The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  10

  DEAD ON ARRIVAL

  In her third-floor apartment at Kreittmayrstrasse 7, Yaroslava Bandera, known to her neighbors as Frau Popel, was waiting for her husband to come home for his usual lunch. When she heard the sound of his car in the courtyard, she looked down from the balcony, saw the Opel Kapitan in front of the garage, and went to open the door to the apartment. Mrs. Bandera, a forty-two-year-old housewife and mother of three children, was bracing herself for what might be a highly unpleasant continuation of the fight they had begun that morning. They had argued about a woman.

  For years she had suspected him of infidelity and fought it every way she could. According to Bandera’s bodyguards, she obsessively called him at work, checking to see if he was in his office or had already left for home. She got rid of the maids who helped run the household because she believed that he was trying to seduce them. Eventually she banned all female guests at home and only barely tolerated male guests, as her husband would volunteer to drive them home and then disappear for hours. However, many who knew Mrs. Bandera believed that she loved her husband dearly, despite the unhappiness in her marriage.

  Stepan Bandera avoided being at home on weekdays. He would come to work earlier than anyone else and leave the office last, often after 10:00 p.m. It was true that he had a soft spot for women, especially younger ones. His friends and colleagues knew that for years he had been meeting with a woman more than ten years his junior, and that he had not broken off the liaison even after she married. Now Mrs. Bandera suspected him of trying to seduce a young maid. A trained nurse, the maid looked after the three children of the Weiner family, who lived on the first floor of the apartment building. Those who knew Stepan Bandera well believed that he was smitten—he took every opportunity to meet with the maid, either in front of the building or as she entered or exited the apartment where she worked. Mrs. Bandera sensed the danger and shot the young woman dirty looks every time she saw her in the building. She also demanded an explanation from her husband. That was what they had been arguing about that morning. Stepan Bandera was distressed and left the apartment earlier than usual. The last words he heard from his wife were: “Just wait until you come back for lunch, and I’ll let you have the rest of my ‘prayer.’”

  Mrs. Bandera was waiting expectantly for her husband to climb the stairs to their apartment and continue their exchange. But when she opened the door, she heard a terrible scream from below and the voice of her first-floor neighbor, Mrs. Chaya Gamse: “My God!” Chaya and her husband, Melach, were survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and in poor health. Mrs. Bandera thought that something might have happened to one of them. Then she saw Herr Gamse coming upstairs and asked whether he needed to use her telephone, but he asked her instead to come down: her husband was lying on the first-floor landing. She got the keys to her apartment and ran downstairs. There, lying between the elevator door and the entrance to the Weiner apartment, was her husband. There was blood coming from his mouth, nose, and ears, but he was alive, able to open and close his eyes. A hoarse sound was coming from his throat.

  Magdalena Winklmann, the maid from the Weiners’ apartment, with whom Mrs. Bandera believed her husband was having an affair, was next to him, cleaning blood from his face, and it seemed that he was tightly holding her hand in his. There were other people around, including Herr and Frau Gamse, whose apartment was across the hall from the Weiners’. The Gamses had been getting ready to eat lunch when they had heard the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs, and then something resembling a scream. Frau Gamse was the first to come out of her apartment and see the man they knew as Stefan Popel lying on the floor. Together with Magdalena, who had emerged from the Weiners’ apartment, she placed Bandera on his side so that he would not choke on the blood coming from his mouth. Frau Gamse had learned that technique in the concentration camps.

  Mrs. Bandera screamed. She sat on the floor, took her husband’s head in her hands, and tapped it, speaking to him in Ukrainian: “Stepan, what happened? Stepan, say what happened.” Herr Gamse had already called for an ambulance, which arrived a few minutes later. Mrs. Bandera suspected a stroke. She called her husband’s office to let his aides on Zeppelinstrasse know that there had been an accident: her husband had fallen on the stairs and needed medical attention. She was obviously under extreme stress. The man who took her phone call remembered a few days later that “she talked without making any sense. All I could understand was something about a fall, about lying on the steps.” He promised to come right away. Mrs. Bandera accompanied her husband to the hospital on Lazarettstrasse, which was only minutes away.1

  Stepan Bandera’s associates from Zeppelinstrasse arrived when the ambulance had already left. They talked to Bandera’s teenage daughter, who told them that her father had apparently had a stroke. They wanted to know details and then talked to the Gamses. They could see blood on the floor near the entrance and by the elevator. They also saw the bag of tomatoes that Bandera had been carrying when he was assassinated, which he seemed to have placed carefully on the floor before he fell. Once Bandera’s visibly distressed associates had left the building, Frau Gamse and Magdalena Winklmann returned to the ground-floor platform with a broom, mop, and bucket of water. They thoroughly cleaned the floor. A few minutes later, there was no sign that anything had happened. The bag of tomatoes was taken away by Herr Gamse.2

