Hristo Lukov was a Bulgarian General and [Third Reich] collaborator during World War II. [The Kingdom of] Bulgaria […] allied with [the Reich] during the war. At that time, Lukov and his political movement, whose main motto was “To expel from Bulgaria anyone who does not have Bulgarian blood,” pushed for the adoption of “The Laws for the Protection of the Nation,” which were inspired by the Nuremberg Laws and provided the segregation, exclusion, and oppression of the Jewish population of the country.

Eventually, Lukov was assassinated by two Jewish Communist partisans, Ivan Burudzhiev and Violeta Yakova, outside his house in Sofia, in 1943.

But [the Kingdom of] Bulgaria’s relationship with the Holocaust is much more complex. In 1943, when the [Reich’s] forces pursued the transportation of 50,000 Bulgarian Jews to concentration camps, the Bulgarian King of that time, Boris III, along with the Orthodox Church, resisted and prevented the transportation and extermination of the Jewish population. However, some 11,000 Jews from the Bulgarian‐occupied territories of Greece and Yugoslavia, were sent to certain death to the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland.

[We] interviewed Petar Cholakov, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute for the Study of Society and Knowledge of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, to find out more about Hristo Lukov and his modern admirers. Mr. Cholakov said Lukov was a complicated and controversial figure whose organization held [Fascist] sentiments.

[…]

To hear from the organizers, [we] interviewed Plamen Dimitrov, the head of the BNS Sofia branch. We met him outside of the offices of BNS, which are in the center of Sofia in a heavily Muslim‐populated neighborhood, near the city’s mosque and synagogue.

Dimitrov said that BNS is a “Bulgarian nationalistic organization” and that their “goal is to keep the memory of our heroes and traditions alive.” He considers Lukov a Bulgarian hero who revived the Bulgarian army after World War I and his role in Bulgarian history was very important because he and his organization (the UBNL) stopped the Communist movement, and did it without using violence.

He also stated that what the critics say towards Lukov is “Communist propaganda” and that “there [is] no historical evidence that prove that Hristo Lukov was anti‐Semitic.”

(Emphasis original.)