Ukraine’s Nazi History

Illustrative Image

Written by Eric Zuesse

The world’s only national Constitution that includes genetic (or ‘racial’) purity as a responsibility of the Government to protect and maintain is Ukraine’s Constitution:

Article 16

To ensure ecological safety and to maintain the ecological balance on the territory of Ukraine, to overcome the consequences of the Chornobyl catastrophe – a catastrophe of global scale, and to preserve the gene pool of the Ukrainian people, is the duty of the State.

(Notice that they bury in a sub-clause the key assertion there, that “to preserve the gene pool of the Ukrainian people, is the duty of the State.” Hitler could have said the same thing; also, Israel’s constitution could have said it if Israel had had one, which — largely for that very reason — doesn’t exist. Mentioning “the Chernobyl catastrophe” is irrelevant in that context, but serves fools as being a reminder to them of that spectacular Soviet blunder and thus helps to conjure up in their unintelligent minds contempt against Russians — such as these nazi propagandists constantly seek to convey.)

This racist base of today’s Ukrainian nation has a deep history, which will here be documented by highlights from (excerpts of), and links to, two of the best (and I have carefully checked them out for accuracy) English-language online sources that have poured forth on the internet after U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2014 U.S. coup grabbed control over Ukraine’s Government and turned it 100% racist-fascist anti-Russian so that the U.S. will become enabled ultimately to position its nuclear missiles there, 300 miles away from Moscow):

1. from the phenomenally careful investigative historian, Thierry Meyssan, at his Voltairenet, on 15 November 2022, an article that is so sensationally good that my cuts to it here are negligible, and I consider the article to be an instant classic: “Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists?”To see the documentation, click onto the given excerpted article’s linked headline here (so, I don’t provide here the links that are within this article):

Like most Western political analysts and commentators, I was unaware of the existence of Ukrainian neo-Nazis until 2014. … I was living in Syria at the time and thought they [the nazis in Ukraine] were violent groupings that had burst onto the public scene to assist pro-European elements. However, since the Russian military intervention, I have gradually discovered a lot of documents and information on this political movement which, in 2021, represented one third of the Ukrainian armed forces. This article presents a synthesis of it.

At the very beginning of this story, that is to say before the First World War, Ukraine was a large plain which had always been tossed between German and Russian influences. At the time, it was not an independent state, but a province of the tsarist empire. It was populated by Germans, Bulgarians, Greeks, Poles, Rumanians, Russians, Czechs, Tatars and a very large Jewish minority supposedly descended from the ancient Khazar people.

A young poet, Dmytro Dontsov, was fascinated by the avant-garde artistic movements, believing that they would help his country to escape from its social backwardness. Since the Tsarist Empire had been immobile since the death of Catherine the Great, while the German Empire was the scientific center of the West, Dontsov chose Berlin over Moscow.

When the Great War broke out, he became an agent of the German secret service. He emigrated to Switzerland, where he published, on behalf of his masters, the Bulletin of the Nationalities of Russia in several languages, calling for the uprising of the ethnic minorities of the Tsarist Empire in order to bring about its defeat. This model was chosen by the Western secret services to organize the “Forum of Free Peoples of Russia” this summer in Prague [1].

In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution turned the tables. Dontsov’s friends supported the Russian revolution, but he remained pro-German. In the anarchy that followed, Ukraine was divided de facto by three different regimes: the nationalists of Symon Petliura (who imposed themselves in the area held today by the Zelensky administration), the anarchists of Nestor Makhno (who organized themselves in Novorosssia, the land that had been developed by Prince Potemkin and that had never known serfdom), and the Bolsheviks (especially in the Donbass). The war cry of Petliura’s followers was “Death to the Jews and Bolsheviks”. They perpetrated numerous murderous pogroms.

