In January 1959 Stashyns’kyi was ordered to Munich to keep track of Stepan Bandera alias Stefan Popel. He flew to Moscow in April and was informed that his next task would be to assassinate Bandera. Because Stashyns’kyi claimed that there was always a bodyguard at Bandera’s side, KGB technicians prepared a spray gun with two barrels, each holding a cyanide capsule that could be fired separately. One capsule was for the bodyguard, the other for Bandera. In May 1959, Stashyns’kyi flew from Berlin to Munich. On the second or third day after his arrival, he found a convenient moment when he saw Bandera alone in his garage. Nevertheless, he did not proceed to fire at Bandera, probably because he was at odds with himself, as he later confessed. He threw the weapon away and tried to open the door of Bandera’s apartment building with special keys prepared by KGB technicians, but without success. Stashyns’kyi returned to Berlin then flew to Munich with new keys. He found the right one, but postponed Bandera’s assassination. During the summer, he spent some days in Borshchovychi with his parents and came back to Munich on 14 October 1959 with a similar weapon. The next day, he went to Bandera’s apartment building at Kreittmayrstrasse 7, and in the stairwell, in the vicinity of the front door, fired the poison from both barrels at Bandera’s face. The second barrel had been reserved for Bandera’s bodyguard, who was not accompanying the Providnyk that day. Stashyns’kyi stated that he was too nervous to control this step and instead of firing only one capsule of cyanide, he fired both. The quantity of cyanide that reached Bandera’s mouth was so large that the Providnyk swallowed some drops. This enabled the experts to identify the poison during the post-mortem.[1756]
For Bandera’s assassination, KGB head Alexander Shelepin rewarded Stashyns’kyi, on 5 or 6 December 1959 in Moscow, with the Order of the Red Banner. He also gave him permission to marry Inge Pohl, whom he had met in a Berlin casino in April 1957. Shelepin’s permission was necessary because KGB personnel did not usually marry people from outside the Soviet Union. After Bandera’s assassination, the KGB kept Stashyns’kyi in Moscow in order to improve his skills and bring him into other operations.[1757]
During the investigations in Germany, Stashyns’kyi disclosed that his relationship with Inge Pohl had changed him. He said that when he saw a newsreel in autumn 1959 he understood that he had killed two human beings, and not two enemies of the Soviet Union. The newsreel showed Bandera’s funeral, the corpse in the coffin, and the mourning relatives and friends. Stashyns’kyi had obviously known that firing poison with the spray gun into his victims’ faces would kill them, but he meant that the weapon was so subtle that he felt that he “acted only theoretically.”[1758]
At the beginning of her relationship with Stashyns’kyi, Inge noticed that he was a “convinced communist” and that he “praised everything that was related to Russia and communist ideology.”[1759] She stated that she did not share his fascination with the Soviet Union and that they often had disputes about this issue. She knew him as
Joseph Lehmann, an ethnic German repatriate who had to learn German because he grew up in Poland. Inge’s vehement criticism of the Soviet Union pained him but they otherwise understood each other very well. They become engaged in April 1959. In autumn 1959, Stashyns’kyi informed Inge that he would be transferred to Poland for a year and could not take her with him. Then at Christmas, he unexpectedly visited her in East Berlin and unveiled his true identity and occupation. Inge was not only surprised but shocked; nevertheless, she went along with it. She followed Bohdan to Moscow and stayed there for eight weeks. He warned her to be polite and not to criticize the Soviet Union, because the KGB was not used to criticism. After Bandera’s assassination, Bohdan informed Inge that she was the first foreign woman a KGB agent had been allowed to marry. In late March, Inge and Bohdan came to East Berlin, where they contracted a civil and church marriage on 23 April 1960. Soon afterwards, they were back in Moscow. At this time Inge noticed that her husband underwent a transformation. According to her, Bohdan understood, during his travels to Germany and his contact with her, that what he had been taught at university and by the KGB about the West and the Soviet Union was erroneous.[1760]
