Review Article

HOW BULGARIA’S JEWS WERE RESCUED (OR NOT)
TWO RECENT CONSIDERATIONS

Lea Cohen
Nedialkov

By Steven F. Sage1

A Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) headline in March 2023 read: “Bulgarian Jews skipped an official ceremony marking 80 years since their rescue from the Nazis. Why?”2

The “why” may be examined in depth by a perusal of the relevant specialized literature, including the two important, recently published books reviewed here. As for the official ceremony to commemorate 10 March 1943, it proceeded anyway eighty years later despite a Jewish boycott. The boycott is a new development. As Bob Dylan once crooned, it seems “the times, they are a-changin’” (again). Openly at issue now after eight decades is the extent of any Holocaust rescue of Bulgarian Jewry occurring on that particular date in 1943, or at all, during Bulgaria’s partnership within the Nazi-led Axis coalition. The paired books reviewed together here present opposing versions of the two main contending sides of the issue.

Lea Cohen’s book is titled, Salvation, Persecution, and the Holocaust in the Kingdom of Bulgaria (1940-1944) (Sofia: Enthusiast, 2023). Titles are always carefully chosen and the “salvation” Cohen refers to cannot have been a flippant choice. “Salvation” and “rescue” are not fully interchangeable synonyms. Customary usage conditions a spectrum of meaning. Rescue commonly requires agency, i.e., an identifiable rescuer or rescuers. To provide an example: At the seashore a toddler wanders into the surf and is carried off by the undertow, but a vigilant lifeguard swims out and saves the child. The lifeguard has rescued the toddler. But if the impersonal surf had safely deposited the child back onto dry sand, we would not call it a rescue. On the other hand, salvation may be brought about by either human or divine intervention, or alternatively, by mere circumstance. A broader range of nuance is thus conceivable with “salvation” than with “rescue.” As a multi-lingual historian, novelist, and former diplomat, Lea Cohen is no stranger to the subtleties of nuance.

Her book includes a preface contributed by Dr. Alexander Oscar, president of the Jewish community in Bulgaria. It was his organization that in 2023, departed from its former policy of compliant participation at the government’s annual March 10 official Shoah commemoration, opting instead for a principled absence. Lea Cohen’s critical historical review of the various putative Bulgarian rescuers of Jewry provides a detailed implicit rationale in keeping with that principled decision. The official Bulgarian government choice of March 10 as the day for solemnities on the rescue theme was connected with the actions in 1943 of a legislator, Dimitŭr Peshev, deputy chairman of the National Assembly. Peshev has been enshrined in Bulgaria as a rescuer with statues, commemorative postage stamps, and a school curriculum inducting him into the pantheon of national heroes. Cohen looks past those official trappings to examine Peshev’s career and his initiative in March 1943.

She does so with respect. Reviewing the decade prior to 1943, she finds Peshev to have been a man of conscience, an upholder of justice and due process in government, and not an anti-Semite. But what about his bona fides as a rescuer? At the National Assembly, Peshev represented the citizens of Kyustendil, in western Bulgaria. The Jews of that city had been selected for inclusion in a transport to take them into Nazi custody for extermination. When a delegation from Kyustendil asked Peshev to intervene and halt the deportation, he responded, lobbying with the Interior Minister on 9 March 1943. All the Jews from Kyustendil and other places in Bulgaria proper were then reprieved that same evening – albeit only temporarily.

But in the early morning hours of March 11, the Jews in Bulgarian-occupied parts of Macedonia (i.e., today’s “North Macedonia”) and Serbia were evicted from their homes, transported, and held en masse in a closely guarded, makeshift facility at Skopje to await deportation. The Jews of Bulgarian-occupied towns in northern Greece had already been rounded up on March 4. On March 17, Peshev circulated a protest petition in the National Assembly on behalf of Jewish citizens of Bulgaria. The petition was quashed, however, and the incarcerated victims were not freed. Through the rest of March the transports of those already arrested proceeded to the Nazi mass murder facility at Treblinka where all were gassed on arrival. They had constituted twenty percent of the total number of Jews living under Bulgarian control.

