Word: bandera
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...death of Ukrainian Nationalist Leader Stefan Bandera in Munich was officially listed as a suicide. Bandera, apparently, had a sudden seizure, fell and broke his neck. An autopsy revealed traces of cyanide, which Munich police surmised had been self-administered, causing the fall. But last week the case was reopened by the confession of the man responsible for Bandera's "suicide"-a former Russian secret-police agent named Bogdan Nikolaevich Stachinsky...
...your Nov. 2 edition you describe the deceased Ukrainian leader Stefan Bandera as dedicated to the "lost cause" of Ukrainian independence. May I respectfully point out that such a cause cannot be considered lost while there remain men-and there are many -willing to follow his example in the struggle for a free and independent Ukrainian nation...
Released by Hitler in 1944 in the hope that he would rouse the Ukrainian populace to fight the advancing Russians, Bandera set up headquarters in Berlin, while Ukrainian partisans once again fought both the Wehrmacht and the Red army in a vain effort to carve a free Ukraine out of the confusion at war's end. To avoid Russian agents, he fled to West Germany in 1945, but shuttled back and forth in various disguises between Munich and the Ukraine, bringing encouragement and funds to the partisan army, which fought on for four more years before being finally subdued...
After that, using the name Stefan Popel, Bandera lived with his wife and three children in Munich, protected constantly by bodyguards. Fortnight ago. leaving his modest apartment, he went back upstairs for something he had forgotten, leaving his bodyguard waiting in the street. A moment later there was a cry, and neighbors found him lying with a broken neck on the stair landing. An autopsy disclosed the real cause of death: cyanide...
Though Munich police said the circumstantial evidence indicated suicide, Bandera's followers were convinced that he had been tricked or overpowered into taking the cyanide, grimly printed in the funeral announcement: "Died a hero's death at the Bolshevists' hands." And last week in Munich's Waldfriedhof, as 1,500 Eastern European exiles watched silently, Bandera's coffin, draped with the blue-and-yellow banner of Ukrainian independence, was lowered into a simple grave hallowed by an urn full of Ukrainian soil...