Note to subscribers: I’m sorry for going MIA on this Substack since December! I’ve suffered some setbacks recently, including a broken computer, as a result of which I lost all my notes from last year… But there is a silver lining: now I can more easily move on to my “Project 2026” for the Bandera Lobby Blog. As some of you will recall, in 2023, the German newspaper Junge Welt organized a conference (and later a book) dedicated to the “Bandera Complex.” The following is based on my first speech from the event, which I hoped to turn into a book. Instead, for now, I plan to expand it into a Substack series. This “preview” is free, but the rest will be for paid subscribers. As a reminder, a paid subscription to this newsletter (or my other Substack) will get you full access to the other one free of charge. The more of you that sign up, the better shape I will be in to churn out mini-chapters of “Eagle, Trident, Swastika.” Alternatively, if this project does not excite my readers, I can get back to the usual programming of covering the contemporary “Bandera Lobby.”
Introduction
A brief history of ‘Galicia’
It is necessary to start with a brief history of western Ukraine, or eastern Galicia, the homeland of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement. When the Nazis formed a Ukrainian division of the Waffen-SS in 1943 they called it the Galicia Division. Himmler did not want to acknowledge it as Ukrainian and thereby encourage the idea that these were fighters for Ukrainian independence. On the other hand, the name evoked memories of the long nineteenth century, when this territory was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Modern-day Ukraine and Russia share an ancestral state, the medieval Kievan Rus’, which included a Principality of Halych to the west. This is where the blue and yellow colors of Ukraine originated, as well as the golden lion associated with the Galicia Division. For hundreds of years, the Poles dominated these lands, which led the Habsburg monarchs to eventually support the proliferation of a Ukrainian identity as a counterweight to Polish ambitions.
According to the historian Paul Robert Magosci, the Galician Ukrainians were “loyal to the Habsburgs until the very end.” Nationalist leaders like Stepan Bandera were born into this empire in the twilight of its existence, which was arguably doomed by the Battle of Galicia in 1914. After World War I, these lands were returned to Poland, which wiped Galicia from the map, but the idea of Galicia as a distinct region survived. I will use the terms “Galicia” and “western Ukraine” interchangeably.
OUN founded
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was founded in Vienna at the 1929 Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, which has been described as “primarily an emigré gathering.” This conclave united many Ukrainian nationalists in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, including the League of Ukrainian Nationalists, which in turn was co-founded by the Union of Ukrainian Fascists.
According to Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, from whose biography of Stepan Bandera I will be quoting, the Union of Ukrainian Fascists actually invented “Slava Ukraini!” as a fascist greeting. He writes that Ukrainian nationalists “underwent a process of fascistization” in the interwar period, but clearly the OUN included some avowed fascists from the beginning. Indeed, the OUN debated whether or not to identify itself as such.
There was, of course, a strong affinity to fascism both in Italy and Germany, but many Ukrainians understood that to openly declare themselves as fascist would be problematic, in part because it would acknowledge the strong influence of foreign ideologies. OUN leader Andriy Melnyk (b. 1890 Galicia - d. 1964 Luxembourg) actually wrote to Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1938 that the OUN was “ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy.”
Speaking of Melnyk, during World War II, the OUN irrevocably split into two rival factions: the Melnykites (OUN-M) and Banderites (OUN-B), but we’ll return to that later. For now I want to focus on the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), which spearheaded the creation of the OUN, and the Nationalist youth that came to dominate the movement in Galicia and wound up overwhelmingly in the Banderite camp.
Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO)
The UVO was a clandestine paramilitary organization founded in Prague in 1920 by World War I veterans who wanted to continue the armed struggle for an independent Ukraine in the former Galicia. UVO commander Yevhen Konovalets led the OUN until 1938, when a Soviet agent blew him up with a box of chocolates in Rotterdam. The UVO used terror to further its aims, beginning in 1921 with a failed assassination of Polish leader Józef Piłsudski.
Rossolinski-Liebe writes, “By 1922 the UVO had already set 2,200 Polish farms on fire.” That year, the organization also began to assassinate Ukrainians who advocated for peaceful co-existence with Poles and participation in elections, deriding them as “collaborators.” Meanwhile, Poland began to crack down on the organization, driving it further underground and its leadership into exile.
Konovalets went to Berlin, where one of his top lieutenants, Riko Yary, established ties to the Reichswehr along with Alfred Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, and Ernst Röhm (a decade before the Nazis came to power). According to Alexander Motyl, a Ukrainian-American academic and author of The Turn to the Right, the UVO traded military intelligence for German financial and political support, and used Germany as a training site for its growing membership. In 1926, the organization’s leadership established its headquarters in Berlin.
Nationalist Youth in Western Ukraine
During the 1920s, while the UVO developed ties to Germany, it also allied itself to the radical nationalist youth movement emerging in Galicia. Motyl writes that the latter “made several more or less original contributions to the [Ukrainian] Nationalist worldview. Foremost among them was the creation of a Ukrainian ‘mythology’ whose centerpiece was the ‘cult of heroes.’”
As these Ukrainians matured, having been too young to fight in World War I, they replenished and made more militant the ranks of the UVO. Rossolinski-Liebe explains that this rising generation held “a more romantic image of war, and were more eager to use violence.” Their greatest ideological inspiration came not from the older generation of OUN leaders, but from the genocidal fascist, Dmytro Dontsov (b. 1883 Melitopol - d. 1973 Montreal), who refused to join the OUN, which was not extreme enough for him.
