Bulgarian Official Admits ‘Horsing Around’ On Buchenwald Trip
Saved: Child survivors exit Buchenwald?s main gate after liberation, escorted by American soldiers. Image by US HolocaUSt MeMorial MUSeUM, coUrteSy of NatioNal arcHiveS aNd recordS adMiNiStratioN, college Park
(JTA) — A leader of Bulgarian Jews condemned his country’s deputy prime minister, who said jokingly that he may have behaved inappropriately when visiting a former Nazi concentration camp.
Valeri Simeonov, vice-president of the United Patriots and Bulgaria’s deputy prime minister, told the Sega newspaper on Tuesday he and some his friends may have taken spoof pictures of themselves in Buchenwald during the 1970s.
Simeonov, 62, said this in downplaying the significance of a political scandal that earlier this week forced a member of Simeonov’s party, Pavel Tenev, to resign from the position of deputy minister. Tenev had been photographed performing a Nazi salute at a Paris museum while standing next to mannequins dressed in Nazi uniform.
Dismissing Tenev’s actions as harmless buffoonery, Simeonov recalled traveling with his friends in the 1970s to Buchenwald, the former Nazi camp in Germany, where the Nazis killed more than 43,000 people, including dissidents, Soviet prisoners of war and many Jews — before almost all Jewish inmates were transferred to Auschwitz in Poland.
The newspaper quoted Simeonov recalling how he himself had “horsed around” in the 1970s when he was taken as a student to the Nazi concentration camp in Buchenwald. “Who knows what gag photos we made there,” Simeonov told the Sega journalist.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