Dmytro Dontsov returned to Ukraine before the German defeat and became the protégé of Symon Petliura. …

To strengthen his side, Petliura secretly negotiated with the founder of the Jewish battalions in the British army (the “Jewish Legion”) and now administrator of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), Vladimir Jabotinsky. In September 1921, the two men agreed to unite against the Bolsheviks in exchange for Petliura’s commitment to forbid his troops to continue their pogroms. The Jewish Legion was to become the “Jewish Gendarmerie. However, despite his efforts, Petliura did not succeed in pacifying his troops, especially as his close collaborator Dontsov was still encouraging the massacre of Jews. …

Simon Petliura took over northern Ukraine. Protector of the “integral nationalists”, he sacrificed Galicia and Volhynia to fight the Russians.

Petliura fled to Poland and then to France, where he was murdered by a Jewish anarchist from Bessarabia (now Transnistria). During the trial, the latter assumed his crime and pleaded to have avenged the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by the troops of Petliura and Dontsov. The trial had a great impact. The court acquitted the murderer. The League against Pogroms, later Licra (International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism), was founded on this occasion.
Not only were the nationalists defeated, but the anarchists as well. Everywhere the Bolsheviks triumphed and chose, not without debate, to join the Soviet Union.

Dmytro Dontsov published literary magazines that fascinated the youth. He continued to promote a Central Europe dominated by Germany and became closer to Nazism as it rose. He soon referred to his doctrine as Ukrainian “integral nationalism “. In doing so, he referred to the French poet, Charles Maurras. Indeed, the logic of both men was initially identical: they sought in their own culture the means to affirm a modern nationalism. However, Maurras was a Germanophobe, while Dontsov was a Germanophile. The expression “integral nationalism” is still claimed today by Dontov’s followers, who, after the fall of the Third Reich, are careful to refute the term “Nazism” with which the Russians describe it, not without reason.

According to him, “Ukrainian nationalism” is characterized by:
“the affirmation of the will to live, power, expansion” (it promotes “The right of strong races to organize peoples and nations to strengthen the existing culture and civilization”)
“the desire to fight and the awareness of its extremity” (he praises the “creative violence of the initiative minority”).

Its qualities are:
“fanaticism” ;
” immorality”.

Finally, turning his back on his past, Dontsov became an unconditional admirer of the Führer, Adolf Hitler. His followers had founded, in 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) around Colonel Yevhen Konovalets. Konovalets called Dontsov “the spiritual dictator of the youth of Galicia”. However, a quarrel arose between Dontsov and another intellectual about his extremism that led to war against all, when Konovalets was suddenly murdered. The OUN (financed by the German secret service) then split in two. The “integral nationalists” reserved for themselves the OUN-B, named after Dontsov’s favorite disciple, Stepan Bandera.

In 1932-33, the Bolshevik political commissars, who were mostly Jewish, levied a tax on crops, as in other regions of the Soviet Union. Combined with significant and unpredictable climatic hazards, this policy caused a huge famine in several regions of the USSR, including the Ukraine. It is known as “Holodomor”. Contrary to what the nationalist historian Lev Dobrianski says, it was not a plan for the extermination of Ukrainians by the Russians, since other Soviet regions suffered, but an inadequate management of public resources in times of climate change. Lev Dobrianski’s daughter, Paula Dobrianski, became one of President George W. Bush’s aides. She led a merciless struggle to have historians who did not adhere to her father’s propaganda excluded from Western universities [3].

In 1934, Bandera organized, as a member of the Nazi secret service and head of the OUN-B, the assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior, Bronisław Pieracki.

From 1939, members of the OUN-B, forming a military organization, the UPA, were trained in Germany by the German army, and then still in Germany, but by their Japanese allies. …

From the beginning of the Second World War, under the guidance of Dmytro Dontsov, the OUN-B fought alongside the Nazi armies against the Jews and the Soviets.

