Salvation of Bulgarian Jews

Bulgaria was an ally of Germany in the Axis bloc, and formally, Boris III was forced to comply with all the requirements of Adolf Hitler in order to receive further assistance and support from Germany. In Bulgaria, in the 1930s and 1940s, radical and anti-Semitic sentiments intensified; in the Bulgarian government, a significant proportion of the posts were held by supporters of radical parties. One of them, Prime Minister Bogdan Filov , signed the Law on the Protection of the Nation on October 8, 1940, restricting the rights of Jews ^[2] , and Minister of the Interior Alexander Belev was involved in the deportation of 11 thousand Jews from occupied Greek Thrace and Vardar Macedonia to Treblinka . On February 22, 1943, Belev concluded a secret agreement with the SS Haupsturm Fuhrer Theodor Danneker on the secret deportation of Jews from these regions, which would be carried out directly by Germany. On the night of March 3–4, 1943, the Jews of Greek Thrace, Eastern Macedonia, and Serbian Pirot were taken by train to Lom via the Danube, then sent along the Danube to Vienna, and from there sent to Treblinka. March 15, almost all of them were executed: about a dozen were saved from death ^[3] .

However, there was still a split in the Bulgarian government over the Jewish question: the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the intelligentsia condemned the persecution of Jews, and soon public opinion began to contradict the position of the government. In this regard, the efforts of the government in Bulgarian society began to intensify anti-Jewish propaganda ^{[2] [4]} . In January 1942, Germany announced at the Wannsee Conference plans for the final resolution of the Jewish question , which included the establishment of "death camps" and the extermination of all who were sent there. In June 1942, the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was formed in Bulgaria, which was headed by Minister of the Interior Belev on August 29, 1942. The commissariat promised the Germans to deliver 20 thousand Jews from the territory of Thrace and Macedonia and confiscate all their property, but according to the results of the inspections, Bulgarian officials did not find a sufficient number of Jews and were forced to arrest 8 thousand Jews living in the territory of pre-war Bulgaria. This created the prerequisites for the mass deportation of Jews to Germany, starting in March 1943 ^[5] .

The Belev law on the protection of the nation, adopted by the National Assembly in January 1941, served as a pretext for the escalation of anti-Jewish politics. Since November of this year, mass arrests of Jews began to prepare for their deportation to Germany, in response to which religious and cultural figures bombarded the Bulgarian government with open letters and protest statements. After much debate, Boris III was forced to cancel the decision to deport Jews. The initiator of salvation was Dimitar Peshev, support from the church was provided by Metropolitan Kirill and Stefan ^[6] .

Many Bulgarian politicians initially supported anti-Jewish laws. Peshev advocated the preservation of laws, but against the deportation of Jews to Germany. The Bulgarian government did not provide protection to Jews in the temporarily occupied territory of Macedonia and Thrace, therefore, no one spoke out against Belev’s actions to expel Jews from Macedonia and Thrace to Treblinka until it became known that Belev decided to send 20 thousand native Bulgarian Jews to Germany. Boris III also officially did not say anything about protecting the Jewish population. Nevertheless, protests across the country involving ordinary citizens who blocked the "Holocaust trains" while laying on the rails forced Boris III to stop deportation. Adolf Eichmann and Adolf Hitler received an official response from Boris III that Bulgaria needed Jewish workers for the construction of railways and other infrastructure: Boris III did formally include Jews in special construction detachments ^[7] .

In 2013, in memory of the rescue of Jews, a section of a street near the Bulgarian Embassy in the USA was renamed to “Dimitar Peshev Plaza” ^[8] . March 10, 2016 was declared Holocaust Remembrance Day in Bulgaria, the day of the 73rd anniversary of the decision to save the Jews ^[9] .

• White buses
• Salvation of Danish Jews

• Michael Bar Zohar. Beyond Hitler's Grasp. The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria's Jews. - Holbrook: Adams Media Corporation, 1998.
• Christo Boyadjieff. Saving the Bulgarian Jews. - Ottawa: Free Bulgarian Center, 1989.
• Frederick B. Chary. The Bulgarian Jews and the final solution, 1940-1944. - University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972.
• David Cohen. Recover. - Sofia: Shalom, 1995.
• Gabriele Nissim. L'uomo che fermo Hitler. - Milan: Mondadori, 1998.
• Haim Oliver. We Were Saved: How the Jews in Bulgaria Were Kept from the Death Camps. - Sofia: Sofia Press, 1978.
• Tzvetan Todorov. The Fragility of Goodness. Why Bulgaria's Jews Survived the Holocaust. - London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001.

• Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
• Bulgarian Jewish Organization “Shalom” (Bulgarian)