Stashyns’kyi also realized that he had lost the trust of his KGB superiors after he married Inge. On one occasion, Bohdan and Inge discovered the wires of a bugging device in their apartment. This, and the delivery of opened letters from East Berlin, strengthened Stashyns’kyi’s disappointment in the Soviet Union and in his occupation. Inge became pregnant in summer 1960. Even before Bohdan informed “Sergej”, his superior already knew about it. The KGB suggested an abortion, which Inge and Bohdan refused. They wanted Inge and Bohdan to stay in Moscow for the next few years. At this time, Bohdan confided in Inge about his involvement in the assassinations in 1957 and 1959, although he was officially forbidden to do so. He also told Inge that if anything happened to him, she should reveal to American intelligence how Rebet and Bandera had died. In January 1961, Inge went to her family in East Berlin. During the following weeks, the KGB put pressure on Inge to return to Moscow but she refused and tried to convince the KGB to allow Bohdan to come to Berlin. Finally, Inge was allowed to give birth in East Berlin but Bohdan was not permitted to join her.[1761]
Bohdan’s and Inge’s son Peter was born a month prematurely on 31 March 1961. When Inge returned home with Peter, she tried to contact American intelligence with the help of a friend, but that did not work. She then decided to join Bohdan in Moscow, which pleased the KGB. With the help of KGB agents, Inge packed her belongings to fly to Moscow in early August, but on 6 August Peter became ill, and he died of pneumonia two days later in the hospital.[1762]
After Peter’s death, the KGB allowed Bohdan to visit his wife in Berlin. Before takeoff from Moscow, Bohdan’s escort implied that either Inge or a Western intelligence agent had killed Peter in order to bring Bohdan to Berlin. This remark infuriated him. The first night in Berlin, 10–11 August 1961, Bohdan spent with Inge in the KGB complex in Berlin-Karlshorst. Inge and Bohdan planned to escape to West Berlin after the funeral, which was arranged for 13 August. On 15 or 16 August they were due to fly to Moscow. They knew that the escape would be difficult because they were permanently under observation. They used a convenient moment, one day prior to the funeral. After losing their “escort” they went from Dallgow, where they visited Inge’s father, to Falkensee. There they took a taxi to the Friedrichstrasse station in East Berlin, where they went on by another taxi to the Schönhauser Allee station and from there by commuter train to West Berlin, where they reached the police station in Tempelhofer Damm.[1763]
Stashyns’kyi’s escape from East Berlin put the KGB and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in a very uncomfortable position. On 13 October 1961, the press office of the Council of Ministers of the DDR organized an international press conference in East Berlin, at which—with the help of Stefan Lippolz—it explained who, they claimed, had killed Stepan Bandera, how, and why. About 130 journalists attended the conference, after which Lippolz gave an interview to Moscow radio.[1764] The conference was opened by Kurt Blecha, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the DDR, who informed the audience that “Bonn intelligence [BND] is the immediate successor of Nazi intelligence.” He then introduced Lippolz as a person who “was pursued by Bonn intelligence and threatened with death,” and who had saved himself by escaping to East Germany.[1765] When Blecha had finished, Gerhard Kehl, a lieutenant colonel of the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), the East German intelligence service known as the Stasi, stated that his colleague Blecha was right when he called Bonn intelligence the immediate successor of Nazi intelligence. He spoke about the OUN and its leader, “the well-known bandit and mass-murderer Bandera.” Kehl stated that Bandera was not killed “as a consequence of his crimes but in order to prevent the crimes of the bloody General Gehlen and his contemporary intelligence becoming known.”[1766]
Only after these introductory speeches did Lippolz reveal his biography to the audience. He said that he was born in Aleksandrowka in Volhynia, had worked for the Abwehr during the Second World War, was captured by the Red Army in 1945, and remained in Soviet captivity until 1952. In 1953 he moved to Munich, where he took over the Stephansklause restaurant, which became the favorite eating place of Ukrainian émigrés. He said that ZCh OUN member Iaroslav Sulima, who worked for the BND, introduced him in 1955 to BND agent Peter Wander, alias Dr. Weber, who persuaded him to work for the BND. His job was to infiltrate the ZCh OUN. In 1957 Dr. Weber gave him a white powder, with which he was to poison Bandera. Lippolz responded that he could not do it and proposed the ZCh OUN member Myskiv for the task, in whom Bandera had complete trust. Afraid of the BND, Lippolz left Munich for Austria, where he heard that Bandera had been murdered. When he returned to Munich, Myskiv informed him that the BND had forced him to poison Bandera. Afterwards, Lippolz left Germany again but corresponded with Myskiv who, fearing that the BND would kill him, also wanted to leave West Germany. Lippolz hid from the BND in Norway and several other European countries, until he finally found safety in the DDR. Then he found out that Myskiv was dead.[1767] This story might have sounded convincing to the journalists at the conference but it would not have impressed anybody, had Lippolz mentioned that Myskiv had not been in Munich between 12 and 16 October 1959, and that he was not killed, but died of natural causes on the night of 26–27 March 1960 after drinking home-made vodka and having sex in his Munich apartment with Maria Konczak, twenty-eight years younger than he was, an employee of Bandera’s neo-fascist newspaper Shliakh peremokhy.[1768]
