Fascism in Bulgaria

[8][9][10] An alternative opinion is that some Bulgarian organizations with considerable membership, activity, and social presence had fully developed fascist ideology by the late 1930s, but they neither came to power, nor participated in the government of the country.

[11] In fact, fascist organizations did not take power within the framework of the royal dictatorships, but discourses close to fascism can be found in then Bulgarian governing elite.

[18] The Bulgarian Marxist historiography labelled the period 1935–1944, as monarcho-fascism and demonized the then rightist movements, due to the authoritarian regime Boris III introduced in 1935, and Bulgaria's accession to the Axis powers during WWII.

[23] The National Social Movement (NSM) founded by Aleksandar Tsankov as a genuinely fascist group was taking inspiration from the NSDAP and rose by the early to mid 1930s.

Despite that organisation became numerically large, Bulgaria hadn't developed a corporate economic system essential to fascism nor any adult counterparts like trade unions or militias were created.

[28] For the extreme left in Bulgaria today, before the coup on September 9, 1944, there was a fascist regime, and the Bulgarian communist guerillas represented the only struggle for freedom, which culminated in the fall of 1944.

Since the arrival of the Soviet troops in September 1944, the social strata from the lowlands took advantage and destroyed the nation's elite, thus interrupting the country's historical development.

[36] Bulgaria switched sides in the war in September 1944,[37] but although the Bulgarian army drove the Germans out of this region then, today the Macedonian historiography has played down its role for ethnopolitical reasons.

[39] This historical narrative was developed in post-WWII Yugoslav Macedonia and became one of the milestones of the nation-building process there, which is based till today on a deeply anti-Bulgarian stance.

Per the Holocaust the Macedonian historians have built a narrative of the common suffering and powerlessness of the locals to confront "Bulgarian fascists" in the context of a ruthless occupation.

[46] In 2020 the then Premier Zoran Zaev claimed that by his order inscriptions with the text "Bulgarian fascist occupier" on some communist era monuments were removed, because that did not correspond with the historical truth.

[47] According to the Macedonian researcher Katerina Kolozova, this terminology today is groundless, because significant part of these "occupiers" were practically local collaborators of the Bulgarian authorities.

[50] According to Dragi Gjorgiev, director of the Institute of National History in North Macedonia, Bulgaria couldn't be defined as a classic fascist state at that time, but rather a pro-fascist one.

Bulgarian premier Bogdan Filov with Italian leader Benito Mussolini in Rome, 1941
Members of Jewish labour battalion in Bulgaria (1941). All Jewish males who were Bulgarian citizens between the ages of 20 and 46 were conscripted in the Construction corps . Nevertheless, the deportation to extermination camps of nearly all about 48,000 Bulgarian Jews was prevented. The Jews from the occupied Greek and Yugoslav territories (the "Newly liberated lands") had a much worse fate. In this way about 80% of the Jews in then Bulgarian territories survived, while the rest were deported for Nazis' extermination. [ 19 ]
Bulgarian policemеn and soldiers deporting Macedonian Jews in 1943. Many of them were recruited Macedonian Slavs , regarded by the authorities as Bulgarians. [ 30 ] [ 31 ] [ 32 ] Bulgaria insists on the rescue of its Jews , and compares their destiny to the killing of the Jews in Bulgarian-occupied territories. [ 33 ]