Bulgarian occupation of Serbia (World War I)


The Bulgarian occupation of Serbia of WW1 started in Autumn 1915 following the invasion of Serbia by the combined armies of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria. After Serbia’s defeat and the retreat of its forces across Albania, the country was divided into Bulgarian and Austro-Hungarian occupation zones. The Bulgarian occupation zone extended from modern-day Southern and Eastern Serbia, the disputed territory of Kosovo and North Macedonia. The civilian population was exposed to various measures of repression, including mass internment, forced labor, and a Bulgarisation policy. According to academic Paul Mojzes: "it appears that ethnic cleans­ing and genocide did take place between 1915 and 1918", what historian Alan Kramer has termed a ‘dynamic of destruction’.
The occupation ended in late September 1918, after the Allied offensive at Dobro Polje, spearheaded by Serbian and French forces, pierced the Bulgarian front and liberated Serbia.

Background

Bulgaria war aims

After the San Stefano Treaty in 1878, Bulgarian leaders aspired for the reconstitution of Greater Bulgaria. Thus the areas of Pomoravlje and Macedonia, became a target of Bulgarian nationalism. Due to the loss at the Second Balkan War in 1913, the Bulgarian Kingdom had to limit their territorial pretenses over the territory of Macedonia. When Serbia was trying to obtain access to the sea in Albania, the Austro-Hungarian diplomacy got more active in order to establish a border between Albania and Montenegro; during the Second Balkan War, Bulgaria renounced the annexation of Serbian Macedonia, which was definitely annexed to Serbia after the Florence Protocol in December of 1913.
The Allies had long pressed Bulgaria to join them but her price was the acquisition of Macedonia, the Allies regarded this as reasonable on ethnic grounds but the proposals had not been agreed in advance with Serbia and Greece, which were strongly opposed to ceding their territory. The Central Powers, however, were prepared to cede what Bulgaria wanted, Serb and Greek territory. Bulgaria’s traditional aims lay in the Bulgarian-inhabited areas of Macedonia, Dobrudja, and European Turkey, but in 1915 it demanded territory well beyond its ethnographic borders. On 6 September 1915, the Bulgarian government joined the Central Powers after signing a secret treaty of alliance with Germany.

Invasion of Serbia

On 6 October 1915 under the overall command of German General August von Mackensen, Austria-Hungary and Germany began the fourth invasion of Serbia since the beginning of the war. On 14 October, the Bulgarian armies moved into Serbian territory joining the ongoing invasion. Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, with the primary goal of regaining territory briefly gained from the Ottoman in 1912-13, then lost to Serbia during the Second Balkan War. The pressure of Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian and German armies in the north, and their massive superiority in numbers and equipment, forced the Serbs to withdrew across northern and central Albania. On 28 November 1915 Army Group Mackensen announced the end of the Serbian campaign, therefore, ending the offensive.
After a six-week campaign, Serbia was almost completely occupied, it was then divided up between the Habsburg Empire and Bulgaria. At the beginning of 1916, regions in the west and north and part of Kosovo were ceded to Austria-Hungary. the Germans decided not to seek occupied territory, despite having played a decisive role in the campaign. As set by the agreement of 6 September, Bulgaria gained the whole of Macedonia and Eastern and Southern Serbia, Austro-Hungary took the rest of Serbia. The Bulgarian divided the territories occupied by its troops into two military general governorates.

