The Holocaust saw the persecution of Jews in the Tsardom of Bulgaria and their deportation and annihilation in the Bulgarian-occupied regions of Yugoslavia and Greece between 1941 and 1944, arranged by the Nazi Germany-allied government of Tsar Boris III and Prime Minister Bogdan Filov.

[1] The persecution began in 1941 with the passing of anti-Jewish legislation and culminated in March 1943 with the detention and deportation of almost all[2] – 11,343 – of the Jews living in Bulgarian-occupied regions of Northern Greece, Yugoslav Macedonia and Pirot.

The deportation of the 48,000 Jews from Bulgaria proper also began at the same time but was found out and halted following the intervention of a group of government members of parliament led by Dimitar Peshev.

[15] The 1930s saw the Bulgarian government under the personal rule of Tsar Boris III become increasingly dependent on Nazi Germany as it sought to break the country's international economic isolation and to counteract the Balkan Pact signed by all its neighbours.

Key figures were the Minister of the Interior Petar Gabrovski and his protege Alexander Belev, both virulent antisemites who eventually architected the country's anti-semitic laws and oversaw their implementation.

Within a month, on 8 October 1940, interior minister, Petar Gabrovski, introduced the parliamentary bill for the Law for the Protection of the Nation (Bulgarian: Закон за защита на нацията, romanized: Zakon za zashtita na natsiyata).

The small parliamentary opposition (Communists and Democrats alike) led by ex-PM Nikola Mushanov and former cabinet ministers Dimo Kazasov, Yanko Sakazov, and Stoyan Kosturkov condemned the law.

[3] [15] The Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was founded in 1942 in the wake of the Wannsee Conference, with Alexander Belev as director, which issued further policing measures against Jews such as mandatory wearing of yellow stars.

Belev signed a secret agreement with Germany's SS-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker on 22 February 1943 to initially deport 20,000 Jews, starting with those in the occupied Greek and Yugoslav regions.

[22] Jews from "Old Bulgaria" were to be rounded up in local detention centres, transported to the internment camps in Lom and Somovit and from there deported by boat up the Danube to Vienna then on to German-occupied Poland.

Armed with this he met on 7 March with his old Kyustendil school friend, National Assembly vice chairman Dimitar Peshev who began to organise a protest group of MPs.

A delegation of four eminent Kyustendil citizens (businessman Asen Suitchmezov, parliamentary representative Petar Mihalev, attorney Ivan Momchilov and IMRO activist Vladimir Kurtev) arriving on 9 March testified as to the preparations.

That day, Peshev and 10 other MPs met with Interior Minister Petar Gabrovski stating their intention to call an emergency debate in parliament if the order was not cancelled.

Upon being informed, Metropolitan Kiril of Plovdiv immediately sent a protest telegram to the king and then contacted the chief of police, threatening civil disobedience (according to some reports he stated that he'd lie across the train tracks if necessary[25]).

Boris III signed off the second option and on 21 May the government authorized the Commissariat of Jewish Affairs to move Jews living in Sofia to villages and towns in the Bulgarian countryside.

[29] By order of the Bulgarian chief of the general staff, effective 27 January 1941, all Jewish servicemen, officers and reservists were removed from the regular armed forces and transferred to the Labour Corps, initially retaining their rank and privileges.

[29] Jews were detailed to do heavy construction work, while regulation practice was that in forced labour battalions (druzhina), all service personnel – medical, clerical, and signal staff, together with cooks and orderlies – were ethnic Bulgarians.

Jewish units were separated from the other ethnicities – three quarters of the labour battalions were from minorities: Turks, Russians, and residents of the territories occupied by Bulgaria – the rest were drawn from the Bulgarian "unemployed".

[19] Nonetheless, military control over the labour battalions continued, because the government's "twin goals of somehow motivating the Jews to achieve results on construction projects, while simultaneously humiliating, robbing, beating, and undernourishing them, constituted a dilemma.

[19] On 14 July 1942 Halachev announced new strictures: inveighing against desertion and failures to report for duty, he ordered that a punishment detachment be set up to work through the winter on a new railway line to Sidirokastro (Demir-Hisar) in occupied Greece.

The Civilian Mobilization Directorate recommended in a report that Jews subject to recruitment in the military be redirected to the state Labor Force – a special branch, established in 1920, militarised in 1940 and existing until 2000.

[43] To this end, Major-General Anton Ganev, the Chief of the Labor Force, issued an order defining the structure and composition in terms of the recruited for training and service, as well as the mobilised ranks.

[48] The expulsion of Sofia's Jews began on 24 May 1943; they were deported to Berkovitsa, Burgas, Byala Slatina, Dupnitsa, Ferdinand, Gorna Dzhumaya, Haskovo, Karnobat, Kyustendil, Lukovit, Pleven, Razgrad, Ruse, Samokov, Shumen, Troyan, Varna, Vidin and Vratsa.

[49] According to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, the spring deportations' postponement left the Jewish population "in limbo — demoted to an untouchable subcaste status, penniless, uprooted, and removed from the body politic, yet not expelled beyond the country’s borders".

[52] Now fighting with the Soviets against the Nazis, the Bulgarian Army tried to shield from liability officers who had abused Jewish forced labourers and lawyers engaged in the liquidation of Jews' assets mostly escaped sanction.

[53] The post-war People's Republic, in accordance with communist principles, compared the survival of most of Bulgaria's wartime Jewish population to the rescue of the Jews from Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943.

A specially convened panel of jurists concluded there was historical evidence that showed Boris had personally approved the deportations of his Jewish subjects; the memorial in the Tsar's name was removed.

His petition of 17 March 1943 was inspired by Jewish residents in his constituency, who were ultimately not exterminated on the same timetable as Jews outside the 1940 borders of Bulgaria as planned but were nonetheless deported from Kyustendil for ghettos in the countryside.

describe it as an "eleventh hour" episode of cynical opportunism that occurred due to the desire for favourable treatment if and when the Nazis lost the war, noting the much less rosy fate of Jews in Macedonia and Thrace, while still others take a middle position.

[62] In 2012, The Third Half, a Macedonian-Czech-Serbian movie about Macedonian football during World War II, and the deportation of Jews from Yugoslav Macedonia presented through the real-life story of Neta Koen, a Holocaust survivor, was shortlisted as the country's entry for Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards, but it did not make the final cut for nomination.