On the morning of 15 June 1934, Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki said goodbye to German Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, who continued his official visit to Poland by flying from Warsaw to Cracow. Pieracki then returned to his office in the Ministry of Interior Affairs at 69 Nowy Świat Street. After work, he left for the Klub Towarzyski, a restaurant and meeting place for politicians, located at 3 Foksal Street. The minister arrived at Foksal Street at about 3:40 p.m. and told his chauffeur to return at 5:30 p.m. Pieracki started walking toward the restaurant without his bodyguards. At this point, Hryhorii Matseiko, a twenty-one-year-old OUN member, began to approach him, shaking a parcel wrapped in paper from the Gajewski confectionery. The parcel contained a makeshift bomb that Matseiko was trying to detonate. The bomb, however, did not explode. Its activation required a vigorous push on the detonator, a T-shaped metal piston, which was designed to crush a glass tube containing nitric acid. If Matseiko had pushed a little harder, the tube would have broken and detonated the bomb, killing the government minister and his assailant. Once Matseiko realized that he could not blow up both the minister and himself, he pulled a gun from his coat and ran toward Pieracki, who had already passed him and was in the entrance of the restaurant. Catching up with him, Matseiko shot twice at the back of Pieracki’s head. When the minister sank to the ground, Matseiko fired a third shot but missed. The young assassin fled the scene, firing several times at his pursuers, and wounding a policeman in the hand.[400]
After escaping from the scene of the crime, Matseiko disposed of the murder weapon. He did not return to the hostel, where he had been living under the name of Włodzimierz Olszański. Instead, he went to Lublin, where he stayed for a few days with a Ukrainian student by the name of Iakiv Chornii. Matseiko then travelled to Lviv and went into hiding, assisted by three OUN members: Ivan Maliutsa, Roman Myhal’, and Ievhen Kachmars’kyi. On 5 August, armed with a gun and supplied with money, Matseiko crossed into Czechoslovakia with the help of Kateryna Zaryts’ka and other OUN members, and later travelled on a Lithuanian passport to Argentina, where he lived under the name Petro Knysh. He married a Ukrainian woman in Argentina but could not get used to the climate; he turned to drink, suffered from mental problems, and died in 1966.[401]
How Matseiko had come to join the OUN was somewhat fortuitous. On 19 November 1931, as he was walking along a street in Lviv, where he had moved from the small town of Shchyrets (Szczerzec) two years before, he heard a shot and then a crowd calling out “Catch the murderer,” pointing at a man who was running toward Matseiko. Matseiko caught him. It was subsequently revealed that the fugitive was Ivan Mytsyk, an OUN member, who, a few minutes earlier, had killed a Ukrainian high school student, Ievhen Bereznyts’kyi. In order to atone for catching Mystyk, Matseiko decided to join the OUN. Before the attack on Pieracki, the homeland executive had commissioned Matseiko to kill other people, but he had not succeeded in doing so. Pieracki was his first victim.[402]
Pieracki was a Polish patriot who had engaged in the struggle for a Polish state during and after the First World War. Since 22 June 1931, he had been the interior minister of the Second Republic. As a politician Pieracki was loyal to Piłsudski and the Sanacja government.[403] He was opposed to every kind of extremism that threatened the Polish state. Gazeta Polska and politicians from the Sanacja depicted Pieracki as a Polish patriot who, like Tadeusz Hołówko and Henryk Józewski, espoused Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation.[404] A more critical and open-minded observer than the Sanacja politicians and the journalists from Gazeta Polska, the writer Maria Dąbrowska characterized Pieracki differently:
Now Pieracki has been killed. He was a repulsive figure, clerical and overly pious ... a social parasite—I know about him because St. [Stanisław Stempowski, Dąbrowska’s life partner] had troubles with him that outraged him. The government is now making him into a great national hero: It has ordered a week of mourning for the officials and is writing panegyrics. Bishop Gawlina delivered an odious speech at the funeral. I put it into [my] “museum of dirtiness.”[405]
Dąbrowska’s waspishly presented dislike for Pieracki might not have been unjustified, although it was certainly influenced by the problematic relations between her life partner and Pieracki, and by the lavish religious-nationalist commemorations of Pieracki after his death.