Bulgarian hegemony

Occupation zones

Two administrative zones supervised by a military commander were created:
Bulgarian policy in Macedonia, and to some degree in occupied Serbia, was motivated by what historian Alan Kramer has termed a ‘dynamic of destruction’ a desire not just to defeat the enemy militarily, but also to erase all traces of its culture and destroy any evidence that it had ever been there at all.
In order to create pure Bulgarian territories, the Bulgarian military government started implementing in eastern Serbia, Macedonia, and parts of Kosovo a political system of systematic denationalization, Bulgarianization, and economical exploitation. That policy, including its paramilitary aspect, was almost identical in its intent and execution to the Serbian policy that preceded it.
In the Morava zone Bulgarization, where most people felt Serbs and men had been fighting against Bulgaria, transforming the region into a part of the Kingdom of Bulgaria, meant the extermination of the Serbian nation and culture and for this the removal of all representatives of Serbian national spirit. All former soldiers and officers between 18 and 50 years of age, former military official, teachers, clergymen, journalists as well as members of Serbian Parliament were interned, shot, or transported to Bulgaria as prisoners of war or forced labourers.
In the zone of Macedonia, the majority of the Slavic population had pro-Bulgarian sentiments or felt themselves to be Bulgarians, especially in eastern parts, thus they welcomed the Bulgarian army as liberators. The occupational authorities in most of Vardar Macedonia were popular enough, except with the non-Bulgarian population. Vardar Macedonia was inhabited by various ethnic groups who did not identify as Bulgarian; namely Serbs, Turks, Albanians, Greeks, Vlachs, Jews, or Roma; and for that other population, the Macedonian Slavs who identified as Serbs in particular, the brutality of the Bulgarian army, the irregulars and the later civil administration had all the features of ethnic cleansing.

Role of paramilitaries

Besides the regular army, Bulgaria's paramilitary groups played an immense part in the fighting capabilities of Bulgaria, they were used as auxiliaries to provide knowledge of local conditions. They were known as comitadjis, these irregular troops also contributed strongly in brutalising the war. The notorious Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization served as a gendarmerie working hand in glove to ‘Bulgarianize’ the region. During the war the IMRO arose from a clandestine organization into an important factor of the Bulgarian nationalistic policy supporting the Bulgarization of the area. Some paramilitary companies joined the Bulgarian Army forming the 11th Macedonian Infantry Division. Additionally this division had guerrilla companies formed by IMRO-irregulars, that participated at the beginning of 1916 in several massacres of Macedonian Serbs in the areas of Azot, Skopska Crna Gora and Poreče. Regular troops took control of the region, but comitadjis were appointed mayors and prefects, and they retained control of the whole police structure. Every major town was controlled by a comitadji leader whose power became absolute and legitimized through a new administrative system.
After 1917 the Bulgarian government started using paramilitary groups to gain control over the internal situation in both Pomoravlje and Macedonia. Aleksandar Protogerov who headed the Bulgarian occupation troops in Morava region crushed the uprising in the Toplica district with the help of IMRO irregulars. Bulgarians paramilitary groups were responsible for multiple instances of war crimes committing during the war in the parts of the Kingdom of Serbia under Bulgarian occupation.

War crimes

Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand declared on the eve of war: "the purpose of my life is the destruction of Serbia". Many Bulgarian troops were sidelined from front line duty to take part in the occupation of Serbia, past animosities led to brutality, the local population was left a choice between Bulgarization or being subject to violence, large scale deportations and the treatment of the residents of the occupation zones came close to genocidal actions. The ‘Documents relatifs aux violations des Conventions de La Haye et du Droit international, commis de 1915–1918 par les Bulgares en Serbie occupée’, a report covering alleged atrocities committed in Serbia, published after the war, stated that ‘anyone unwilling to submit him or herself to the occupiers and become Bulgarian was tortured, raped, interned, and killed in particularly gruesome manners, some of which recorded photographically'.
Bulgarian units that occupied Serbian territories showed extreme brutality, systematically expelling the non-Bulgarian population in the regions they occupied, they arrested the population and set the rebel villages on fire. In addition to the numerous cases of rape, Bulgarian forces encouraged the mixed marriage of Serbian women with Bulgarian men and espoused the view that children born to such marriages should be raised as Bulgarians. Middle-class Serbian functionaries were also suppressed: teachers, religious workers, functionaries, and intellectuals were executed by the Bulgarian soldiers who were following strict instructions to treat civilians the same way they treated soldiers. Additionally, there were regular bombardments of Serbian territories by the aviation and Bulgarian artillery which were operating on the Balkan front around the end of 1916. At the same time, there was a prohibition of Serbian culture; Bulgarians systematically looted Serbian monasteries and the toponymy of villages was changed to Bulgarian.
In addition to those sent to concentration camps, some 30,000 Serbs were sent to Austrian camps or used as forced labour. Factories were plundered of their machinery and a devastating typhus epidemic stalked the land. Thousands died in desperate uprisings, and in some cases, Bulgarian policy was so rigid that it even provoked mutinies among its own soldiers. The Bulgarian soldiers are depicted as simply living off the land without paying any redistribution and also robbing and hitting civilians, whereas the peasants had to work for the occupational authorities without getting any pay, this sometimes included working on defensive positions and carrying ammunition for the Bulgarians which violated the Hague conventions. In ex-Serb Macedonia, for the first time in history, gas chambers were used for the purpose of mass executions, exhaust pipes of trucks were attached to sealed sheds by Bulgarian soldiers where they herded the Serbs whom they wished to elim­inate.

