Bulgaria after the death of Tsar Boris III

At the beginning of September 1943 Bulgaria was bidding farewell to Tsar Boris III, who had died suddenly. For five days the ruler’s coffin lay in the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, where crowds of citizens filed past it, and on 5 September the funeral procession reached the Rila Monastery, in whose church the tsar was buried. The country, an ally of Hitler since 1941, was left with a six-year-old monarch, without a lawfully constituted regency and without the man who for a quarter of a century had personally directed its foreign policy.

Some chronologies state under 4 September 1943 that the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria. This is a whole year out. In 1943 Bulgaria was at war with Britain and the United States, but not with the USSR, with which it maintained normal diplomatic relations. Moscow declared war on Bulgaria only on 5 September 1944, a few days before the Red Army marched in.

The death of the tsar

By the summer of 1943 Bulgaria’s position had become difficult. After the defeats at Stalingrad and in Tunisia, the Allied landing in Sicily and the overthrow of Mussolini on 25 July, it was clear that the Axis was losing. On 1 August American bombers returning from Ploiești in Operation Tidal Wave flew over Bulgaria and clashed with Bulgarian fighters. The tsar, who in March 1941 had brought the country into the Tripartite Pact but had stubbornly refused to take part in the war against the USSR, was already cautiously seeking channels to the Allies.

On 14 August Boris flew at Hitler’s summons to the Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg (Kętrzyn). What was said is known only indirectly. According to the prime minister, Bogdan Filov, the talk was of using Bulgarian divisions in the Balkans, where after Italy’s expected exit from the war the Germans needed every soldier. Other accounts speak of a stormy argument in which Hitler is said to have once again demanded that Bulgarians be sent to the Eastern Front and that the Jews be handed over, and the tsar to have once again refused. A few days after his return Boris fell seriously ill. He died in Sofia on the afternoon of 28 August 1943, aged 49. The doctors, among them specialists summoned from Germany, attributed his death to heart disease, and the surviving medical records give no indication of foul play.

The sudden death of a relatively young monarch immediately gave rise to rumours. The American press wrote of a quarrel with Hitler, and even of an assassination attempt at Sofia railway station. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that according to Hitler, Boris had been poisoned, probably at the instigation of the Italian court. The Führer suspected the sister of the Bulgarian Tsaritsa Giovanna, Princess Mafalda of Savoy, a daughter of Victor Emmanuel III, although in fact she arrived in Bulgaria only for the funeral. According to the German attaché in Sofia, two of the German doctors called in did not rule out poisoning but would not say so without a post-mortem, and the royal family refused to permit one. Other versions pointed to the Germans, supposedly ridding themselves of an inconvenient ally, to the British or to the Russians. None of them has been confirmed. Historians point out that belief in poisoning suited many Bulgarians, because it made the tsar and the country a victim rather than an accomplice of the Reich.

The regency and a new government

Boris was succeeded by his son, Simeon II, born in June 1937. The Tarnovo Constitution provided that regents for a minor ruler were to be elected by the Grand National Assembly, and it excluded members of the dynasty from the regency. The government, however, did not want to call new elections in wartime. On 9 September 1943 the ordinary National Assembly elected a regency council made up of the late tsar’s brother, Prince Kiril, the war minister, General Nikola Mihov, and Filov. From the outset the opposition regarded this regency as illegal.

The strongest figure on the council was Filov, an archaeologist and a supporter of the alliance with Germany. On giving up the premiership he pushed through as his successor the finance minister, Dobri Bozhilov, a banker with no political base of his own, who formed a new government on 14 September 1943. Bozhilov’s cabinet was in most matters just as pro-German as its predecessor. Prince Kiril had no political experience, and General Mihov was above all a soldier. The regents had none of Boris’s authority, either at home or abroad, and yet they wanted the same as he had: to get out of the war without losing the lands taken in 1941 and without the German occupation that would follow any open attempt to change sides. Filov was counting on an Allied landing in the Balkans that would allow Bulgaria to go over to their side on favourable terms.