To Dontsov, anything less than “a complete and all-consuming hostility to Russia was a political sin of the greatest order.” Interestingly, Alexander Motyl writes that even Konovalets considered Dontsov to be a “fanatic and egocentric, whom one must accept as he is if he is not ‘immediately to become a fanatical opponent.’” Dontsov was essentially the godfather of this dogmatic, even irrational hatred of everything Russian that we see today. According to Rossolinski-Liebe,
Dontsov sought to reverse the common or universal system of values and morality. … Dontsov argued that all deeds that would help Ukrainians to achieve a Ukrainian state, regardless of their nature, were moral and right. He thereby encouraged the younger generation to reject ‘common ethics’ and to embrace fanaticism because, as he claimed, only fanaticism could change history and enable the Ukrainians to establish a state. … Dontsov began to admire fascism in late 1922. By 1926 he had already translated and published parts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Ukrainian. For Dontsov, Hitler was the ideal of a fascist leader. The Ukrainian ideologist compared the Führer to Jesus and to Saint Joan of Arc. In addition to extreme nationalism and fascism, Dontsov also popularized antisemitism. In the late 1930s, he opted for the racist kind of antisemitism preached and practiced by the National Socialists in the German Reich. Nazi Germany was for him the ideal fascist state, although it was the Italian Fascists who first drew his attention to the phenomenon of fascism.
Mykola Mikhnovsky (b. Kiev 1873 - d. Kiev 1924), considered the grandfather of Ukrainian ethnonationalism, exercised significant influence on Bandera’s generation from beyond the grave. He coined the slogan, “Ukraine for Ukrainians.” In his advocacy for a “Greater Ukraine” stretching from the Carpathians to the Caucasus, he instructed Ukrainians, “Do not marry a foreign woman, because your children will be your enemies.” The Banderites took this admonition literally. By the end of World War II, writes Rossolinski-Liebe, they “regularly demanded that Ukrainians in mixed marriages kill their spouses and children.”
Stepan Bandera (b. Galicia 1909 - d. Munich 1959), the son of a nationalist priest, had recently celebrated his twentieth birthday when the OUN was founded in 1929. A true fanatic, he is known to have repeatedly tortured himself as a student in order to prepare for future interrogations by Polish authorities. Rossolinski-Liebe tells us that “Bandera had almost no contact with Russian and other Soviet citizens, whom the Ukrainian nationalists frequently called ‘Muscovites.’ He knew them only as an abstract, demonized enemy.”
Within a few years, Bandera and his cohorts had taken control of the OUN’s “homeland executive” in Galicia, so that when Hitler came to power in January 1933, Bandera, just 24, became the de facto OUN “homeland” leader. Just over a year later, the OUN pulled off its highest profile assassination: Poland’s Interior Minister, Bronisław Pieracki.
1935-36 OUN trials
Over the course of 1935-36, two major trials of rising OUN leaders took place in Warsaw and Lviv. The first concerned the assassination of the Polish Interior Minister, while the second dealt with several other crimes, most of them political murders. According to Rossolinski-Liebe, the lead prosecutor described the OUN as a “‘company’ that murdered in order to make money,” alleging that murder and spying for other countries provided the OUN’s main source of revenue.
Bronisław Pieracki (b. Austria-Hungary 1895 - d. Warsaw 1934) had led the “pacification” effort directed at the UVO in Lviv, and hoped that through the promotion of democratic elections, the Polish government could “settle the Ukrainian problem.” According to declassified CIA documents, Pieracki’s assassination coincided with an OUN fund-raising campaign in North America, and was intended to send a message to the world about the “determination and power” of the Ukrainian Nationalists in Poland. Two weeks prior to his assassination, Pieracki had reportedly initiated a number of successful conferences with Ukrainian political leaders, resulting in the OUN’s designation of him as its “enemy #1.”
Hryhorii Matseiko, the OUN assassin who killed Pieracki, escaped to South America. In 1941, the U.S. government came to believe that Nazi Germany had offered Matseiko “a very considerable financial reward if he should have the ‘same success’ [assassinating] President Roosevelt.” Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover warned Washington that a confidential informant had relayed that Matseiko once operated as a German agent in Poland.
Henry Field, the official “Anthropologist to the President,” brought a photo of the OUN assassin to Roosevelt’s private secretary and suggested that “if she ever saw this man outside or inside the White House she [should] ring for help.” In 1941, Field prepared a memo on “Ukrainian Terrorists” that highlighted Ivan Buchko, a Ukrainian Catholic bishop then living in the United States, and the OUN’s greatest friend in the Catholic hierarchy. After World War II, Buchko, the chief Ukrainian advisor to the Vatican, played a pivotal role in saving Ukrainian Waffen-SS veterans from repatriation to the Soviet Union, and helped connect U.S. intelligence with Mykola Lebed, who had overseen the assassination of the Polish Interior Minister years before.
Not until after Pieracki’s assassination did Stepan Bandera become publicly known as the “homeland leader” of the OUN. In the subsequent trials, Bandera’s comrades took their cues from him. Their antics included making fascist salutes, being forcibly removed from the courtroom, and insisting on speaking Ukrainian in the Warsaw trial, which required that testimony be delivered in Polish. In Lviv, where he had the opportunity to speak in his native tongue, Bandera took full responsibility for the crimes of the OUN and delivered a very Dontsovian speech, in which he said,
We know the value of our and other lives, but our idea, as we understand it, is so huge that, as it comes to its realization, not hundreds but thousands of human lives have to be sacrificed in order to carry it out. … The measure of our idea is not that we were prepared to sacrifice our lives, but that we were prepared to sacrifice the lives of others.
