After some internal infighting between the Reich’s Foreign ministry and the head of the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), [Berlin’s] request for the preparation of deportations was made explicit in mid-October 1942 through the [Reich’s] Legation in Sofia.¹¹ The Bulgarian authorities granted their approval by mid-November, provided that a section of the Jews would remain in Bulgaria for forced labor, and that a [Reich] advisor would assist in the process.¹²

SS Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, infamously known for his rôle in the deportation of Jews from France, took up the part. One month after his dispatch to [the Tsardom of] Bulgaria (January 21, 1943), he concluded with Commissioner Belev an agreement pertaining to the deportation of 20,000 Jews from the “new” territories: since the number of Jews in occupied Yugoslavia and Greece did not exceed 12,000, this accord opened the way for the deportation of about 8,000 “undesirable” Bulgarian Jews. The arrests, deportations, and appropriation of Jewish properties were authorized by a series of decrees adopted by the council of ministers at the beginning of March 1943.

At this point, however, the destinies of Bulgarian and non-Bulgarian Jews bifurcated. In early March 1943, the Bulgarian authorities organized round-ups and the temporary internment of Jews from northern Greece (March 4), Vardar Macedonia (March 11) and Pirot (March 12), with the support of the Bulgarian police, army and administration. Deported by train (from Skopje) and by boat (from Lom, along the Danube) — together with the German police — an estimated 11,343 Jews were later exterminated in Treblinka. Their properties were subsequently confiscated, and liquidated.

In the “old” kingdom, by contrast, the public protests of elected officials, orthodox dignitaries and notables, coupled with [Axis] military defeats in the East, convinced the authorities to suspend, postpone and finally renounce the deportations of Bulgarian Jews.

In May 1943, Commissioner Belev submitted a new deportation plan. When the government and King Boris III refused to apply the plan and “contented themselves” with authorizing the expulsion of Jews living in Sofia and other Bulgarian cities into the provinces, [Berlin’s] demands were not considered sufficiently pressing by the Bulgarian executive to move ahead with the deportation of Jews of Bulgarian nationality.

Thus, in the last resort about 48,000 Bulgarian Jews were not deported; 11,343 Jews from the occupied territories were exterminated. Such was the toll in the fall of 1944 when the Red Army invaded/liberated (the wording depends on the political views of the observer) Bulgaria and helped a communist led coalition, the Fatherland Front, to overthrow the wartime régime.

Trying to make sense of Jewish experiences during the world conflict represents a daunting task — all the more as, in these multicultural regions long part of the Ottoman empire, many a Jewish lineage extended beyond recently created nation-state borders. The descendants of those who survived the war and those who did not grew up with painfully divided memories and knowledge of World War Two.

[…]

The transport of Jews from the occupied territories is readily presented as the sine qua non condition of the “rescue of the Bulgarian Jews,” and as a concession intended to preserve as many lives as the unequal power relations between [the Tsardom of] Bulgaria and the Reich would allow. Not only does this representation of the events fail to properly account for the destruction of the Jews living in areas occupied by [the Tsardom of] Bulgaria.

It also casts a shadow upon anti-Jewish policies in the “old” kingdom: aside from the Jewish expulsions from Sofia and other cities in May 1943, the enforcement of anti-Jewish policies – identification of the Jews; professional exclusions and Aryanization of property; political, economic, and social marginalization; detention and internal exile; forced labor, et cetera – remains a territory almost uncharted by public historians and state-sponsored commemorative initiatives.¹⁶

(Emphasis added.)

See also: The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust