genocide in line with their own ideology. They conducted massacres of Jews in places where there was no German presence. When the Hungarian forces forbade the OUN from carrying out a big pogrom, they defiantly carried out a little one and then complained to the Germans. Across the countryside the OUN erected triumphal arches welcoming the Nazis and praising Stepan Bandera and Adolf Hitler. The Nazis were greeted by adoring crowds and their invasion was blessed by the Greek Catholic clergy. OUN/B activists had the crowds sign “plenipotentiary letters” which praised Hitler and the German Army while also asking for the release of Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko.
During the early days of the German invasion, Stepan Bandera had set up his headquarters close to Ukraine and used couriers to communicate his orders to the OUN/B. He had ordered and approved of the massacres of Jews. Stetsko’s 30 June 1941 declaration of independence had angered the Germans. Bandera did his best to repair relations with the Nazis. On 3 July 1941, Bandera attended a meeting in Cracow with the Undersecretary of State for the General Government Ernst Kundt (German occupied Poland). Bandera argued that as leader of the OUN it was the will of the people that he head Ukraine. Kundt countered that only Hitler could decide such matters. Bandera conceded that he could only create a Ukrainian state with German permission. On 5 July 1941, Bandera was sent to Berlin and placed in “Honourable Captivity”. On 8 July 1941, someone tried to assassinate Yarsolav Stetsko and on 9 July 1941, Stetsko was arrested and escorted by the Abwehr to Berlin. On 12 July 1941 Stetsko was freed. On 14 July 1941 Bandera was freed. They were confined to Berlin and lived together in an apartment. Bandera was allowed to carry a gun and held an ID issued by the RSHA (Heidrich’s “Homeland Security” department). These two networked with the Lithuanian fascists in exile and the Japanese ambassador. Stetsko kept busy writing his autobiography for his German handlers: writing that, while he considered Moscow his main enemy, he fully endorsed exterminating the Jews since he considered them tools of Moscow.
On 19 July 1941, Hitler decided to incorporate Eastern Galicia into the General Government. This offended the OUN/B who wanted to rule a united Ukraine. Now their territory was being absorbed back into German-occupied Poland. Actually it turned out to be beneficial to the OUN/B’s interests as Ukrainians in Galicia were favoured over the Poles and Jews and they were allowed to continue to carry out Ukrainization of Polish educational institutions. Ukrainians in East Galicia were treated like fascist allies Slovakia and Croatia. The Nazis set up UTSK in the Ukrainian Central Committee run by Volodymyr Kubiiovych in the General Government area. Kubiiovych had been a close ally of the OUN in the 1930s and shared their ideology while being more flexible. He lobbied for the creation of a Ukrainian National Army to fight alongside the Nazis and argued that all Jewish property should be turned over to Ukrainians. In 1943 he would get his wish with the creation of the Waffen-SS Galizia division, composed of Ukrainians. Ukrainians in the former Soviet Ukraine on the other hand were mercilessly exploited. All education beyond the 4th grade was banned. The Germans modelled their behaviour in Soviet Ukraine on American plantation owners treating Ukrainian peasants like Black slaves who could only be kept in check with whips and clubs. The main goal was to loot Ukraine’s grain. The result would be very different attitudes towards the memory of the Nazis in Western and Eastern Ukraine.
On 30 August 1941, the OUN/B assassinated the OUN/M leaders Melina Senyk and Mykola Stibors’kyi in broad daylight on the streets in Zhytomyr. This outraged the Germans and other Ukrainian nationalists. The Germans were further outraged when the OUN/B tried to blame Germany for the killings. The OUN/M provided the Germans with names and addressees of OUN/B leaders who were then arrested. The Germans also shot some OUN/B members as looters and closed their offices in Berlin and Vienna. They tried and failed to purge the administration and police of OUN/B members. On 13 September 1941, Bandera and Stetsko were arrested again. Despite this both continued efforts to repair relations with the Germans. Both sent orders to the OUN/B not to resist the Germans and to continue to supply recruits for the police and the puppet government. Even after being sent to a cushy concentration camp and even after two of his brothers died in a concentration camp, Bandera never ceased attempts at reconciliation with the Germans. Even when it became clear the Germans were losing in 1944, Bandera was more committed then ever to allying the OUN/B with the Nazis. The German purge was totally ineffective. The OUN/B was continually flooded with new recruits and continued to grow in power. The head of the Ukrainian police simply ignored orders to get rid of OUN/B members. In other words even when the Nazis turned on the OUN/B the organization continued to supply recruits for the police, which would play a major role in carrying out the holocaust. Many Ukrainian police would also go on to join the Waffen SS Galizia division. Others would later join the UPA, using their experience in mass murder to massacre Poles.
The Ukrainian police were formed from the Ukrainian militias that the OUN/B had recruited in the wake of the German invasion. They were known as the Schutzmannschaften or auxiliary police. In March 1942, despite the Nazi’s earlier crackdown, the OUN/B ordered its members to join the police en masse. The Ukrainian police answered ultimately to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, overall commander of the SS. It was ordered that they be given two hours of Nazi indoctrination every day. In the cities the Ukrainian police assisted in raids, deportations, and shootings. They also patrolled the ghettoes. They enforced the anti-Jewish laws, forced Jews to wear identifying arm bands, created death lists by interviewing locals, rounded up the victims, guarded the prisoners, escorted them to the site of the execution and often shot the victims, especially if they were children. The Nazis had their own killing squads, the Einsatzgruppe C that also carried out many of the mass executions. In the countryside there were few German forces or German police and the Ukrainian Police played the leading role in destroying the Jews and then spent years hunting down the survivors. The Ukrainian police often displayed the same sadistic brutality the OUN/B had shown in the Lvov pogroms. One survivor recounted being locked in a bathhouse with dozens of victims who were forced to desecrate their holy books. Some had had their beards set aflame. The fire then spread to their clothes and they were burned alive. Others were beaten to death. Throughout it all the victims were forced to sing to entertain their Ukrainian tormentors. The Ukrainian police were used not only to terrorize Ukraine but also to terrorize Belarus, Poland, Slovakia and other areas. Particularly infamous was Battalion 201, which included Roman Shukhevych. He would also join the Waffen-SS Galizia division and become leader of the UPA. Shukhevych, a monster like Bandera, is now widely promoted as a “Hero of Ukraine.” In addition to carrying out mass murders of Jews, Byelorussians and Poles; Shukhevych loved to have Eastern Ukrainian’s shot for little or no reason and privately contemplated exterminating them all. Many recruits to Battalion 201 like Shukhevych had been part of the Abwehr’s Nachtigall and Roland battalions and carried out mass murders of Byelorussian civilians as part of their anti-partisan warfare in 1942.
Early in 1943 Heinrich Himmler created the Waffen-SS Galizia division, also known as the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS. It was called Galician instead of Ukrainian to pander to Hitler. Hitler, born in Austria-Hungary, felt that since Galicia had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was probably some German blood in them. Over 80,000 Ukrainians volunteered to join the SS Galizia but only 8,000 were accepted. It soon expanded to 14,000 men by recruiting members of the Ukrainian police. The Ukrainian general commanding the SS Galicia was Pavlo Shandruk. The SS Galicia was established to battle the Red Army. It was also deployed to crush the Slovakian national uprising and played a major role in the destruction of Warsaw after the Warsaw uprising. On 22 July 1944 the Waffen SS Galicia division, by then much larger, was encircled and destroyed by the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army under the command of Pavel Rybalko. They were decimated by the Soviet artillery and Katyusha rocket batteries. However the Germans were able to replace the units by recruiting more members and the SS Galicia division went on to wage dirty wars against partisans and civilians in Italy, Yugoslavia, France and Czechoslovakia. They surrendered to the British two days after the war ended and with the help of the Vatican were able to avoid deportation back to the Soviet Union by claiming to be Polish citizens. Eventually they would end up in Britain before being resettled in Canada and America strengthening the OUN diaspora during the Cold War. Unknown to most citizens of Canada and the US there are public monuments to these Waffen SS veterans in both countries.
In 1943 at the same time that the OUN/B were joining the Waffen SS en masse, and while they were setting up the UPA to exterminate the Poles, the OUN/B was publicly distancing themselves from the Nazis and secretly trying to forge an alliance with the western allies for a future struggle with the Soviet Union. Here the considerations were the Soviet victory at Stalingrad foreboding Germany’s ultimate defeat. The more farsighted Nazis were already planning their escapes, and their deals with Western intelligence agencies. The hardliners in American and British Intelligence like Allen Dulles were already gearing up for a covert war against the Soviet Union using committed anti-communists and anti-Russians among their current fascist “enemies” (for men like Dulles they were friends and business partners).