Mykola Lebed (b. Galicia 1909 - d. Pittsburgh 1998), reared in the Lviv oblast, had also been tried in Warsaw, where he stood accused of organizing Pieracki’s assassination — surveilling his movements, choosing the time and place of his murder, enlisting Matseiko to carry it out, and supplying the murderous bomb. In the assassination’s aftermath, Lebed fled to Germany, but was quickly extradited to Poland. (Like his OUN compatriots, Lebed made Nazi salutes in the Warsaw courtroom.) Lebed later claimed that Polish officials offered him freedom in exchange for information about the OUN’s relationship with the German government, but the 1934 nonaggression pact between the two countries foreclosed the possibility of that relationship being discussed during the trial proceedings.
In 1949, after Lebed broke with Bandera, the CIA smuggled him into the United States where he remained on its payroll throughout the Cold War. In 1952, the agency shielded Lebed from a criminal investigation by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which considered him a terrorist and Nazi collaborator. The CIA even cast doubt on his involvement in the Pieracki assassination. Allen Dulles, then deputy director of the CIA, arranged for Lebed to become a U.S. citizen on the basis that he was engaged in “operations of the first importance” and of “inestimable value to this Agency.” The CIA placed Lebed in charge of the Prolog Research Corporation, a CIA front that, according to historian John-Paul Himka, became “one of the most authoritative Ukrainian publishing houses in the United States.”
In order to “clear his name” with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the CIA submitted a list of questions to Lebed in 1952. Evidently, his answers lay unscrutinized for decades. When the U.S. Department of Justice launched its Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s to find Nazi war criminals living in the United States, again the CIA opposed an effort to hold Lebed accountable, stating, “We have no basis to believe that Mr. Lebed was a Nazi collaborator.” This was of course a blatant falsehood. Even at the dawn of the Cold War, a U.S. intelligence report had described Lebed as a “well known sadist and collaborator of the Germans.”
Bohdan Pidhainy (b. Galicia 1906-d. Toronto 1980), another Banderite from the Lviv region who stood trial in Warsaw, received a fifteen-year sentence for his role in Pieracki’s assassination. During World War II, he served in the Waffen-SS Galicia Division. In the early years of the Cold War, according to Rossolinski-Liebe, Pidhainy became “the main connection” between the OUN-B leadership and MI6, the British foreign intelligence service. This Waffen-SS veteran lived in Canada for the last chapter of his life, a period of over twenty years.
Yaroslav Stetsko (b. Galicia 1912 - d. Munich 1986), an important Banderite ideologue, served as the deputy head of the “political-ideological apparatus” of the OUN leadership in Galicia. In 1938, the OUN’s Canadian newspaper published a viciously antisemitic article by Stetsko. According to Orest T. Martynowych, the historian who uncovered this, Stetsko “insisted that Jews were ‘nomads and parasites’” and exulted in the Ukrainians as “the first people in Europe to understand the corrupting work of Jewry.” Martynowych says that this same article “placed Jews at the center of an international conspiracy by suggesting that Jewish capitalists and Jewish Communists were collaborating to promote Jewish interests.”
During the 1936 trial of OUN members in Lviv, Rossolinski-Liebe writes that Polish officials removed Stetsko from the courtroom and “punished [him] with twenty-four hours [of solitary confinement] in a darkroom” for making a fascist salute. Ten years later, Stetsko became the leader of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which Scott and Jon Lee Anderson have described as the “largest and most important umbrella for former Nazi collaborators in the world.” In 1983, Stetsko received an invitation to the White House, in part to celebrate the ABN’s 40th anniversary, where he shook hands with President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush.
Roman Shukhevych (b. Lviv 1907- d. Lviv 1950), the military chief of the OUN leadership in Galicia, would later become Supreme Commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, the Banderites’ wartime paramilitary wing. Historian Jared McBride has described the UPA’s campaign to eradicate Poles living in western Ukraine as “one of the most violent ethnic cleansing episodes in 20th century Europe.”
The Banderites have placed numerous oversized busts of Shukhevych, one of their greatest heroes, throughout North America. Even if one subscribes to the falsified version of history promoted by Ukrainian nationalists, according to which the UPA was an anti-Nazi resistance force that saved Jews, Shukhevych himself indisputably collaborated with the Third Reich. In 1941, he acted as the Ukrainian commander of the German-led Nachtigall Battalion that marched into Nazi-occupied Lviv before being designated a captain in Schutzmannschaft 201, a Ukrainian auxiliary police battalion. Both of these formations participated in the extermination of Jews.
The OUN in 1930s Germany
In 1938, when the New York Times reported the death of OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets, they described him as “a leader of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement and chief of the Ukrainian Press Agency in Berlin.” The Encyclopedia of Ukraine states that this Ukrainian Press Service functioned as “an information bureau established in 1931 in Berlin by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to inform the Western world, [and] particularly the German government and citizens, about ‘the Ukrainian question’ and the Ukrainian national movement.”
The Ukrainian Press Service provided information to other OUN-run outlets located in New York, Geneva, London, Paris, Rome, Prague, Madrid, Brussels, Vienna, and Kaunas. That is to say, the OUN promulgated pro-Nazi propaganda from Berlin into Ukrainian emigré communities around the world.
