Statement of the Press Centre Directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: ‘It is not the Soviet Army but the Bulgarian people who saved Bulgarian Jews’
03 November 2017 News
In connection with a statement of a Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria declares the following:
"While Bulgarian citizens stood on the tracks to stop the trains headed for the Nazi death camps, while members of the Bulgarian political, economic and intellectual elite wrote protest letters in defence of the Bulgarian Jews and Bulgarian Orthodox Church hierarchs joined the Jews summoned for deportation, stating that the compatriots would be taken to the camps only together with them, the Red Army was thousands of kilometres away from Bulgaria's borders.
"Without underrating the significance and role of the Red Army for the liquidation of Nazism in Europe in the course of World War II, we insist on emphasizing that such attempts at supplanting historical facts do not further the universal human cause of combating the resurgence of anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance and categorically condemning Nazism and neo-Nazism in its contemporary forms.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs takes a consistent stand on the issue of the desecration of monuments and the manifestation of anti-Semitism in the country: we categorically condemn such acts as well as acts of intolerance and racism in all their forms and work with other institutions and law-enforcement authorities in Bulgaria to identify the perpetrators and hold them to account."