As for the subsequently consecrated date of 10 March 1943, the historical record yields nothing of relevance to warrant red letters on the calendar. A revised deportation plan once again targeted all of Bulgaria’s Jews including those of Kyustendil. Lea Cohen asks rhetorically, if anyone had really been saved on 10 March 1943, then what was the purpose of Peshev’s petition a week later? It turns out that Peshev did not actually rescue anyone at all. His petition failed to dissuade the Bulgarian government’s perpetrator organ from blithely rescheduling its plans to deport and thereby to physically annihilate all of the country’s Jewish citizens. That leaves the celebrated petition as at best a noble gesture having no practical effect. In her nuanced account Cohen upholds Peshev’s personal integrity while nevertheless demolishing both the flimsy official cult around him and along with it the factually vacuous charade of March 10 as a day of national observance.

But the rescue hoax is a hydra-headed monster. Lea Cohen has accordingly dealt with much more than the contrivance exalting Dimitŭr Peshev. An alternate variant centered on the monarch, Tsar Boris III. It is an unchallenged presumptive fact that in June 1943, Boris indefinitely suspended the rescheduled deportations of Bulgaria’s Jews. No archival documents to that effect have surfaced but a verbal command from on high would have sufficed. The question then is whether this royal move qualifies Boris as a rescuer. Via diplomatic channels he had been warned by the Anglo-American allies of dire consequences should Bulgaria continue complicit in genocide. Yet ancillary persecution continued unabated. Shorn of all their property and assets, subjected to arduous punitive forced labor, malnutrition, and living under strict ghetto conditions, the victims survived but remained victimized. Apologists for the monarch have sought to portray him as a philo-Semite. Cohen documents why this claim is not merely untrue, but preposterous. In particular, she recounts in detail the trial of two Jewish businessmen on trumped-up charges, and Boris’ approval of their death sentences in April 1943. This detailed case of how the regime destroyed the Arié family’s Germandrée toiletries firm and judicially murdered its top executives is rightfully restored by Cohen to the larger story of the Holocaust in Bulgaria.

She goes on to demonstrate how the “rescuer” cult around Tsar Boris was advanced during the first decade of the twenty-first century in Bulgaria as a political ploy by a faction loyal to Boris’s son, Simeon. Availing of the political changes following the overthrow of Communism, the royal heir returned to the country from foreign exile and served as elected prime minister for a time. Part of Simeon’s public relations campaign included portraying his father in glowingly benign terms. The campaign continued despite an Israeli judicial commission which in 2000 had delved into the documented facts and judged Boris unworthy of a monument that was earlier erected in Jerusalem.

Cohen extends her purview back beyond those well-known circumstances to narrate how even during the Communist period, a creeping rehabilitation of wartime Bulgarian pro-Nazi figures was already underway. That process had been fostered by no less than Lyudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of the entrenched dictator Todor Zhivkov and herself the country’s Minister of Culture.

Another posthumous beneficiary of the rehabilitation trend was Bogdan Filov, the Germanophile prime minister who with Tsar Boris’ approval had aligned Bulgaria with the Third Reich and adopted anti-Semitism as state policy. Filov’s early professional training in Germany had been as an archaeologist. Later as a folklorist and museum director in Sofia he took a narrow approach toward exhibiting Bulgarian ethnography, pointedly excluding the country’s minorities. That same prejudice guided the approach of his larger policies once he rose politically under the monarch. Filov’s rise owed partly to intrigues by his unabashedly anti-Semitic wife, Evdokia (“Kita”) Peteva-Filova, who left a revealing diary cited by Cohen.

Filov was tried for treason and shot in 1945, shortly after Bulgaria switched allegiance from the Axis to the Allied side under a Communist-dominated regime. But during the 1970s, that circumstance did not deter Lyudmila Zhivkova from tentative moves toward recognizing Filov as a scholarly professional. Even more vigorously rehabilitated, as Cohen demonstrates, was a prolific fascist writer of historical novels, Fani Popova-Mutafova. During her pro-Nazi heyday, Popova-Mutafova had proclaimed,

In Germany, the image of Hitler transcended the borders of the state and became a symbol of that renaissance of the Spirit which has been longed for by all humanity, bent under the age-old delusions of its Jewish enslavers, waiting for a new messiah to herald the coming of a better, happier, and more joyful world… That which is new is the liberation of the Aryan world from the poison of Judaism (Cohen, p. 145).

