BULGARIAN NATIONAL LEGIONS

Author: Zhelyazko Kolev

 

Who are the G.O.P.? — For a long time Republicans have been known as the "G.O.P." Party faithful thought it meant the "Grand Old Party", but apparently the original meaning (in 1875) was "gallant old party." And when automobiles were invented it also came to mean, "get out and push." That's still a pretty good slogan for Republicans who depend every campaign year on the hard work of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to get out and vote and push people to support the causes of the Republican Party.

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Bulgarian National Front: — The industrial and political leadership (particularly the right wing) of this country always had a nice cozy relationship with fascists.

Read "Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party" by Russell Bellant. Read how in May 17, 1985 Reagan, at the Shoreham Hotel, got a standing ovation from the National Republican Heritage Groups (Nationalities) Council [NRHG(N)C]. This group operates under the auspices of the Republican National Committee and Reagan even toasted them.

The founding chair of the Council was Laszo Pasztor, an activist in various Hungarian rightist and Nazi-linked groups. In WWII Pasztor was a leader of the youth group of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian equivalent of the German Nazi Party.

One of the organizations Pasztor approached to help form the Council was the Bulgarian National Front, headed by Ivan Docheff. As early as 1971, the G.O.P was warned that the National Front was beyond the pale. A Jack Anderson column quoted another Bulgarian-American organization, the conservative Bulgarian National Committee, which labeled Docheff's National Front as "fascist". Neither the G.O.P nor the Nixon campaign took action. Professor Spas T. Raikin, a former official of the National Front, says the group grew out of an organization in Bulgaria that in the 1930's and 1940's was "pro-Nazi and pro-Fascist."

Docheff was with a Bulgarian youth group in the early 1930's and he met with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movements leading philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg, in 1934 shortly after the Nazis came to power. Docheff then established the Bulgarian Legion, a pro-Hitler group that agitated for government action against Bulgarian Jews.

After the war, when abroad Docheff formed the Bulgarian National Front (BNF).

When interviewed on the BNF's role in the Reagan-Bush campaign, Docheff said that twenty-five U.S. chapters of the Front were active in the re-election effort: "If you want to know who the local chapter leaders of the Bulgarian National Front are, find out who heads the local Bulgarian unit of the Reagan-Bush campaign. They are the same persons."

Although the warnings by the Bulgarian National Committee and the subsequent investigation of Docheff have provided adequate levels of warning to the G.O.P, it has continued to maintain ties to the Bulgarian National Front. Even while the U.S. government was investigating Docheff on war crime charges, he was a pre-election guest of the White House in September 1984, arranged through Republican Heritage Groups Council executive director Radi Slavoff.

Attending the Reagan speech at the Shoreham was another Pasztor choice, General-Major Nicholas Nazarenko. He is still consumed with his wartime hatred of Russians and Jews. He organizes annual "Captive Nations" march in New York City every summer, in which he appears in Cossack military dress.

The evening after Reagan's speech he showed author Russ Bellant a huge suitcase of materials he carried with him as part of his political activity. It was filled with literature on the "Jewish Problem," Cossack publications, and memorabilia from his service in WWII — on the German side. He described his involvement with the German army as an officer in special Cossack units, battle by battle. His final military action was in an SS Cossack unit under German General Helmuth von Pannitz. In order to prove his sincerity, he showed his German officer's ID, and photographs of him and his unit. There were swastikas on the uniform. Nazarenko was active in Richard Nixon's 1968 and 1972 campaigns, and his Cossack veterans group is one of two Cossackian components of the Republican Heritage Groups Council.

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Pictures 1 & 2: This book relates about the activities of the Bulgarian National Legions (BNL) and allied pro-Fascist organizations in the country from 1933 to 1944. It is based upon excerpts from the Police Archive which was captured from the Communists after 9 September 1944. As a matter of fact, whether, the BNL existed as a secret arm of Gestapo in Bulgaria during the mentioned period is a controversy. More about the political platform of the organization can be investigated after studying kin associations, like the Italian right movement "Il Balilla". Interesting source book are the memoirs of Prof. Spas Raikin, published simultaneously in bulgarian and english. Finally, an interested reader can get some materials from the site www.bnfront.com/, ditto.

(i). Bulgarian National Legions was founded as sham supporting organization in year 1933. Its leader Gen. Hristo Lukov was assassinated on 13 February 1943.

 

(ii). Ivan Docheff (1907-2006) was leader of the youth branch in BNL. He was former member of IMRO-Shumen, who after the banishment of the mother organization became ultra-nationalist and in 1944 fled from the country with retreating German forces.

 

 

Copyright © 2008 by the author.