Petur Gabrovski

Who was Petur Gabrovski?

Petur Dimitrov Gabrovski was a Bulgarian politician who briefly served as Prime Minister during the Second World War. Gabrovski was a lawyer by profession. He was also a member of the Grand Masonic Lodge of Bulgaria.

Gabrovski began his political career as a Nazi, forming his own movement the Ratniks of the Advancement of the Bulgarian National Spirit - more commonly known as Ratnik or the Ratnitsi. The group was virulently Anti-Semitic and was said to have links to Nazi Germany, although it failed to achieve anything approaching a mass following.

Gabrovski's political career took off in October 1939 when he was brought into the cabinet of Georgi Kyoseivanov as minister responsible for the railways, with his appointment to the cabinet seeing him resigning from the Ratnitsi. In the cabinet established by Bogdan Filov in 1940 he was promoted to the post of Minister of the Interior. In this role Gabrovski was quick to enact laws limiting the role of Jews in Bulgarian life and expelled several hundred recently arrived Jews, who had hoped to gain entry into Mandatory Palestine from Bulgaria, forcing them to go to Turkey instead. He also sent Alexander Belev, a fellow lawyer and Ratnik whom he appointed to a post in the ministry, to Nazi Germany to make a study of their racial laws. He subsequently became associated with the transportation of Jews to concentration camps and most notoriously signed a written agreement to approve the transportation of 20,000 Jews from Macedonia and Thrace on 22 February 1943.