Ukrainian fascism: “This fascism was inspired by Nazism”

An interview with Susann Witt-Stahl (ed.), ‘Der Bandera-Komplex: Der ukrainische Faschismus – Geschichte, Funktion, Netzwerke’ (November 2024: 352 pages) by Arnold Schölzel in the German Junge Welt, 19 Oct 2024.

Translation by Helmut-Harry Loewen.

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JW: Why is it necessary to deal with Ukrainian fascism in Germany?

SWS: Even from its precursor, integral nationalism, “the German bayonets crawled,” as Rosa Luxemburg remarked in 1918 on the plunderers’ peace [Raubfrieden] of Brest. This certainly applies to the developed fascism of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN, especially OUN-B, its radical wing under the leadership of Stepan Bandera. This fascism was ideologically inspired by Nazism. Its supporters were trained by Hitler's Germany. Mikola Lebed, for example, head of the OUN-B security service, learned how to torture from the Gestapo. OUN fighters participated in the German Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS or in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, in the Holocaust and war of extermination. During the Cold War, the Adenauer government helped to ensure that the OUN-B was able to set up the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, ABN, the most powerful umbrella organization of former Hitler collaborators worldwide, from its headquarters in Munich in 1946 with the help of British and US intelligence services. Today, a German government is equipping the successors of the UPA, most of whom are integrated into the Kiev army, and other Ukrainian fascist hordes. So the greeting “Slava Ukrajini!,” the OUN's version of “Sieg Heil!,” which a German chancellor has repeatedly uttered on official occasions since 2022, can certainly be understood as a commitment: to an alliance of German imperialism with Ukrainian nationalism as an instrument of aggression against Russia that has lasted more than a century. It would therefore be a wretched political and historical failure not to deal with Ukrainian fascism.

- What is the state of the documentary sources on this topic in Germany and internationally?

Better than expected, at least as far as the history of the OUN and Banderism up to the end of the Second World War is concerned. Historians such as John-Paul Himka, Per Rudling and the Bandera biographer Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe have done important work. Many original sources can still be found in the archives and libraries of research institutions, including in Western countries with large Ukrainian diaspora communities, such as the USA and Canada. For example, the letter from Bandera's deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, from 1941, in which he assured the leadership of Hitler's Germany of his support for the “methods of exterminating Jewry”, has survived. But there is a major problem in Ukraine: the OUN and its lobby, which has been influencing the Kiev government since the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, are falsifying their own history on a grand scale. First and foremost Vladimir Vyatrovich, the country's Banderite “memory czar.” He wreaked irreversible havoc during his tenure as director of the state-run Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, UINP, to which he had been appointed by the fascist-controlled Maidan coup government.

- Can you give an example of what Vyatrovich has done? What is he doing today?

After all archives from the Soviet era, such as those of the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], were transferred to the UINP in 2015 on the orders of then President Petro Poroshenko, Vyatrovich had documents that seriously incriminated the OUN and UPA removed from the collection or manipulated them. Unfortunately, he still has a great influence on the politics of the past in Ukraine and continues to ensure that Bandera research is replaced by the Bandera cult through books and lectures. Among other things, he is currently promoting a project for the mass production of a shirt that Bandera wore in a famous photo; the proceeds will go to the Ukrainian armed forces.

- The OUN continued to exist after the Second World War and played a not insignificant role in the Cold War. What about the sources for the period after 1945?

In the archives of the CIA and other secret services alone, there is a great deal of evidence on the cronyism of the governments of the USA, Canada, Great Britain and West Germany with Nazi collaborators who had gone into exile from Eastern Europe; much of it is accessible. By the end of the 1980s, when there was still investigative journalism and more academic freedom, some disturbing truths came to light. There was the “Nazi hunter” Charles R. Allen, much to the annoyance of the US OUN-B leadership based in New York, who published his revelations in various leading media outlets when they had not yet degenerated into NATO propaganda organs. Christopher Simpson's book ‘Blowback’ about the recruitment of Banderists and other fascists by US governments provides important facts. Russ Bellant's book ‘Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party’ is quite rightly regarded as standard literature.

- What significance does the OUN-B have today?

Its influence is considerably underestimated. As a warmonger, the OUN-B has acted efficiently in Ukraine, for example in the “resistance movement against capitulation” founded in 2019 to achieve the short-term goal of preventing a negotiated peace with Russia. The irrational demands aimed at triggering a world inferno, which can even be found in President Zelensky's “victory plan,” also bear their signature. In Western countries, the OUN-B is currently reanimating the ABN with platforms such as the Free Nations Post-Russia Forum, flanked by established think tanks from the USA, such as the Atlantic Council. The latter held its first world congress in summer 2024 under the new name “Anti-Imperial Block of Nations” and has already dropped anchor in Germany with an “anti-imperial coalition.” All this and much more is hardly known to the public in the so-called free world, if at all. This is because the OUN-B mainly operates in the semi-darkness of widely ramified networks of façade structures. However, the main culprit for this misery is the cartel of silence and lies, which has been in place since 2022 at the latest, in research, education and the media, including experts who have dedicated themselves to fighting fascism. Michael Colborne, for example, author of the research collective Bellingcat and a book about the neo-Nazi movement Azov, was not too embarrassed to claim in 2023 that the OUN-B no longer existed.

- You managed to get two authors from the USA, Moss Robeson and Russ Bellant, who have dealt intensively with the past and present of the OUN-B, to contribute to the conference and the volume. Can you briefly outline what they have achieved?

Moss Robeson is a highly talented young researcher from New York. In just five years, he has managed to locate the influential front organizations of the Bandera lobby, identify their board members as OUN-B functionaries and uncover their connections to the US military-industrial complex. He is also responsible for a great deal of research into the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., whose establishment in the early 1990s was largely initiated by Banderists, and similar anti-communist organizations as supporting structures of a new fascist international. Since 2022, he has also been working on the Azov lobby, which has helped neo-Nazis achieve cultural hegemony in Ukraine, not least through its own film production companies, fashion labels and clever marketing, and which is expanding towards the West, not least with the support of the digital NATO hooligan network “North Atlantic Fella Organization.” Robeson also works historically, for example on the previously almost unknown beginnings of the OUN-B in the USA in the 1940s, at a time when it was still part of Hitler's foot soldiers. Russ Bellant's revelations of the machinations of the “Grand Old Party”, US government circles, military personnel with immigrant fascists from Eastern Europe and the former Axis powers in the Reagan era are invaluable, if only because he met and interviewed well-known Hitler vassals such as Nikolai Nazarenko, ex-commander of a Cossack unit of the Waffen SS, for his ‘Old Nazis’ volume. Bellant is an indispensable contemporary witness. Both authors are characterized by the fact that they work completely independently, something that connects them to junge Welt.

- How would you rate the quality of the sources?

We mainly used primary sources, such as original documents from the OUN-B and articles from its publications, such as ABN Correspondence. A lot also comes from the social media channels of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, where you can unearth real treasures. The secondary sources used, such as newspapers and historical essays, almost all come from Western, often even decidedly pro-Western journalists and academics. This makes the volume difficult to attack with the usual crude “Putin propaganda!” accusations that everyone is confronted with today as soon as they signal an interest in the historical and political truths of the Ukraine conflict.

- How do you explain the fact that the propaganda tales of the Ukrainian fascists in Germany are not only taken at face value by politicians and the media, but also by the general public?

There is no opposition that raises objections. In the formation of German society at all levels into a cheering squad for the NATO military roller [NATO-Militärwalze], which is advancing ever more resolutely to the east, the civil society ‘left’ must obviously be mobilized. This also applies to the increasingly social-chauvinist Antifa establishment, which is always at the ready to play down the power of the Bandera fascists in the Ukrainian security apparatus and the Nazi armada in the army. When there was not even a protest after the federal government, in response to a parliamentary question, indirectly denied the OUN's well-documented involvement in the Holocaust, it finally became clear that what such blind antifascism refuses to recognize as a portent, the functional elites of German imperialism know how to use as a convenient opportunity. If you can avoid talking about Banderism today, you’ll be able to remain silent about Nazism tomorrow.

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On October 29, 2023, the daily newspaper junge Welt and the magazine Melodie & Rhythmus organized the academic conference “The Bandera Complex: Ukrainian Fascism - History, Function, Networks.” A volume with materials from the conference (352 pages; 23.90 euros), edited by M&R editor-in-chief Susann Witt-Stahl, will be published by Verlag 8. Mai on November 6 under the same title. This Saturday, October 19, Susann Witt-Stahl will present the volume at 2 p.m. at the publisher's stand at the book fair in Frankfurt am Main (Hall 3.1, B 48). Arnold Schölzel spoke to her about the aim of the conference and the book.