She had served nearly a year’s imprisonment for her political leanings in the early postwar period of the Communist regime. But under Todor Zhivkov and his daughter, Popova-Mutafova’s novels were republished in popular new editions with a large circulation. Their message was unmistakable. These books glorified an idealized medieval past when Bulgaria had militarily expanded well beyond its present truncated frontiers to encompass far broader swathes of Balkan territory. Scrubbed were the author’s inconvenient diatribes against the Jews. Otherwise a revived form of something close to fascism was back again, thinly veiled but still perceptible as pentimento beneath a veneer of the regime’s obligatory Communist slogans and visual iconography.

On the positive side, Lea Cohen devotes due regard toward wartime efforts by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church on behalf of the Jews. The metropolitans (equivalent to archbishops) Stefan of Sofia and Kiril of Plovdiv are credited for their stand at odds with the government’s determined anti-Semitic drive. Cohen notes how the churchmen’s stance infuriated Tsar Boris and Bogdan Filov. And that antagonism is precisely the point as regards the issue of any “rescue.” The clerical opposition remained at best a sustained gesture but in the long run it exerted little practical effect. There is no evidence whatsoever that earnest remonstrance by the church’s Holy Synod was the factor that finally restrained the government from implementing a planned deportation of all Jews in the late spring and through the summer of 1943.

In early February 1943, the German envoy at Sofia, Ambassador Beckerle, had already reported to Berlin about willingness by the Bulgarian regime to deport only the Jews from Bulgarian-administered zones of Yugoslavia and Greece, while holding back those in Bulgaria proper. The logical extrapolation is that if there was no firm commitment to deport in the first place, then the various subsequent “rescue” stories of decisive intervention, the monarch, the Church, Peshev, and the syncretistic notion of “civil society,” are reduced to irrelevance or at best, they lose decisiveness.

So the highest echelons of government were shaky on taking the ultimate step. Still, the wavering government did acquiesce without hesitation in the deportations from Bulgarian-administered parts of Yugoslavia and Greece. Likewise without hesitation, in Bulgaria proper the government did evict Jews, confine them under ghetto ordinances, freeze their bank accounts, subject the men to forced labor, and confiscate their property, all of which constituted steps in the Nazi-prescribed conduit of measures intended to culminate in deportation for the purpose of physical annihilation. The suspension of that ultimate step of deportation came only in the immediate wake of renewed and amplified Anglo-American warnings. There is simply no evidence that connects the suspension to any of the competing rescue narratives originating from within Bulgaria.

But whether or not any “rescue” occurred, the Jews of Bulgaria proper mostly survived. It was a circumstance many of them understandably referred to in subsequent years as Salvation. The stroke that saved them had arrived from an unknown quarter outside Bulgaria, leaving a lacuna in public awareness within which the incompatible hoaxes of Rescue could later germinate and grow.

A very few lapses in Lea Cohen’s book are so tangential, e.g., a wrong first name for a Nazi official, that they do not detract from the narrative’s overall high quality. She has helpfully provided facsimile primary source documents where appropriate, and conveniently placed in text. Cohen furthermore dismisses the weak, unsubstantiated claim that Bulgarian “civil society” as a whole can be credited with any rescue. That makeshift compromise had been proposed when the cases for various ostensible rescuers began to crumble for lack of any factual basis.

Carefully presenting irrefutable evidence, Cohen has provided a forceful, timely, indispensable contribution to the ongoing controversy on the fate of Bulgarian Jewry during the Shoah.

* * *

Hitler’s junior partner and fellow perpetrator Tsar Boris III demonstrably never “rescued” Bulgaria’s Jewish citizens from persecution. And notwithstanding their respective gestures of protest, neither did senior clerics of the Orthodox Church nor the legislator Dimitŭr Peshev. Nor did “civil society” magically intervene to halt the processes of an ideological, genocidal official anti-Semitism. So if eighty percent of Bulgaria’s Jews were nevertheless somehow rescued despite that pervasive ideology, and since “rescue” presupposes agency, who or what candidates remain for bestowal of the laurels?