The OUN chose to kill Pieracki because he was a well-known Polish politician and because he could be blamed for the pacification of Ukrainian villages in the autumn of 1930. In October 1934, the OUN announced in its bulletin: “On 15 June in Warsaw, a UVO fighter assassinated one of the hangmen of the Ukrainian nation. The UVO fighter killed Bronisław Pieracki, interior minister of the government occupying the western Ukrainian land.”[406] The place of the assassination was especially significant. Pieracki was killed not in the south-eastern territories of the Second Republic, which the OUN understood as “the western Ukrainian land” and which he visited shortly prior to his assassination (between 3 and 9 June 1934), but in the center of Warsaw, the capital of Poland.[407]
In the first moments after the crime, the police did not suspect the OUN, to which Matseiko belonged, and at whose behest he had killed the minister, but the Polish National Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny, ONR). The ONR was also a threat to the government and was more active in Warsaw than were Ukrainian nationalists. In the first instance, the police arrested more ONR than OUN members. The escaping Matseiko, however, left behind important evidence, namely the parcel that contained the undetonated bomb. He also left his hat, and his coat in which the police found a blue-and-yellow ribbon, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. This evidence indicated that the assassin might be Ukrainian, unless it was a non-Ukrainian who had left it deliberately in order to steer the investigation in the wrong direction.
Bandera was arrested a day prior to the assassination. He was apprehended together with twenty other young OUN members, at about 5:30 a.m. on 14 June 1934, in the student residence in Lviv. When arresting Bandera, the police did not know that they had apprehended the head of the homeland executive of the OUN.[408] During the same night, the police also arrested Karpynets’ and discovered a chemical laboratory in his apartment at Rynek Dębnicki 13, in Cracow. On 17 June 1934, the police took the bomb left at the crime scene in Warsaw to Karpynets’ laboratory where they found materials employed in its manufacture.[409] This discovery convinced the police of the identity of those responsible for Pieracki’s assassination and caused further mass arrests of Ukrainian nationalists. In June 1934 a total of about 800 OUN members were apprehended in different Polish towns and cities; the majority on 14, 17, and 18 June.[410]
In the longer term, the OUN provoked mass arrests by the increase of propaganda and terrorist acts in 1933–1934, when Bandera took over the leadership of the homeland executive. The arrests were also the result of longer observation and infiltration conducted by the investigation department in Cracow, which was interested mainly in the illegal transportation of OUN propaganda and explosive materials from Czechoslovakia through the Czech-Polish town of Těšín (Cieszyn). The arrests occurred independently of the assassination, at least until 17 June, when the police established that the bomb left at the crime scene was prepared by the OUN. However, the OUN’s decision to assassinate Pieracki on 15 June did not occur independently of the arrests. The assassination was rescheduled for 15 June because the police had begun arresting OUN members on 14 June in Lviv and Cracow, having discovered, during the night of 13–14 June, the laboratory in which the bomb had been prepared.[411] Although the police already knew on 17 June who was behind Pieracki’s assassination, it was only on 10 July that they announced it. This delay—in conjunction with propagandistic and ideological mourning campaigns with a strong patriotic background for the assassinated interior minister—provoked the media to extensive speculation that stoked public anger against the unknown assassin.[412]
The first stage of the political cult of Stepan Bandera came about as a result of the politically and ideologically steered emotions released by Pieracki’s assassination and by the two great trials against members of the OUN, from 18 November 1935 to 13 January 1936 in Warsaw, and from 25 May to 27 June 1936 in Lviv. Immediately after the assassination, the Polish media, especially that connected to the Sanacja movement, portrayed Pieracki as a martyr and hero and tried to set up a political myth around him. Although this effort was unsuccessful, the Polish propaganda apparatus stirred up collective anger, which struck against the OUN, once the authorities had announced who, in the capital of Poland, had killed a Polish minister and fighter for Polish independence.