  Stepan Bandera was pronounced dead on arrival. The doctor on duty inspected the body and agreed that the cause of death was a stroke. Bandera’s fall on the stairs had bruised his skull, causing the bleeding from his nose, mouth, and ears. There was no sign of foul play and no reason to suspect anything but an unfortunate incident. Bandera’s associates, however, seemed to think differently. One of them asked whether Bandera could still be revived, perhaps by injections or by administering oxygen. After receiving a negative answer, the associate asked whether the doctor thought the accidental-looking death might be an assassination. The doctor did not think so: stairs were a tricky thing, and a trip and fall that took place as the result of a stroke could easily be fatal. Bandera’s associates had no choice but to accept the conclusions of the doctor who signed the death certificate: it had been a stroke.3

  Bandera’s associates returned to their headquarters and began their own investigation of what had happened that day. The morning of October 15 at Zeppelinstrasse 67, the building occupied by numerous branches of Bandera’s covert organization, had begun like any other. Stepan Bandera had arrived sometime after 8:00 a.m. in the company of his bodyguard, Vasyl Ninovsky. He had proceeded to his office while Ninovsky had gone to the print shop of the organization’s newspaper Shliakh peremohy (The Way to Victory), located on the first floor of the building.

  Bandera’s aides and office employees had begun to arrive at about 9:00 a.m. Bandera had been in meetings that morning with three of his associates, all of whom were later investigated by police and the Bandera organization’s internal security service. Around 11:30 a.m., Bandera had left his office and descended one floor to the newspaper offices, where his old acquaintance Eugenia, known to the German authorities as Eugenia Mak, had her work station. He asked whether she would like to accompany him to the market to buy some fruit, but she declined. “She refused three times, stating that she wasn’t in the mood,” recalled the witnesses. “And that she didn’t need anything.” According to the same report, “Bandera insisted, stating that she should at least go to keep him company. She agreed to go only after other employees kept urging her.”

  They began to leave for the ground floor, but Bandera suddenly remembered that he had left his beret in his office. After a moment’s hesitation, he told Eugenia that he would get it after lunch. Bandera usually lunched at home, and he decided to pick up some fruit and vegetables at Munich’s famous market, the Grossmarkthalle. Known to his circle as a “hands-on” head of his household, Bandera loved to run errands; he personally bought food products for his family, and he enjoyed eating well. His other pas
sion was his car, which he took care of personally, spending hours keeping it clean and running properly. He would fix minor engine problems himself instead of going to a mechanic. Bandera and Eugenia left the building, got into Bandera’s dark blue Opel Kapitan, and drove off to the Grossmarkthalle, located southwest of Zeppelinstrasse on the other side of the Isar River.

  At the market, Bandera purchased some grapes and plums, as well as tomatoes, apparently for pickling. Their shopping done, the two put their bags in Bandera’s car and drove back to Zeppelinstrasse. He dropped Eugenia not far from the office building. She wanted to take the bag of walnuts she had bought at the market, but Bandera promised to bring them to her after lunch—they were buried under his own purchases in the trunk of the car. He was in a hurry. “Wait a moment. I’ll tell Vasyl Ninovsky to escort you home,” suggested Eugenia, referring to Bandera’s bodyguard. But Bandera, who was known for not following his security team’s instructions, would not listen. “By the time Ninovsky comes down, I’ll be home,” he told his secretary. “I’ll be seeing you.” Bandera’s associates could learn no more about their leader’s last hours.4

  It was a matter of routine rather than any particular suspicion about the cause of death that made the medical personnel call the Munich Kripo (Kriminalpolizei), a police unit responsible for criminal investigations. While examining the body, the doctor had found a gunbelt under Bandera’s right arm containing a Walther 765 PKK, a relatively small pistol, easy to conceal, originally designed for the German police force. It was unusual—indeed, illegal—to carry a gun in Germany, and the medical personnel were under instructions to report every such case to the authorities. The police originally were not terribly interested: the medical examination had shown no sign of violent death. Eventually it was decided that Bandera’s body would be taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University for an autopsy. The postmortem was scheduled for the following day, so the police investigation would have to wait until then. The two detectives assigned to the case, Hermann Schmidt and Oberkommissar Adrian Fuchs, felt no reason to rush.

  The postmortem investigation took place on Friday, October 16. It was conducted by a group of doctors, who were led by the director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, Professor Wolfgang Laves, a balding, bespectacled sixty-year-old medical doctor and scientist who had headed the institute since 1945. Laves was assisted by a younger colleague, Dr. Wolfgang Spann, a physician who later conducted the postmortem examination of Hitler’s right-hand man Rudolf Hess. Bandera’s autopsy lasted two hours. Its findings took the police by surprise. The head of the homicide unit, Hermann Schmidt, returned to police headquarters visibly shocked and pale. When questioned by journalists, he responded brusquely, “You will not learn anything from me!” He then called in his staff and phoned the Bavarian branch of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz). He spent considerable time on the phone with representatives of the office, which was also in charge of West German counterintellegence. The news that Schmidt did not want to share with the journalists made the protectors of the West German constitution very concerned.