Eight decades after the events, a retired Bulgarian military man, Dimitar Nedialkov, has offered his self-described “iconoclastic” solution in The Bulgarian Army and the Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews, 1941-1944 (Sofia: Professor Marin Drinov Publishing House of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 2021). Like Lea Cohen’s book, Colonel Nedialkov’s also appeared in both Bulgarian and English-language editions. It was thus ipso facto pitched to sway public opinion both domestically and abroad.

The colonel, a former Bulgarian air force pilot, holds a doctoral degree and bears the title Professor, credentials compelling a serious consideration of this book. He has a respectable, even sterling track record as a researcher and author of books on aircraft development and on air power in warfare. The Genesis of Air Power (Sofia and Moscow: Pensoft, 2004) tackled those subjects for the period leading up to the Great War (1914-1918) more commonly known as World War I. Nedialkov opens with a staff officer’s treatise on air power as a complex functioning system composed of multiple components. Deploying an encyclopedic wealth of detail, he proceeds to trace historical developments back to eighteenth and nineteenth century experiments and false starts using hot air observation balloons. His discussion of the American Civil War demonstrates the author’s familiarity with relevant incidents in that four year struggle. But ultimately, airplanes phased out balloons, blimps, and zeppelins. When Nedialkov turns at last to the rapid evolution of heavier than air craft powered by internal combustion engines in the early twentieth century, he demonstrates virtuoso expertise. He knows aeronautical engineering and he adeptly imparts the basics for novices. The pace of aircraft improvement then was astonishingly swift. And the colonel provides an abundance of photographs and diagrams to illustrate his points as he skillfully brings the reader along. He’s written other worthwhile books, too, on the aviation history of Bulgaria. On air power he writes solidly within his credentialed métier.

Purely in terms of organizing historical material, Nedialkov’s book on air power shares a feature with his contribution on the Holocaust years in Bulgaria. The latter book includes a similar build-up of fulsome detail in setting forth a back story. For Nedialkov, the record of Jews as arms-bearing soldiers in the Bulgarian Army during the Serbian War (1885), the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), and World War I comprises a body of supposedly germane material to preface what followed during the Shoah years. The colonel indulges in rousing battle pieces, memorializing Jewish fighting men who died in battle for Bulgaria. He recounts at length the deeds of Jewish heroes and the military medals they earned.

Such an array of particulars might properly belong in a survey history of Jews in the Bulgarian lands covering many decades. But such a survey is not what is implied by the title of Nedialkov’s book. His title specified just the briefer period of the four years 1941-1944, a time when Jews were considered not national heroes but an internal enemy to be enslaved, expropriated, and – so the intention went – expelled to their deaths. The purpose of lengthily narrating Jewish heroism in Bulgaria’s wars was meant to buttress Nedialkov’s foundational thesis of seamless Jewish assimilation into the Bulgarian polity. He writes that,

…the centuries-old coexistence of the two ethnic groups in the Balkans had never been clouded by serious enmity. In the minds of the Bulgarians, Jews were not a minority, but fellow denizens with the same rights and obligations (Nedialkov, p. 17).

Except, it ain’t necessarily so. In a land with an official state church, the Jews, in fact, were formally recognized by the government as a distinct minority outside that church and apart from all of Christianity. They moreover bore recognizably different names from ethnic Bulgarians. Besides speaking Bulgarian in public they kept their own in-group languages of Ladino and Hebrew. Jews had been targeted for persecution with pogroms in the cities of Kazanlŭk and Eski Zagra during the war of 1877-1878 that gave birth to modern Bulgaria. Jews were overwhelmingly endogamous and they rarely converted to the Orthodox Christianity of mainstream Bulgarians. They celebrated their own religious holidays, sang their own songs, and were formally enjoined to observe dietary customs differentiating them from gentiles. In some cities, Jews clustered in largely Jewish neighborhoods. Jews supported a system of schools enrolling only Jews, as well as all-Jewish musical groups and sports teams. Meanwhile, the appeal of Zionism steadily gained adherents, postulating as it did a Jewish homeland far removed from Bulgaria. All this drew negative gentile notice over the years since such circumstances could hardly be hidden. Some Bulgarians used a derogatory term for Jews: “Chifuti.” Jewish otherness was manifest, a fact that the colonel studiously disregards as he develops his argument. It doesn’t work.

