Moss: So, today, apologists and supporters of Bandera would say that this was totally just a strategic thing, but the fact is that they were very much ideologically — or, at least, became so by the time that World War II started, that the OUN was ideologically aligned with Nazi Germany. Just to give one example — one of the leaders of the OUN, which, he goes over to the OUN‐M camp, but, regardless — in the fall of 1938, he was in Canada, and he’s saying the world is divided into two different camps: one led by, quote, “the communist international Moscow under the control of international Jews,” and the other is the nationalist camp, including Fascist Italy and [the Third Reich].

And he even says, in 1938, “Our Canadian–Ukrainian democrats are afraid that Hitler will invade the Ukraine and that the Ukrainian fascists are in close alliance with Germany and Hitler. Actually, we Ukrainian nationalists will ally ourselves not only with Germany, but with the Devil himself as long as the Devil will help us.” And so Hitler was that Devil that they were perfectly willing to go along with. If the whole thing was to be strategic, that doesn’t really make sense because, obviously, Hitler had no intentions to liberate Ukraine, and there were signs of that at the time.

[…]

Moss: It gets worse when you consider that, about a week after [the Western Axis] invades the Soviet Union and OUN‐B tries to declare its own independent state without [Berlin’s] permission and Germany — the Gestapo — arrests Bandera and his first deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, and brings them to Berlin. And the thing is, there’s this myth that, because they refused to retract their declaration of independence, they wound up in a concentration camp.

That doesn’t happen for months, until the end of the summer — Bandera and Stetsko are initially placed under house arrest, and then they’re allowed, actually, that’s even loosened and they’re just restricted to Berlin. So there’s this sort of ambiguous relationship over that summer, and the militias that the OUN‐B created, that they thought would be the nucleus of this revolutionary army or whatever, ends up becoming subordinated to the SS and plays a serious rôle in the mass shooting of Jews that summer as [Axis forces] push east into the Soviet Union and, particularly, Soviet Ukraine.

And so it’s actually only after the OUN‐B assassinates two key OUN‐M leaders just before [Axis troops] reach Kyiv that, I think it’s Heydrich orders, as a result of this assassination of these rival OUN leaders, that the [German Fascists] actually now finally come down pretty hard on the OUN‐B. And yet the leaders of the OUN‐B, Bandera and Stetsko and others who wind up in concentration camps, are treated as political prisoners, as are — I think there was a similar thing with Romanians and, essentially, these other [Axis] collaborators who got a little out of hand and were put in these concentration camps as privileged political prisoners.

And then, in the case of the OUN‐B and other OUN leaders, they’re released in the autumn of 1944. So, it’s all part of this myth that the OUN (and, particularly, the OUN‐B) only briefly had the strategic alliance with [the Third Reich], but then, once it became clear that the [German Fascists] weren’t going to support them, that they launched this big anti‐Nazi resistance. And it’s just simply not true because, even when Bandera is under arrest in Germany (or held under, basically, de facto arrest), he’s still encouraging his followers to collaborate with [the Third Reich].

The more you look into it, the more you can see that these myths about the OUN‐B being an anti‐Nazi resistance movement is just patently wrong.

(Emphasis original.)

Events that happened today (September 29):

1881: Ludwig von Mises, Austrofascist turned neoclassical liberal, rudely burdened us all with his presence.
1912: Michelangelo Antonioni, Axis journalist and draftee, was born.
1941: The Wehrmacht, with the aid of Ukrainian anticommunists, commenced the two‐day Babi Yar massacre.
1998: Bruno Munari, Axis artist, expired.