In 1938, Orest Chemerynsky, a director of the Ukrainian Press Service, authored a promotional pamphlet titled, “The Age of Nationalism,” in which he laid out the ideological mission of the service: “Ukrainian Nationalism uses the term ‘nationalism’ in the same way as German and Italian nationalisms use the terms ‘national socialism’ and ‘fascism.’ … Nationalisms — fascism, national socialism, Ukrainian Nationalism and so on — are the various national expressions of one spirit, which is marching against the same opponents (demoliberals [sic] on one side and communist bolshevism on the other) and taking the path of revolutionary struggle for the highest development of their respective nations.”
Riko Yary (b. Galicia 1898 - d. Vienna 1969), the first director of the Ukrainian Press Service, functioned during the 1930s as the OUN’s chief representative in Berlin and liaison to the German military and its intelligence agency, the Abwehr. As a top lieutenant to Konovalets, Yary built the OUN’s relationships with the Reichswehr, having been introduced to Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, and Ernst Röhm as early as 1921.
Alexander Motyl writes that Yary, the son of prominent German colonists in Galicia, led the intelligence sector of Konovalets’ Ukrainian Military Organization. Rossolinski-Liebe portrays him as “the financial officer of the OUN leadership-in-exile” who discussed a plan to take power in the OUN with Bandera, Shukhevych, Lebed, and Stetsko shortly after World War II began. Years later, a former member of the Ukrainian Military Organization testified to an investigator of the House Un-American Activities Committee, “[Riko Yary] is a German. In fact he does not speak Ukrainian very well. In any case he knows many of the officers of the German General Staff.”
During the Cold War, the CIA placed Mykola Lebed in charge of a front company, the Prolog Research Corporation, which grew into a major Ukrainian publishing house in the United States. I want to highlight three Banderite editors of the Ukrainian Press Service who later worked under Lebed for Prolog.
Bohdan Kordiuk (b. Lviv 1908 - d. Munich 1988), Bandera’s predecessor as the OUN leader in Galicia, moved to Berlin in January 1933, the month that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor. The following year, he spoke at an OUN conference in Geneva on the topic, “The International Politics of Ukrainian Nationalism.” Historian Marek Wojnar writes that Kordiuk’s presentation heralded “the emergence of a new, radical geopolitical vision among the younger generation [of] OUN activists” — that is, of an imperialist Greater Ukraine in a Berlin-Rome-Kyiv triangle that would not only eradicate communism, but break up the Soviet Union and Russia itself.
“Small nations,” Kordiuk declared, “will be used not only as a decentralization material against Moscow, but we will also build our messianism and imperialism on that basis.” In other words, Ukraine should “liberate” the so-called “subjugated nations” of Russia and turn them into vassals of Kyiv. Ukrainian Nationalists, he said, could be “co-creators of the new world order,” arguing that Ukrainians were in fact “the master race.” Unsurprisingly, Hitler did not agree.
Myroslav Prokop (b. Galicia 1913 - d. New York 2003) succeeded Lebed as president of the Prolog Research Corporation in 1973. Toward the end of World War II, the OUN-B leadership in Ukraine dispatched both Prokop and Lebed to western Europe to make contact with the western Allies. Today, the two men lie buried next to one another in New Jersey.
A third post-war employee of Prolog, Volodymyr Stakhiv (b. Galicia 1910-d. Munich 1971), wrote a letter to Hitler the day after Operation Barbarossa began in which he shared the OUN belief that “the Jewish-Bolshevik impact on Europe would soon be checked.” Years later, according to Rossolinski-Liebe, Stakhiv’s brother Yevhen alleged that Mykola Lebed had advised him “to forget and not to mention uncomfortable elements of the past,” in particular Bandera’s concerted effort in late 1941 to “repair relations with Nazi Germany.”
Given what we know about the OUN’s relationship with Nazi Germany before and during World War II, it should not come as a surprise that the organization received support from the Abwehr, or German military intelligence, to foment an OUN-led Ukrainian uprising in Poland when the Nazis invaded in 1939.
In his biography of Abwehr chief Wilhelm Canaris, Michael Mueller relates that Canaris had received orders from Berlin to coordinate with the OUN to incite a “revolt” in Galician Ukraine, its objective being “the destruction of everything Polish and the Jews.”
Rossolinski-Liebe writes that the OUN leadership questioned the timing of a “national revolution,” and chose instead to establish a militia that attacked and massacred Jews, Poles, and Ukrainian political opponents in advance of the Red Army’s arrival in Poland. With Poland conquered, the Abwehr cut off relations with the OUN, but it re-established communication with the Banderites by 1941, probably thanks to Riko Yary.
The Wikipedia entry for Alfred Rosenberg (b. Estonia 1893 — d. Nuremberg 1946) describes him as a primary architect of “key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, persecution of the Jews, Lebensraum, abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to ‘degenerate’ modern art.” As head of the NSDAP’s Office of Foreign Affairs and the war-time Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Rosenberg long considered himself Hitler’s expert on Ukraine, viewing it as an important pawn in the project to dismember the Soviet Union. As Christmas 1938 approached, Rosenberg confided bitterly to his diary, “The Ukrainian question is now stirring the minds of all the politicians, and they all think they understand the issue. … Some 12 to 15 years ago, I was the one who brought the problem politically into the German struggle and explained the historic opportunities.”
