March 28, 2024 • 57 mins
Can you trust anyone in wartime? Host Becky Milligan meets a man in Sofia, Bulgaria, who shows her a side of King Boris III that makes her question whether he’s really the hero of this story. As Becky picks her way through the viper’s nest of conflicted history, she must confront the royal children with some uncomfortable truths.
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Speaker 9 (02:13):
Goodbye September the fifth, nineteen forty three the state funeral
of King Boris, the third of Bulgaria, and the nation
is united in grief. The streets outside Saint Alexander Nevsky
Cathedral are packed with weeping crowds. No one speaks and
(02:38):
all heads about. Many here have waited hours already, but
everyone wants to enter the church to pay their last
respects to their beloved king. Inside the cathedral for the
service is the royal family, the widowed Queen Giovanna Kirol,
(03:03):
the king's younger brother and his two sisters. And standing
in front of the open casket are two small frightened children,
Princess Maria Louisa and the boy King Simeon.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
We first saw him in the chapel of the Palace Chapel,
and then in the cathedral where I was laying in state.
As a matter of fact, Queen Elizabeth sooner they had
brought me back some memories of what occurs after the
death of his sovereign.
Speaker 9 (03:40):
They've never seen a dead person before and now protocol
demands that they embraced their father one last time.
Speaker 10 (03:48):
That was my father, So it just kissed him, and
I knew it for a ten year old, you know,
you kissed your father's forehead and it's cold and it
wasn't easy.
Speaker 11 (04:01):
So it's very dear.
Speaker 10 (04:03):
I don't like to talk about it, but you brought
it up. I'm sorry, no, no, because people should know, and.
Speaker 9 (04:11):
You remember it clearly as though it was yesterday. Is
it never gone?
Speaker 11 (04:16):
Never forget it?
Speaker 9 (04:18):
And it must have been really hard for your brother
as well. He was even smaller.
Speaker 10 (04:21):
Yeah, he was for years, angam, so it was six still,
you know, you go to a funeral and it all
comes back.
Speaker 9 (04:31):
They're both wearing white knee socks and black armbands. Maria
Louisa is in a pleated skirt and jacket. Little Simeon
has on shorts and a frock coat. They clutch at
their mother's hand. They looked so vulnerable, so achingly bereft.
You can't help thinking of the young Princess William and
(04:53):
Harry as they walked behind Princess Diana's coffin.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
It was such a gruesome or terrible feeling to kiss
his forehead being icy coal that I've got this to
this day and God knows all the stage, but I
still avoid going to burials where one can.
Speaker 11 (05:15):
See the dead person.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
It's just something which has shocked me so deeply that
I can hardly take it. It's ridiculous, but there it is.
That's left something that psychiatrists would probably find all sorts
of explanations.
Speaker 9 (05:37):
It must be an unimaginable trial for the children's mother,
Queen Giovanna too.
Speaker 11 (05:43):
My mother was heroic.
Speaker 10 (05:44):
She was standing there, never shed a tear in front
of us, never, never, ever, she was stoic. That's all
I can see. And then of course she was on own.
Speaker 9 (05:58):
But on top of all the pain and of that day,
there's also a deep sense of disquiet about how the
king comes to be lying there at all. The queen
already suspects her husband didn't die a natural death, and
King Boris's sister Eudoxia shares that hunch. Your Doxia is
convinced the Nazis poisoned him. Specifically, she blames one of
(06:21):
the German doctors who tended the monarch on his sick bed.
She doesn't trust him. Did she share that intuition with
the queen, because if she did, if your docta did
mention the name doctor Sites, the Queen's blood must have
frozen in her veins.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Seits was the head of a clinic where my mother
had gone.
Speaker 11 (06:44):
She was almost like a sort of private physician.
