Blagoy Popov
Blagoi Simeonow Popov ( Bulgarian Благой Симеонов Попов, German - outdated Blagoi Popoff, born November 28, 1902 in Dren, community Radomir, Pernik Oblast, Bulgaria; † 28 September 1968, Varna ) was a Bulgarian communist. He became known as one of the five defendants in the Reichstag fire trial of 1933.
Life and work
Popov was the son of a village teacher. He attended secondary school and joined the Communist Youth, later in the Bulgarian Communist Party a. In October 1924, after the September uprising in 1923, Popov emigrated to Yugoslavia and then went to Moscow, where he first returned to Bulgaria end of 1930. In 1932, he fled to Germany.
A few days after the Reichstag fire of February 1933 Popov was arrested on March 9, 1933 in Berlin - allegedly because the police had evidence that he had been involved in the arson of the building directly as accomplices or cryptically - organizationally.
Following the preliminary investigation by the Gestapo Popov was indicted in the so-called Reichstag fire process together with the encountered in the Reichstag Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe, and his two Bulgarian compatriots Georgi Dimitrov and Vasil Tanev and the German Communist Party politician Ernst Torgler before the Supreme Court in Leipzig, to have the attack on the Reichstag building carried out or prepared.
The defense of Popov and the other two Bulgarians took the lawyer Paul Teichert. The public's attention was mainly van der Lubbe, and the prominent politician Torgler and kicking as the main spokesman for the defendants in appearance Dimitrov.
At the end of the process Popov was acquitted on 23 December along with Dimitrov, Tanev and Torgler, while van was convicted and executed der Lubbe to death. Despite the acquittal, Popov and the other three were acquitted not set free, but first held in protective custody. On the motives for this measure different reasons in the literature cited: Partially because the Nazi leadership was disappointed with the verdict of the court and the defendants alternatively wanted to punish by protective custody, and partly because the government wanted to protect them from wild attacks by the SA that would have thrown in the world press a negative light on the Nazi state.
In the spring of 1934 Popov, Tanev and Dimitrov Josef Stalin were awarded Soviet citizenship. Then they were first flown to Königsberg and from there to Moscow. In the Soviet Union Popov was like the other two first as a hero, but was arrested in October 1937 in the wake of Stalin's purges, and spent over 17 years in Soviet prisons and labor camps.
1954 freed and rehabilitated, Popov returned to Bulgaria and was from 1956 to 1959 First Counsellor of the Embassy of the People's Republic of Bulgaria in the German Democratic Republic. In August 1968, a month before his death, he completed his memoirs about his time in custody in the Soviet Union, but in his home until 1991, were not allowed to appear, and were first 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.