Occupier and protector at once

The regency took over a state with two faces. Since April 1941 the Bulgarian army had been occupying Greek territory in Western Thrace and eastern Macedonia, almost all of Yugoslav Macedonia and part of Serbia. In 1943, to relieve the Wehrmacht, the Bulgarian occupation zone in Serbia was enlarged further: westwards as far as the Ibar river in January, and northwards in July. Bulgarian divisions fought the partisans there and were responsible for reprisals against the population. In Bulgaria itself the Fatherland Front, in which the communists played the leading role, had been active since 1942, and partisan detachments were growing in the mountains of the west and south of the country.

The same government that was now handing power to the regents had in March 1943 shared responsibility for the destruction of the Jews of the occupied territories. Under an agreement signed by the Bulgarian Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, Aleksandar Belev, and Adolf Eichmann’s envoy Theodor Dannecker, the Bulgarian army and police rounded up 11,343 Jews in Thrace, Macedonia and the Pirot district, who had been refused Bulgarian citizenship, and handed them over to the Germans. Almost all of them were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp. The deportation of Jews from Bulgaria within its old borders, by contrast, was halted on 9 March after a protest by citizens of Kyustendil and by the deputy speaker of parliament, Dimitar Peshev, and later after interventions by Church hierarchs and some politicians. The tsar did not agree to deportations from the state’s old territory, although in May the authorities expelled some 20,000 Jews from Sofia to the provinces. After his death Bozhilov’s government likewise refused German demands for deportation, and some 48,000 Bulgarian Jews survived the war.

Between Berlin and Moscow

Bulgaria was a peculiar member of the Axis camp. On 13 December 1941 it declared war on Britain and the United States, which Sofia regarded as a symbolic gesture, but which led Washington to respond formally in kind in June 1942. It did not break off relations with the Soviet Union, and the Soviet legation operated in Sofia throughout the war. Neither Boris nor his successors sent soldiers to the Eastern Front. They explained to the Germans that the army was needed to watch Turkey and the Aegean coast, and that the pro-Russian feelings of the population made war with the USSR impossible.

In the autumn of 1943, however, the war began to reach Bulgaria itself. The Allies, who after the armistice with Italy had gained airfields in southern Italy, could reach deep into the Balkans with their bombers. In October they bombed Skopje, and from mid-November the raids fell on Sofia. The heaviest came on 10 January and 30 March 1944, and one of their aims was to force the regents out of the war.

Significance

The death of Boris III deprived Bulgaria of the only politician with enough authority to lead it out of the alliance with the Reich on his own. Filov’s regency played for time and counted on the Western Allies, but their landing in the Balkans never came. Meanwhile the Red Army was advancing westwards. The talks with the British and Americans opened in 1944 by the government of Ivan Bagryanov, which replaced Bozhilov’s cabinet in June, came too late. After the Soviet Iași–Chișinău operation and Romania’s switch to the Allied side, Moscow, without regard for London and Washington, declared war on Bulgaria on 5 September 1944. It is this event, a year later, that is sometimes mistakenly moved to September 1943. On 8 September the Red Army crossed the border, and the next day a coup handed power to the Fatherland Front, which at once declared war on Germany.

For the men who had taken power in September 1943 this meant the end. The regents, among them Prince Kiril and Filov, as well as Bozhilov and dozens of ministers and deputies, were sentenced by the so-called People’s Court and shot on the night of 1–2 February 1945. In 1946 the monarchy was abolished in a referendum, and nine-year-old Simeon II went into exile with his mother. Bulgaria had to give up the Greek and Yugoslav lands taken in 1941 and found itself in the Soviet sphere of influence for nearly half a century. The dispute over the role of Boris III – an ally of Hitler who saved some Jews and sent others to their deaths – continues to this day.