The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, ) was a Ukrainian ultranationalist and terrorist organization established in 1929 in Vienna, as a union between the Ukrainian Military Organization and smaller, mainly youth, radical nationalist right-wing groups. There is a contemporary organization claiming to be the same Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists still active in Ukraine. The OUN was the largest and one of the most important far-right Ukrainian organizations operating on the territory of the Second Polish Republic in the interwar period. Mostly active in the period preceding, during and the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the ideology of the OUN has been described as influenced by works of Dmytro Dontsov, from 1929 by Italian Fascism and from the autumn of 1930 by German Nazism. The OUN sought to infiltrate legal political parties, universities and other political structures and institutions. The organization relied on violence, terrorism and assassinations to accomplish its objective of an ethnically homogenous and totalitarian Ukrainian state. During the Second World War, in 1940, the OUN split into two parts. The older, more moderate members supported Andriy Melnyk and the OUN-M, while the younger and more radical members supported Stepan Bandera's OUN-B. After the start of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the OUN-B in the person of Yaroslav Stetsko declared an independent Ukrainian state on 30 June 1941 in occupied Lviv, while the region was under the control of Nazi Germany, pledging to work closely with Germany, which was presented as freeing Ukrainians from Soviet oppression. In response, the Nazi authorities suppressed the OUN leadership. OUN members, in the German serive, took an active part in the genocide of Jews in Ukraine and Poland. In October 1942 the OUN-B established the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). In 1943–1944, in an effort to prevent Polish efforts to re-establish pre-war borders, UPA combat units carried out large-scale ethnic cleansing against Polish people. Historians estimate that 50-130,000 Polish civilians were massacred in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. In the course of the war, with the approaching defeat of Nazi Germany, the OUN-B changed, at least in official statements, its political image. It moved away from fascist symbolism and totalitarianism toward democratic slogans. OUN's denials of its role in the Holocaust began in 1943 after it became obvious that Germany would lose the war. The whitewashing continued after the war, with OUN's propaganda describing its legacy as