Battlefield heroics could not stave off Bulgaria’s defeat in 1918, the first of the Central Powers to capitulate to the victorious Allies. The country thereupon withdrew from disputed territories, contracted to a smaller size and ended compulsory military conscription. Labor service on infrastructure projects was soon implemented in place of the army draft. Again, Jews did their stint alongside other Bulgarian citizens as Nedialkov duly recounts. There was no segregation then of Jews into separate labor corps units and the work was construed as a patriotic duty, not a form of punishment. The colonel offers a positive account of this citizens’ obligation. And as in his air power book, well-chosen photographs from the archives augment the narrative.

Then during the 1930s, the labor service became increasingly regularized under a militarized state agency. These developments coincided with the Nazi rise to power in Germany and Bulgaria’s steady political and economic drift into the Third Reich’s orbit. In Hitler’s Germany, service in a formerly voluntary youth labor outfit was made compulsory for males, and in July 1934, it was reorganized to become the paramilitary Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD). A former army officer, Konstantin Hierl, directed RAD from its outset. Bulgaria shortly followed suit and inaugurated an obligatory Labor Corps as of the New Year in 1935, with statutory tasks subordinating it to the national army. As with RAD in Germany, Bulgaria’s new Labor Corps was armed, uniformed, and organized with a system of military ranks, drilled in a regimental style, and its rank and file members billeted in barracks. Photos show Labor Corps members goose-stepping on parade. Attempting to soften or divert attention from the Nazis’ martial inspiration, Nedialkov at first likens the Bulgarian Labor Corps to America’s non-military, unarmed Civilian Conservation Corps as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program.

Credibility is at stake, however. Eventually the colonel is obliged to cite a reason for the adoption of Nazi and fascist style norms,

… political moves dictated not so much by the domestic situation as by desire to imitate the dominant European power by externally and formal copying of some Nazi attributes to further secure German support for the idea of Bulgarian national unification, while stubbornly declaring neutrality as often as possible (Nedialkov, p. 60).

This signals an impending Faustian bargain whereby in return for gaining territorial irredenta, Nazi policy expected a reciprocal action by the Sofia regime, i.e., to initiate a campaign targeting the Jews. Bulgaria had already received the territory of southern Dobrudzha when neighboring Romania was partially dismembered. Still greater potential gains were dangled and Tsar Boris III went for the bait. Bulgaria’s Jews were then confronted by the drafting of Nazi-inspired anti-Semitic legislation in 1940, which in January 1941, took effect as the so-called “Law for the Defense of the Nation.” War in Europe was already well underway and Hitler was busily redrawing national frontiers. The Tsar and Prime Minister Filov, both confirmed Germanophiles, proceeded to cast the country’s lot with the Axis although Nedialkov cites indications that their fealty to Hitler came with some reluctance and in the face of a Nazi military buildup in Romania just across the Danube.

Historical debate, in general, habitually centers on the opposing processes of change versus continuity. Most Holocaust historians interpret the adoption of a specifically anti-Jewish law as a watershed event heading toward overt and sustained official persecution. The emphasis is thus on change. Nedialkov, however, takes an opposing stance. While he cannot deny that the law was enacted, his ideological case requires that he minimize its impact while constructing an apologetic for the Sofia regime. Within the pivotal change in 1941, the colonel proceeds to identify aspects of continuity.

In developing his case he makes some observations valid for that year of 1941, when the continuity vs. change dynamic played out in a revamped obligatory Jewish labor service. On the change side, the new legislation decreed Jews ineligible for service as armed soldiers. But wholly exempting them from conscription would constitute an unfair privilege, as Nedialkov explains. Thus an unarmed, segregated Jewish labor service came into being as if by default. On the continuity side, in 1941, the Jewish labor battalions still operated within the army’s table of organization. The men aged twenty to their late forties still drew pay. Rank and file conscripts still wore army fatigue uniforms, albeit without insignia. They were supervised both by Bulgarian officers and by Jewish junior officers and NCOs. Deployments were on road building projects away from home, lasting all through the warmer months when construction work was feasible.

