As shown in many previous posts, NATO’s Nazis in Ukraine openly express their admiration for Hitler and his racist National Socialist Third Reich; they prominently display Nazi iconography on their flags, banners and uniforms.

But what did the German Nazis think of Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and his extremists?

The short answer: they viewed Ukrainians as untermenschen (subhuman) being Slavic and were slated for extermination and enslavement in Generalplan Ost.

But manpower issues on the Eastern Front required Nazi Germany to use locals for various tasks.

Ukrainian women dressed in national costumes salute German high command during a parade in Stanislaviv in October 1941.

Nationalists in western Ukraine hoped that their efforts would enable them to re-establish an independent state later on. For example, on the eve of Operation’ Barbarossa, as many as 4,000 Ukrainians, operating under Wehrmacht orders, sought to cause disruption behind Soviet lines. After the capture of Lwow, a highly-contentious and strategically important city with a significant Ukrainian minority, OUN leaders proclaimed a new Ukrainian State on 30 June 1941, and encouraged loyalty to the new regime in the hope that the Germans would support it. In 1939, during the German-Polish War, the OUN was “a faithful German auxiliary”.

Despite an initial warm reaction to the idea of an independent Ukraine (see Ukrainian national government (1941)), the Nazi administration had other ideas, particularly the Lebensraum programme and the total ‘Aryanisation‘ of the population. It played the Slavic nations against one another. OUN initially carried out attacks on Polish villages to try to exterminate Polish populations or expel Polish enclaves from what the OUN fighters perceived as Ukrainian territory. This culminated in the mass killings of Polish families in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.

According to Timothy Snyder, “something that is never said, because it’s inconvenient for precisely everyone, is that more Ukrainian Communists collaborated with the Germans, than did Ukrainian nationalists.” Snyder also points out that very many of those who collaborated with the German occupation also collaborated with the Soviet policies in the 1930s.

he Germans disapproved of the proclamation and, for his refusal to rescind the decree, fascist leader Stepan Bandera was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in January 1942. He was released in September 1944 by the Germans in the hope that he could fight the Soviet advance. Bandera negotiated with the Nazis to create the Ukrainian National Army and the Ukrainian National Committee in March 1945. After the war, Bandera settled with his family in West Germany. In 1959, Bandera was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich.

(summarised from Wikipedia)