When Poland was investigating the Pieracki assassination in the mid-1930s, it discovered that the OUN had ties to MI6 as well as the German Abwehr. When it comes to such matters the historical evidence is always a sanitized version or some sort of limited hang out. The CIA spent decades destroying incriminating records and declassifying misleading or altered records. Which is my way of saying we will never know the early history of the ties of the OUN with MI6 and the OSS and US military intelligence during the war.
The OUN/B was already trying to improve their image in the west in April 1942. At their second OUN/B conference they claimed that they would no longer take part in anti-Jewish actions. At the same conference they still condemned Jews as “a tool of Russian Bolshevik Imperialism. In addition the OUN/B did not quit the police and so continued to be a vital element in carrying out the mass murder of Jews. By 1943 the Jews had largely been eliminated in western Ukraine. The survivors were being hunted by the Ukrainian police, which was full of OUN/B members. At their third Conference from 17-21 February, the OUN/B was now claiming that it would fight both Germany and the USSR and that they were now democrats ruled by a triumvirate, led by the (war criminal) Roman Shukhevych. In July 1944 the OUN sent emissaries to attempt to make a deal with the Western allies, including Mykola Lebed, head of the OUN internal security branch or SB, known for its bloodthirsty assassinations of alleged OUN traitors. Lebed would later receive decades of backing from the CIA. In July of 1944 the OUN/B furthered their “Democratic” rebranding, creating the front group UHVR, the Supreme Liberation Council of Ukraine. It would later provide many recruits for the CIA and MI6.
A few months before the February 1943 OUN conference, the OUN started what was to become the UPA. Contrary to myth the UPA only attacked Germans when it needed to steal arms. It made a secret deal with the German military to avoid confrontations. The UPA was formed for the purpose of exterminating the Poles and despite the OUN’s public statements that it would fight the Germans, the UPA was secretly funded by the Abwehr (German military intelligence). When the Germans retreated the Abwehr secretly turned over the Wehrmacht’s huge arms stockpiles to the UPA. Still the OUN’s two-faced strategy to win Western support would be very useful later for muddying the historical record and creating the myth that the OUN had battled both the Nazis and the Soviet Union. The UPA would later become a CIA proxy army run with the help of war criminal Reinhard Gehlen. It would wage an anti-Soviet war for five more years after the end of World War 2. Seventy years later the return of Ukrainian fascism to power via the Maidan coup would be universally celebrated as the triumph of “Democracy.”
The UPA was founded at the November 1942 OUN conference although it originally was called the UVV the Ukraine Liberation Army. The OUN/B stole the name UPA or Ukrainian Insurgent Army from a rival group of Ukrainian fascists lead by Taras Bulba-Borovets who led his own armed group in Ukraine with a similar ideology and methodology to the OUN/B. It too shared responsibility for mass murders of Jews and other Ukrainians. The OUN/B waged war on this rival group assassinating Bulba-Borovets’ wife and many of his top officers. When he went to the Germans for help they instead sent him to the same cushy concentration camp as Bandera and Stetsko. In March and April of 1943 OUN/B sent out word that its many members in the Ukrainian police should quit and join the UPA. Of 12,000 police, 5000 quit to join the UPA. Other Ukrainian police joined the Waffen-SS Galizia division. The new UPA recruits brought their experience in mass murder of Jews to the new plan for ethnic cleansing of Volhynia and Galicia of Poles. Poles were given the ultimatum leave or die. Often the threat was posted on a murdered Pole who had been unspeakably tortured and mutilated.
In February and March of 1943 the UPA began experimental massacres that claimed hundreds of lives. Whole Polish villages were wiped out. Soon Mykola Lebed ordered the complete cleansing to begin. The UPA would arrive in carts to carry away the loot and often recruited local Ukrainian peasants to join their massacres. The massacres were often carried out in the most horrific way possible with axes, pitchforks and saws. The UPA would sometimes spend hours sadistically torturing their victims to death. The aim was both to save bullets and to terrorize the Poles into fleeing. Another of their favourite methods was to attack churches with hand grenades or set them on fire when the whole town was attending. They also liked to gather all their victims up for a town hall meeting and burn them alive. The UPA would usually return again a couple days after their massacre so that they could kill all the survivors. They even slaughtered nuns who were caring for Polish orphans. On 11 July 1943, the UPA launched attacks on 96 different Polish villages in a single day killing 10,000 Poles. The UPA killed between 100,000 and 250,000 Poles during this genocidal campaign. The UPA would often pretend to be Soviet partisans and in addition to carrying out false flag attacks that could be blamed on the partisans they were probably playing their role for German intelligence, gathering information on which villages were sympathetic to the partisans.
The UPA also continued to hunt the few remaining Jews who were hiding out in the forests or in Polish villages. The UPA had learned from the Germans how to exploit their Jewish victims. Some were kept as slave labour working the farmlands of massacred Poles and then killed before they could be liberated by the Red Army. Others Jews who were doctors, dentists, nurses or tailors were conscripted into the UPA and then murdered when the Red Army was approaching. Later these facts would be spun by OUN apologists into the myth that the UPA wasn’t allied to the Nazis because it had Jewish members or that the UPA had acted to “save” the Jews. By 1944 the UPA had grown to 25,000-30,000 members. With Soviet forces advancing the UPA was now openly allied with Nazi Germany. The UPA attacks on the Jews hiding in the forests were so terrible that some Jews actually fled to German concentration camps believing their chances of survival would be better as slave labourers. In the summer of 1944 the Red Army would liberate Western Ukraine. The UPA would continue to kill Poles and increasingly began to target any Ukrainians who submitted to Soviet authority. Anyone who paid their taxes or joined a collective farm could be killed or have their home burnt down by the UPA. The UPA would become a sort of proto-Gladio, a stay-behind network behind enemy lines, created first by the Nazis and then absorbed by MI6 and the CIA. The UPA war with the Soviet Union would continue until 1950. Their network would survive into the 1960s. The UPA war was not only waged in Ukraine but also in Poland, Byelorussia, and Czechoslovakia. The story of the UPA will be continued in Part 3 of this series dealing with the Cold War.
As the war turned in favour of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany faced defeat, the Germans increasingly realized that they needed the OUN/B. The Nazis granted an OUN/B request to be allowed to meet with Stepan Bandera. The details of Bandera’s imprisonment are clouded in mystery. It is not clear when exactly he was transferred from Gestapo custody following the OUN/M murders to his cushy Sachenhausen concentration camp, where he received care packages and visits from his wife. Stetsko claimed it was in January 1942. Bandera claimed it was in 1943. Records claim it was October 1943. On 28 September 1944, the Germans released Stepan Bandera and soon thereafter also released Stetsko, Melnyk, Bulba-Borovets and 300 more OUN/B prisoners. Melnyk had been arrested when the OUN/M tried to contact Western intelligence in 1944. The OUN/M had had much better relations with the Nazis and was appointed to serve in the puppet government. It had supplied many recruits to the Waffen SS Galicia division. Bandera would spend the rest of the war working with the Nazis to recruit Ukrainian support to their cause. However Bandera would refuse to merge OUN forces with the Vlasov army’s KONR- the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia- created 14 November 1944. Bandera claimed they were “Russian Imperialists.” Instead Rosenberg set up the separate Ukrainian National Committee (UNK), which included Bandera, Melnyk, Kubiiovych and was headed by Shandruk, the general commanding the Waffen SS Galicia division on 23 February 1945. Prior to this, in December 1944, Bandera and Stetsko helped train the Abwehr Commando’s unit of Ukrainian paratroopers who were to be dropped into Lvov with one million rubles for UPA head Roman Shukhevych to continue the fight against the Soviet Union. Bandera sent the message that he would return soon, a promise he never kept. Stetsko claimed that he was still Prime Minister of Ukraine because of his earlier declaration back in 30 June 1941; the one that had unleashed a wave of OUN/B massacres.