For years, Rosenberg deluded himself into thinking that his vision of a Reich puppet state in Ukraine would come to pass. The OUN also deluded itself about the viability of an alliance with Nazi Germany. It wasn’t until the summer of 1941, as the Germans marched into Kiev, that Rosenberg finally capitulated to Hitler’s view that Ukrainians “must be treated like the Russian people.”
Never a fan of the OUN, Rosenberg clashed with Canaris on this, writing in his diary before the war that Germany “cannot risk giving the impression that we are supporting an anti-Polish Ukrainian group nowadays (Jary [i.e. Riko Yary’s OUN]). Great fuss on the part of Admiral Canaris: his mission is endangered by our intervention.” Toward the end of the war, Rosenberg bemoaned in his diary, “An army of 1 million Ukrainians with an eye to new land in the East would perhaps have spared us the catastrophe of Stalingrad.”
The OUN in 1930s USA
From the start, the OUN pursued what the scholar Vic Satzewich has called “a dual strategy of political lobbying and guerrilla operations.” In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Konovalets and other OUN leaders traveled to the U.S. and Canada to establish front groups to serve as the foundation of an OUN network in North America. “The diaspora in North America was seen as an important piece of the strategy,” Satzewich writes, “insofar as it would help keep the Ukrainian cause in the public eye and help OUN leaders cultivate relations with the American government.”
These North American OUN front groups raised tens of thousands of dollars for the OUN leadership-in-exile under the guise of raising money for the “liberation” of Ukraine, while muscling their way to subsume as many other Ukrainian organizations as possible. Take, for example, the Ukrainian Youth League of North America. At its 1937 convention, the league’s outgoing president distributed a pamphlet titled, “Nationalism and Fascism,” to bolster his speech in which he warned that “Ukrainian nationalism as exemplified by the [OUN] was Fascistic and therefore a menace to the Ukrainian-American movement.”
Two years later, the editor of the youth league’s magazine made a similar stand to “expose malignant growth in Ukrainian American life” and its “anti-democratic elements.” She demanded the opportunity to present supporting evidence to the 1939 convention proving that certain “Ukrainian Nationalists had at times identified themselves with Fascism.” Among other things, she read from an OUN-affiliated publication that purportedly recommended that the Organization for the Rebirth of Ukraine, the original OUN front group in the United States, “pattern itself upon the Ku Klux Klan.”
This Organization for the Rebirth of Ukraine (ODWU) was organized in 1929-30 and first chaired by Gregory Herman, a U.S. Army Reserve officer from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. By 1940, a spooked Herman reported to the FBI that the OUN had used him “as a front” to do the Nazis’ bidding. He even claimed that Hitler personally controlled the OUN. Several years before contacting the FBI, Herman had been replaced by Alexander Granovsky, an entomologist who spent a decade trying to determine the favorite color of insects.
In 1938, at the largest Ukrainian-American rally to date, Granovsky made a Nazi salute, as did many in the audience. This caused quite a stir in the community. Yevhen Skotzko, one of the OUN leaders in the United States, later tried to tell the FBI that it was all a misunderstanding. As he recalled, “Granovsky was making a patriotic speech. During his fervor he made a movement resembling a Nazi salute,” and some confused people mirrored the gesture.
In late 1938, Skotzko paid a visit to the OUN’s Ukrainian Press Service in Berlin and returned to the United States on a mission to create a copy-cat Washington bureau. Luke Myshuha, the Nationalist editor-in-chief of Svoboda, the main Ukrainian-American newspaper, meanwhile spent several weeks in Europe, during which time he broadcast a speech from an OUN radio station in Nazi-occupied Vienna and took credit for the appearance of an article about the Ukrainian Nationalist cause in the Nazi Party’s newspaper. Myshuha wrote to his colleagues back home, “Everybody here is ‘convinced’ that I travel through Europe to prepare myself to be the head of the Leadership of the OUN!”
In 1935, the OUN leadership-in-exile relocated Yevhen Liakhovych, its representative in London, to the United States. That same year Liakhovych tried to meet with the British fascist Oswald Mosley but instead, sat down with his deputy and chief propagandist. “During this talk,” writes Rossolinski-Liebe, “Liakhovych explained the nature of Ukrainian antisemitism to his fascist counterpart: ‘Antisemitism is an irrational and unjustifiable hatred. … We [the OUN] are combating the Jews because they have always done us harm.” The following year, Liakhovych was the main speaker at the ODWU convention in Cleveland, Ohio. After World War II, when the OUN’s internecine conflict reached North American shores, the ODWU stuck with the Melnykites (OUN-M), but Liakhovych established its Banderite counterpart, helping to lay the groundwork for the “Bandera Lobby” in the United States.
‘Un-American Activities’
The United States Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938 under the chairmanship of Texas Democratic Congressman Martin Dies. HUAC is best known for its scurrilous post-war interrogations, or communist witch hunts. Before HUAC, there had been the Congressional Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Other Propaganda Activities. Its Democratic co-chairman, Congressman Samuel Dickstein of New York, derided HUAC as a “red baiting excursion” even before the committee held its first hearing. That being said, the first witness called before HUAC was John Metcalfe, its own anti-Nazi investigator.
