Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909, in the Ukrainian village of Stari Uhryniv, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Andriy, was a Greek Catholic priest, and his mother, Myroslava, was the daughter of a priest. When Bandera was five, the First World War reached the valley where the family lived.
Trenches zigzagged through the orchards, soldiers demanded grain, and schoolrooms closed. The 1918 armistice ended the First World War but also brought the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Peace did not follow in the Galicia region, where many ethnicities fought for their own states.
Ukrainians founded the Ukrainian People's Republic, but the Poles, whose ancient state was restored after the war, wanted the same territory. Polish troops fought Ukrainian volunteers for control of Lviv, and by 1919 the new Polish Republic had absorbed eastern Galicia. Overnight, the Bandera family became Polish subjects.
Polish policemen arrived, the Ukrainian language was suppressed, and the white and red flag replaced the blue and yellow colors of the short-lived independent Ukraine that Bandera had begun to love. At 15, he joined Plast, a Ukrainian scouting movement that blended camping trips with clandestine lectures on history and self-discipline.
Soon afterward, he swore the secret oath of the Ukrainian Military Organization, an underground league whose members believed petitions would never free their homeland. They believed only actions supported with weapons could redraw borders and create an independent Ukraine.
In 1927, Bandera graduated from high school in the town of Stryi and entered the agronomy faculty of Lviv Polytechnic University. Lecture halls could not hold him. After dark, he slipped out to attic rooms where older conspirators taught him how to forge documents, mix invisible ink, and memorize passwords.
At first, he distributed leaflets urging students to boycott official ceremonies organized by Polish authorities. Soon he was participating in far more sinister activities, and he never finished his studies because of his involvement in the nationalist movement.
February 1929 saw the birth of a larger, more disciplined network, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN. At only 20, Bandera entered as a foot soldier but rose through the ranks with startling speed. He handled propaganda for the movement, traveled by night train under false names, spoke in cramped village halls, and built courier lines that carried letters from the Carpathians to the Baltic coast.
His followers painted Polish government buildings with tar, sabotaged telephone poles, and attacked local politicians. When two militants murdered Polish deputy Tadeusz Hołówko in 1931, Bandera allegedly ordered church bells rung across Lviv to cast the killers as martyrs as they were sentenced to death as murderers and terrorists.
Violence in interwar Poland intensified. Ukrainian nationalists robbed post office safes to fund weapons, detonated bombs at official exhibitions, and staged boycotts against state shops. The climax came on June 15, 1934, when an OUN gunman shot Poland's interior minister Bronisław Pieracki.
Bandera was arrested in Lviv and tried for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Pieracki and for being an OUN leader. He was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, from the west and the Soviet Union attacked on September 17 from the east, Poland collapsed in weeks. By one account, Bandera escaped from prison after it was abandoned by the guards. By another, he was released. Either way, he moved first to Lviv, then to Kraków after realizing the Soviets would occupy Lviv.
Kraków was the capital of Germany's occupational General Government, where officers of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, saw potential in any group prepared to fight the Soviet Union. Bandera, using the code name Consul 2, cooperated with the Abwehr. His goal was to run diversion activities against the Soviet Union after Germany's attack.
In 1940, the OUN split. Another leader, Andriy Melnyk, led a cautious wing that sought German goodwill through diplomacy. Younger militants rallied to Bandera, forming what became the OUN-B, named after him. Both factions preached radical nationalism and shared anti-Semitic slogans, but Bandera demanded swift revolution.
During his cooperation with Nazi Germany, he drafted plans for mobile groups of 5 to 15 volunteers who would follow German troops, raise Ukrainian flags, and seize local administrations the moment Soviet rule collapsed. To finance the effort, he accepted Nazi money and charmed German officials with promises of sabotage behind Red Army lines.
During his time in Kraków, Bandera married Yaroslava Oparivska. She was also a member of the OUN, and they had three children.
Between his release from a Polish jail in 1939 and Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Bandera's faction cooperated closely with German military intelligence. Before the start of the war in August 1939, the Abwehr created a 120-man sabotage unit codenamed Bergbauernhilfe. Its members were recruited from Bandera's followers and trained for operations against Poland.
The goal of this unit was to erode Polish defenses by conducting a terror campaign directed at Polish farmers and Jews. After Bandera resettled in German-occupied Kraków, his relationship with the Nazis deepened. In spring 1941, he held meetings with the heads of Germany's intelligence regarding the formation of the Nachtigall and Roland battalions.
During this time, the OUN received 2.5 million Reichsmarks for subversive activities inside the Soviet Union. Bandera assured the Germans that these units, together with small mobile groups already infiltrating Soviet territory, would secure German lines of advance as soon as the frontier was crossed. This arrangement positioned his movement as an auxiliary partner in Hitler's eastern campaign even before Operation Barbarossa began.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. As Panzer tanks rolled east, Bandera's mobile groups crossed the front line. On June 30, in freshly captured Lviv, members of Bandera's movement proclaimed a sovereign Ukrainian state. Militias wearing matching armbands began arresting Jews and suspected Soviet collaborators, and these activities ended in violent pogroms.