Counter-insurgency operations

Serbian Uprising

In February 1917, a large Serbian uprising broke out, in the Bulgarian occupied territories of southern and eastern Serbia. It followed attempts by the Bulgarian army to force draft Serbian men into the Bulgarian army and shoot those who resisted. The scheme was identical to that previously pursued by the Serbian army, which had attempted to conscript Bulgarians at the beginning of 1914 in Macedonia.
Serbian guerrilla leaders Kosta Vojinović ‘Kosovac’ and Kosta Milovanović ‘Pecanac, were flown into Serbia from Salonika for the purpose of directing the insurrection. IMRO leader Aleksandar Protogerov came from Macedonia to assist the Bulgarian army with the counter-insurgency operations, which were met with harsh reprisals throughout the country.
On 10 March 1917 Protogerov issued an ultimatum to the chetniks to surrender within five days or face execution. They did not surrender, so Protogerov and his army attacked the civilian population and their villages. About 20,000 Serbs were killed, in the town of Surdulica alone about 2,500 Serbian men were executed, thousands of women and children were interned and others sent to prison. Thirty- six villages near Leskovac were completely depopulated. Families were left without a house or home. More than 80,000 were deported to Bulgaria, in Niš, almost the entire male population, some 4,000 men, was deported. One batch was sent by train to Pirot, the rest had to go on foot.

Liberation

On 15 September 1918 French and Serbian mountain troops successfully attacked hitherto impregnable Bulgarian positions at Dobro Pole. Greek and British forces joined in, the Bulgarians, deprived of German and Austrian support, quickly found themselves in full flight, pursued by the Army of the Orient. The Bulgarian Tsar and government decided to seek an armistice, capitulating on 30 September, the first of the Central Powers to do so. According to its terms, Bulgarian troops had to evacuate all occupied Greek and Serbian territories, including Macedonia.

International response

In 1899 and in 1907 for the first time, an International Peace Conferences was held at The Hague. The conference brought forward a codification of the customs and laws of war. Following the first world war, the "Inter-Allied Commission" a fifteen-member commission was created, ahead of the upcoming Paris Peace Conference of 1919, to report violations of the Hague Conventions, international laws, document war crimes and identify the perpetrators.

Inter-Allied Commission

The reports of the commission in Eastern Macedonia summarized the violations of the Hague Conventions: the massacre of the civilian population, torture, rape, internment, punitive economic expropriation, requisitions, and various taxes, plunder, forced labor, destruction, arson, and other actions aimed at "destroying the Serbian presence in the newly occupied territories".

Paris Peace Conference

At the Peace Conference of 1919, the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties, a precursor of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, was created. The Commission organized war crimes "against the laws of war and humanity" into thirty-two specific classes including: "massacres, rapes, deportations and internments, tortures and deliberate starvation, forced labour and systematic terrorism".
According to the report of the commission, Bulgaria was found responsible for no less than eighteen classes of war crimes.

Aftermath

The Serb army returned in 1918 to find a land devastated by war and exploitation; besides losing 210,000 men of its armed forces, Serbia suffered an additional 300,000 civilian casualties out of a 3.1 million population
After the defeat of Bulgaria, and the return of Macedonia, the Slav population of the area was declared Serbian and Bulgarian cultural, religious, and educational institutions were closed down. Bulgaria was forced to give up all its conquered territory as a consequence of the Treaty of Neuilly imposed by the Allies, its army reduced to a force of 20,000 volunteers and stripped of much of its equipment; Four small regions were ceded to the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, its population also declared Serbian. Bulgaria would return in 1941, as an ally of Nazi Germany, to once more occupy the lands it believed were rightfully its own.

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