Bandera’s next stop, after celebrating Greek Catholic Christmas with his family, was Weimar, Germany. Bandera argued that the OUN/B must give its “Full Support” to Nazi Germany until the end. He was busy recruiting for the soon to be created Ukrainian National Army (UNA). Bandera spent three weeks in Berlin. He then headed for Vienna where he was elected head of the Foreign Units of the OUN (ZCh OUN). On 5-6 February 1945, the OUN in Ukraine elected Bandera as their leader but decided he should remain in exile. On 17 March 1945, the Germans announced the creation of the Ukrainian National Army (UNA). The Waffen SS Galicia division was rebranded the 1st division of the UNA and its commander, Shandruk, was named commander of the UNA. Meanwhile Bandera fled Vienna as the Red Army approached, escaping to Czechoslovakia and then Innsbruck in Austria. Eventually Bandera would end up under the protection of the infamous Reinhard Gehlen, the first president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the espionage service founded by the US Forces in the American occupation zone. Gehlen had been recruited by the US intelligence services because he had been responsible for occupied Eastern Europe in the Abwehr. When German forces fled the Red Army back in the first half of 1944 over 120,000 Ukrainian collaborators and war criminals fled west with them. During the Cold War many of these escaped Ukrainian war criminals would work for Western intelligence services. Many would eventually be resettled in the US and Canada. Ukrainian fascism would live on in exile for decades. Eventually with the help of its Western sponsors it would seize power in Ukraine yet again sparking a new covert war and triggering the on-going proxy war between NATO and Russia.
For Ukraine the war would not truly end until 1950. However that is the subject for Part 3. This is only a scratch to the surface of the history of Ukraine during the war. The crimes of the Nazi Germany would require their own articles or books. The Nazis created massive machinery for genocide. However they relied on Ukrainian collaborators every step of the way. An article also needs to be written just about the German conquest of Ukraine and the Soviet liberation of Ukraine. These were huge battles between millions of men.
However the crimes of the OUN are clear. They propagandized the Ukrainians to carry out mass murder. The OUN/B created militias that carried out genocide in 1941 and again in 1943. They supplied recruits to the Ukrainian police, which played a major role in the Holocaust. They joined the Waffen SS Galicia division along with the OUN/M. They formed the UPA to carry out genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Poles. Bandera was unable to supervise this directly but he came up with the plans before being imprisoned and after his release he worked enthusiastically for the Nazis. Bandera never admitted to the OUN/B’s crimes, let alone apologizing or condemning them. His OUN followers took an active role carrying out unspeakable atrocities. Banderite became a synonym for murderous bandits. There has been shamefully little written about the history of the OUN and much of what was written was from a pro-OUN perspective. Sadly due to the nature of academia the more relevant the story of the OUN becomes the fewer people will dare to tell it for fear of being labelled “Russian propagandists.”
After the Orange revolution of 2004 Stepan Bandera was declared a “Hero of Ukraine”. Even a postage stamp was issued commemorating him. During the 2014 Maidan coup, a huge poster of Stepan Bandera hung on the stage. Few in the west had ever heard of Stepan Bandera or the OUN back in 2014. Now in 2022 the world is on the brink of nuclear war and the global economy is collapsing all because CIA and other western intelligence agencies have been using Ukrainian fascists as proxies for nearly 80 years. In Parts 3 and 4, I intend to trace the history of the OUN and its ideological heirs through the Cold War and post-Cold War eras up to the Maidan coup and the Ukrainian civil war.
Sources
My main source is Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide and Cult, an in depth history of Stepan Bandera and the OUN. It is a must read although written with the standard academic anti-Soviet bias.
I also read “Children of the Borderlands” by Lucyna Kulinska, a collection of survivors’ testimonies from the Polish victims of the UPA genocide. An English translation is available on EBay. It gives a vivid and horrifying picture of events. However it is edited from a strongly anti-Soviet perspective. Still the author should be applauded for exposing a forgotten genocide, which the strongly pro-Ukrainian Polish government is intent on covering up.
Hitler’s Shadow Nazi, War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War by Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda has a chapter on Mykola Lebed and the CIA ties to the OUN. Based on declassified U.S. intelligence files, it provides a limited hangout version of events.
Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine by Wendy Lower provides a horrifying picture of the German occupation and the complex machinery that carried out the genocide. However it is extremely misleading whenever discussing the OUN/B, always portraying it as hostile to the Nazis. Perhaps that is because the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute funded her work. Worse still, she worked closely with the archetypical Cold War propagandist/historian Timothy Snyder, who helped her edit the book. Generally if you want to uncover an author’s shady connections look in the acknowledgments section which most people skip.
Moss Robeson on the history of the OUN
https://youtu.be/izf7XjVJUSk
One of my favourite documentary series the Unknown War had an episode on Ukraine while it doesn’t mention the OUN/B it does describe the epic battle to liberate Ukraine
https://youtu.be/5l81l2JNs2Y
Evan Reif on the history of the OUN
Part 1
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/06/10/how-pre-ww-ii-ukrainian-fascists-pioneered-brutal-terror-techniques-later-improved-by-cia-now-ironically-taught-to-descendants/
Part 2
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/06/10/how-monsters-who-beat-jews-to-death-in-1944-became-americas-favorite-freedom-fighters-in-1945-with-a-little-help-from-their-friends-at-cia/
Evan Reif on the true heroes of Ukraine the Soviet Partisans
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/07/08/glory-to-the-heroes-sidor-kovpak-and-the-war-for-ukraines-memory/
Gerald Sussman on the OUN and the CIA
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/09/12/ukraine-the-cias-75-year-old-proxy/
I’ve done a number of articles that intersect with the story of the OUN during the Cold War
Nazis and the CIA
http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2014/06/nazis-and-cia.html
Operation Gladio
http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2014/06/operation-gladio_23.html
The World Anti-Communist League Part 1
http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/07/irancontra-pt-3-wacl.html
The World Anti-Communist League Part 2
http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2016/08/irancontra-pt-4-wacl-2.html
Ratline: the Vatican, The Nazis, and the CIA
http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2019/07/ratline-vatican-nazis-cia-v2.html
Old Nazis, New Right
http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2017/10/old-nazis-new-right.html
The Zelensky quote is from
https://www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/lawmakers-ask-zelensky-to-return-hero-of-ukraine-title-to-bandera-shukhevych.html
- Hugo Turner
https://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2022/11/history-of-fascism-in-ukraine-part-2.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
Read More »
https://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2022/11/history-of-fascism-in-ukraine-part-2.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
Election 2022: The More Things Change …
https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/17238?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
History of Fascism in Ukraine : Part 1
Hugo Turner: The History of Fascism in Ukraine Part 1:
The Origins of the OUN Ukraine 1917-1941
With the war in Ukraine raging, it is time to trace the history of fascism in Ukraine. Once believed to be an anachronistic Cold War relic, the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) has emerged as the most successful post-war fascist group. Politicians around the globe shout its fascist slogan “Slava Ukraini” a phrase that originated with the League of Ukrainian Fascists, was adopted by the OUN and popularized by Stepan Bandera while he and the OUN were on trial for the assassination campaign the OUN were waging in Poland. In Ukraine, the United States, Canada and Britain, monuments are built to the Ukrainian SS veterans who killed over a million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Poles, and countless Ukrainians, Russians, Byelorussians. Today Israel and Poland are among Ukraine’s biggest sponsors. In Ukraine itself it is illegal to criticize these mass murderers. In the West their history has been whitewashed for decades by Cold War academics who allowed escaped Ukrainian war criminals to shape the history of Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Most importantly thanks to two CIA backed coups or “colour revolutions” the first in 2004 and the second in 2014 the heirs of the OUN were given almost total control of Ukraine. OUN ideology has become the official ideology of Ukraine and Nazi thugs are given total impunity to terrorize anyone who complains. Fascist paramilitaries have been incorporated into the police and military while others like the Azov battalion have retained a certain autonomy answering only to Ukrainian Intelligence the SBU or the Interior Ministry. Even Ukrainian presidents have difficulty reining in these fascist groups who openly defy them when the presidents are not busy pandering to them.
This article will trace the origins of the OUN and explain its history up to the eve of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. By then the OUN, working closely with both German military intelligence (the Abwehr) and the SS, had begun to plan their genocidal takeover of Ukraine. From Nazi occupied Poland the OUN/B controlled over 20,000 underground activists ready to take up arms to exterminate Jews, Poles, and Russians and organize a warm welcome for the Nazis in Soviet Ukraine. Part two will cover the horrific war crimes the OUN carried out during the war. In part one I will be relying mostly on the definitive “Stepan Bandera The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, which I recommend to anyone looking to do an in-depth study of the history of the OUN.
The early Ukrainian nationalists were socialist leaning moderates. They were poets, romantics and intellectuals who drew inspiration from the peasants and Cossacks and their unique Russian dialect, which was also spoken in Southern Russia. The name Ukraine simply meant borderland and its people were known as Malorussians, which meant “little Russians”. Yet as the craze for nationalism swept Europe some intellectuals began to think of Ukraine as a separate nation. Of these the main influence on the later fascist Ukrainian nationalists was the historian Mykhailo Hrushev’sky his monumental history of Ukraine portrayed Ukrainians as a completely separate race from Poles or Russians and attempted to sever the historical ties between the closely interlinked Russia and Ukraine. Russians traced their origins to the Kievan Russ (centred in modern day Kiev, Ukraine) and viewed Ukrainians and Byelorussians as close cousins to the Russians. Many Ukrainians viewed themselves as Russians. Also many Russians moved to Ukraine during the 18th and 19th centuries. Even today most Ukrainians speak Russian. The Russian empire encouraged this merging of the two identities and tried to discourage the use of Ukrainian.