Dickstein could already read the writing on the wall. Just days after Metcalfe’s testimony, Chairman Dies changed the focus of HUAC’s inquiry from Nazism to Communism, influenced by the purported findings of its pro-Nazi investigator, Edward Sullivan, whose recent trip to Hollywood convinced him that America’s film capital had become a hotbed of communism. Historians have credited Sullivan with sparking HUAC’s years-long obsession with outing Communists in Hollywood.
By way of background, Sullivan had saluted Adolf Hitler and denounced “the dirty, lousy, stinking Jews” at a 1934 New York City mass meeting of the Friends of New Germany, the predecessor of the German American Bund. Weeks after that appearance, Sulllivan spoke at a banquet of the Ukrainian Youth League of North America, and the following year he established the Ukrainian American Education Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In fact, even without Ukrainian lineage, Sullivan became so entwined with the American OUN network, that he became the de facto leader of its substantial branch in Pittsburgh. Therefore it should come as no surprise that HUAC’s interest in the OUN was said to have “stopped as soon as it started.”
In late September 1939, almost a month after the Nazis invaded Poland, Emil Revyuk gave stunning testimony to HUAC about the OUN’s pro-Nazi hijacking of the Ukrainian-American community. Revyuk, a socialist, then served as president of the United Ukrainian Organizations of America, an umbrella organization that had otherwise been taken over by the Nationalists and was used to raise money almost exclusively for the OUN leadership in Europe. When OUN leaders visited the United States, Revyuk stated, they received payment from his organization. Revyuk provided HUAC with reams of damning evidence, including his own correspondence with Nationalist leaders. The conservative chairman Martin Dies (D-TX) interrupted the questioning of Revyuk to ask,
What is the necessity of continuing to read quotations from these [Ukrainian] papers? The quotations thus far establish very clearly that this [OUN] is a Fascist organization in sympathy with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. They are linked with it. I am just wondering what more is needed to show that? It is in their own language. They take pride in announcing the fact they are Nazis. … I see no necessity to go any further into this. From the standpoint of what is the nature of the organization, it is very clearly a Fascist organization with a direct tie-up with international officers in Germany. … The Chair believes also that we have about come to the time when the power of this committee ought to be tested … I think the time has come to make a test case. … Before we adjourn, the Chair will announce that the witness for tomorrow will be William Z. Foster, chairman of the Communist Party.
Despite Revyuk’s alarming testimony, Chairman Dies ignored it, choosing instead to promote his fantastical beliefs that Communists had infiltrated circles of influence in the United States. In a stunning non-sequitur, Dies reacted to Revyuk by calling on the federal government “to proceed against Communists on as broad a scale as possible.” For its part, the Washington Evening Star, which obviously found Revyuk’s testimony newsworthy, reacted to his revelations this way:
An international organization with headquarters in Berlin and Vienna has worked for years to organize 800,000 Ukrainian-born Americans along Nazi lines, and has solicited funds from them to establish a ‘fuehrership’ in the Ukraine, the House Un-American Activities Committee was told today by Emil Revyuk ... The money, he explained, was sent to OUN in Berlin (an organization for Ukrainian Nationalists) for distribution by its Executive Committee, the Provid. ... Mr. Revyuk said that several members of the Ukrainian Nationalist inner circle in Germany came to the United States last year to attend the meetings of Ukrainian Nationalists in Jersey City. At these meetings the Nazi salute was given, he said. ... The witness had testified all policies of ODWU were dictated by the inner circle of the Ukrainian Nationalists in Germany.
Almost twenty years after Revyuk’s provocative testimony, Stepan Bandera’s deputy Yaroslav Stetsko made his first trip to the United States and delivered forty pages of oral testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee. At its conclusion, a former aide to U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who championed the Red Scare of the 1950s, declared, “Mr. Stetsko, you are an outstanding Ukrainian nationalist leader.”
As a postscript, I will add that John Metcalfe, HUAC’s anti-Nazi investigator, interviewed a number of prominent Ukrainian Americans, including former members of both the Ukrainian Military Organization and the ODWU.
One of them, Maxim Boychuk, said, “The main point of that organization [the OUN] was to select the people to collect the money, to rob our people, the Ukrainian people.” Boychuk estimated that during the 1930s, the American branch of the OUN sent $100,000 (worth roughly $2 million today) to the OUN leadership-in-exile, and “never once has there been an accounting of even one cent.” This resonates true even today. One could argue that the main function of the contemporary OUN-B network outside of Ukraine is to “collect the money.”
Conflict in the OUN
Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, the young OUN leaders imprisoned in Poland, including Bandera and Lebed, escaped and made plans to seize control of the organization. In the interim, Lebed participated in a Gestapo training school in southern Poland, emerging as chief of the Banderites’ ruthless Security Service. By 1941, the OUN was irrevocably split between the Melnykites (OUN-M) and Banderites (OUN-B), with the latter being the more popular faction in Galicia. That spring, the Banderites held a congress in Krakow and passed resolutions to 1) “combat Jews as a pillar of the Moscow-Bolshevik regime”; 2) adopt the red and black flag (symbolizing the Nazi concept of blood and soil), and 3) mandate a fascist salute to accompany the call and response, “Slava Ukraini — Heroyam Slava.”
During World War II, as part of its campaign against the Melnykites, the Banderites apparently assassinated several OUN-M leaders who had developed the OUN network in North America. This partially explains why the factional conflict continued in the Ukrainian diaspora during the Cold War. When the CIA submitted its questionnaire to Lebed in 1952, the section pertaining to his World War II activities asked him to comment on OUN-B “terrorism” against “Melnyk supporters,” which he likely orchestrated. Lebed appears to have satisfied the agency, claiming instead that he led efforts at reconciliation between the warring factions.
