Quoting page 237:

Bandera’s physical absence from Lviv, and many other localities in which the pogroms took place, does not exonerate him of the responsibility for the crimes committed by the OUN-B, because he had prepared the “Ukrainian National Revolution,” which anticipated establishing a state and eliminating the political and ethnic “enemies” of this state. The preparation included writing “Struggle and Activities,” together with Stets’ko, Shukhevych, and Lenkavs’kyi, and, with the help of this and other documents, informing the underground in Ukraine how to act after the beginning of the German attack on the Soviet Union. “Struggle and Activities” was unambiguous about what the Ukrainian nationalists should do with Jews, Poles, Soviets, and Ukrainian opponents.

Page 207:

Stefania Cang-Schutzman saw how the Jews in the Łąckiego Street prison were beaten and otherwise mistreated, how women were undressed, and how pregnant women were beaten in the stomach. The [anticommunist] Ukrainians ordered the Jews to give up jewels, money, and all other valuable objects that they possessed. Another survivor from the Łąckiego Street prison remembered that a German officer interrupted the violence of the crowd with the comment: “We are not Bolsheviks.” People watching the mistreatment of the Jews from the roofs demanded, however, that the Jews in the prison yard be killed. Alfred Monaster wrote in his testimony that on 1 July, in the prison on Łąckiego Street, beautiful Jewish women were selected, […]

I’ll let you guess what happened after that.

Page 215:

Posters with slogans such as “Ukraine for the Ukrainians” […] informed their readers as to whom the territory in which they lived should belong, and who should and should not be allowed to live in it. Many of the posters and other revolutionary propaganda materials linked the idea of founding a Ukrainian state with killing the Jews. One such poster “To the Ukrainian Nation! [Ukraїns’kyi Narode!]” read: “Know! Moscow, Hungarians, Jews [Zhydova]—are your enemies, Kill them, do not forget! Your leadership is the leadership of the Ukrainian Nationalists OUN, your leader is Stepan Bandera, your aim is an Independent United Ukrainian State” On 30 June 1941, a group of about ten Jews was forced to print the OUN-B posters and other propaganda material that motivated the crowd to kill the Jews.

That is a tiny sample of the violence that anticommunists inspired by Stepan Bandera (among others) committed; these clippings can’t possibly do them any justice. I only end the sampling there for those of us not yet prepared to read a 600+ page biography.

I end this on a less unpleasant note, from page 354:

During the summer [of 1959], [Bohdan Stashyns’kyi] spent some days in Borshchovychi with his parents and came back to Munich on 14 October 1959 with a […] weapon. The next day, he went to Bandera’s apartment building at Kreittmayrstrasse 7, and in the stairwell, in the vicinity of the front door, fired the poison from both barrels at Bandera’s face. The second barrel had been reserved for Bandera’s bodyguard, who was not accompanying the Providnyk that day. Stashyns’kyi stated that he was too nervous to control this step and instead of firing only one capsule of cyanide, he fired both. The quantity of cyanide that reached Bandera’s mouth was so large that the Providnyk swallowed some drops. This enabled the experts to identify the poison during the post-mortem.

(Emphasis added.)

Whether Bandera was more deserving of either the intended single dose, or the accidental double dose, is a choice that I leave up to you.

  • SovereignState
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    2 years ago

    At least he got to see his movement go up in flames, and wasn’t around to see its resurgance in Europe. Silver lining?