Stepan Bandera
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Stepan Andriyovych Bandera (Ukrainian: Степан Андрійович Бандера) (January 1, 1909–October 15, 1959) was a Ukrainian nationalist leader who headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
He was born in the village of Uhryniv Staryi, in the district of Kalusz in Galiсia (Stanyslaviv oblast), which at that time was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. His father, Andriy Bandera, was a Greek-Catholic priest in Uhryniv Staryi. His mother, Myroslava Bandera, was from an old clerical family, being the daughter of a Greek-Catholic priest in Uhryniv Staryi.
Stepan spent his childhood in Uhryniv Staryi, in the house of his parents and grandparents, growing up in an atmosphere of Ukrainian nationalism.
In spring 1922, his mother died from tuberculosis of the throat.
Starting in 1922, he was a member of Plast – Ukrainian Scouting Organization. From 1931 Bandera was deputy of regional guides, then – head of regional executive of OUN and commandant of ULO. He was condemned to death for the organization of the murder of the Home Secretary of Poland in 1934 but the sentence was vacated and commuted to life imprisonment. Released by the USSR when the Soviets occupied Lvov in 1939, in 1940 he headed the revolutionary group of OUN that broke away from Andrii Melnyk's OUN. Khrushchev admitted that freeing a man simply because the USSR had no sympathy for a murdered "reactionary" Polish statesman was an error, commenting in his memoirs "...we still showed a certain lack of judgment by freeing people like Bandera from prison without first checking up on them" (Khrushchev Remembers: Little Brown and Co., Boston, 1970 at 140). On June 30, 1941, he was elected a member of the Government of the renewed Ukrainian State proclaimed in Lviv following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. After that he was imprisoned in German Sachsenhausen concentration camp until February 1945 when he was released and headed the West European units of OUN and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). UPA partisan units continued fighting the Soviet Union and communist Poland until the early 1950s, especially in the Carpathian Mountains regions.
On October 15, 1959, at the entrance of a house in Kreittmayr street, 7 (Kreittmayrstraße), in Munich, Stepan Bandera was found at 13:05, bleeding and barely alive. He died of his wounds. A medical examination established that the cause of his death was poison. Two years later, on November 17, 1961, the German judicial bodies proclaimed that the murderer of Stepan Bandera was Bohdan Stashynskyi who acted on the orders of Soviet KGB head Alexander Shelepin and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. After a detailed investigation against Stashynskyi, a trial took place from October 8th to October 15, 1962. The sentence was handed down on October 19th, in which Stashynskyi was condemned to 8 years of heavy imprisonment. The German Supreme Court confirmed at Karlsruhe that in the Bandera murder, the Soviet Government in Moscow was the main guilty party. In an interview with Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2005 former KGB Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov claimed that "the murder of Stepan Bandera was one of the last cases when the KGB disposed of undesired people by means of violence" [1] On October 20, 1959 he was buried in the Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Munich.
In late 2006 the Lviv city administration announced the future transference of the tombs of Stepan Bandera, Andriy Melnyk, Yevhen Konovalets and other key leaders of OUN/UPA to a new area of Lychakivskiy Cemetery specifically dedicated to Ukrainian national liberation struggle.[2]