Hrushevs’ky’s work would inspire another far more extreme Ukrainian nationalist in Russian-controlled Ukraine, Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, who would preach a worldview that saw a Ukrainian race surrounded by enemies that needed to be eliminated. He inserted 19th century Social Darwinism and scientific racism into Ukrainian nationalism, writing in the majority Russian city of Kharkov. He labelled “Russians, Poles, Magyars, Romanians and Jews as enemies of Ukraine” (as long as they ruled or exploited Ukrainians) and hoped to create a Ukrainian state stretching from the Caucuses to the Carpathian Mountains. His Ten Commandments of the UNP (Ukrainian National Party) founded in 1904 would be a major influence on the OUN. It included such memorable lines as “Do not marry a foreign woman because your children will become your enemies.” Elsewhere Mikhnovs’kyi wrote “Ukraine for Ukrainians, and as long as even one alien enemy remains on our territory, we are not allowed to lay down our arms.”
80% of Ukrainians lived within the Russian empire. The other 20% lived in an area that had once been controlled by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and, after Poland was dismembered and ceased to exist in the late 18th century, were ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were known as Ruthenians and their language was closer to Polish than to the dialect spoken in Russian Ukraine. The Austro-Hungarian Empire encouraged extreme Ukrainian nationalism seeing Ukrainians as a vital counterbalance to the rebellious Poles. The area the Ukrainians or Ruthenians lived in was known as Eastern Galicia. This was the situation when Stepan Bandera was born in 1909. The OUN had its origins entirely in this western controlled part of Ukraine. In the wake of World War 1 and the Russian Civil War this territory would be controlled by a reborn Poland once again in the form of Poland’s Second Republic. The Second Republic also included the Western Ukrainians in Volhnyia part of Russian Ukraine conquered in its war against the Soviets.
Over the centuries Ukrainian aristocrats in Poland had decided to assimilate and become Polish nobles. Thus most of the Ukrainians were peasants. Poland also encouraged the creation of the Greek Catholic Church, which continued to follow the Orthodox Christian rite while subordinate to the Roman Pope instead of the Orthodox Patriarch. By Bandera’s time the Greek Catholic Church was an important element of Western Ukrainian identity and many OUN leaders like Stepan Bandera were the children of Greek Catholic priests, who were also hard-core Ukrainian nationalists. While swearing loyalty to the Polish state the Greek Catholic Church would enrage the Polish government by acting to support the OUN ringing church bells when OUN members were executed, or as a warning when police were on the way to disrupt Ukrainian nationalist events and holding memorial services, called Panakhydas, for various “heroes of Ukraine”. They were adopted as nationalist martyrs in the OUN cult.
Ukrainians in western Ukraine were mostly peasants (until 1848 they were serfs) working for Polish landlords and their Jewish managers. West Ukraine thus gave birth to a nationalism that was full of hatred for Jews and Poles. The OUN would target both for extermination. The OUN would combine traditional Ukrainian anti-Semitism with Nazi “racial science.” However Poland was an authoritarian military dictatorship. This was another major influence on the OUN who lived in Poland. Dmytro Dontsov found it much safer to vilify the Russians and the Soviet Union who were enemies of Poland then to risk the wrath of the Polish state. Dontsov was a former Marxist who argued that Ukrainian nationalism should purge itself of all elements of socialism or democracy both of which he blamed for the failure to establish a Ukrainian state. By 1922 Dontsov had found his model in Mussolini’s fascist Italy. He was even more impressed by Hitler and the Nazis. Dontsov translated these fascist thinkers into Ukrainian. He also wrote the introductions for fawning biographies glorifying Mussolini and Hitler. He popularized fascism, anti-Semitism and Russophobia among the students of Bandera’s generation. His vulgarized version of the philosophy of Nietzsche, Fichte, and Rousseau argued that Ukrainians must cast aside conventional morality and be willing to commit any crime if it meant the birth of a Ukrainian state. Dontsov praised fanaticism as a virtue. However he resisted numerous invitations to join the OUN for fear of being arrested by the Polish government.
Having introduced some of the intellectuals who developed or inspired Ukrainian fascism, let us go back in time to World War 1 and the Russian Revolution to introduce the historical origins of the OUN. The OUN were made up of two generations. The older generation had fought on the side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War 1. Some formed the Sich Riflemen, which included future OUN leader Levhen Konovalets. They were from Western Ukraine. During World War 1, Galicia would be a battleground between Russia and the Austrian and German forces. Russia captured Galicia only to be forced back out again.
When in 1917, the February Revolution overthrew the Tsar and installed a mildly left wing “democracy” ruled by Kerensky, Ukrainian Nationalists in Russian Ukraine created a Rada and declared their autonomy within the Russian Empire. It was headed by the left wing Vinnichenko as Prime Minister. Later that year the October Revolution overthrew the Kerensky government in Russia. The Rada decided to take advantage of the chaos and declare a Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) on 20 November 1917. The head of military affairs was Symon Petliura who would become infamous for his mass murders of Jews during the civil war, killing 50-60,000 of them. The OUN would adopt him as a hero of Ukraine. In 1926 Petlura would be assassinated by a Jewish survivor who had lost his family, anarchist Sholom Schwartz. Exposing the horrific crimes of Petliura’s forces at the trial Schwartz was declared not guilty by the sympathetic jury. Today Petliura has once again been declared a hero of Ukraine.
The Soviets were desperate to end the war with Germany and had been negotiating what would be known as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Ukrainian People’s Republic had sent envoys to the negotiations and the Germans and Austrians recognized their claims, as did the Soviet negotiators. The Soviet Union was also backing a self-proclaimed Soviet Ukrainian republic. When this Soviet Ukraine sent envoys the Germans refused to let them participate. Tensions were rising between the Soviets and the Ukrainian People’s Republic or UNR. The UNR were allowing the white Russian army (the Counter-Revolutionaries), led by General Kornilov, and their allies among the Don Cossacks, lead by Hetman Kaledin, to operate on their territory while disarming Red Army troops and forces loyal to the Ukrainian Soviets and urging Ukrainian troops serving in the Red Army to return to Ukraine. On 15 December 1917 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed giving Germany and Austria control of huge swaths of Russian territory in exchange for peace. Freed from the German threat on 17 December 1917, the Soviet Government sent the Ukrainian People’s Republic an ultimatum demanding that the UNR cease shielding the white army, disarming Soviet troops, and blocking the passage of the Red Army. British and French envoys promised to aid the Rada if it resisted the Soviet ultimatum. The Soviets were backing Ukrainian communists attempt to set up a communist parallel government in Kharkov while officially recognizing the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
The detail is too complicated to discuss here. However Ukraine became a battleground between the Red Army, the Germans, the Polish, and the white Russian counter-revolutionary forces. Also fighting were the West Ukrainian army, Petlura’s forces, the forces of the Ukrainian Anarchist Makhno, and various bandit warlords and Cossacks. Kiev would change hands more then a dozen times. Initially the Ukrainian People’s Republic rejected the Soviet ultimatum to allow the Red Army to pass through to attack the white forces. However war was avoided for a couple months. Soon the Red Army was occupying Kiev as the Rada lacked popular support. People wanted land reform not Ukrainization, something viewed as annoyance by many Russian speakers. The Rada forces had deserted to the Red Army. However the Soviets would control Kiev for only three weeks. The Rada turned to the Germany and Austria who recognized the UNR. The Germans invaded Ukraine forcing the Red army to withdraw. Symon Petliura’s forces took power. In April 1918, the Germans disbanded the Rada and installed a puppet Government under Hetman Skorpadsky. Germany was under an economic blockade with its people facing starvation. The Germans proceeded to loot Ukraine’s grain, angering the peasants. In November 1918 the German military collapsed and they abandoned Ukraine. Skorpadsky retreated with them. Petliura and the new Rada government called “The Directorate” seized power in Kiev yet again before being forced out by the Red Army. As Petliura’s forces retreated they carried out massive pogroms against the Jews. Petliura’s forces often dressed up as communist forces to carry out these Pogroms murdering the communist sympathizers who came to greet them first, and then spending days robbing, raping, and murdering the rest of the Jews. With Germany out of the war, Britain and France were free to back the even more bloodthirsty white General Denikin in his attempt to destroy the Soviet Union. Ironically Denikin was a Russian nationalist who viewed Ukraine as inseparable from Russia. Denikin’s forces carried out equally horrific pogroms. Petliura allied with Denikin and then with Poland.