The collaboration between the Ukrainian “integral nationalists” and the Nazis continued with constant massacres of the majority of the Ukrainian population, accused of being Jews or Communists, until the “liberation” of Ukraine by the Third Reich in the summer of 1941 to the cry of “Slava Ukraїni!” (Glory to Ukraine), the war cry used today by the Zelensky administration and the US Democrats. At that time, the “integral nationalists” proclaimed “independence” from the Soviet Union in the presence of Nazi representatives and Greek Orthodox clergy, not in Kiev, but in Lviv, on the model of the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia and the Ustasha in Croatia. They formed a government under the leadership of Providnyk (guide) Stepan Bandera, whose friend Yaroslav Stetsko was Prime Minister. Their support in Ukraine is estimated at 1.5 million people. That is, the “integral nationalists” have always been in the minority. [This minority control Ukraine’s government because the U.S. government backs them — once Germany’s Nazis were no longer leading Ukraine’s nazis, America’s nazis (as-of 25 July 1945) took over that role, and they hold it today.]

Celebration of independent Ukraine with Nazi dignitaries. Behind the speakers, the three portraits displayed are those of Stepan Bandera, Adolf Hitler and Yevhen Konovalets.

The Nazis were divided between the Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine, Erich Koch, for whom the Ukrainians were subhuman, and the Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, for whom the “integral nationalists” were true allies. Finally, on July 5, 1941, Bandera was deported to Berlin and placed under Ehrenhaft (honorable captivity), i.e., under house arrest as a high-ranking official. However, after the members of OUN-B murdered the leaders of the rival faction, OUN-M, the Nazis sanctioned Stepan Bandera and his organization on September 13, 1941. 48 of their leaders were deported to a prison camp in Auschwitz (which was not yet an extermination camp, but only a prison). The OUN-B was reorganized under German command. At that time all Ukrainian nationalists took the following oath: “Faithful son of my Fatherland, I voluntarily join the ranks of the Ukrainian Liberation Army, and with joy I swear that I will faithfully fight Bolshevism for the honor of the people. This fight we are waging together with Germany and its allies against a common enemy. With loyalty and unconditional submission I believe in Adolf Hitler as the leader and supreme commander of the Liberation Army. At any time I am prepared to give my life for the truth.”

The oath of loyalty to Führer Adolf Hitler by members of the OUN.

The Nazis announced that many bodies had been discovered in the prisons, victims of “Bolshevik Jews. So the “integral nationalists” celebrated their “independence” by murdering more than 30,000 Jews and actively participating in the roundup of Jews from Kiev to Babi Yar, where 33,771 of them were shot in two days, on September 29 and 30, 1941, by the Einsatzgruppen of SS Reinhard Heydrich.

In this tumult, Dmytro Dontsov disappeared. In reality, he had gone to Prague and placed himself at the service of the architect of the Final Solution, Reinhard Heydrich, who had just been appointed vice-governor of Bohemia-Moravia. Heydrich organized the Wannsee Conference, which planned the “Final Solution of the Jewish and Gypsy Questions” [4]. He then created the Reinard Heydrich Institute in Prague to coordinate the systematic extermination of all these populations in Europe. The Ukrainian Dontsov, who now lived in Prague in great luxury, immediately became its administrator. He was one of the main architects of the largest massacre in history. Heydrich was assassinated in June 1942, but Dontsov retained his functions and privileges.

Reinhard Heydrich speaking at Prague Castle. He was in charge of managing Bohemia-Moravia. However, his real function was to coordinate the “final solution” of Jewish and Gypsy questions. Dmytro Dontsov joined his team in 1942 and oversaw massacres across Europe until the fall of the Reich. Prague Castle was the scene of the meeting of the European Political Community against Russia last October.

Stepan Bandera and his deputy Yaroslav Stetsko were placed under house arrest at the headquarters of the General Inspectorate of Concentration Camps in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen (30 km from Berlin). They wrote letters to their supporters and to the Reich leadership in complete freedom and were not deprived of anything. In September 1944, as the Reich army retreated and Bandera’s followers began to rebel against it, the two leaders were released by the Nazis and reinstated in their previous positions. Bandera and Stetsko resumed the armed struggle, among the Nazis, against the Jews and the Bolsheviks.

Centuria Integral Nationalist Order Ceremony. According to George Washington University, by 2021 it had already penetrated the main NATO armies.

