Blagoi Popov

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Blagoi Simeonow Popow ( Bulgarian Благой Симеонов Попов , German-outdated Blagoi Popoff ; born November 28, 1902 in Dren, Radomir municipality, Pernik Oblast , Bulgaria; † September 28, 1968 in Varna ) was a Bulgarian communist. He became known as one of the five defendants in the 1933 Reichstag arson trial .

Live and act

Popov was the son of a village teacher. He attended secondary school and joined the Communist Youth, later the Bulgarian Communist Party . In October 1924, after the September uprising in 1923 , Popov emigrated to Yugoslavia and then went to Moscow , from where he did not return to Bulgaria until the end of 1930. In 1932 he fled to Germany.

A few days after the Reichstag fire of February 1933, Popow was arrested in Berlin on March 9, 1933 - allegedly because the police had evidence that he was directly involved in the setting up of the building as an accomplice or was involved in the organizational structure.

Following the preliminary investigation by the Gestapo , Popow was indicted in the so-called Reichstag fire trial together with the Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe , who was found in the Reichstag , as well as his two Bulgarian compatriots Georgi Dimitrov and Wassil Tanew and the German KPD politician Ernst Torgler before the Reichsgericht in Leipzig , to have carried out or prepared the attack on the Reichstag building.

The defense of Popow and the other two Bulgarians took over the lawyer Paul Teichert . The public's attention was mainly directed to van der Lubbe, as well as the prominent politician Torgler and Dimitrov, who appeared as the main spokesman for the defendants.

At the end of the trial, Popov was acquitted on December 23, along with Dimitrov, Tanew and Torgler, while van der Lubbe was sentenced to death and executed. Despite the acquittal, Popov and the other three acquitted were not released, but initially held in protective custody . Various reasons are given in the literature about the motives for this measure: partly because the Nazi leadership was disappointed with the judgment of the court and wanted to punish the accused with protective custody as an alternative, and partly because the government wanted to protect them from savage attacks by the SA that would have cast a negative light on the Nazi state in the world press.

In the spring of 1934, Popov, Tanew and Dimitrov received Soviet citizenship from Josef Stalin . They were then flown to Koenigsberg and from there to Moscow . Like the other two, Popov was initially considered a hero in the Soviet Union , but was arrested in October 1937 in the course of the Stalinist purges and spent over 17 years in Soviet prisons and penal camps.

Liberated and rehabilitated in 1954, Popov returned to Bulgaria and was First Counselor of the Embassy of the People's Republic of Bulgaria in the German Democratic Republic from 1956 to 1959 . In August 1968, one month before his death, he completed his memoirs about his imprisonment in the Soviet Union, which, however, were not allowed to appear in his home country until 1991, and were initially published in 1981 by Bulgarian emigrants in Paris.

Works

  • Za da ne se povtori nikoga veče , Paris 1981.
  • Ot procesa v Lajpcig do lagerite v Sibir , Sofia 1991.

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Popov, Blagoi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Popow, Blagoi Simeonow (full name); Попов, Благой Симеонов (Bulgarian); Blagoi Popoff
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bulgarian communist
DATE OF BIRTH November 28, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Pernik Oblast
DATE OF DEATH September 28, 1968
Place of death Varna