Renowned Parisian Historian speaks on Holocaust and Prosecuting Perpetrators in Bulgaria

Prof. Nadège Ragaru will be with us in this Zoom-based program from France. She is a historian and Research Professor at Sciences Po Paris (France). Formerly, she was Oxpo Visiting scholar at the University of Oxford and Reid Hall Fellow at the University of Columbia. She is a member of the International Academic Advisory Board (IAAB) of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, a member of the History Commission of the Memorial de la Shoah (Paris), and sits on the editorial board of Yad Vashem Studies. Her latest book is Bulgaria, the Jews and the Holocaust. On the Origins of a Heroic Narrative (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2023)

In December 1944, Bulgaria, a country then governed by the communist-dominated Fatherland Front, established an exceptional jurisdiction exclusively dedicated to the prosecution of crimes against Jews. This decision, one of the first of its kind in Europe, was all the more surprising since in this former ally of Nazi Germany the near totally of the Jews holding Bulgarian citizenship had survived the war (by contrast, an estimated 11, 343 Jews living in Bulgarian-occupied Yugoslav and Greek territories were rounded up in March 1943 and deported to Treblinka where they were exterminated).

This talk will address the key paradox of the “trial of the antisemites.” The very jurisdiction established to demonstrate the uniqueness of the Jewish wartime predicament ended up crafting a historical master narrative centering on “Bulgarian collective innocence” and relegating into the background the very Jewish suffering it was created to prosecute.