But it was already too late. The Reich collapsed. The Anglo-Saxons got Dontsov, Bandera and Stetsko. The theorist of integral nationalism was transferred to Canada, while the two practitioners of mass murder were transferred to Germany. MI6 and the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) rewrote their biographies, making their Nazi involvement and responsibility for the “Final Solution” disappear.

Stepan Bandera during his exile, celebrating the memory of Yevhen Konovalets.

Bandera and Stetsko were installed in Munich to organize the Anglo-Saxon stay-behind networks in the Soviet Union. From 1950 onwards, they had an important radio station, Radio Free Europe, which they shared with the Muslim Brotherhood of Said Ramadan (the father of Tariq Ramadan). The radio station was sponsored by the National Committee for a Free Europe, a CIA offshoot of which its director Alan Dulles was a member, as well as future president Dwight Eisenhower, newspaper magnate Henry Luce and film director Cecil B. DeMilles. Psychological warfare specialist and future patron of the Straussians, Charles D. Jackson, was chairman.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, for his part, after living in Palestine, took refuge in New York. He was joined by Benzion Netanyahu (the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister). The two men wrote the doctrinal texts of “revisionist Zionism” and the Jewish Encyclopedia.

Bandera and Stetsko moved around a lot. They organized sabotage operations throughout the Soviet Union, particularly in the Ukraine, and parachuted leaflets. For this purpose, they created the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which brought together their Central European counterparts [5]. The British double agent, Kim Philby, informed the Soviets in advance about the actions of the Bandera. Bandera met with Dontsov in Canada and asked him to take the lead in the struggle. Once again, the intellectual refused, preferring to devote himself to his writing. He then drifted into a mystical delirium inspired by Viking myths. He announced the final battle of the Ukrainian knights against the Russian dragon. As for Bandera, he allied himself with the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek whom he met in 1958. But he was assassinated the following year by the KGB in Munich.

Funeral of Criminal Against Humanity, Stepan Bandera.

Chiang Kai-Shek and Yaroslav Stetsko at the founding of the World Anti-Communist League.

Yaroslav Stetsko continued the struggle through Radio Free Europe and the ABN. He went to the United States to testify before Senator Joseph MacCarthy’s Commission on Un-American Activities. In 1967, he and Chiang Kai-shek founded the World Anti-Communist League [6]. The League included many pro-US dictators from around the world and two schools of torture, in Panama and Taiwan. Klaus Barbie, who assassinated Jean Moulin in France and Che Guevara in Bolivia, was a member. In 1983, Stetsko was received at the White House by President Ronald Reagan and participated, along with Vice President George Bush Sr., in Lev Dobrianski’s “Captive Nations” (i.e., peoples occupied by the Soviets) ceremonies. He finally died in 1986.

But the story does not end there. His wife, Slava Stetsko, took over the leadership of these organizations. She too travelled the world to support any fight against the “communists”, or rather, if we refer to Dontsov’s writings, against the Russians and the Chinese. When the USSR was dissolved, Mrs. Stetsko simply changed the title of the League to the World League for Freedom and Democracy, a name it still has today. She then devoted herself to regaining a foothold in Ukraine.

Slava Stetsko ran in the first elections of the independent Ukraine in 1994. She was elected to the Verkhovna Rada, but having been stripped of her nationality by the Soviets, she could not sit. However, she brought the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, to the CIA offices in Munich and dictated parts of the new constitution to him. Even today, Article 16 of the new constitution states: “Preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state. Thus, Nazi racial discrimination is still proclaimed by modern Ukraine as in the worst moments of World War II.

Slava Stetsko opening the 2002 session of the Verkhovna Rada.

Slava Stetsko was re-elected at the next two sessions. She solemnly presided over the opening sessions on March 19, 1998 and on May 14, 2002.

In 2000, Lev Dobriansky organized a large symposium in Washington with many Ukrainian officials. He invited Straussian Paul Wolfowitz (a former collaborator of Charles D. Jackson). During this meeting, the “integral nationalists” put themselves at the service of the Straussians to destroy Russia [7].

