Stepan Bandera

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Stepan Bandera (ca.1934)
Signature of Stepan Bandera

Stepan Andriyovych Bandera ( Ukrainian Степан Андрійович Бандера , scientific. Transliteration Stepan Andrijovyč Bandera *  1. January 1909 in staryi uhryniv , Galicia , Austria-Hungary ; †  15. October 1959 in Munich ) was a nationalist Ukrainian politicians ( OUN ) and partisan leader ( UPA ). He was murdered in Munich by a KGB agent.

The classification of Bandera's work and his person is very controversial in Ukraine. In the east of the country , but also in Poland , Russia and Israel , he is mainly regarded as a Nazi collaborator and war criminal . In the west of Ukraine , on the other hand, he is revered by many Ukrainians as a national hero.

Life

Stepan Bandera as a child (1923)
Ukrainian 100th birthday stamp (2009)

youth

Stepan Bandera was born in 1909 in Staryj Uhryniw , Galicia , which at that time still belonged to Austria-Hungary. After the First World War , the area fell to Poland . Both parents came from Christian families, his father Andrij was a priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church . His siblings were: Marta-Marija (1907–1982), Oleksandr (1911–1942), Volodymyra Bandera-Dawydjuk (1913–2001), Wassyl (1915–1942), Oksana (1917–2008) and Bohdan (1919–1944) . The young Bandera attended school in Stryj , in 1922 his mother died of tuberculosis .

Ukrainian nationalism

After graduating from school, he began studying at the Lemberg Polytechnic in 1928 , where at that time only a few events were open to Ukrainians. He eventually joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was then headed by Andrij Melnyk . Bandera rose quickly in the hierarchy of the OUN and was already part of its management team in the early 1930s.

In 1934 Bandera was sentenced to death in Poland because he was accused of participating in the murder of the Polish interior minister, Bronisław Pieracki . However, this sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In September 1939, after the beginning of the Second World War and the occupation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union, he was released again. The reasons for his release are not exactly known.

Second World War

He then went to Krakow , which was occupied by Germany , where he worked with the defense of the Wehrmacht , from which he was given the code name Consul II . The Abwehr hoped that Bandera would bring the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) to the side of the Germans.

In fact, even before the war against the Soviet Union, combat groups such as the Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists were formed from the ranks of the OUN under German supervision in the “ General Government ” . Bandera belonged to the radical wing of the OUN. Due to differences between Bandera and the leader of the OUN, Andrij Melnyk , there was finally a split in 1940 into a conservative OUN-M under the leadership of Andrij Melnyk and a revolutionary and radically anti-Semitic OUN-B under the leadership of Bandera (the 'B' stands for banderiwzi , ie "banderists").

Militias set up by Banderas OUN-B partially took over police power after the German Wehrmacht marched into Lviv on June 30, 1941. They were instrumental in pogroms against the Jewish civilian population , fueled by a mass murder of around 4,000 Ukrainian prisoners by units of the Soviet NKVD a few days earlier . The militia prepared for the mass shooting of 3,000 Jews by Einsatzgruppe C of the German security police on July 5, 1941 by making arrests . According to research by Ukrainian historians, Bandera himself was not in Lviv but in Krakow that day; whether he was involved in the pogrom is still controversial.

The independent Ukrainian state, also proclaimed in Lviv on June 30, 1941 by the OUN-B and Bandera's fellow campaigner Jaroslaw Stezko , did not, however, correspond to the ideas of the National Socialists. Bandera was imprisoned in the so-called cell building of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in July 1941 . B. also the former Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg was arrested. Two of his brothers, Oleksandr and Wassyl Bandera , are said to have been killed by Polish inmates in Auschwitz . In the concentration camp, however, he was given special status as a so-called honorary prisoner , so he had a larger, furnished cell with a bedroom and a living room, and even pictures on the walls and a carpet on the floor.

Unusually for a concentration camp, he was released on September 25, 1944. He was supposed to found a Ukrainian National Committee and, alongside the National Socialists, direct the actions of the Ukrainian resistance against the Red Army , but because of the rapid Soviet advance it never came to that. In December 1944, Bandera turned down the collaboration offered by the National Socialists. After the end of World War II , the UPA broke up into rival groups that were active until the late 1950s.

Exile and assassination by the KGB

Grave at the Waldfriedhof in Munich in April 2014

In autumn 1946 Bandera fled via Austria to Munich, where he hid from the Soviet secret service KGB for years under the false name Stefan Popel , as he had been sentenced to death in absentia in the Soviet Union for his anti-Soviet actions. In 1947 Bandera became chairman of the OUN in exile and remained so until his death.