In western Ukraine they declared their own Ukrainian republic the ZUNR on 1 November 1918 in Lvov. The backbone of its military (the UHA) was veterans of the Sich Rifleman. At the same time Poland proclaimed the independent Second Republic The war began in Lvov as Ukrainian and Polish militias battled for control of the city. A Polish Ukrainian war began for control of Galicia. Poland eventually would crush and absorb the West Ukrainian republic. The ZUNR leaders would go into exile and form the UVO. Ironically many of the men from its army would desert to the Red Army. This was because the Red Army was waging war against Poland and the Ukrainian People’s Republic (in Russian Ukraine), which had signed a deal with Poland surrendering Polish control of Western Ukraine. The complex story of the Russian civil war in Ukraine would need its own article or book to do it justice. However there are a couple of lessons that can be learned. Ukrainian nationalists were happy to become tools of foreign powers while supposedly seeking independence. Ukrainian nationalists were willing to see their country exploited economically by foreign powers. Ukrainization had little appeal in Russian Ukraine. The Soviets won because the Ukrainian people were more concerned with their economic situation. Although briefly united by treaty on 22 January 1919, the Western Ukrainian ZUNR and the Russian Ukrainian UNR ended as bitter enemies. Ironically the OUN, with their dreams of genocide, still considered the mass murderer Petliura a hero although he had sold out to Poland, recognising the Polish claim to eastern Galicia in exchange for Polish support. Ten years after Petliura’s assassination, the OUN issued a pamphlet urging Ukrainians to beat or kill a Jew to avenge Petliura.
Finally the Polish-Soviet War ended on 18 March 1921. Poland and the Soviet Union signed the Treaty of Riga awarding Poland control over Eastern Galicia and Volhynia with around 5 million Ukrainians. Ukrainians were Poland’s largest minority making up 16% of the population. In Galicia, which the OUN would plot to turn into a Ukrainian state, the population was 47% Polish, 42% Ukrainian and 11% Jewish. In Eastern Galicia, Ukrainians comprised 62% of the population along, with 25% Poles and 12% Jews. The rest of Ukraine became a Soviet republic within the USSR with 26 Million Ukrainians (or Russians) living there. Around 500,000 Ukrainians would live in Czechoslovakia and 800,000 in Romania. Czechoslovakia was supportive of Ukrainian nationalism allowing Ukrainian schools and universities. Ukraine was home to many other ethnic groups including Hungarians, Romanians, and Germans. After the civil war ended, Soviet Ukraine was relatively stable. During the 1920s, the NEP (New Economic Policy), a rollback of socialism, favoured the peasants. Lenin gave the Soviet republic of Ukraine a huge swath of Russian territory along the Black Sea coast called Novorossiya along with the industrial areas of Donetsk and Lugansk. To this day, Lenin is still condemned by Russian nationalists for the decision; one Russia appears intent on reversing in the current war. Lenin strongly promoted Ukrainization, forcing government officials to learn Ukrainian and building Ukrainian schools and universities. In 1923 the Soviets even convinced the nationalist Ukrainian historian Hrushevs’kyi to serve in the new government as head of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
In the 1930s, collectivization would lead to a famine and a low level civil war throughout the Soviet Union including Ukraine. Western historians love to demonize the Soviet Union for collectivizing agriculture ignoring the fact that it was collectivization that finally ended the periodic famines that had rocked Russia for centuries. Collectivization was necessary in order for the Soviet Union to industrialize and establish the military strength it would need to resist the coming genocidal German invasion. The OUN diaspora has mythologized the famine during collectivization as an attempted genocide “The Holodomor” and used it to justify their horrific crimes during World War 2. The OUN claim that the famine was deliberately engineered to wipe out Ukrainians. This ignores the fact that Russia and Kazakstan were equally hard hit. Moreover it overlooks the role of grain speculation and export of masses of grain to the West by Ukrainian merchants, offered high prices by Western buyers. The famine was the result of bad weather and economic warfare waged by the West. Mainstream historians, especially in the English language literature, continue to promote the view that the economic troubles in the Soviet Union and their consequences were always and entirely of the government’s own making.
Today the OUN justify their crimes by vilifying the Soviet Union but in reality they had no presence in Soviet Ukraine and operated only in Poland and from exile in Europe. It was only after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, when the Soviets would occupy Western Ukraine as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was Ukraine briefly united. The Soviets would launch a crackdown on the OUN, a fascist terrorist group spying for Nazi Germany, arresting thousands of suspected members and executing hundreds. This would continue until the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.
It was in Poland’s Second Republic that the OUN would have its origins. In 1920 the veterans of the Sich Riflemen who had fought for the ZUNR in western Ukraine founded the UVO an underground terrorist army. UVO stood for Ukrainian Military Organization in Ukrainian. Its founders were Levhen Konavalets, Andrii Melnyk and Roman Sushko. Konavalets would head the UVO and later the OUN until his death. Melnyk would head the OUN after Konavalets. The UVO was not a mass political organization but instead a terrorist group that funded itself by spying for the German Abwehr (Military Intelligence). Initially the main political party of the Ukrainian nationalists were the UNDO who sought to win independence through legal and democratic means and initially were opposed to fascism and terrorism. By the 1930s however, the right wing of UNDO secretly worked closely with the OUN. The UVO founded the OUN the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists at the 1st Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in Vienna held between 28 January and 3 February 1929. The OUN were to be a mass political organization recruited from Ukrainian nationalist youth groups that were popular in Poland. The OUN were to indoctrinate the public and wage a terror war against the Polish authorities. The older generation of OUN leaders in exile formed the PUN while young recruits like Stepan Bandera worked for the Homeland Executive back in Poland. The PUN tried and failed to unite all Ukrainian political parties but they did manage to infiltrate and gain control of many Ukrainian youth groups. The younger generation of OUN were even more radical then their elders and their elders were openly fascist. The younger generation had joined nationalist youth groups at age 8 and at age 15 graduated to groups for teenagers. As teenagers they had devoured the works of Dontsov and other fascists. The younger generation included names that would later become infamous for their crimes like Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and Roman Shukhevych. At the beginning of the 1930s, the younger generation of OUN were highly motivated, fanatical, reckless youth. Historians call them the “Bandera Generation.”
Stepan Bandera was born on 1 January 1909 to Andrii and Myroslava Bandera. His father Andrii Bandera was a Greek Catholic priest and an ardent Ukrainian nationalist who had served as a deputy in the short-lived ZUNR (West Ukraine) had helped raise armed units of Ukrainian nationalists and had served as a chaplain in the ZUNR’s army the UHA. Stepan’s mother Myroslava was the daughter of a Greek Catholic priest. The Bandera family had four sons and 3 daughters. Stepan Bandera didn’t attend elementary school because the village teacher had been drafted. Instead his parents home-schooled him, raising him to be a fanatical nationalist and a devout Greek Catholic. However, unlike his father, Stepan would value his nation even more than religion.
Young Stepan Bandera joined the nationalist scout group Plast where he befriended the future head of the OUN Homeland Executive Vasyl Okhrymovich. That friendship would lead Bandera’s quick rise through the ranks of the OUN. Bandera joined the nationalist youth group OVKUH where he met future infamous OUN members Roman Shukhevych and Yaroslav Stetsko. By his teen years Bandera and other young future OUN leaders were fanatical fascists who spent their time reading the works of Dontsov and Mykhnovs’kyi. Bandera’s hobbies included singing, hiking, doing impressions, sticking pins under his fingernails, whipping himself, burning himself, and smashing his fingers in door jambs. He was attempting to train himself to resist torture. For young Ukrainian nationalists the Polish high schools were a battleground. Poland was determined to teach them loyalty to the new Polish state. Ukrainians like Bandera were determined to resist by destroying symbols of Polish nationalism and disrupting class as much as possible. For Bandera education was secondary. The cause was everything. Once he became head of the Homeland executive Bandera would have one of his former high school teachers Ivan Babii assassinated for being a Ukrainian who followed Polish government orders.