1941-42
In the summer of 1941, the Banderites marched east with the Nazis, helping to inaugurate the “Holocaust by Bullets.” When they reached Soviet territory, the Banderites, writes historian Karel C. Berkhoff, experienced an unforeseen shock. Soviet Ukrainians, it turned out, “did not collectively blame ‘the Russians’ for anything,” including the 1932-33 famine, later dubbed the “Holodomor” by Ukrainian nationalists.
Furthermore, Soviet Ukrainians did not consider their ethnicity, or the goal of an independent Ukraine, to be that important, “or even particularly relevant.” According to Berkhoff, the Banderites “encountered a conviction [among Soviet Ukrainians] that they [the nationalists from western Ukraine] were Germans or, sometimes, Poles.” In one town, Berkhoff relates that a Banderite task force had trouble convincing residents that they, too, were Ukrainian. And years after the war, a task force member recalled conversations in which he explained to Soviet Ukrainians that he was not German, nor Polish, but of a shared ancestral lineage.
“We are not Germans! We are your brothers, Ukrainians from the Western Lands — from Galicia,” I added to be on the safe side. . . .
Although it was dark, the people, curious about the “Germans,” slowly gathered around us, as if at a meeting…
“So there haven’t been any Germans here?” I ask again.
“No, only you.”
“Yes, but we are not Germans! We are just like you. Can’t you tell by our language?”
“Yeah, it looks like the Germans can talk like us!” one of them answered.
In western Ukraine, the Banderites attempted to establish a pro-Nazi administration, which the Germans quickly repressed, never having approved of the initiative. On June 30, 1941 in Lviv, the OUN-B first announced the “restoration of Ukrainian statehood” and its short-lived government. Its designated Prime Minister, Yaroslav Stetsko, declared, “The newly formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Muscovite occupation.”
Others who held positions in this short-lived “government” included Mykola Lebed as Minister of State Security, Volodymyr Stakhiv as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Roman Shukhevych as Deputy Minister of Defense. In a demonstration of its fascism, an OUN-B militia spearheaded a massive pogrom in Lviv the very next day. As they accompanied the invading Nazis in the towns and cities of western Ukraine, the Banderites repeatedly declared statehood while exterminating Jews. According to historian John-Paul Himka, the region suffered through roughly 150 pogroms that horrible summer.
Within days of the “declaration of statehood,” Bandera and Stetsko were placed under house arrest in Berlin. Lebed therefore became the acting leader of the OUN-B. Ten years later, he recalled to his CIA handlers, “At the suggestion of Col. Yaryi, I had a conversation with representatives of the Wehrmacht.” The Germans offered to grant the Banderites “administrative power” in exchange for withdrawing their declaration of independence. According to Lebed, “When I rejected that type of proposition, the discussion ended with a formal cessation of cooperation. One of the German representatives declared that we part as friends and enter a state of belligerence. He said he did not know how or when we would meet again, but he wished us well.”
It is a popular myth that the Nazis immediately and harshly cracked down on the Banderites. In fact, it wasn’t until months later, after the assassination of two important Melnykite leaders, including one of the main organizers of the OUN network in North America, that the Germans began to shoot OUN-B members, and imprison its leaders, including Bandera and Stetsko, in concentration camps as privileged political prisoners. They were released in 1944, when the Nazis and OUN began to secretly collaborate once again.
Ukrainian Police
After realizing that the Germans would never support their independence project, the Banderites joined Ukrainian police formations, which played a critical role in the perpetration of the Holocaust. Still, Bandera and Stetsko tried to salvage their organization’s relationship with Germany, but to no avail.
In the fall of 1941, Lebed organized an OUN-B conference in western Ukraine at which the Banderites decided not to resist the Germans. Rossolinski-Liebe writes, “In March 1942, the OUN-B local leaders issued orders to their members to join the police en masse. They tried to have at least one OUN-B member in every police unit, in order to control the police force.” Himka quotes a former Ukrainian policeman: “To work in the German police you have to be a non-human, worse than any animal.”
Ukrainian Insurgent Army
In 1943, the Banderites launched the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), calling on its members to defect from the police battalions, which they did, and to bring their weapons and training (in committing atrocities) with them. These former police constituted the UPA’s core, which set out to ethnically cleanse the Poles living in western Ukraine.
The UPA massacred tens of thousands, often using farm tools as weapons in order to save scarce ammunition. By that point, most Jews in the region had been liquidated, but the rabid UPA hunted survivors in the forests. So ruthless was the UPA that some in hiding fled to the Germans for protection! A UPA song lyric bragged, “We slaughtered the Jews, we’ll slaughter the Poles, old and young, every one; we’ll slaughter the Poles, we’ll build Ukraine.”
Many people have accepted the lie that the UPA was in fact an anti-Nazi resistance movement. As Himka explains, “Unlike the Soviet partisans, the nationalists had no interest in sabotage operations that would have undermined the German war effort against the Soviets, such as derailing supply trains destined for the Eastern front.”
Expanding on Himka’s analysis, Rossolinski-Liebe writes, “UPA attacks on Germans were mainly to obtain their weapons and equipment, or to prevent them from taking food from the population.” Based on a study of more than three hundred biographies of OUN-B and UPA leaders, the scholar Ivan Katchanovski has determined that at least 74% of the top-ranked UPA leaders collaborated with Nazi Germany and/or other Axis countries during World War II.