On 17 November 1961, at President Kennedy’s request, West German Chancellor Adenauer informed the public how Stashyns’kyi had escaped in August from East to West Berlin and had revealed that he had killed Rebet and Bandera.[1769] The next day, Lippolz told the press that he had never heard of Stashyns’kyi and thought that he must be a “paid element” whose job was to persuade the public that the BND had nothing to do with Bandera’s assassination.[1770]
The controversy between the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, BRD) and the DDR concerning Bandera’s murder was, from the very beginning, embedded in the Soviet campaign against Theodor Oberländer, minister for displaced persons, refugees, and war victims in the federal government. Oberländer had studied agricultural science in the 1920s and had worked in this position at several German universities and institutes. He joined the NSDAP in 1933 and combined his scientific work with party politics. In 1941 he was one of the German officers of the Ukrainian Nachtigall battalion. The DDR, and several other satellite states and republics of the Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine, used the fact that Oberländer was an officer in the Nachtigall battalion to conduct a propaganda campaign against him in order to discredit the Adenauer government.[1771]
The campaign against Oberländer began in spring 1959 and was probably inspired by Erich Koch who stated during a trial in Warsaw in March 1959, “I completely do not understand why I stand here, fourteen years after the war, in front of this court, when my former head of the regional administration in the NSDAP administration of East Prussia, SA-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Oberländer, is today a minister in Bonn!”[1772]
During the following months, Oberländer became the object of hate and condemnation and the subject of communist “antifascist” rituals performed by several politicians from Soviet republics and satellite states. In July 1959, Władysław Gomułka, leader of the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR), initiated the campaign against the minister and the Nachtigall battalion, stating that Oberländer was responsible for the murder of the Polish professors in Lviv during the night of 3–4 July 1941.[1773] Soviet propaganda repeated this statement many times. During the following months, the Polish newspaper Trybuna Ludu, the Hungarian Népszabadság, and other newspapers connected the battalion and Oberländer with further massacres, such as the shooting of 12,000 Jews in Kam”ianets’-Podil’s’kyi, and 34,000 Jews in Babi Yar, in which the battalion was not involved. The battalion’s actual war crimes, such as the shooting of Jews in two villages on the way to Vinnytsia, were not mentioned during the campaign.[1774]
On 31 July 1959, the Society of People Persecuted by the Nazi Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes, VNN) submitted a charge against Oberländer and the battalion of murdering “310,000 Poles, Jews, and communists in the time between 30 June 1941 and 20 November 1943,” to the Federal State Administration of Justice Department in Ludwigsburg, West Germany. The VNN was a political organization founded in 1947 and based in West Germany. It frequently published lists of politicians who had worked with the National Socialists or were considered to have been involved in compromising activities. The Nachtigall battalion was described in the charge as a unit that had committed several war crimes, and Oberländer, together with other German officers of the battalion, as a person who was responsible for these crimes.[1775] The West German authorities began an investigation of this case and ended it in 1960. The investigators did not find any evidence that Oberländer or any other officers had issued an order to kill Jews, but they did not exclude the possibility that Ukrainian soldiers from the battalion had participated in the pogrom and committed war crimes.[1776] In reaction to these accusations Oberländer claimed at a conference on 30 September 1959 in Bonn that, although he was in Lviv between 1 and 7 July 1941 and was always moving about, he did not see any violence or excesses at all—which was obviously a lie.[1777]