By 1927 Bandera had joined the UVO and was doing reconnaissance work for them. In the fall of 1928 Bandera headed for University in Lviv a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism. Bandera would never graduate because his studies were constantly interrupted by arrests for nationalist agitation and ties to murders. Bandera had a sort of split personality. He was deadly serious when it came to organizing. Yet when his work was done loved to joke and play pranks with his fellow OUN members. Physically unimpressive he was a captivating speaker. In the Spring of 1929, Bandera joined the OUN. He was a talented organizer and rose quickly through the ranks. By 1930 Stepan Bandera was in charge of distributing OUN propaganda. He was nicknamed “Baba” which meant woman because he often cross-dressed as a woman while carrying out his OUN missions. In 1931 Bandera was put in charge of smuggling OUN propaganda in from Czechoslovakia and Gdansk. That was also the year his best friend and the head of the OUN’s Homeland Executive Okhymovich died after being arrested and possibly tortured by the Polish authorities. Ivan Habrosevych would became the new head of the Homeland Executive and when he was forced to flee wanted Bandera to replace him. However Bandera was in prison until June of 1932 and had to settle for being deputy leader upon his release. By January of 1933 Bandera was the de facto head of the OUN Homeland Executive and he became the official head during the OUN conference in Berlin in June of 1933. Bandera’s leadership would see a massive escalation in OUN activity and high profile assassinations. He was acting on the orders of the PUN the OUN leadership in exile.
The PUN needed Bandera to stage spectacular attacks that would help their fundraising efforts among Ukraine’s diaspora in the United States and Canada. OUN power and influence in the form of the Ukrainian lobby would continue to grow in the United States and Canada in the decades that followed. Originally Canada’s Ukrainian population had been notoriously left wing and after the Russian October revolution were considered a serious national security risk because of their widespread support for the new communist regime. However at the end of the Russian civil war many white Russians and Ukrainian nationalists would relocate to Canada and the US. Veterans of the west Ukrainian UHA army formed the Ukrainian War Veterans Association, which along with the Ukrainian National Federation raised over $40,000 for the OUN. In the US Henry Ford used a group of Ukrainian fascist thugs to terrorize labour organizers.
The main sponsors of the OUN were Germany, Lithuania, and Italy. Germany and Lithuania provided funding, military training and passports. In the border wars that followed World War 1, Poland had captured an important chunk of Lithuania including its main city. Lithuania funded the OUN in revenge. Italy provided OUN training bases and Stepan Bandera’s brother Oleksandr spent years in fascist Italy studying for a degree in political science and engaging in fascist activism. Italy was a major backer of the Croatian Ustashi. The OUN were close allies with the Croatian Ustashi and the two groups trained and conspired together. Both groups would later have the distinction of carrying out atrocities that were so horrible that even the Nazis were shocked. During the Cold War both groups would be among the most influential fascist émigré groups. Both groups would also return to power at the end of the Cold War. A revived Ustashi in Croatia, under Franjo Tudjman in the early 1990s, and the OUN in 2004 and 2014 both incited civil wars and NATO interventions. The former would be instrumental again in the destruction of Yugoslavia, while the latter would re-ignite war against Russia. Nazi Germany would become the OUN’s most important sponsor. The UVO/ OUN’s espionage no doubt helped the Germans when they invaded Poland. We will return to the Nazi-OUN alliance later. It is interesting to note that Poland also discovered that the OUN were being backed by Britain’s MI6.
Before turning to the OUN terror campaign in Poland let us examine the OUN ideology. The OUN would later spend decades trying to rationalize or deny their collaboration with the Nazis. Yet in reality they carried out their crimes not just to please their German masters but because it was also fully in accord with their own ideology. The OUN were openly fascist, although there was some debate in their early years whether fascism was possible without control of a state. Eventually they decided that they would need a fascist movement in order to create a state. This movement would have to be like those Hitler and Mussolini had created to seize control of pre-existing states. The OUN believed in two types of revolution. The first was a “permanent revolution”, what the OUN called their endless war to indoctrinate the masses with their version of Ukrainian nationalism. Ukrainians were to be constantly mobilized in the struggle with the Polish government in the process becoming ever more radicalized.
The second revolution was to be a “national revolution”. Unified by the OUN the Ukrainian people would found a fascist dictatorship and create a Ukrainian state. The OUN despised democracy even more than communism. They wanted a dictator known as a Providnyk or a Vozhd the Ukrainian version of a Führer. Once a national revolution had been succeeded, the OUN would proceed to eliminate all their enemies: Jews, Poles, Russians and the rest of the ethnic minorities. The cities where Jews often outnumbered Ukrainians would be cleansed. Intermarriage between Ukrainians and other ethnicities would be banned. Every area of life sports, culture, religion, and economics would be reorganized in support of the OUN goals. All other political parties were to be banned. The OUN ideology had become interchangeable with the Nazi ideology. Their plans had been inspired by the Nuremberg racial laws of Nazi Germany. By the late 1930s Hitler was considered a hero in west Ukraine and the OUN hoped Germany would invade Poland and allow the Ukrainians to establish their own fascist dictatorship. Hitler however had other plans for Ukraine.
In order to wage their permanent revolution, Bandera and the homeland executive waged a terror campaign that became a low intensity civil war. The OUN correctly predicted their terror campaign would lead to mass imprisonment of Ukrainians. Bandera was ordered to set up an OUN stay behind network that would operate from the forests. The UVO had tried to assassinate the future Polish dictator Pilsudski back in 1921. It was the OUN assassination campaign that would launch Stepan Bandera into fame or infamy. During the 1930s the OUN would claim hundreds of victims. Poles who mocked Ukrainian nationalists would often end up dead. So would Ukrainians who dared to criticize the OUN. Bandera was also obsessed with killing suspected traitors within the OUN. Bandera was especially skilled at setting up mass propaganda campaigns. Any OUN member killed was turned into a martyr and a whole cult was set up around the person with the aid of the Greek Catholic Church. This had begun before Bandera’s time but he was very successful at popularizing it. In addition to foreign financing the OUN relied on armed robbery to raise cash. Their favourite targets were banks and post offices. If one of the robbers happened to be killed he was turned into a hero of Ukraine. Every OUN trial or arrest was also used to gain publicity for the cause. The Ukrainian nationalists had built mounds to honour the fallen UHA soldiers of the short-lived ZUNR government of Western Ukraine. Bandera ordered all Ukrainian villages to build mounds whether or not there were any soldiers buried there so that they could gather for OUN events. The Polish government in turn ordered the mounds destroyed. Soon all over Galicia Ukrainian villagers were battling police with hoes and pitchforks in defence of the mounds. The OUN also began destroying the tombs of Polish soldiers and police. If the government succeeded in destroying the mounds they were often quickly rebuilt.
Bandera neither smoked nor drank. In the Summer of 1933 Bandera decided to launch a national boycott of alcohol and tobacco. However his goals went beyond health concerns. His real targets were the Jewish merchants who sold alcohol and tobacco, and the Polish Government that got a cut of the sales. Bandera ordered any Ukrainian caught drinking during the boycott beaten and also ordered a campaign of arson to burn down Jewish-owned taverns. The OUN launched another anti-Semitic campaign where gangs of OUN thugs would go around and break all the windows in Jewish neighbourhoods. They also went around burning down Jewish houses and destroying Polish farms. The OUN also tried to destroy Polish rail lines and telecommunications infrastructure. Bandera launched a massive campaign to destroy Polish nationalist symbols in schools and ordered the assassination of teachers. The OUN bombed a newspaper they thought was pro-communist. Most of the hundreds of OUN victims killed during this period were thus ordinary people whose names are lost to history.
It was the OUN’s high profile assassinations that would make the OUN infamous and nearly end Bandera’s career. On 22 October 1933, the OUN attempted to kill the Soviet Consul in Lvov to protest the famine in Ukraine. However in a case of mistaken identity the assassin killed the secretary to the consulate Aleksei Mailov instead, also wounding a Polish janitor. The assassin Mykola Lemyk received a life sentence for his crime. On 31 March 1934, Bandera ordered the assassination of OUN member Bachyns’kyi whom he suspected had ties to Polish intelligence. The assassins were close friends with the victim; so they all got drunk together and then killed their friend. On 15 June 1934, the OUN carried out their most successful assassination, killing Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki in Warsaw. The assassin Hryhorii Matseiko first tried to kill Pieracki in a suicide bombing. However he failed to press the trigger hard enough to detonate the bomb. Instead Maitseko followed Pieracki and shot him twice in the back of the head. He then opened fire on his pursuers, wounding a policeman. Managing to escape with the help of the OUN, he was smuggled into Czechoslovakia and then fled to Argentina with a Lithuanian passport. The morning of his death Pieracki had met with Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, raising awkward questions after Germany offered refuge to some of the escaped OUN plotters. Initially the police suspected the Polish fascist group UNR was responsible. However the sloppy assassin had left clues like the unexploded bomb and his clothes with a yellow and blue Ukrainian flag sewn into them. Stepan Bandera had actually been arrested the day before the assassination in a raid that captured 20 other OUN members, including the bomb maker. Apparently the Poles did not yet realize that Bandera was the head of the OUN Homeland Executive. Bandera denied everything including being an OUN member.