  With Hermann Schmidt silent, the journalists turned for comment to the head of the city police, Anton Heigel. They did not get very far. Heigel told them: “I have not yet received any report, and the whole matter does not interest me at all.” The police chief’s comment was disappointing but also intriguing. The only statement that the police had issued so far, before the results of the autopsy were released, had confirmed what journalists already knew from their own sources: Stefan Popel was not the man he claimed to be. “Death resulting from an unfortunate accident,” read the press release. “About lunchtime on 15 October 1959 the 50-year-old stateless journalist Stefan Popel, called Bandera, fell down the stairwell of his residence in the western part of the city. He died of his wounds while being taken to hospital. An investigation has begun into the course of the unfortunate accident.”

  The name “Bandera” was first mentioned in connection with Popel at about 10:00 p.m. on October 15, when the Munich-based Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Broadcasting) transmitted the following bulletin: “One of the leaders of the Ukrainian émigrés, the 50-year-old Stepan Bandera, lost his life in Munich today. It is said that he suffered such an unfortunate fall on the stairs of his building that he died while being taken to hospital. The police still do not know anything about the precise circumstances of his death.” The announcer concluded with the following statement on Bandera’s background: “As a Ukrainian nationalist, before and during the Second World War he was incarcerated in Polish and German prisons or concentration camps.” Bandera, whom many knew by name but had never seen in person, was one of the most mysterious and reclusive leaders of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian movement in the West. The media knew that his organization had influence over tens of thousands of recent émigrés in Germany, Britain, the United States, Canada, and several other countries.

  The journalists hounding the police for answers had good reason to be impatient—the latter were clearly hiding something from the press. The Munich tabloid Abendzeitung explained the flurry of media interest: “Munich has become a playground for agents, spies, and emigrants, mainly from the East. The unwitting resident generally knows nothing about the activity of these people from the shadows, which is shrouded in secrecy. Only once in a while is the curtain raised on such sinister doings—when a crime is committed against one of those to whom the Federal Republic has granted political asylum.” The weekend issues of other Munich newspapers would also publish stories about Bandera’s mysterious death, but no conclusive evidence on whether it was anything more than a stroke and an accident.5

  On Monday, October 19, the Munich Kripo homicide unit issued a press release. It quickly became apparent why Hermann Schmidt, the head of the unit, had looked so harried and secretive the previous Friday. The release stated that the autopsy of Stepan Bandera, which had begun on Friday, had continued into Saturday. “The investigation carried out on October 17 at the Institute of Forensic Medicine to establish the cause of death revealed that Bandera died of cyanide poisoning,” detailed the report. “The homicide commission is now investigating whether this was a suicide or a criminal act.”

  On Friday, Professor Laves’s young assistant Wolfgang Spann had detected a faint smell of almonds from the corpse’s dissected brain. Further investigation had found traces of cyanide in the stomach—the result of both barrels of the weapon being fired simultaneously. There were no remains of a capsule, and there was not enough residual cyanide to kill a person, but there was no doubt that cyanide was involved and had somehow entered the deceased man’s stomach. The police decided to release the news of cyanide poisoning without going into much detail. The results of a full investigation into the chemical particles found in Bandera’s stomach would not be forthcoming until much later. The news was picked up and broadcast the same day by Reuters and other international news agencies. German newspapers published the news on October 20, the day of Bandera’s funeral.6

  The news that Stepan Bandera had died of poison came as a shock not only to those who assumed that he had died of natural causes but also to those among his entourage who believed that he had been assassinated. Cyanide poisoning with no indication of violence pointed to suicide rather than murder, but Bandera’s colleagues preferred to paint him as a martyr for the cause rather than a depressed and disillusioned individual who, for whatever reason, had taken his own life. Yet the latter explanation was the one gaining traction among the medical doctors who conducted the autopsy and the police investigators. Professor Laves had little doubt about it. He assured Frau Popel, who was now being called Frau Bandera, and her husband’s associates that he had significant experience with suicides of “freedom fighters,” as he had conducted autopsies of seven or eight such individuals. “Freedom fighters,” he argued, were under constant pressure, and they often were inclined to choose death over life.
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br />   Professor Laves had considerable experience indeed, although most of it concerned suicides in general, not necessarily those of “freedom fighters.” His most famous former patient, Adolf Hitler, had committed suicide back in April 1945. In his conversations with Mrs. Bandera, Professor Laves explained to the distressed widow that for someone like her husband, suicide was little more than an occupational hazard. A “freedom fighter” might voluntarily choose to kill himself when faced with overwhelming pressure from an enemy intent on breaking him psychologically, or blackmailing him and threatening his family and friends. Any or all of these scenarios might have led Stepan Bandera to commit suicide by swallowing cyanide.

  Laves concluded that the poison in Bandera’s stomach had been orally ingested no more than three hours before his death. When Frau Bandera and her husband’s associates continued to argue that suicide was hardly possible, given the character of the deceased, Dr. Laves lost his temper. “Then who killed him? A ghost?” he asked his interlocutors, not without condescension. The case seemed closed.7

  11

  FUNERAL

  Stepan Bandera’s interment was expected to be attended by dozens, if not hundreds, of “freedom fighters” from all over the world, and the Munich police, along with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, accordingly took extra precautions to guard the funeral procession and the funeral itself. They feared possible assassination attempts by the communist authorities behind the Iron Curtain from whose embrace the freedom fighters were trying to liberate their nations.