In 1944, the Banderites began negotiations with the Germans to release imprisoned OUN leaders and to utilize the UPA as a stay-behind force to slow the Soviet advance. That December, according to Rossolinksi-Liebe, “the Abwehr took Bandera and Stetsko to Cracow, where they helped Abwehrkommando 202 prepare a Ukrainian unit for parachuting into the hilly surroundings of Lviv. The Germans gave the unit a million roubles, stolen in Russia, which its couriers transferred to Shukhevych, the Supreme Commander of UPA.”
After the war, Yuri Lopatinsky, a courier parachuted by the Nazis into western Ukraine, returned to Germany as a liaison of the UPA to Western intelligence. After the CIA failed to exploit the UPA as a stay-behind army, Lopatinsky eventually became a CIA spotter for “hot war agents” — that is, a scout for Ukrainians willing to parachute into Soviet territory after a theoretical nuclear strike, in advance of U.S. special forces. He too is buried in New Jersey, alongside Lebed.
Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council
By 1942, a year after the FBI opened its investigation into pro-Nazi Ukrainians living in the United States, the Banderites began to rehabilitate their image to appeal to Western governments for support, realizing that the defeat of Nazi Germany loomed ahead. According to Himka, an OUN-B military conference held that October in Lviv decided, “It is necessary to be careful with [the Jews] inasmuch as they have great influence in England and America.” Himka explains, “The winter of 1943-44 was a period when OUN and UPA were officially adopting a policy of national tolerance, hoping to become acceptable partners for the Western Allies. At the same time, this was the most intense period of their murder of Jews.”
Two years later, according to Rossolinski-Liebe, the OUN established the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR) “for the sake of ‘a democratic image’ and eventual cooperation with the United States and Great Britain.” Confirming this revisionist contrivance, Himka quotes a high-ranking Banderite in Volhynia, who said of this underground and allegedly democratic OUN-UPA government: “No such organization exists as the UHVR exists. … UHVR exists only on paper, in OUN’s printed propaganda.”
Notwithstanding its existence solely on paper, the plan served its purpose. The Banderites dispatched Lebed to western Europe as emissary of the so-called “Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council,” thereby setting him on a collision course with Stepan Bandera, who rejected its mostly superficial reforms and refused to endorse it.
In 1946, Mykola Lebed wrote a book about the UPA that Rossolinski-Liebe describes as “perhaps the first comprehensive post-war publication that not only denied the OUN and UPA’s atrocities, but also argued that the UPA helped ethnic minorities in Ukraine, particularly Jews.” The CIA deemed the book credible, making easier its decision to back Lebed over Bandera. Toward the end of the Cold War, the agency even smuggled the book into Soviet Ukraine to help “keep alive the Ukrainian nationalist spirit.”
By 1952, the CIA had valorized Lebed’s efforts to “consolidate” the Ukrainian diaspora as one of its chief political warfare objectives vis a vis the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The agency remained optimistic about the UPA’s abilities, and U.S. plans to “work toward a rapprochement between [Lebed and Bandera] … so that, under our control, the Ukrainian emigration [will] take a united stand against the U.S.S.R. which would be more consistent with American Foreign Policy.”
Two years later, a less optimistic CIA acknowledged that it had failed to determine “how extensive the Ukrainian Resistance Movement was at any time during the years of 1948–1953.” In the meantime, the Banderites established a dizzying array of so-called “facade structures” around the world that came to be known as the “Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front.”
During the Cold War, the OUN-B campaigned against Lebed’s group as the CIA’s “neo-Marxist” (liberal nationalist) puppets, and ultimately hijacked the organized Ukrainian diaspora, making influential friends along the way among far-right Cold Warriors in the West who agitated for World War III. Rossolinski-Liebe writes, “The OUN leaders hoped that, after the defeat of Germany, the Western Allies would attack the Soviet Union, enabling the OUN to establish an independent state.”
As a publication edited by the Banderites stated in 1950, “Do we … really want to provoke another world war? Of course not. What we want is to give expression to considerations of the world situation and politics to-day, viz. that a third world war will come, because it is inevitable.”
In his monumental book, Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on The Cold War, Our Domestic and Foreign Policy, Christopher Simpson contemplates the ramifications of the CIA’s sponsorship of the OUN. “In the end,” he writes,
U.S. aid was given to the [UPA] rebels only insofar as it served short-term American intelligence-gathering objectives, no more. What this meant in strategic terms was that the [Ukrainians] … were used as martyrs — some of whom died bravely; some pathetically — and grist for the propaganda mills of both East and West. … In hindsight, it is clear that the Ukrainian guerrilla option became the prototype for hundreds of CIA operations worldwide that have attempted to exploit indigenous discontent in order to make political gains for the United States.
Sound familiar? It is apparent that the “Ukrainian guerrilla option” was but another of the CIA’s maniacal blunders. We have only to consider the ongoing current proxy war in Ukraine to pronounce the collaboration of the West with the OUN as an unmitigated disaster, not just for the people in its path, but for the entire world.
Sorry to hear about the setbacks Moss, but hope you’re OK in yourself. Personally I’m very supportive of this sort of article, as I think it’s important in having a clearer picture of historical behaviour and decisions, but also properly understanding the present state of affairs.