Ms. Rogatchi… continues her campaign to smear our family name...

Dear TBT,

Ms. Rogatchi… continues her campaign to smear our family name while ignoring the inconvenient facts I have calmly pointed out to her. In her letter in the March 4 issue of The Baltic Times she refers to our family as the family of a Nazi collaborator.  
Stepan Bandera spent most of WWII (33 months) in the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp. Stepan Bandera’s two brothers – Oleksa and Vasyl – were killed in Auschwitz. Their tattoo numbers were 51020 and 49271, respectively. Our family defended the Bandera name before the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada in 1985.

Furthermore, Ms. Rogatchi’s assertion that [Stepan Bandera] was “the butcher of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews, Hungarians, Byelorussians and Russians” is sadly misinformed.  If she cannot come up with any facts to back up her claims that Stepan Bandera was a mass murderer and butcher of civilians, I would kindly ask that you refrain from printing her defamatory materials.  

I should point out that our family lawyer before Canada’s Commission of Inquiry in War Criminals (called the Deschenes Commission) in 1985 was Alex Epstein, a prominent Canadian Jewish lawyer who defended the Bandera name. In a separate e-mail I will send you the full text of a 2004 article written by Herbert Romerstein, a veteran Jewish American policymaker entitled “Divide and Conquer: The KGB disinformation campaign against Ukrainians and Jews.” Therein you will find many interesting facts - including those that pertain to the Baltic States - and a section called “Active measures against Ukrainian leader Stephan Bandera.” It’s probably just coincidence, but Ms. Rogatchi’s writings seem to have been predicted by Mr. Romerstein’s article written six years ago...  

Finally, my own investigation into the European Parliament’s resolution she presents with her “pleasure” was that the point about Bandera was included at the very last moment on the insistence of a Polish nationalist MEP. Some MEPs now regret voting for it. The story of this resolution is far from over as its implications go far beyond the issue of Bandera’s wartime record.  
If Stepan Bandera was even guilty of half the crimes you accuse him of then he would have been swinging from the gallows at Nuremberg sixty-five years ago. Your information is based on Soviet propaganda that accompanied Bandera’s assassination by the KGB in 1959.

Sincerely,
Stephen Bandera
Grandson of Stepan Bandera
Toronto, Canada