Expose the 'Bandera Complex'

“The agenda of our conference is: education against mass manipulation and historical lies!”—Stefan Huth, chief-editor of junge Welt

Since the “Euromaidan” of 2014, and the Russian invasion of 2022, Ukrainian fascists have demonstrated their power and received an enormous increase in prestige. In order to expose the political roots of the cult surrounding the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera which undergirds the growth of far-right and neo-Nazi movements in Ukraine that stand in the way of negotiations to end the war, the daily newspaper junge Welt and cultural magazine Melodie & Rhythmus will hold a day-long conference on “The Bandera Complex: Ukrainian fascism – the history, function, networks” on October 29 in Berlin.

This is an expensive event, which will be live-streamed and have professional, simultaneous German-English translation to reach an international audience. In order to cover extra costs and help make this conference as successful as possible, the “Bandera Lobby Blog” has organized this fundraiser.

Moss Robeson, the creator of the Bandera Lobby Blog, will be one of two speakers traveling from the United States, and another will be Russ Bellant, author of the groundbreaking 1989 book, “Old Nazis, New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic fascist networks and their effect on U.S. cold war politics.” Robeson and Bellant have spent years researching the OUN-B, or Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which collaborated with Nazi Germany and helped to perpetrate the Holocaust in Ukraine. Many people know about contemporary extreme-right Ukrainian groups like Azov, Right Sector, and C14, but the continued existence of OUN-B as an international, clandestine far-right network is a well-kept open secret. As one OUN-B member explained to Russ Bellant in the 1980s, “You have to understand. We are an underground organization. We have spent years quietly penetrating positions of influence.”