BULGARIAN WAR CRIMES IN POLJANICA 1942‒1943.

Abstract

After the April collapse of the army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941, Bulgarian troops established control over certain parts of the territory of southern Serbia. In the occupied territory of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria established an occupation administration and established a repressive administrative system, the ultimate goal of which was the Bulgarianization of public life and the Serbian population, and the complete integration of the occupied territories into the state-legal order of Bulgaria. Guided by the stated objectives, from April 1941 to September 1944, the Bulgarian occupation troops committed a large number of war crimes against the Serbian population. The subject of our research is the crimes of the occupation forces in the Poljanica region during 1943. Using unpublished sources from the Bulgarian province, the paper provides hitherto unknown information about the suffering of Poljanica in the Second World War.