The investigation in the BRD led to developments in the DDR. Albert Norden, professor at the Humboldt University and prominent member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), became Oberländer’s main opponent. At a conference in East Berlin on 22 October 1959, Norden presented some documents to the journalists and claimed that a trial against Oberländer was necessary because Oberländer was a “Nazi putschist against the Weimar Republic, one of the people most responsible for the preparation of the Second World War, and the hangman of Slavic intelligentsia and Jews.”[1778] Oberländer’s show trial in absentia in the DDR began on 20 April 1960, the seventy-first anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth, and ended on 29 April. The subject of Bandera was an important element of the DDR trial against the BRD minister. Bandera was referred to as the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists, and Oberländer as the person who supported the terrorist and murderous activities of Bandera’s people. Oberländer was accused of recruiting young Ukrainians for the Nachtigall battalion and ordering them to annihilate hundreds of thousands of innocent people.[1779]
Because Bandera died in the middle of the campaign against Oberländer, the Eastern bloc politicians used his death to support the theory that Oberländer, in cooperation with Gehlen, had killed the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists because he could have revealed more incriminating facts about the minister. Immediately after Bandera’s assassination, cartoons depicting Bandera, Gehlen, and Oberländer appeared in the newspapers. The most popular cartoon showed Oberländer standing and weeping, close to a coffin containing Bandera’s corpse. The caption said: “He was such a good man. It is a great pity that he knew too much about me.”[1780]
The lavish measures of the propaganda apparatus of the various republics and satellite states of the Soviet Union did not influence the investigation and trial of Stashyns’kyi. The trial for the murder of Rebet and Bandera took place in the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) in Karlsruhe from 8 to 15 October 1962. The verdict was announced on 19 October. During the trial, Stashyns’kyi explained in detail how he came to work for the KGB, how he killed Rebet and Bandera, how he met Inge Pohl, and how his attitude toward the KGB and his criminal deeds had changed. The psychologist Joachim Rauch certified that Stashyns’kyi was accountable for his actions and explained the change in Stashyns’kyi’s attitude. The defendant’s version of the assassination was confirmed by experts. The judges believed Stashyns’kyi and his narrative, parts of which the defendant might have polished slightly, in order not to incriminate himself even more.[1781]
Acting on behalf of Daria Rebet, Dr. Mira appealed for a mild sentence for Stashyns’kyi. He stressed that Mrs. Rebet did not hold a grudge against Stashyns’kyi and that she considered that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Kommunisticheskaia Partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza, KPSS) was responsible for the murder of Lev Rebet.[1782] Daria Rebet spoke in a similar tone. She stressed that she could not blame Stashyns’kyi but only the “Soviet system.”[1783] Natalia Bandera, on behalf of her absent mother, began her speech with the claim that “almost the whole family of my deceased father and my mother died at the hands of enemies.” She talked about her own suffering and the suffering of her family and stressed that her father “was a deeply religious man” who “died for God and an independent, free Ukraine—for the freedom of the whole world.”[1784] Before Iaroslava Bandera’s lawyer began his speech, the American politician Charles J. Kersten, whom the Bandera family had asked to speak, encouraged the judge to call the Soviet government to account. He stressed that this was the wish of Iaroslava Bandera.[1785] Like Natalia Bandera, Dr. Iaroslav Padokh, the attorney for Iaroslava Bandera, appealed to God and claimed that “Bandera’s and Rebet’s death and this unbelievable trial, conducted in front of the highest court of Germany … helps not only the Ukrainian people but all freedom-loving nations to achieve victory in their hard struggle against violence.”[1786]
Stashyns’kyi’s lawyer, Dr. Helmut Seydel, argued that “the defendant is not the doer of the crime but only the helper of the perpetrator” and that “he was only an instrument of the KGB.”[1787] The judge, Heinrich Jagusch, agreed with this explanation. He stated that “the defendant was in both cases [Rebet’s and Bandera’s] not the murderer, although he himself conducted the acts of murder, but only an instrument, a helper.” That Stashyns’kyi admitted his guilt and claimed to regret it was taken into consideration, and he was sentenced to only eight years imprisonment, in which the time already spent in prison was included.[1788]