By 17 June 1934, the police had solved the Pieracki case. However they kept quiet. Instead Pilsudski turned Pieracki into a national martyr with all the pomp and circumstance that America uses to bury an assassinated president. A state of national mourning was declared in Poland. All theatres were closed and festivities cancelled while the coffin was carried around the country by train to be greeted everywhere by mourning crowds. Thus Poland was at a fever pitch when the government announced that the OUN were responsible on 10 July 1934. Two weeks later the OUN would carry out another assassination on Bandera’s orders, killing a Ukrainian high school director and teacher Ivan Babii. Babii had once punished Bandera for helping a fellow student cheat on an exam. The assassin, Mykhailo Tsar, shot himself in the head when he realized escape was impossible. The murder enraged even the Ukrainian nationalist press, which denounced the OUN as terrorists. On 9 October 1934, the OUN were accomplices in the Ustashi assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles, France. Mussolini was so embarrassed when his ties to both groups were exposed that he ordered the Ustashi and the OUN confined to two small separate villages in Sicily. The trial of the Ustashi assassins would take place in 1935, at the same time as the OUN trials in Poland.
Poland held two big trials of the OUN leadership. The Warsaw trial dealt with the assassination of Pieracki and lasted from 18 November 1935 until 13 January 1936. The Lvov trials dealt with the OUN’s other murders and crimes and lasted from 25 May 1936 until 27 June 1936. Together some 20 defendants were tried. Czechoslovakian intelligence had raided an OUN leaders home, seizing thousands of pages of OUN documents to which they gave the Polish government access. This “Senyk archive” revealed a great deal about the OUN’s goals and structure. Stepan Bandera and many OUN members continued to deny everything. However a few OUN members turned on the group and as state’s evidence agreed to testify, knowing the OUN would no doubt seek revenge by killing them. Some OUN defectors felt guilty for the murders of fellow Ukrainians especially fellow OUN members. Others caved in under interrogation. The Polish prosecutor, Zelenski, performed well in proving the state’s case against the OUN. At the Warsaw trial Bandera and other defendants refused to testify in Polish (in which they were all fluent) while the court refused to hear testimony in Ukrainian. Bandera was dragged out of the courtroom kicking and screaming for his contempt of court. It was at the Warsaw trial that the OUN first started using the slogan “Slava Ukraini” publicly in combination with the Roman (Nazi) salute. Vira Svientsitska was the first to shout the slogan with salute in court as she was being dragged from the courtroom for refusing to testify in Polish. Bandera and Mykola Lebed would shout the slogan at their sentencing. Lebed would later be the main OUN figure backed by the CIA, after carrying out horrific crimes for the Germans during the war. Stepan Bandera, Mykola Lebed and the bomb maker Iaroslav Karpynets’ would all receive death sentences when the Warsaw trial ended on 13 June 1936. The other defendants received long prison sentences of between 8 and 15 years. Luckily for the OUN the Polish Parliament had abolished the death penalty on 2 January 1936. This act spared the lives of the leaders of a movement that would go on to murder hundreds of thousands of Poles. Instead they were sentenced to life imprisonment. Poland used the Pieracki murder as a pretext to build a prison camp for Ukrainians. Many low level OUN members were given local trials. By 1938 when Ukrainian owned agricultural firms were refusing to supply the cities—in the wake of a Polish police crackdown on nationalist demonstrators—Poland gaoled some 30,000 Ukrainians.
The Lvov trials were more relaxed. The defendants were allowed to testify in Ukrainian and instead of denying their crimes the OUN sought to justify them. Bandera was allowed to give a long courtroom speech where he portrayed himself as a Robin Hood figure helping the poor Ukrainian peasants against the evil Poles and Russians. He put himself forward as the OUN’s Providnyk or Führer ignoring the OUN leader in exile Konavelets. In his speech Bandera argued the true measure of the OUN was not their willingness to die but their willingness to kill and that not hundreds but thousands of people needed to die to in order to fulfil their goals. Full of self-serving lies Bandera’s legendary Lvov courtroom speech is still read and reread by fascists in Ukraine today. The Lvov trial made Bandera a superstar among Ukrainians in Poland and the diaspora.
Arrested the day before the Pieracki assassination Bandera would remain in Polish prisons until his eventual escape in September 1939. Bandera and other OUN prisoners used their time in prison to study and organize. They taught some of their fellow Ukrainian prisoners to read and write and each OUN leader gave lectures on a different academic topic. In prison Bandera and the OUN mentored Hryorii Perehinak, who would go on to play a major role in the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia during the war. Bandera and the OUN waged three hunger strikes which the Polish prison guards ended by force-feeding them through their noses. The OUN also plotted to free Bandera. One plot involved impersonating monks to help Bandera escape. The Polish authorities however were reading the OUN’s mail and arrested the plotters. Another scheme involved bribing his prison guards to release him with money raised from overseas Ukrainians. The OUN cancelled the plan either because they feared it was a trick to kill Bandera while escaping or they feared reprisals against other OUN prisoners if Bandera escaped. The authorities were so concerned about these OUN plots that they built guard towers at one prison and also kept moving Bandera around. The Bandera escape plans became even more intense after the OUN head Konavalets was assassinated in Rotterdam on 22 May 1938. Bandera’s supporters wanted him free so he could gain control of the OUN. Poland had him transferred to a prison in Brest.
Finally on 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War 2 began. In the chaos Bandera was finally able to escape on 13 September 1939. Bandera headed for Lvov. A small part of the German military was occupying Galicia. The OUN had risen up and begun by massacring 3,000 Poles and an unknown number of Jews. The remnants of the Polish military were massacring Ukrainians and Jews. However Bandera quickly realized that the time was net yet right for the OUN to seize power because western Ukraine was about to become part of the Soviet sphere of influence as part of the Molotov and Ribbentrop Pact. Bandera and many of the OUN headed for the German occupied portion of Western Poland called the General Government. On 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and despite years of OUN propaganda many West Ukrainian’s welcomed them as liberators. Bandera’s family would eventually get caught up in the Soviet crackdown on the OUN in western Ukraine. In March 1941, a couple months before the German invasion of the USSR, they arrested Stepan’s father Andrii and two of Stepan’s sisters for harbouring an OUN member. His sisters were deported to Siberia while his father was sentenced to be shot.
Bandera headed for Cracow, which was to become home to 30,000 OUN members and their sympathizers. Along the way Bandera stopped in the town of Iavoriv where the OUN and the German military engaged in a brutal massacre of local Jews and burned down the local synagogue. Bandera never mentioned the incident or other OUN mass murders. Arriving in Cracow, Bandera soon met his future wife, OUN member Iaroslava Oparivska. They would marry in June of 1940. Bandera had more than romance on his mind. He wanted to seize control of the OUN.
In November 1939 Bandera headed for a spa in Slovakia for an OUN meeting. Then he headed for Vienna where he met up with the current head of the Homeland Executive Lopatyns’kyi. They decided to head to Rome to confront the new OUN head Andrii Melnyk. Melnyk had been a founding member of the UVO and OUN but was not as well known in Western Ukraine as Bandera. Melnyk had been made the OUN head at the 2nd congress of Ukrainian Nationalists held in Rome in August 1939. The assassinated OUN head Konovalets had named Melnyk as a successor in his will. Bandera’s followers claimed the will was a forgery. Bandera considered Melnyk’s top advisers to be traitors. Bandera and Lopatyns’kyi arrived in Rome mid January 1940. Stepan reunited with his brother Oleksandr, who had earned a PhD in political economy since arriving in Rome in 1933. They then met with Melnyk and demanded that he fire his advisers, appoint Bandera’s picks to OUN leadership and then go into exile in Switzerland. Melnyk in return offered to make Bandera one of his advisers but demanded the obedience of the Homeland Executive. Bandera believed that Melnyk also ordered his assassination so Bandera went into hiding.
The OUN was moving towards its split into the OUN/M headed by Melnyk and the OUN/B headed by Bandera. On 10 February 1940 Bandera and his supporters like Roman Shukhevych declared a revolutionary leadership in the OUN. Soon each side was expelling the other from the OUN. Each side was accusing the other side of being married to Jews and being secretly controlled by the Soviet Union. It became a bit of a comedy that would turn dark. During the war Bandera would have many of his OUN/M rivals assassinated including Melnyk’s advisers whom he had labelled as traitors. Today the Ukrainian nationalist obsession with traitors in high places remains a defining characteristic of post-Maidan Ukraine. Bandera’s OUN/B would ultimately win the power struggle since they enjoyed better connections to OUN activists in Soviet-controlled Western Ukraine, were more popular among Ukrainians in German-controlled Poland and with the young. The Nazis would work closely with both the OUN/M and the OUN/B. They seemed to favour the OUN/M as more easy to control. Ideologically there was little difference between the two and the OUN/B and OUN/M fought over who was the more pro-Nazi.