Dmitro Yarosh when founding the Anti-Imperialist Front against Russia with the jihadists. He is now special adviser to the head of the Ukrainian armies. …

The pro-US president, Viktor Yushchenko, created a Dmytro Dontsov Institute, following the “Orange Revolution”. Yushchenko is an example of Anglo-Saxon whitewashing. He has always claimed to have no connection with the mainstream nationalists, but his father, Andrei, was a guard in a Nazi extermination camp [8]. The Dmytro Dontsov Institute would be closed in 2010, and then reopened after the 2014 coup.

President Viktor Yushchenko, shortly before the end of his term of office, elevated the criminal against humanity Stepan Bandera to the title of “Hero of the Nation”.

In 2011, the mainstream nationalists succeeded in passing a law banning the commemoration of the end of World War II because it was won by the Soviets and lost by the Banderists. But President Viktor Yanukovych refused to enact it. Enraged, the “integral nationalists” attacked the procession of Red Army veterans, beating up old men. Two years later, the cities of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk abolished the Victory Day ceremonies and banned all manifestations of joy.

In 2014, Ukrainians in Crimea and Donbass refused to recognize the coup government. Crimea, which had declared itself independent before the rest of Ukraine, reaffirmed its independence a second time and joined the Russian Federation. The Donbass sought a compromise. The “Ukrainian nationalists,” led by President Petro Poroshenko, stopped providing public services there and bombed its population. In eight years, they murdered at least 16,000 of their fellow citizens in general indifference.

It was also from the 2014 coup that the full nationalist militias were incorporated into the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In their internal regulations, they enjoin each fighter to read the works of Dmytro Dontsov, including his master book, Націоналізм (Nationalism).

In April 2015, the Verkhovna Rada declared members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) “independence fighters.” The law was enacted, in December 2018, by President Poroshenko. Former Waffen SS were retrospectively entitled to a pension and all sorts of benefits. The same law criminalized any claim that OUN militants and UPA fighters collaborated with the Nazis and practiced ethnic cleansing of Jews and Poles. Published in Ukraine, this article would send me to jail for writing it and you for reading it.

Inauguration of a commemorative plaque of the Criminal Against Humanity Dmytro Dontsov on the facade of the state news agency Ukrinform. During the ceremony, the general director of Ukrinform assured that Dontsov had founded, in 1918, the first Ukrainian press agency, UTA, of which Ukrinform is the successor. …

In February 2022, the “full nationalist” militias, which made up one-third of the country’s armed forces, planned a coordinated invasion of Crimea and the Donbass. They were stopped by the Russian military operation to implement UN Security Council Resolution 2202 to end the suffering of the people of Donbass.

Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland demonstrates her support for President Zelensky with members of the Canadian branch of the OUN. Today, Ms. Freeland is a candidate for the General Secretariat of NATO.

In March 2022, Israeli Prime Minister Nafatali Bennett, breaking with the “revisionist Zionism” of Benjamin Netanyahu (the son of Jabotinsky’s secretary), suggested to President Volodymyr Zelensky that he should agree with Russian demands and denazify his country [8]. Emboldened by this unexpected support, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dared to mention the case of the Jewish Ukrainian president, saying: “The Jewish people in their wisdom have said that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews. Every family has its black sheep, as they say.” This was too much for the Israelis, who always worry when someone tries to divide them. His counterpart at the time, Yair Lapid, recalled that the Jews themselves never organized the Holocaust of which they were victims. Caught between its conscience and its alliances, the Hebrew state repeated its support for Ukraine, but refused to send it any weapons. In the end, the General Staff decided and the Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, closed any possibility of support to the successors of the mass murderers of Jews.

Ukrainians are the only nationalists who are not fighting for their people or their land, but for one idea: to annihilate the Jews and the Russians.