But even the reduced perks of residual army status did not extend into 1942, when construction work resumed. German pressure had intervened, including a highly critical visit by Konstantin Hierl of RAD. Gone thereafter were the uniforms, military work boots, army ranks, nominal pay, and supervision by Jewish junior officers and noncoms. The work environment turned decidedly hostile as pro-Nazi ideology took hold in the Bulgarian officer corps. Extortion from Jewish conscripts by officers became rampant. Examples suffice to illustrate the sharply altered situation.

Some three hundred Jews in the 1st Labor Battalion were fielded to do the work at Trŭnska Klisura under an army captain Ivanchev. According to an affidavit by a survivor, Ivanchev used beatings and threats in attempts to boost productivity. At one instance he is alleged to have pointed a machine gun at a stand-to of the conscripts. He intimated also that he would order their deportation to Poland. Thus in 1942, months prior to any actual deportation from Bulgarian lands, such intimidation was used to extract more work out of exhausted Jewish slave laborers. The fate of deportees who had been sent into Nazi custody elsewhere in Europe was already widely suspected. Ivanchev parroted a Nazi trope blaming the Jews for starting the war, and lamented the loss of German soldiers fighting in Russia, comparing their exalted worth to that of the Jews under his command. This was in the pivotal autumn 1942, as the world focused on the crucial battle underway at Stalingrad.

Ivanchev’s sentiments were echoed by Inspector Todor Atanasov of the Bureau of Temporary Labor at the Zhelŭzartsi encampment, about 230 km NE of Sofia, where the 5th Labor Battalion was constructing a road. Atanasov harangued,

Dirty Jews, you’re finally being brought to account. For sixty years you enslaved the Bulgarian people and never imagined that you would pay any price yourselves. Up to now you abused our women and sisters. Well, now we’ll do the same to yours. I’ve come straight from the Council of Ministers. Your salvation is in work, work, and only work. The norms will be set high. Those who appeal to their group leader will be told there’s no leniency for anyone. Everyone works.3

Atanasov predicted the conscripts’ fate as part of a continent-wide program,

Not a Jew will be left alive in Europe. We’ll push you into the Black Sea and the Danube. We’ll take you out and mow you down with machine guns.4

Such statements are hardly consistent with Nedialkov’s depiction of an army sympathetic to the fate of its erstwhile Jewish comrades-in-arms. The colonel furthermore skips over key aspects of the larger picture. Deliberately harsher conditions in the labor battalions coincided with an overall increase in persecution against the Jewish population as a whole, not just on the men toiling in the road gangs. The Jews of Sofia, half of those residing within Bulgaria proper, were evicted from their homes and all their household property was seized to be sold at auction. Eager buyers grabbed up the goods at cheap rates, a circumstance putting the lie to the later rosy propaganda notions that an ethic of “civil society” functioned in the country. Jewish bank accounts were frozen and ghettoization on reduced rations was imposed on the now-destitute Jewish civilians in Bulgaria’s cities. The army for the most part kept pace.

Matters in the labor battalions continued to worsen still further in 1943 and 1944. Nedialkov notes attempts by a senior Bulgarian officer, Colonel Tsvetan Mumdzhiev, to rein in abuses. Mumdzhiev had by then risen to command the labor units. As a by-the-book military man, he strove to keep the conscripts healthy enough and willing enough to meet their assigned work norms. His efforts were duly appreciated and acknowledged by Jewish veterans who in 1945 petitioned People’s Court Panel VII to drop the indictment against their former commander. The tribunal acquitted Mumdzhiev. His conduct stands as a rare bright spot in an otherwise darkening picture.

