Background
Boris was born on 30 January 1894 in Sofia. He was the first son of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria and his wife Princess Marie Louise.
Boris was born on 30 January 1894 in Sofia. He was the first son of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria and his wife Princess Marie Louise.
He received his initial education in the so-called Palace Secondary School, which Ferdinand had created in 1908 solely for his sons. Later, Boris graduated from the Military School in Sofia, then took part in the Balkan Wars.
During the First World War, he served as liaison officer of the General Staff of the Bulgarian Army on the Macedonian front. In 1916, he was promoted to colonel and attached again as liaison officer to Army Group Mackensen and the Bulgarian Third Army for the operations against Romania. Boris worked hard to smooth the sometimes difficult relations between Field Marshal Mackensen and Lieutenant General Stefan Toshev, the commander of the Third Army. Through his courage and personal example, he earned the respect of the troops and the senior Bulgarian and German commanders, even that of the Generalquartiermeister of the German Army, Erich Ludendorff, who preferred dealing personally with Boris and described him as excellently trained, a thoroughly soldierly person and mature beyond his years. In 1918, Boris was made a major general.
After the establishment of a military dictatorship in Bulgaria (1934) by the authoritarian Zveno Group, Boris worked to remove it and gradually reassert his power; by November 1935 he had successfully installed Georgi Kyoseivanov, a diplomat and personal favourite, as prime minister. From 1938 until his death Boris was dictator in all but name.
After Bulgaria’s adhesion to the Axis pact (March 1941), Boris maintained a modicum of independence; even after Bulgaria’s entry into World War II on the side of the Axis and its assistance with the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, he was able to resist declaring war against Russia. During the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler demanded the deportation of Bulgarian Jews, who numbered some 50,000. Within Bulgaria there was grassroots opposition to this demand, and in the spring of 1943, Boris canceled all agreements for the deportation. Earlier, however, he did not halt the deportation of 11,000 Jews from Macedonia and Thrace. Boris died shortly after a stormy interview with Hitler. Whether his death was caused by heart attack or by assassination is uncertain.
Boris’s marriage to Princess Giovanna of Italy (1930) temporarily cemented Bulgarian-Italian relations, but during the late 1930s he passed more into the German orbit and sought rapprochement with Yugoslavia.
