August 28: King Boris and the Jews

King Boris III of Bulgaria died on this date in 1943 in Sofia, two days after returning from meeting with his Nazi allies in Berlin. Despite its alliance with the Axis powers, Bulgaria had protected its 48,000 Jewish citizens from deportation to the Nazi death camps, and some suspected that the king had been poisoned by the Nazis in revenge. Bulgaria did hand over for destruction at least 11,000 Macedonian and Thracian Jews from territories it had annexed, and Bulgarian Jews were subjected to racist laws, prohibitions, and extensive forced labor, with 20,000 Jews forced out of Sofia into the provinces. Plans to hand them over to the Nazis in the spring of 1943, however, met with significant enough protest that King Boris cancelled them. By the war’s end, the Bulgarian Jewish population remained at 48,000 -- but within a few years of Israel’s establishment in 1948, 35,000 of them emigrated there. In January 1973, Yad Vashem awarded the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” to Dmitar Peshev, a prominent Bulgarian politician who had mobilized parliamentarians to oppose the deportation of Jews and generated the critical public protest.

“The peasants -- the largest single element of the population -- were by and large not anti-Semitic; Jews were more likely to be innkeepers than rent collectors . . . There were also a few small fascist groups, but they did not find fertile soil even when they received German backing for their efforts; indeed, they tended to be closer to the Italian than to the German model, and again generally were not anti-Semitic.” --Holocaust Education & Archive Research