From 31 March until 3 April 1941, the OUN/B held their own second Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists at Cracow, deliberately ignoring the Second Congress convened in Rome that had appointed Melnyk head of the OUN. Bandera was declared Providnyk of the OUN. The OUN/B published a pamphlet expressing their ideology. In the months leading up to the invasion of the Soviet Union they were planning with their German handlers in the Abwehr. The OUN/B claimed “Jews in the USSR are the main pillars of the Bolshevik Regime, and the avant-garde of the Moscow imperialism in Ukraine.” They announced that they were planning to ally with Byelorussians, Finns, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians and other “enslaved nations” to destroy the USSR. They announced that they would destroy the collective farms and replace them with a free enterprise system. They created a red and black OUN/B flag symbolizing blood and soil. They announced their policy as “one people, one Party, and one Leader”. On 10 April 1941, the OUN expressed elation when the Nazis allowed the Ustashi to carve a Croatian puppet state out of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. That clerical-fascist state, to which the first Croatian president in 1991, Franjo Tudjman, belonged, waged a genocidal campaign against Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs and Orthodoxy. The OUN/B sent Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic their personal congratulations by telegram. The Nazis had already created a fascist puppet state in Slovakia. Hence the OUN/B were convinced that the Nazis would allow Bandera to rule Ukraine as dictator after the German invasion.
Throughout 1939-1941 both factions of the OUN were working closely with Germany’s military intelligence the Abwehr headed by Wilhelm Canaris, as well as with the SS. Their Abwehr handlers were Wilhelm Canaris, Theodor Oberlander, Hans Koch, and Alfred Bisasz. Oberlander would become infamous for his role with Ukrainian and Pan-Turkist SS units. The Abwehr provided resources for the OUN to train and arm it’s forces in German-occupied Poland and Soviet-controlled West Ukraine. The Abwehr recruited 350 OUN members into the Nachtigal Battalion and 330 OUN members into the Roland Battalion. A further 800 OUN/B members were trained at the Ievhen Konovalets Military School in Cracow to form task forces that would seize control of local governments and raise Ukrainian militias to carry out genocide. The Abwehr recruited OUN members as spies, translators and soldiers. The Abwehr also trained refugees from west Ukraine and sent them back to infiltrate the Soviet Union. The Soviets managed to capture 486 of them as they crossed the border. The Abwehr planned to have the OUN attack Soviet forces from the rear.
In May of 1941, after weeks of work, the OUN/B finalized plans for their role in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), which would begin 22 June that year. The Germans would tell the OUN the exact date of the invasion so the OUN underground in the Soviet Union could be ready. Their plan was recorded in the “Struggles and Activities of the OUN in Wartime.” or Struggles and Activities plan for short. It was written by Stepan Bandera, future war criminal Roman Shukhevych, Lenkavs’kyi and Yaroslav Stetsko (later head of the World Anti-Communist League’s Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, who would be invited to the Reagan White House). Its goal was to “establish the totalitarian power of the Ukrainian Nation in all Ukrainian territories.” It listed the OUN/B’s future allies, other minorities in the Soviet Union like the Baltic States, Belarus, plus the Finns. Of course their key ally was the Nazi Germans themselves. OUN activists were to travel the countryside proclaiming an independent Ukraine and welcoming the Germans in the name of Stepan Bandera. They would avoid combat with the Red Army leaving that for the German Wehrmacht. Instead they would organize the countryside. The plan identified its enemies clearly as Poles, Russians, Jews, and Ukrainians who failed to support the OUN. These enemies were to be liquidated. The plan called for forming militias in the countryside comprising all males aged 18-50. These gangs would drag off their enemies to forests and other desolate places to be massacred. All Jews were to be registered and then eliminated. The OUN/B was to compile a death list of Poles and NKVD informers. The OUN/B planned to recruit the countryside to purge the cities that were full of Jews, Russians, and Poles. The OUN/B would seize control of all local government; remake the education system along Ukrainian fascist lines. The plan called for the creation of youth groups that would indoctrinate children starting at age 6. At age 10 they would join the next group and at 18 the next group until at 21 they would join either the OUN, one of its paramilitary formations, cultural or sporting fronts. The plan provided for a huge list of OUN/B fascist slogans to mobilize the masses like “death to Muscovite Jewish Communism.” and “Ukraine for Ukrainians.” In other words the OUN/B were planning on creating a fascist dictatorship lead by Stepan Bandera that would then eliminate Jews, Poles, and Russians as well as anyone in Ukraine who was an obstacle to their plans.
Hitler however had his own plans for Ukraine and the Soviet Union. In Hitler’s insane dreams Ukraine was destined to become Germany’s version of America’s Wild West or British India. He envisioned German settlers hardened and transformed by the colonization of Ukraine. Hitler was a big fan of Westerns and cowboys. Ukrainians were in his view just like the Russians inferior Slavs who were to be massacred and enslaved. Ukraine would become part of Greater Germany. He planned to enslave the populace. The more pragmatic Nazi view was championed by Alfred Rosenberg and by the Waffen SS who saw many useful allies in Eastern Europe like the Ukrainians and championed an international view of fascism. During the war, as the tide turned against the Nazis, they would increasingly adopt this more pragmatic view; relying increasingly on their Ukrainian fascist allies.
On 22 June 1941, Germany would invade the Soviet Union and the OUN would follow the Wehrmacht into Ukraine. The next years would bring untold suffering and horror to the Soviet people. The history of the OUN would enter its bloodiest phase. They would play a vital role in helping the Germans commit mass murders and other crimes throughout Ukraine and the other occupied territories. These I will discuss in Part 2 of this series.
Sources
My main source is the highly detailed Stepan Bandera The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist Fascism, Genocide, and Cult by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of fascism in Ukraine.
The section on Ukraine during the Russian civil war relies on Edward Hallet Carr’s classic The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Volume 1. Pages 289-307. Part of a 3 volume series I recommend if you want an in-depth study of the political, economic, and diplomatic history of the Russian revolution.
The section on Hitler’s plans for Ukraine relies on Wendy Lower’s “Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine.” which tells the horrifying story of the German occupation of Ukraine.
For a discussion of fascism in Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan coup I recommend Ukraine in the Crossfire by Chris Kaspar de Ploeg.
A PDF version of Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard by Douglas Tottle, debunks the “Holodomor” myth.
https://www.garethjones.org/tottlefraud.pdf
Additional details on massacres of Jews during the Russian civil war in Ukraine can be found in Yasha Levine’s recent articles.
Yasha Levine on Petliura
https://yasha.substack.com/p/my-ukrainian-grandma-and-our-lost
Yasha Levine on Denikin
https://yasha.substack.com/p/white-russian-saviors
Yasha Levine on the Holodomor
https://yasha.substack.com/p/holodomor-and-the-erasure-of-jewish?r=45jbs&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Cynthia Chung on the History of the OUN Part 1
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/03/22/why-does-ukraine-seem-to-have-so-many-nazis-nowadays/
Cynthia Chung on the History of the OUN Part 2
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/04/06/how-the-ukrainian-nationalist-movement-post-wwii-was-bought-and-paid-for-by-the-cia/
Evan Reif on the History of the OUN Part 1
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/06/10/how-pre-ww-ii-ukrainian-fascists-pioneered-brutal-terror-techniques-later-improved-by-cia-now-ironically-taught-to-descendants/
Evan Reif on the History of the OUN Part 2
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/06/10/how-monsters-who-beat-jews-to-death-in-1944-became-americas-favorite-freedom-fighters-in-1945-with-a-little-help-from-their-friends-at-cia/
Evan Reif on the History of the OUN Part 3
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/06/23/the-bloody-peacemakers/
A short mainstream documentary on Ukraine during the Russian Civil war
https://youtu.be/9Gwuu7TXPwI
A short documentary on the Polish-Ukrainian War
https://youtu.be/zk0IZsshET0
My history of the Soviet Union under Stalin discusses the necessity of the collectivization of agriculture.
http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2019/03/understanding-stalin-v-2.html - Hugo Turner
https://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2022/11/history-of-fascism-in-ukraine-part-1.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
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https://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com/2022/11/history-of-fascism-in-ukraine-part-1.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=blogger
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