2. This will be the entire article, because it is so brief, and so good in every way (including by its including lots of fine links to its sources), and also because the U.S. regime succeeded in getting it removed from the live Web, and so this archived version of it is especially precious: Max Blumenthal’s 24 February 2014 classic (issued two days before Obama’s coup grabbing Ukrainewas completely finished), “Is the U.S. Backing Neo-Nazis in Ukraine?”. This time, I include the live links that are in the article, because there are so many of them, and because in this archived version, all of them are likewise to online-archived sources (not to sources that no longer are online — such as would be the case if this article still were online — so, this version will be just as complete as the article itself was when it was archived on 4 April 2015):

As the Euromaidan protests in the Ukrainian capitol of Kiev culminated this week, displays of open fascism and neo-Nazi extremism became too glaring to ignore. Since demonstrators filled the downtown square to battle Ukrainian riot police and demand the ouster of the corruption-stained, pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, it has been filled with far-right streetfighting men pledging to defend their country’s ethnic purity.

White supremacist banners and Confederate flags were draped inside Kiev’s occupied City Hall, and demonstrators have hoisted Nazi SS and white power symbols over a toppled memorial to V.I. Lenin. After Yanukovich fled his palatial estate by helicopter, EuroMaidan protesters destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who died battling German occupation during World War II. Sieg heil salutes and the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol have become an increasingly common site in Maidan Square, and neo-Nazi forces have established “autonomous zones” in and around Kiev.

An Anarchist group called AntiFascist Union Ukraine attempted to join the Euromaidan demonstrations but found it difficult to avoid threats of violence and imprecations from the gangs of neo-Nazis roving the square. “They called the Anarchists things like Jews, blacks, Communists,” one of its members said. “There weren’t even any Communists, that was just an insult.”

“There are lots of Nationalists here, including Nazis,” the anti-fascist continued. “They came from all over Ukraine, and they make up about 30% of protesters.”

One of the “Big Three” political parties behind the protests is the ultra-nationalist Svoboda, whose leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has called for the liberation of his country from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” After the 2010 conviction of the Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk for his supporting role in the death of nearly 30,000 people at the Sobibor camp, Tyahnybok rushed to Germany to declare him a hero who was “fighting for truth.” In the Ukrainian parliament, where Svoboda holds an unprecedented 37 seats, Tyahnybok’s deputy Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn is fond of quoting Joseph Goebbels – he has even founded a think tank originally called “the Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center.” According to Per Anders Rudling, a leading academic expert on European neo-fascism, the self-described “socialist nationalist” Mykhalchyshyn is the main link between Svoboda’s official wing and neo-Nazi militias like Right Sector.

Right Sector is a shadowy syndicate of self-described “autonomous nationalists” identified by their skinhead style of dress, ascetic lifestyle, and fascination with street violence. Armed with riot shields and clubs, the group’s cadres have manned the front lines of the Euromaidan battles this month, filling the air with their signature chant: “Ukraine above all!” In a recent Right Sector propaganda video [embedded at the bottom of this article], the group promised to fight “against degeneration and totalitarian liberalism, for traditional national morality and family values.” With Svoboda linked to a constellation of international neo-fascist parties through the Alliance of European National Movements, Right Sector is promising to lead its army of aimless, disillusioned young men on “a great European Reconquest.”

Svoboda’s openly pro-Nazi politics have not deterred Senator John McCain from addressing a EuroMaidan rally alongside Tyahnybok, nor did it prevent Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland from enjoying a friendly meeting with the Svoboda leader this February. Eager to fend off accusations of anti-Semitism, the Svoboda leader recently hosted the Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine. “I would like to ask Israelis to also respect our patriotic feelings,” Tyahnybok has remarked. “Probably each party in the [Israeli] Knesset is nationalist. With God’s help, let it be this way for us too.”

In a leaked phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, Nuland revealed her wish for Tyahnybok to remain “on the outside,” but to consult with the US’s replacement for Yanukovich, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, “four times a week.” At a December 5, 2013 US-Ukraine Foundation Conference, Nuland boasted that the US had invested $5 billion to “build democratic skills and institutions” in Ukraine, though she did not offer any details.

