Nationalizing the Holocaust. ‘Foreign’ Jews and the Making of Indifference in Macedonia Under Bulgarian Occupation

Abstract

During World War II, Bulgaria was an ally of Nazi Germany but, resisting German pressure, it decisively postponed the deportation of about 48,000 Bulgarian Jews. However, in the territories under Bulgarian occupation—Vardar Macedonia and the Pirot region in Yugoslavia; and Western Thrace (the eastern part of Aegean Macedonia) in Greece—11,343 Jews were rounded up and deported to Nazi extermination camps. Only a handful survived. Several historians have suggested that the discrepancy between the fates of Jews in the ‘old’ and in the ‘new’ kingdoms needs to be viewed in the light of citizenship policies, regarding the fact that, following the adoption of an ordinance on nationality in June 1942, Jews were not granted Bulgarian citizenship in the ‘new territories’. The present article is based on an assumption that the analytical scope for studying the contrast between the fates of the Jews in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ kingdoms needs to be widened beyond a mere survey of citizenship laws and practices. Taking Vardar Macedonia as a case study, it argues that anti-Jewish policies, and the diversity of local responses to these policies, must be set against the history of competing Serb, Bulgarian, Greek and (to a lesser extent) Albanian nation-building ambitions in a multi-ethnic region that had long been part of the Ottoman Empire.

The author wishes to thank Roumen Avramov, Liliana Deyanova, Katja Happe and Andrea Löw for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.