The tribunal’s decision implied that the real murderer was not Stashyns’kyi but his superiors. The judge mentioned Shelepin and Khrushchev but did not blame them personally. The tribunal gave Stashyns’kyi a mild sentence because it considered him a mere cog in the greater totalitarian Soviet system. The trial therefore appeared to be a political one; the Soviet leaders, not Stashyns’kyi, became its main defendants even if they were not in the court. Jagusch—in the spirit of the Cold War—compared the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany and Stashyns’kyi to Adolf Eichmann, whose trial in Jerusalem was taking place almost simultaneously.[1789] Jagusch’s rhetoric and the court’s sentence suggest that the impact of the Cold War on Stashyns’kyi’s trial was strong. In 1963 Inge Pohl and Stashyns’kyi’s defending lawyer Seydel pleaded for a reduction of the sentence or an early discharge.[1790] Stashyns’kyi was released on 31 December 1966, after serving two-thirds of his sentence.[1791] Bohdan and Inge’s relationship did not survive the turbulence; she divorced him.[1792]
Shelepin, head of the KGB, together with KGB personnel in Moscow, Kiev, and East Berlin, was deeply involved in the assassinations of Rebet and Bandera. Whether Khrushchev personally issued the order to assassinate Bandera cannot be proved, as long as the documents concerning the case remain classified. The same applies to several details concerning Stashyns’kyi’s defection and his fate after the trial. Yet the fact is that the KGB received the orders from the Central Committee of the KPSS. Khrushchev, the first secretary of the KPSS at the time of Rebet’s and Bandera’s deaths, did not hide his attitude toward anti-Soviet émigrés: “There are times when security services should physically eliminate the leaders of the counter-revolution in exile,” he remarked to Fidel Castro in May 1963.[1793]
The ZCh OUN was disappointed with the lenient sentence imposed on Stashyns’kyi for killing their Providnyk. Stets’ko and other Ukrainian nationalist émigrés used the trial to support their political campaign against the Soviet Union.[1794] During and after the Stashyns’kyi trial in Karlsruhe, the ZCh OUN’s conduct, however, did not differ greatly from that of the Central Committee of the KPSS. After Stashyns’kyi’s trial, the ZCh OUN organized a press conference on 10 October 1962, in order to contradict some aspects of Stashyns’kyi’s testimony. In particular they were concerned about the evidence relating to the OUN-UPA’s murder of Poles during the Second World War, which the defendant witnessed in his youth. The ZCh OUN leaders denied it and claimed that it was only “Stashyns’kyi’s false depiction of the struggle of the Ukrainian underground.”[1795]
The end of the Second World War made it necessary for the Ukrainian nationalists to falsify their own past in order to stay in Western countries and promote the struggle for the independence of Ukraine. The leadership of the OUN and UPA had already begun the process of whitewashing its past in late 1943 when it ordered the collection and destruction of documents that connected the leadership to the pogroms and other forms of ethnic violence. After the war the OUN émigrés began to deny the involvement of the OUN and UPA in the Holocaust, collaboration with the Nazis, the ethnic cleansing of the Poles, the fascistization of the movement, the plans to establish a fascist collaborationist state, and a number of other matters that cast a poor light on the movement. Instead they presented the OUN and UPA as an idealistic and heroic anti-German and anti-Soviet resistance movement. The Western intelligence services collaborated with OUN émigrés despite their knowledge about the crimes committed by their movement. The competition for the resources from the intelligence services and the ideological dissimilarities between the OUN émigrés caused another split in the organization.
The Second World War did not change Bandera’s far-right views, but the Providnyk adapted them to the realities of the Cold War in order to collaborate with the British and American intelligence services. He attempted to reintroduce a leader principle into the organization, which would make him once again the sole leader of the entire movement. Like other OUN members Bandera never condemned or even admitted the atrocities committed by the OUN and UPA during the Second World War. In his writings he did not mention Jews and Poles as the “enemies of the Ukrainian nation,” because they no longer lived in Ukraine in substantial numbers. Bandera was skeptical of democracy, defended Franco’s policies, and believed that only a far-right militaristic organization could liberate Ukraine and rule it in an appropriate way. Despite Franco’s invitations Bandera decided to stay in Munich where he established a center, at which he was protected by former Nazis such as Gerhard von Mende and American intelligence. He visited Ukrainian communities in several Western countries, but not the United States, whose consulate in Munich did not recommend a visa until it was too late for him to visit. His family life seems to have been harmonious although there is evidence to suggest that he mistreated his wife. He was obsessed with women and apparently tried to rape one victim. Soviet intelligence made several attempts to kidnap or assassinate him over the years, thereby affecting his life and also the well-being of his family. Bandera’s assassination came about during the campaign against Theodor Oberländer and caused much international speculation.