Denazification - decommunization - the case of Iraq -
examples of treatment of former criminal authoritarian regimes

By Dr Sdrafko Tzankoff

Dr S. Tzankoff was born in Sofia in 1920 as son of Assen Tzankoff, a social democrat, and nephew of prof. Alexander Tzankoff, prime minister of Bulgaria (1923-1926). He studied law in Sofia and as a doctoral student went in 1942 to Berlin. After the war he lived as an emigre first in Austria and France. Worked at "The Voice of America" in Paris and Munich in 1956-1958, then until his retirement - at a US oil company in Germany responsible for law, personnel and administration. In July 2000, he launched an independent online publication for Bulgarian politics and history, "Forum Sdr@fko Tzankoff"

When, on May 1, 1945, World War II ended, I was at an alpine hotel named Ehrenbachhoehe, in Kitzbuehel. in Austrian Tirol, where I was united for the first time after a long period with my mother and father.

50 years later, I wrote a feature for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, that war read by the secretary at the hotel at that time. Thanks to my rare name, that she remembered well, she immediately got in touch with me, we made friends with her and her husband, and from her, I learned the details that I didn't know at the time, which rounded up historically the picture, so that I can tell it to you today.

The hotel was requisitioned in April 1945 by the German foreign office to accommodate political and public figures from South-Eastern Europe to which Germany, for some reasons, felt at the moment of its defeat morally indebted or responsible. In particular, there were Hungarians from the last Hungarian pro-German government that ruled the country till the occupation by the Soviet armies, Yugoslav politicians form the pro-German government that ruled for a couple of days Yugoslavia in 1941, and my father, who was foreign minister in the Bulgarian emigre anticommunist government in Vienna after September 9, 1944, after the Soviets occupied Bulgaria, of which I reported in detail in my forum.

The hotel was in the highest part of the Alps and could be reached by sleigh only.

The third day after the end of the war, that is May 3, 1945, the US occupation troops entered Kitzbuehel that was long time before turned from winter resort into German military hospital town. They entered without fighting that had practically ceased on May 1. As early as the next day, two young American officers from a special denazification unit, speaking an excellent German, refugees from Nazi Germany, at least one of them was obviously Jewish, came with an attache case with lists of names, compared the names from the hotel register with their lists and arrested the Hungarian men who had ruled Hungary and were apparently singled out as responsible for the anti-Jewish measures of their government. They did not arrest anybody from their families, neither the Yugoslavs, nor us, Bulgarians.

This was obviously the implementation of long prepared denazification measures the Americans carried out here in Austria, that was till this days a part of the Third (Nazi) Reich, in this case against subjects of countries from South-Eastern Europe, including Bulgaria.

Heddi, that was the hotel secretary's name, a German young woman from Romanian Banat [Transylvania], tracked the arrested Hungarians' fate: the Americans released a small group of them soon, because concluded they were not guilty of crimes against humanity, and turned the rest over to the Hungarian communist authorities. Who executed them under the Soviet rules after "trials" similar to the Bulgarian "people's" tribunals.

My conclusion is: this was an example of a timely conceived and organized denazification by the victor - the US. It might be - as any human deed - not perfect but acceptable.

Later on, Germany was left alone to build its government. It introduced exemplary parliamentary democracy. The general denazification that followed was not impeccable but was the best among the others it might be compared with.

When the Berlin Wall collapsed in late 1989, the German dissidents rescued the archives of their communist State Security - STASI; decommunization in Germany is a bit pedantic but, no doubt, the best in Europe, if not in the world? There was no foreign victor: neither the US, nor the Federal Republic of Germany were "victors", the communist regime in East Berlin was toppled by its own population, lead by its dissidents.

Allow me if I may hear mention another example - in the Far East: in Japan after 1946, the US relegated the issue to a general of theirs, McArthur, the victor of Japan, who too implemented a policy of his own making against the then authoritarian regime in Imperial Japan, one that history can consider as successful.

The case of Iraq showed that when the victor - the US - had not prepared the peace after the victory but naively hoped that the people, liberated from Saddam Hussein, would voluntarily embrace democracy, authoritarian past was not in the least overcome.

As to Bulgaria, as a distant observer, I am not entitled to lead the discussion that you envisage. In my reckoning, the situation is as follows:

Nobody "conquered" the communist regime form the outside, it surrendered its power in an attempt to preserve its privileges, and - personally for themselves - the state finances, under slight pressure from dissident groups (no organized dissident movement existed in Bulgaria), and these groups, having "done their job" on December 14, 1989, went back home.

It could hardly be expected from the rulers to start a decommunization as in all People's Assemblies, including the Grand National Assembly, the former communist State Security members had a majority. The two anti-communist cabinets of Filip Dimitrov and Ivan Kostov in this regard were busy keeping their anti-communist image only. To fight for decommunization in other ways did not interest them particularly.

What's the situation today?

1. No post-communist country excelled glamorously in decommunization - with the partial exception of the former German Democratic Republic.
2. Other post-communist countries have certain successes.
3. Bulgaria has no successes at all for the simple reason that in fact it has not begun any real attempts at decommunization.

The only hope is that it is not too late to start.

Translation from Bulgarian by Dr. Neli Hadjiyska and Dr. Valentin Hadjiyski