On 15 June 1934, the evening newspapers were already portraying the death of Pieracki as a national tragedy. Gazeta Polska, a semi-official paper of the leading parliamentary group Sanacja, was at the head of the campaign. On 16 June, in the center of the front page, the newspaper printed a photograph of Pieracki looking sadly and seriously into the eyes of the readers. A dark frame made the photograph look like a huge obituary notice. Above it, a massive headline reported the “assassination of the interior minister yesterday at about 3.15 p.m.” A second headline informed readers about the place of the assassination and reported Pieracki’s death as having occurred at 5:05 p.m., in the hospital. It further informed readers that the killer had not yet been caught.[413] The text below Pieracki’s photograph raised anger against the unknown group that was responsible for the crime. After “finding out where the roots of this crime are … this sick part of the social organism should be burned away with a white iron,” the newspaper declared. “The time of non-responsibility in Polish history is over. The criminal is responsible for both the physical crime and the political one.” The article argued that Pieracki did not die for nothing, but sacrificed his life for the glory of Poland. It also implied that the minister was killed by an enemy who was cowardly and cunning enough to murder him from behind, and not in front of his eyes as an enemy on a battlefield would.[414]
The second page of the issue of the Gazeta Polska for 16 June 1934 informed readers about the details of the crime, Pieracki’s death in hospital, the unsuccessful pursuit of the assassin, and the impact of the crime on society. According to this report, the news about Pieracki’s assassination had spread as fast as lightning throughout the city and had caused genuine sorrow everywhere. As a sign of mourning, cinemas, restaurants, and taverns were closed. On the sidewalks, people read the special evening editions of the newspapers, which kept them informed about the crime and provoked discussion. Flags were hung on many public and private buildings. The Legion of the Young (Legion Młodych), a youth organization associated with the Sanacja movement, marched from the hospital where Pieracki had died, to the Belweder, the palace where Marshal Piłsudski lived. During the procession, fights with the Polish fascist organization ONR occurred. Similar emotional reactions and manifestations of sorrow emerged in Lviv, Cracow, Lublin, Łódź, Vilna, Białystok, and Toruń. Gazeta Polska reported that such capitals as Paris, London, and Bucharest had expressed condolences, and feelings of disgust for the unknown murderer.[415]
The crime took on the shape of a national tragedy. Pro-government media used the ceremonies of mourning, grief, and anger to elaborate a collective desire for revenge and justice. On the next day, 17 June 1934, Gazeta Polska devoted the entire front page to turning Pieracki into a martyr and hero. This time too, the first page bore a black frame that made it look like an obituary, but no photograph of Pieracki appeared in the frame. Instead, the name Bronisław Pieracki was printed in large letters with a cross above it, and the letters Ś and P, the abbreviation for “Of holy memory.” Below, in smaller but large enough letters, Pieracki’s titles, posts, honors, and medals, such as “Interior Minister,” “Delegate of Sejm,” and “Holder of the Virtuti Militari Medal,” were listed. One of these honors was “Brigadier General,” a military rank with which Marshal Piłsudski had honored Pieracki, the day after his death. Below this enumeration, the readers were informed that Pieracki had fallen while “standing on guard,” and that the mourning service would take place on Monday, 18 June at the Church of the Holy Cross. After the service the coffin would be taken to the main railway station, whence it would be transported to Nowy Sącz, the city where Pieracki’s family lived.[416]
On the second page, Gazeta Polska reported a special mourning gathering of the council of ministers at 10:00 a.m. on the day after the assassination, during which Prime Minister Leon Kozłowski announced that the “punishing hand” should catch not only the direct, but also the indirect perpetrators of the crime. The government stated that, until the day of the funeral, flags would be hung at half-mast, and that black ribbons would be affixed to them at all public buildings. The president of Warsaw—equivalent to mayor—Marian Zyndram-Kościałkowski appealed to Varsovians to decorate all private houses with flags. Government offices were obliged to mourn for eight days. The Ministry of Interior Affairs and its branch offices would mourn for twenty-eight days. The appeal requested the cancellation of ceremonies and festivities during the mourning period, and obliged all officials to wear mourning ribbons. In all towns and cities in Poland, as well as in all places outside Poland where Poles were living, mourning services were to be held. On the day of the funeral, all performances in theatres and cinemas were cancelled. Polish radio was required to broadcast special programs.[417]
