Mass Internment of Civilians, Camps, and Forced Labor in Bulgaria during World War I
Mass Internment of Civilians, Camps, and Forced Labor in Bulgaria during World War I

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the Bulgarian army’s civilian internment policies during World War I. It attempts to answer how and why the Bulgarian army deported around 70,000 civilians from the territories it occupied during the war. The deportees were treated as prisoners of war, interned in camps, then organized into labor commandos and forced to perform labor in a variety of locations. Far from being simply a conflict between soldiers, as it is often assumed, World War I was the twentieth century’s first total war, which laid the groundwork for mass civilian internment, concentration camps, and militarized forced labor in Bulgaria. The deportations in the Balkans were set against the global background of civilian internment during World War I and the paper demonstrates how the new forms of violence unleashed against civilians during the war forever changed the course of the twentieth century.

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