The agent of the KGB Bogdan Staschinski murdered him on October 15, 1959 in the entrance of his house at Kreittmayrstrasse 7 with a pistol-like weapon that sprayed hydrogen cyanide gas. He was still alive when he was found, but died a little later; his body was autopsied by the Munich forensic specialist Wolfgang Spann . On October 20, he was buried in the Munich forest cemetery . His grave was  devastated by strangers on the night of August 17, 2014 - during the war in Ukraine .

The KGB was found to be responsible for the murder of Bandera. The perpetrator Bogdan Stashinsky, who had made himself, was born on 19 October 1962 to eight years in prison convicted. Bandera was not the only Ukrainian nationalist in exile who felt this way: Jewhen Konowalez was killed in a booby trap in Rotterdam in 1938 and Lew Rebet in 1957, also in Munich by Bogdan Staschinski.

Bandera left behind his wife Jaroslawa, with whom he had been married since June 1940 and had three children: Natalia (1941–1985), Andrei (1944–1984) and Lesya (1947–2011). After the assassination Banderas walked the family to Toronto ( Canada off).

Aftermath

Portrait of Banderas at Kiev City Hall during Euromaidan on January 14, 2014
Stepan Bandera statue in Ternopil , January 1, 2017

In western Ukraine in particular, Bandera is revered as a national hero by broader strata of the population, where there are hundreds of streets named after him, many life-size statues and busts, several monumental monuments and several museums in his honor. The nationalist party “ Svoboda ”, which is politically successful, particularly in western Ukraine, and the right-wing extremist organization Prawyj Sector also refer to Bandera. The supporters of the Karpaty Lviv football club regularly show large banners with his likeness at home games of their club. In eastern Ukraine, but also in Poland , Russia and Israel , however, Bandera is predominantly considered a criminal and collaborator. The American historian Per Anders Rudling also describes Bandera as a fascist .

On January 22nd, 2010 the then Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded Bandera the honorary title Hero of Ukraine . The then Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko of the Fatherland Party expressed her support to Yushchenko in this matter. The Polish and Russian governments and some other institutions protested against this honor. The European Parliament expressed the hope that the new President of Ukraine would revise this presidential decree. The Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned the honor and pointed out that Bandera was complicit in the deaths of thousands of Jews.

Supporters of Karpaty Lviv hold a banner with the inscription "Bandera - our hero"

In March 2010, the new President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych , announced that Yushchenko's decree would be repealed. In January 2011, court decisions to revoke the title finally became final. The press office of Blok Juliji Tymoshenko criticized the court decision as political. The withdrawal is also a breach of Yanukovych's election promises.

By a resolution of the Kiev city ​​parliament in July 2016, the Moscow Prospect of the capital was renamed Stepan Bandera Prospect ( Проспект Степана Бандери ).

A current presentation on the subject is available from Lutz Klevemann, who warns that Bandera's role should not deal with his own history of collaboration, fascism and anti-Semitism in Ukraine. The independent Ukraine proclaimed by Bandera was by no means in the interests of Hitler , but he used the Ukrainian nationalists and had Bandera's militias set up a Ukrainian auxiliary police . Collaboration also plays a major role in connection with Soviet prisoners of war . As in Germany, her fate was long withheld in Lviv. In the citadel above the city, which is now a luxury hotel, over 140,000 Soviet prisoners of war died because the German occupiers let them starve to death.

Since the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict, strangers have desecrated his grave in Munich three times (February, May 2015 and July 2016).

Film, theater

literature

  • David R. Marples: Stepan Bandera: In search of Ukraine for Ukrainians . In: Rebecca Haynes, Martyn Rady (eds.): In the shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the right in Central and Eastern Europe . IB Tauris, London a. a. 2011, ISBN 978-1-84511-697-2 , pp. 227-244.
  • Grzegorz Rossoliński love: Stepan Bandera. The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult. ibidim-Verlag, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-8382-0604-2 .
  • Salomon, Hobe, Tulatz: Nazi collaborator as Ukraine's new hero . In: Jewish Berlin 4/2010.
  • Always afraid . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1959 ( online report of the Bandera assassination).
  • Andrii Portnov: Something is wrong with the Bandera myth. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 8, 2016. (Portnov is a Ukrainian historian, 2015/2016 Fellow at the “Forum Transregional Studies” in Berlin and visiting professor at the Institute for Slavonic Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin .)
  • Lutz Kleveman: Lemberg: The forgotten center of Europe. Construction Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 9783351036683 .

