Boris III of Bulgaria
Boris III was Tsar of Bulgaria for twenty-five years, from his father's abdication in the defeat of October 1918 to his own death in August 1943, two weeks after a stormy meeting with Hitler, of what the doctors called a heart attack and everyone else suspected was poison. He had taken Bulgaria into the Axis in March 1941 to get Macedonia and Thrace without fighting for them, refused to send an army against the Soviet Union, declared a symbolic war on Britain and America, and in March 1943, when the trains for the death camps were ready, stopped the deportation of the fifty thousand Jews of old Bulgaria under pressure from the parliament, the church and the street, while letting the eleven thousand Jews of the occupied Macedonian and Thracian territories go. He was the son of Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, brought up Orthodox by the terms of his father's bargain with Russia, and inherited a country that had lost two wars in six years and was governed by the peasant tribune Stamboliyski, whom the army murdered in 1923. The Communist bomb in Sveta Nedelya cathedral in 1925, which killed a hundred and fifty people and missed him, and the two assassination attempts of that year made him a monarch who kept out of sight. The officers' coup of 1934 abolished the parties, and Boris used it. In 1935 he removed the officers and governed through prime ministers of his own choosing, with a tame parliament from 1938, a royal dictatorship conducted, foreign diplomats said, by the most intelligent monarch in the Balkans. He was a botanist and an engine-driver who took the controls of the royal train. The war he wanted no part of came to him: Germany gave him the southern Dobruja from Romania in 1940, and the price of the rest was the Tripartite Pact, signed on 1 March 1941, with German troops crossing Bulgaria to Greece and Yugoslavia within days. He kept the army at home. The Jewish law of 1941 and the deportation agreement of February 1943 were his government's. The stop in March was his, after the deputy speaker Peshev and the metropolitan Stefan had made the trains a scandal. Hitler summoned him to Rastenburg on 14 August 1943 to demand troops for the east and he refused. He fell ill on the 23rd and died on the 28th, and a regency for his six-year-old son Simeon lasted until the Soviets came.
- Lived: 1894 CE – 1943 CE
- Nationality: Bulgarian
- Roles: tsar, monarch
