Stepan Bandera
Ukrainian nationalist leader (1909–1959)
Stepan Andriiovych Bandera (1 January 1909 – 15 October 1959) was a Ukrainian far-right leader of the radical militant faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN-B.
Bandera was born into the family of a Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest in the Austro-Hungarian region of Galicia, which after World War I became part of Poland. Involved in nationalist organisations from a young age, he joined the Ukrainian Military Organisation in 1924. In 1931, he became head of propaganda of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and later became head of the OUN for Poland in 1932. In 1934, he organised the assassination of the Polish interior minister, Bronisław Pieracki, for which he was sentenced to death for terrorism, subsequently commuted to life imprisonment.
During the invasion of Poland in 1939, Bandera left custody amidst the turmoil, moving on to Kraków. In 1940, the OUN split into two factions with Bandera leading the more radical faction, the OUN-B, in opposition to the OUN-M. Bandera's OUN-B was devoted to the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state, envisioned by him as "a one-party fascist dictatorship free of national minorities" according to Timothy Snyder. On 22 June 1941, the day that Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Bandera formed the Ukrainian National Committee. Its head, Yaroslav Stetsko, announced the creation of a Ukrainian state on 30 June 1941, in German-captured Lviv. The proclamation pledged to work with Nazi Germany. Germany disapproved of the proclamation and, for his refusal to rescind it, Bandera was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in January 1942.
“Stepan Bandera” enters the record as ukrainian nationalist leader (1909–1959). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Stepan, Bandera and Ukrainian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q157280. VIAF identifies the subject as 47555648. The Library of Congress control number is n85365513. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1909, 1959, 1924 and 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stepan Bandera” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.