“The Euro-Maidan movement has come to embody the principles and values that are the cornerstones for all free democracies,” Nuland proclaimed.

Two weeks later, 15,000 Svoboda members held a torchlight ceremony in the city of Lviv in honor of Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era Nazi collaborator who led the pro-fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B). Lviv has become the epicenter of neo-fascist activity in Ukraine, with elected Svoboda officials waging a campaign to rename its airport after Bandera and successfully changing the name of Peace Street to the name of the Nachtigall Battalion, an OUN-B wing that participated directly in the Holocaust. “‘Peace’ is a holdover from Soviet stereotypes,” a Svoboda deputy explained.

Revered by Ukrainian nationalists as a legendary freedom fighter, Bandera’s real record was ignominious at best. After participating in a campaign to assassinate Ukrainians who supported accommodation with the Polish during the 1930’s, Bandera’s forces set themselves to ethnically cleanse western Ukraine of Poles in 1943 and 1944. In the process, they killed over 90,000 Poles and many Jews, whom Bandera’s top deputy and acting “Prime Minister,” Yaroslav Stetsko, were determined to exterminate. Bandera held fast to fascist ideology in the years after the war, advocating a totalitarian, ethnically pure Europe while his affiliated Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) carried out a doomed armed struggle against the Soviet Union. The bloodbath he inspired ended when KGB agents assassinated him in Munich in 1959.

The Right Connections

Many surviving OUN-B members fled to Western Europe and the United States – occasionally with CIA help – where they quietly forged political alliances with right-wing elements. “You have to understand, we are an underground organization. We have spent years quietly penetrating positions of influence,” one member told journalist Russ Bellant, who documented the group’s resurgence in the United States in his 1988 book, “Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party.”

In Washington, the OUN-B reconstituted under the banner of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), an umbrella organization comprised of “complete OUN-B fronts,” according to Bellant. By the mid-1980’s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members, with the group’s chairman Lev Dobriansky, serving as ambassador to the Bahamas, and his daughter, Paula, sitting on the National Security Council. Reagan personally welcomed Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7000 Jews in Lviv, into the White House in 1983.

“Your struggle is our struggle,” Reagan told the former Nazi collaborator. “Your dream is our dream.”

When the Justice Department launched a crusade to capture and prosecute Nazi war criminals in 1985, UCCA snapped into action, lobbying Congress to halt the initiative. “The UCCA has also played a leading role in opposing federal investigations of suspected Nazi war criminals since those queries got underway in the late 1970’s,” Bellant wrote. “Some UCCA members have many reasons to worry – reasons which began in the 1930’s.”

Still an active and influential lobbying force in Washington, the UCCA does not appear to have shed its reverence for Banderist nationalism. In 2009, on the 50th anniversary of Bandera’s death, the group proclaimed him “a symbol of strength and righteousness for his followers” who “continue[s] to inspire Ukrainians today.” A year later, the group honored the 60th anniversary of the death of Roman Shukhevych, the OUN-B commander of the Nachtigall Battalion that slaughtered Jews in Lviv and Belarus, calling him a “hero” who “fought for honor, righteousness…”

Back in Ukraine in 2010, then-President Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the title of “National Hero of Ukraine,” marking the culmination of his efforts to manufacture an anti-Russian national narrative that sanitized the OUN-B’s fascism. (Yuschenko’s wife, Katherine Chumachenko, was a former Reagan administration official and ex-staffer at the right-wing Heritage Foundation). When the European Parliament condemned Yushchenko’s proclamation as an affront to “European values,” the UCCA-affiliated Ukrainian World Congress reacted with outrage, accusing the EU of “another attempt to rewrite Ukrainian history during WWII.” On its website, the UCCA dismissed historical accounts of Bandera’s collaboration with the Nazis as “Soviet propaganda.”

Following the demise of Yanukovich this month, the UCCA helped organize rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests. When several hundred demonstrators marched through downtown Chicago, some waved Ukrainian flags while others proudly flew the red and black banners of the UPA and OUN-B. “USA supports Ukraine!” they chanted.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

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