Web links

Commons : Stepan Bandera  - collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hadern: Controversial Ukrainians in the forest cemetery. In: evening newspaper . March 9, 2014, accessed August 23, 2016 .
  2. ^ Danylo Chaykovsky: Stepan Bandera, his Life and Struggle .
  3. ↑ Hannes Heer : Bloody Overture . In: The time . No. 26 , 2001 ( online ).
  4. ↑ Kai Struve: German rule, Ukrainian nationalism, anti-Jewish violence. The summer of 1941 in western Ukraine. De Gruyter, Berlin 2015, pp. 259–265, 353, 431.
  5. ↑ RW Tschastij: Stepan Bandera - mify, legendy, dejstwitelnost. Kharkiv 2007, ISBN 966-03-3656-X , p. 382.
  6. ↑ Ukraine: Blessed Sword . In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , 1994 ( online ).
  7. ^ Andreas Umland: Analysis: The Ukrainian nationalism between stereotype and reality . Federal Agency for Civic Education , October 9, 2012.
  8. ↑ a b c d Hitler's helpers: how nationalists continue to divide Ukraine . Panorama, Das Erste, 2014
  9. ↑ The symbolization of the Ukrainian past: Stepan Bandera and the UPA. In: Heinrich Böll Foundation . December 9, 2014, accessed February 27, 2017 .
  10. ↑ a b c Bandera: Always fear . In: Der Spiegel . No. 44 , 1959 ( online ).
  11. ↑ karpaty.info
  12. ↑ encyclopediaofukraine.com
  13. ↑ Grave of Stepan Bandera in the Munich forest cemetery (Grabfeld 43, location )
  14. ^ Cemetery in Munich: grave of Ukrainian nationalist Bandera devastated. In: Spiegel Online . August 17, 2014, accessed August 17, 2014 .
  15. ↑ Ukrainian Displaced Persons in Germany . Federal Agency for Civic Education , June 30, 2014.
  16. ↑ Take off your beard . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1961 ( online ).
  17. ↑ Who Is Ukraine's Stepan Bandera? In: Russia Insider. May 1, 2015, accessed August 23, 2016 .
  18. ^ Ulrich Krökel: Young nationalism in the EM city of Lemberg . Zeit Online , May 30, 2012.
  19. ↑ bpb.de
  20. ^ Fan page of FK Karpaty Lviv , accessed on April 19, 2013.
  21. ^ Website of the photo agency UNIAN , accessed on April 19, 2013.
  22. ↑ President awarded Stepan Bandera the title Hero of Ukraine ( Memento of April 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Website of the President of Ukraine (Ukrainian), accessed on January 22, 2010.
  23. ↑ Timoshenko supports Yushchenko on Bandera. Voice of Russia , January 30, 2010, accessed March 17, 2014 .
  24. ↑ Tymoshenko: Historic truth should be guideline in Bandera issue. Kyiv Post , January 30, 2010, accessed March 21, 2014 .
  25. ↑ Тимошенко о Бандере, двух историях, черной пропаганде и мудрости. vlasti.net, January 31, 2010, accessed March 21, 2014 .
  26. ↑ Kaczynski condemns Yushchenko's glorification of the Nazi collaborator Bandera , article in RIA Novosti on February 5, 2010.
  27. ↑ Nazi collaborator as the new hero of Ukraine. Jewish Community of Berlin, April 1, 2010, accessed on August 23, 2016 .
  28. ↑ Ukrainian President promises to override Yushchenko's presidential decrees on Heroes' Orders for Bandera and Shukhevych . ( Memento of the original from March 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved March 5, 2010. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nrcu.gov.ua
  29. ^ Clifford J. Levy, 'Hero of Ukraine' Prize to Wartime Partisan Leader Is Revoked. The New York Times , January 12, 2011, accessed March 21, 2014 .
  30. ↑ Court declares invalid decree conferring Hero of Ukraine title to Bandera. MIGnews, January 13, 2011, accessed on March 21, 2014 .
  31. ^ A b Sputnik: Stepan Bandera grave in Munich desecrated again. Retrieved January 1, 2018 .
  32. ^ Lutz Kleveman: Lemberg: The forgotten center of Europe. Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 9783351036683 , p. 96 ff., P. 172 ff.
  33. ↑ Bandera - Myths of Reality # 4 in the Maxim Gorki Theater
personal data
SURNAME Bandera, Stepan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bandera, Stepan Andrijowitsch (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ukrainian politician
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Staryj Uhryniw , Galicia, Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 1959
Place of death Munich