… AND THE JEWS IN BULGARIAN-OCCUPIED GREEK AND YUGOSLAV TERRITORIES DURING WORLD WAR TWO
"Bulgaria's policy towards the Jews during World War Two was long perceived as resembling the two faces of Janus. Indeed, Jews were not deported from what was known as the "old" kingdom, i.e., inside the borders as they stood before April 1941. Although they were subjected to a wide range of anti-Jewish measures, roughly 48,000 Jews holding Bulgarian citizenship survived the war. 1 An estimated 200 to 300 Jews successfully avoided deportation in Vardar Macedonia, most by escaping to Albania and/or joining the resistance. Only approximately 200 Jews from Western Thrace, most of whom were foreign citizens, were able to avoid being deported. 2
Rival explanations for the differences in fate of Jews in the "old" and "new" kingdoms lie at the heart of historiographical and memorial controversies in recent decades in Bulgaria and worldwide. Despite increasing internal and international pressure, no Bulgarian political leader to this day has officially accepted responsibility for the arrests and deportations of Jews during World War Two in territories under Bulgarian occupation. Several different debates are enmeshed with each other regarding this point. First, they involve opposing views about Bulgarian sovereignty within the occupied zones. On March 1, 1941, Bulgaria, an irredentist power 3 that had been defeated in the First World War and whose territory was reduced under the Treaty of Neuilly (1919), had joined the Tripartite Pact. Bulgaria had allowed German troops to cross Bulgarian territory in their assault against the Yugoslav and Greek Kingdoms. At a summit meeting on April 17, 1941 between King Boris III, Hitler, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Ciano, Bulgaria was granted responsibility for administering most of Vardar Macedonia (a portion of the banovina of Vardar that was created in 1929, a province of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), Northern Greece (i.e., Western Thrace 4) and the Serbian region of Pirot (part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). Unlike Southern Dobrudža, whose return to Bulgaria by Romania in September 1940 was subject to the signing of an international treaty, the Treaty of Craiova, the final status of Western Thrace and Pirot was supposed to be determined at the end of the war. From April 1941 to September-October 1944, however, these regions were under Bulgarian military and administrative rule…"
Main page
link
Amicalement
Armand