Mumdzhiev did his duty while others in the Bulgarian Army followed their orders, for a brutal contrary effect. One set of orders on 4 March 1943, was to roust the Jews of the northern Greek towns from their homes in the early morning hours of that day, and send them onward for deportation to Treblinka. The task was completed without compunction. Then in Bulgaria proper, a ghetto was established in the city of Tŭrgovishte where an army regiment was also stationed. On 29 November 1943, five Jewish members of the ghetto council there complained to authorities in Sofia about the behavior of that army unit, citing:

The concluding sentence of the letter appealed to the Commissar of Jewish Affairs: “We kindly ask for your order to stop the persecution and beatings.”5

Such evidence presents an inconvenience to Nedialkov yet he holds firm, undaunted. Here, instead is the crux of the colonel’s argument,

The Bulgarian army and auxiliary structures were turned into Bulgarian Jews’ main refuge and support. The struggle for the cause of rescue began in earnest in the very first days of the turbulent year of 1943.6

Despite such unsupportable bombast, the book is not without its uses. The author does document nuanced expressions of hesitation by the government in Sofia to pack off its Jewish citizens in Bulgaria proper for murder by the genocidal Nazis. Those nuances are essential to understanding the complexities faced by pro-Axis regimes that were crossing a line into criminal complicity in mass murder just as the tides of war turned against the Third Reich.

Nuanced hesitancy aside, that same Sofia regime unswervingly pursued an overriding chauvinist agenda: to administer lands once part of the medieval Bulgarian state, to convince Slavic speakers in those newly acquired territories that they were really Bulgarians, and to expel non-Christian, non-Slavs from an enlarged Greater Bulgaria. The Bulgarian army marched in to occupy, and to materially benefit. When the Jews of Macedonia were deported to Treblinka, the army’s officer clubs in Macedonia were granted priority access to desirable furniture, sets of dinnerware, and items such as musical instruments that had belonged to the departed erstwhile owners. Club managers took what they liked, the officers proceeding to sit down on the Jews’ chairs, dine from the Jews’ plates at the Jews’ tables, and sip their wine from the Jews’ fine crystal ware, accompanied by melodies played on the dead Jews’ pianos. This is all well-attested by easily accessible, conveniently published documents from the Bulgarian national archives that Colonel Nedialkov nevertheless chose to overlook.

The Bulgarian Army meanwhile served as custodian and armed guard over Jewish forced laborers from 1941-1944, just as Tsar Boris and his prime minister. Bogdan Filov, advanced their territorial and ethnic cleansing objectives. On 5 March 1943, the Council of Ministers under Filov issued Decree #29, Protocol #34, granting ultimate authority over the mobilized labor conscripts to the Commissariat of Jewish Affairs as the executive perpetrator organ. The decree obliged the army and its co-custodian, the (aptly named) Bureau of Temporary Labor, to hand over all Jewish workers upon request by the Commissariat. The Commissariat in turn scheduled 30 September 1943, as the date for completing wholesale deportation and the achievement of a Bulgaria cleansed of Jews.

But events never came to that. Faced with specific Anglo-American allied threats, the government suspended the deportations in early June that year. The Jews in forced labor thus survived albeit all the while suffering indignities, beatings, malnutrition, overwork, malaria, deprivation of basic amenities, and daily anguish over the fate of their evicted, pauperized, and ghettoized families.

In a routine bureaucratic turf dispute, various government agencies had wrangled over which would control and exploit Jewish forced labor. But it is a travesty to claim that the army waged a crusade to rescue the Jews. The eventual outcome of Jewish survival owed nothing to lobbying, intervention, or any principled insubordination by the Bulgarian Army. Nedialkov carefully shades background factors while meticulously omitting contrary documents that vitiate his case. He then stretches his argument so far beyond facts that it breaks like a worn out rubber band. The colonel’s overtaxed premise and his Evel Knievel leap to an unwarranted conclusion do discredit to a book that, in some parts, is otherwise not entirely lacking in merit.

Nedialkov could have instead written a balanced account of how Bulgaria’s varied forced labor units functioned during the Shoah period. It is worth noting here that Muslims, including ethnic Turks, were also conscripted into unarmed labor battalions to toil on road building and other infrastructure projects. Sufficient material exists in the Bulgarian military archives to support a comparative study of working conditions experienced by the two subordinated, targeted ethnic minority groups.

