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134 Chapter 5 From Leaf to Ash Jews, Germans, and Bulgarian Gold in the Second World War Toward the end of 1940, Jacques Asseoff, a Jewish tobacco magnate from Bulgaria, got on a ship in Istanbul that was laden with his company’s tobacco purchases. Headed for the port of New York, the ship had a minor accident at sea but still made it to its destination in April of 1941. Asseoff probably sold his precious cargo—200,000 kilograms of tobacco (worth some $ 256,000)—to the American tobacco company Liggett and Myers. Since he was Jewish, Asseoff’s timing for his exit from Europe could not have been better. Though Bulgaria was not at war when he left Istanbul, it had joined the Axis powers by the time he arrived in New York. But before his departure the writing was already on the wall. In September of 1940, the Bulgarian parliament had approved the infamous Law of the Defense of the Nation (LDN), patterned directly on the Nazi German Nuremburg Laws of 1935. Published in October, the new law was implemented gradually and sporadically, allowing Asseoff and his family a window of opportunity to flee the country and settle in New York. Asseoff’s Bulgarian bank accounts were probably frozen in October, but it took another two years for the Bulgarian authorities to dismantle his tobacco empire,Balkantabak. And though he ultimately lost the bulk of his Bulgarian assets, he had already transferred significant funds out of the country. Before war reached the Balkans,he had managed to depart,accompanied by one last load of Bulgarian tobacco. FROM LEAF TO ASH 135 As one of the most successful tobacco merchants in interwar Bulgaria, Asseoff was witness to the growth of a Bulgarian-German commercial partnership . This relationship,in which the tobacco trade was central,ultimately provided one of the foundations for Bulgaria’s entry into the war on the Axis side. In the course of the 1930s the development of Bulgarian-German trade relations had profound repercussions for Asseoff and other tobacco merchants. For while Nazi Germany began to swallow up territories in Eastern Europe in 1938–39, its commercial advance across the region came much earlier. German trade with Bulgaria and other countries in Eastern Europe expanded rapidly in the course of the 1930s as a part of Nazi Grossraumwirtshaft (greater German economic space). German economic policy promoted a regional economic autarchy that decreased German financial dependence on the West.1 With the launching of the Neuer Plan (New Plan) in 1934, Nazi Germany shifted its trade paths east, increasing its imports of raw materials from Eastern Europe in exchange for exported manufactured goods.2 The resulting exchange pattern was coupled with increased political influence in the region, heightened by the visible economic and political successes of the fascist model in Italy and Germany.3 The Neuer Plan targeted all of Eastern Europe, but by 1939 Bulgaria had the largest percentage of trade (67–70%) oriented toward Germany of any state in the region.4 This did not bode well for Jews like Asseoff. Interwar Bulgarian merchants—Jews and gentiles—had turned to Germany, one of the few willing buyers of their agricultural goods. Yet even before Bulgaria became an Axis state, Jews were gradually shut out of the tobacco trade by Nazi dictate. Bulgarian merchants, in contrast, continued sending Oriental tobacco—Bulgaria’s most valuable export in this period—up the Danube to Germany, one of the only options for economic survival as war swept the continent. Without a doubt Germany needed Bulgarian tobacco to bolster its war efforts. By the 1940s cigarettes for troops had become a wartime necessity. In the annals of tobacco history, World War II, like World War I before it, was a critical turning point in the global consumption of tobacco. Smoking grew to unprecedented levels as Allied and Axis states supplied soldiers on the front and civilians on the home front with cigarette rations. Bored, agitated, hungry, and stressed populations sought a source of comfort in the cigarette. Even in labor and death camps, tobacco was sought after, traded, and smuggled; it was more valuable than currency during the war. German soldiers smoked a path of destruction across Europe; even mass shootings of Jews by Nazi death squads were punctuated by requisite smoke breaks.5 As in the past, tobacco was not just a palliative, an oasis of comfort and pleasure . It was also, indirectly, a bearer of violence and...

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