Condolences from such prominent persons as Primate August Hlond, ambassadors of numerous countries to Warsaw, and organizations such as workers’ associations were published on the second page. A personal decision of Marshal Piłsudski to organize a military-style funeral was announced, as was a huge mourning march, which began the same day at 12:00 on Marshal Piłsudski Square, and was attended by 100,000 people. Gazeta Polska also announced that Pieracki’s mother had fainted when she heard on the radio about the death of her son. The Ministry of Internal Affairs offered a reward of 100,000 złotys to the person who helped catch the killer.[418] On the third page, Gazeta Polska published an article entitled “A Soldier’s Death.” It depicted Pieracki as a very respected and patriotic Pole, a faithful servant of the Polish state, as well as a representative of his generation, who, during and after the First World War, fought for Polish independence and who was engaged after the war in rebuilding the state. Pieracki’s assassination was presented as a blow against all patriotic Poles and was used to evoke a desire for revenge.[419] This was strengthened by the observation that the bullet that hit Pieracki during the struggle for independence in 1915 had not prevented him from serving the state, but an assassin’s bullet had. The political group that fired the bullet therefore had to be smashed.[420]
The day after his assassination, the street in which Pieracki was killed was renamed Bronisław Pieracki Street. Military, social, and workers’ associations and organizations, as well as leading politicians, came to the ceremony. The renaming ceremony was conducted by the president of Warsaw, Zyndram-Kościałkowski, who stressed the tragedy of the loss with the words: “The minister of the Polish Republic, the colonel of the Polish Army, the soldier of Marshal Piłsudski was murdered! God was desecrated through the killing of a man, the fatherland was desecrated through the killing of a minister of the Republic”[421] The speaker further indicated that the street should be renamed, in order to commemorate the efforts that Pieracki had invested in the fatherland, and “to remember that everyone should live and work hard … according to the order of the Leader of the Nation (Wódz Narodu) [Józef Piłsudski] to elaborate a Poland as He [the Leader of the Nation] wants to see, and for which we, His soldiers, fought.”[422] Zyndram-Kościałkowski depicted Pieracki as a faithful servant of the state, in which everything happens for the glory of the leader, and always as the leader wishes. He also indicated that the loss of Pieracki harmed the whole of society, because it harmed the leader. Other Polish cities followed this example and renamed streets after Pieracki. The municipal council of Chrzanów decided to do so on 18 July 1934, and the one in Kowel followed suit on 20 July.[423]
Pieracki’s assassination was also used to legitimize the establishment of the previously mentioned first Polish detention camp in Bereza Kartuska and to repudiate the Little Treaty of Versailles. Both the detention camp and the repudiation of the treaty had been planned for some time, but were carried out only after the assassination.[424] Gazeta Polska and Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny depicted the creation of the camp as a necessary response to the assassination.[425]
On 18 June 1934, next to a number of other condolences from various organizations and offices, Gazeta Polska published the first condolences from Ukrainian associations in Volhynia.[426] It reported that a large demonstration had taken place on 17 June 1934 in Lviv, and that in all other cities of the Lviv, Ternopil’, and Stanyslaviv voievodeships—all three mainly inhabited by Ukrainians—mourning ceremonies took place, and resolutions condemning the assassin were passed.[427] On the front page of their 17 June issue, Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny printed a long article titled “Bloody Hands …” The article was a response to the discovery of the OUN laboratory in Cracow and to the mass arrests of OUN members on 14 June. The author of the article exposed the violent and criminal nature of the OUN, condemned the Greek Catholic Church for sanctifying the OUN, and called on the church to distance itself from the OUN. The writer did not state that the OUN had committed the
crime against Pieracki, but he described the OUN as a terrorist and criminal organization that might have carried it out.[428]
On 18 June 1934, Pieracki’s corpse was transported from Warsaw to Nowy Sącz, a small city in Małopolska (Little Poland) where Pieracki’s family lived and where he was to be buried on 19 June. For this journey a special “mourning train” (pociąg żałobny) was prepared. It consisted of a carriage with Pieracki’s body inside, another carriage which was full of wreaths, and eight carriages for relatives, government members, and representatives of various organizations and government bodies. Before the train departed, Prime Minister Kozłowski delivered a speech in which he stressed that the murder of Pieracki “defamed the honor of our country, it insulted our instinct of justice and public morality.”[429]