Bulgaria

Bulgaria is one of the few countries in occupied Europe whose native Jewish population survived the war almost intact. Around 48,000 Bulgarian Jews lived through the war on Bulgarian soil. The Bulgarian government, despite being a German ally and an active participant in the war on the Axis side, refused to deport its own Jews to the death camps. The same government did, however, authorise the deportation of around 11,000 Jews from territories Bulgaria had occupied in Greece and Yugoslavia. Almost all of those were murdered. The Bulgarian record is one of the moral complexities of the Holocaust: a country that saved most of its own Jews and handed over almost all of the Jews of the territories it had taken from others.

The community

Bulgarian Jewry was small and old. Around 48,000 Jews lived in Bulgaria in 1939, around 0.8 per cent of the total population. Most were Sephardic, descended from Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 who had settled in the Ottoman Empire. They spoke Ladino, the Sephardic language. They were concentrated in Sofia, Plovdiv and the Black Sea coast. They were urban, middle-class, and well integrated. Antisemitism was a marginal political force in pre-war Bulgaria.

The German alliance

Bulgaria entered the war on the German side in March 1941, partly because of historical ties with Germany and partly because Germany offered Bulgaria territorial gains at the expense of Greece and Yugoslavia. Bulgaria was given control of Macedonian and western Thracian territory that had been part of Yugoslavia and Greece between the wars. The Bulgarian government, under Prime Minister Bogdan Filov and King Boris III, signed up for the alliance and the territorial expansion but did not commit Bulgarian troops to combat outside the immediate area.

Bulgarian antisemitic legislation followed in late 1940 and 1941. Jews were excluded from the professions, required to register, and had property restrictions imposed. The legislation was modelled on the Nuremberg Laws but was applied with what Bulgarian Jews later remembered as a notable lack of administrative enthusiasm. Many of the regulations were enforced loosely or not at all by local officials.

The deportation that did not happen

In early 1943 the Bulgarian government signed an agreement with Adolf Eichmann’s representative Theodor Dannecker for the deportation of around 20,000 Jews. The agreement specified 6,000 from the newly Bulgarian-occupied territories and 14,000 from Bulgaria proper. The deportations of the 11,000 Jews of the occupied territories proceeded in March 1943: Macedonian Jews from Skopje, Bitola and elsewhere, plus Thracian Jews, were rounded up by Bulgarian authorities and handed over to the SS at the Bulgarian border. They were taken to Treblinka and almost all were murdered.

The deportation of the 14,000 Bulgarian Jews never happened. The story of why involves several actors. Dimitar Peshev, the Vice-President of the Bulgarian Parliament, learned of the planned deportations and led a parliamentary protest, with 43 deputies signing a letter to Filov demanding the cancellation. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, with the active leadership of Metropolitan Stefan of Sofia and Metropolitan Kiril of Plovdiv, threatened to lay down on the railway tracks. The Bulgarian intelligentsia, including writers and lawyers, signed petitions. Public opposition built rapidly across the country.

King Boris III, faced with a domestic political crisis, withdrew authorisation for the deportation of the Bulgarian Jews. The German embassy was furious. Boris attempted to compromise by ordering Bulgarian Jews out of Sofia and into smaller towns, where they were held under restrictions but not handed over. Boris died in unclear circumstances in August 1943, possibly poisoned. His successor, the regency under Prince Cyril, did not reverse the position. The Bulgarian Jews remained in the country under increasing restrictions but undeported. By September 1944, when the Soviet Army crossed into Bulgaria and the country switched sides, the deportations had become effectively impossible.

The post-war record

Around 90 per cent of Bulgarian Jews emigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1951, partly because of pressure from the new communist government and partly because they wanted to. The Bulgarian community is small today, around 2,000 to 5,000 people. The Bulgarian state has formally honoured the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews and has acknowledged the deportation of the Macedonian and Thracian Jews. Dimitar Peshev was honoured by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 1973. The two metropolitans of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church were similarly honoured. King Boris III is a more contested figure, with some historians treating him as a hero and others as a reluctant collaborator who was overtaken by events.

Why the difference

The Bulgarian case is sometimes invoked to argue that resistance to the deportations was always possible, and that the countries that did deport their Jews chose to. The argument oversimplifies. Bulgaria had several specific advantages: a small Jewish community well integrated into urban Bulgarian society, a domestic political tradition not deeply infected with antisemitism, an Orthodox church willing to take a public stand, and a German ally that was not directly occupying Bulgarian territory. Other countries lacked some or all of these conditions. But the Bulgarian case does show that local political and religious leadership, when it acted decisively, could make the difference between deportation and survival. The Bulgarian Jews lived because their countrymen, when it came to it, refused.

See also

Sources

  • Frederick Chary, The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution 1940-1944, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972
  • Michael Bar-Zohar, Beyond Hitler’s Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews, Adams Media, 1998
  • Tzvetan Todorov, The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust, Princeton University Press, 2001
  • USHMM: Bulgaria