There is no evidence that Bandera, still in Kraków, actively supported or participated in the Lviv pogroms or acts of violence against Jewish and Polish civilians. But he was well informed about the violence and was unable or unwilling to instruct Ukrainian nationalist military units to protect minorities.
His activities regarding Ukrainian independence were short-lived. German authorities requested that the declaration of independence be withdrawn, but Bandera refused. A few days later, he was arrested, held in Berlin, and later sent to the special prisoners block of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, a facility used for high-profile political prisoners and high-risk escapees.
During his imprisonment, Bandera's wife Yaroslava was able to visit and keep him in touch with his followers. His relationship with the Germans was not ideal. Two of his brothers, Oleksandr and Vasyl, were sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
Meanwhile, units loyal to the OUN-B and Bandera had formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, in the forests of Volhynia. They fought both Nazis and Soviets while also massacring Polish and Jewish villagers in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Bandera, thanks to a visit from his wife, managed to get into contact with other OUN-B leaders, and some believe he was one of the orchestrators of the terror that took place in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Between 1941 and 1944, the militant wing of the OUN-B translated its slogan, "Ukraine for Ukrainians," into systematic bloodshed.
OUN-trained militias helped launch the Lviv pogroms of June and July 1941, in which several thousand Jews were beaten and shot. Two years later, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, formed and led mostly by members of the movement, turned on the region's Polish and Jewish minority, coordinating nighttime attacks on farms and church villages across Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
The attacks often took place in such a way that a UPA unit entered a village pretending to be Soviet partisans. The men split up, entered houses, and demanded food from the residents. Meanwhile, the village was surrounded and all Poles passing through were detained.
In the village of Parosla, UPA partisans ordered all the inhabitants to lie down and tied them up under the pretext that they were about to carry out an assault on a nearby German rail transport. If the village inhabitants were found tied up, that would serve as proof for the Germans that the Poles did not cooperate with the UPA in the attack.
Not all the inhabitants of Parosla believed them, since some could speak Ukrainian. But being unarmed, they had no choice but to do as they were told. Almost all the Poles in the village were murdered with knives and axes, including old men, women, and children, among them a six-month-old baby who was stuck to a table with a knife.
Only 12 Poles survived, including a 12-year-old boy named Witold Kojadziński, who suffered a cracked skull from an ax blow. This was also part of Bandera's struggle for Ukrainian independence. In these attacks against the civilian population, it is estimated that 60,000 to 120,000 civilians were murdered.
As the Red Army pushed west in 1944, the Nazis sought the help of any force that might slow the Soviet advance. In September 1944, Bandera walked out of Sachsenhausen concentration camp after promising to direct anti-communist operations. He met other released OUN leaders and drafted plans to fight the Soviet Union.
One example was an idea to parachute Ukrainian units to the rear of the advancing Soviet forces and create chaos. Yet collapsing front lines made most schemes irrelevant.
After the war, Bandera and his family moved several times around Germany, at that time occupied by the Western Allies. Soviet and Polish politicians and diplomats demanded his extradition, calling him a terrorist responsible for thousands of deaths. American counterintelligence officers disagreed. They considered him extremely dangerous but also too valuable to hand over to the Soviets, since he knew the Ukrainian underground movement and was a skilled anti-communist fighter.
Under a shadow arrangement called Operation Aerodynamic, Washington quietly blocked Polish and Soviet requests. As a result, Bandera moved a lot in postwar Germany and eventually settled in Munich, once a stronghold of the Nazis.
Bandera also worked for Ukrainian independence after the end of the Second World War, and the Kremlin wanted his voice silenced. Over the years, Soviet agents tried to find and kidnap him into the Soviet Union. When Soviet patience finally ran out, the KGB sent the young Ukrainian Bohdan Stashynsky to execute Bandera.
The KGB trained Stashynsky to use a spray gun that fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide capsule. The gas was designed to induce cardiac arrest, making the victim's death look like a heart attack. Stashynsky had used the weapon to kill another Ukrainian politician, Lev Rebet, in 1957.
On October 15, 1959, he used an improved version of the same gas gun to assassinate Stepan Bandera in Munich. This time the KGB was successful, and the 50-year-old Bandera was killed on the spot. On October 20, 1959, Bandera was buried in Munich, and two years later his wife and three children moved to Toronto, Canada.
Bandera is still remembered by many as a Ukrainian national hero. He is mainly seen by this group for his struggle for Ukrainian independence, whether against Poland or the Soviet Union. That struggle, however, was tied to the suffering of thousands of innocent people and meant an alliance with the monstrous regime of Nazi Germany.