There was a gradation of misery. Some of Bulgaria’s Jewish labor battalions in some encampments no doubt endured worse conditions than in others, depending on the inclinations of their commanders and guards. On the whole in Bulgaria, most Jewish labor conscripts were far better off than those in Nazi German camps. But the translated title of one veteran’s memoir sums it up: Our Sufferings (Нашите Страдания) in the Jewish Labor Camps during the Fascist Regime in Bulgaria, 1941-1944.7 The author of that memoir was a lawyer and a prosecutor at the tribunal, Sofia People’s Court Panel VII. Elie Baruh found no grounds to suggest that the Bulgarian Army as an institution consciously functioned as a rescuer of the Jews during the Holocaust. And neither did Dimitar Nedialkov adduce any documents proving that farfetched allegation.

What then prompted Colonel Nedialkov, an accomplished soldier-scholar, to venture his name on a dubious, “iconoclastic” as he put it, book? The sponsorship behind its publication offers a clue. Page 2 reads, “This book was published with the kind support of Elbit Systems.” The Israel-based (Matam, Haifa) Elbit Systems, Ltd. is an international defense electronics firm with a world-wide clientele. They produce military drones, surveillance technology, and commercial aviation systems, also various munitions. The firm is valued at over US$9 billion, so whatever costs they put up amounted to pocket change, probably disbursed from a well-funded public relations budget. Elbit maintains a business agenda. Holocaust rescue tales have traditionally sweetened Israel-Bulgaria deals. In Nedialkov, Elbit executives found a published author, tech-savvy former air force flier who could talk the talk on the firm’s same wavelength, each side good (really good) at their respective martial specialties. But the Elbit guys are not Holocaust historians. Nor prior to this book was Colonel Dimitar Nedialkov.

It would be unfair, though, to assume the colonel’s motives were simply pecuniary. He is a respected authority in his niche, not some struggling hack writer. Why then this book project? A ready short answer is, to salvage something from the flotsam of the moribund Rescue hoax. The book’s very premise that the army rescued the Jews carries an implicit concession that the monarch, the Bulgarian Church, Dimitŭr Peshev, and “civil society,” et al. did not accomplish that alleged rescue. Adding yet another, tardily arriving champion to the posse does nothing, logically, to boost the credibility of the tattered rescue notion. If anything, it detracts.

But a rescue there must be. It’s an imperative since that frayed notion, tracing back to the period of Communist rule and intoned thereafter as mantra, has become a pillar of Bulgarian national identity. The colonel, as a patriot and pilot, rose to the occasion. And took off into the clear blue.

1 Steven F. Sage (Ph. D.) served as a diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Sofia from 1984-1986. Subsequently he focused on Bulgaria as a Research Fellow and staff member at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, writing all of the Bulgaria articles in the museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. His historical briefs on Jewish forced labor camps and on ghettos in Bulgaria, citing primary source materials, were submitted to the German Bundesministerium der Finanzen as the basis for that ministry’s approval of compensatory payments and pensions to survivors. Sage’s book on The Holocaust in Bulgaria (working title) is in progress. His previous Shoah-related book is Ibsen and Hitler (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2006 / Basic Books, 2007).

2 "Bulgarian Jews skipped an official ceremony marking 80 years since their rescue from the Nazis. Why?" JTA - By David I. Klein - March 15, 2023.

3 Affidavit of Boris Davidov Leviev to Sofia People’s Court Panel VII, submitted 15 February 1945, at USHMM archive RG46.058M, reel 7.

4 Ibid.

5 The letter was dated 22 January 1944, USHMM archive, RG46.049M, reel 122.

6 Nedialkov, Dimitar, The Bulgarian Army and the Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews, 1941-1944 (Sofia: Professor Marin Drinov Publishing House of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 2021), p. 140.

7 Baruh, Elie, Nashite stradaniya v evreiskite trudovi lageri prez fashistkiya rezhim v Bŭlgariya, 1941-1944 (Tel-Aviv, 1960)

Copyright by Sephardic Horizons, all rights reserved. ISSN Number 2158-1800