Speaker 9 (06:48):
Doctor Sites was not just any old doctor. He was
a personal friend of the queen's And so I have
to ask did he use that friendship to in filtrate
the palace and commit the ultimate act of treachery, the
murder of the king from Blanchard House And exactly right, media,
(07:17):
this is the Butterfly King. I'm Becky Milligan, chapter three,
(08:01):
Snake in the Grass. Remember that lead on the Asiatic Poison. Well,
I'm back in Bulgaria with my producer EJ following it up.
There's a historian here who's promised us some new information
(08:21):
about Boris's death. Our route to his office takes us
right past the royal Palace, the one where he spent
his final days. The palace is over there. That's where
they all lived, the royal family, and it's where he died.
I think, I think so. It's right in the middle,
isn't it. That is quite grand. That's grander than the
(08:46):
palace that we've been to. It's quite yellow, freezing. I
forgot to put on another help. So far we've only
been to Varana Palace, his country retreat, but it's this one,
the one in downtown Sofia that was King Boris's main residence,
(09:07):
and it's here he was taken ill and died. The
palace was built in the late nineteenth century, but after
the Second World War, when the Soviet Union invaded and
abolished the monarchy, it became an art gallery. Hity, it's
a national gallery. Yeah, why do you if you think
(09:29):
about Buckingham Paris, I mean that has to open up
to visitors. Yes, it does. Yeah, Actually he doesn't like it,
does he, the king. He doesn't want to live there,
so maybe it will become more open.
Speaker 12 (09:41):
Well, poor old.
Speaker 9 (09:41):
Simeon doesn't have much choice, does it, because this is
no longer a royal palace.
Speaker 12 (09:45):
It's the art gallery and that's just it.
Speaker 9 (09:47):
I wonder if he did have his eye on it
and they just you know, he couldn't get it back
after he came back after the communist regime. Yeah, it's
it's okay. It is hand some large palace like but
not extraordinary, my fear, might I make bite for your birthday.
(10:14):
The historian we've come to meet, Professor vladimirs Latarski, is
a forensic researcher.
Speaker 13 (10:21):
You know, the work of the historian is that you
start with an article, a document, and you are trying
to make the whole story concerning the death of King
burhis step by step.
Speaker 9 (10:36):
So step by step, he's turned the archives inside out
looking for evidence about the King's murder. Not the Bulgarian
archives we already know those were stolen when the Communists
occupied Bulgaria after the war. The German archives. He discovered
some very interesting things among the Nazis' personal papers, information
(10:59):
that was never meant to be shared, completely off the record,
and the evidence came from this man.
Speaker 13 (11:12):
The diary of Joseph Jobbels, the Minister of the Propaganda
Joseph Gebels.
Speaker 9 (11:19):
Gebels was Hitler's right hand man. As propaganda minister, he
was effectively the voice of the Nazi party. His diaries
are full of twisted anti Semitic dogma, but they also
give us access to some of the most secret goings
on within the regime. The originals are kept in the
Hoover library in Iowa, but professors Latarski read copies in Berlin,
(11:42):
and in one particular entry he spotted a very intriguing passage.
It talks directly about the death of King Boris and
about how.
Speaker 12 (11:52):
He was killed.
Speaker 13 (11:54):
After the death of the king, there was a meeting
between the doctor team and Hitler. But after the conversation
of obviously, Hitler spoke with Giobbels.
Speaker 9 (12:08):
And Hitler told Gebels that the doctors had revealed to
him the cause of the king's death.
Speaker 13 (12:14):
Hitler said to Goobbels, it is quite sure that the
king was poisoned.
Speaker 12 (12:20):
That is what he had heard from the doctors.
Speaker 9 (12:24):
But the doctors went much further than that. They actually
named the poison.
Speaker 13 (12:29):
It was some kind of poison from India, probably snake poison.
Speaker 9 (12:36):
Snake poison from India. Now that adds up because India
plus snakes equals asiatic poison. So is snake venom what
killed King Boris, the third of Bulgaria. I need to
speak to a herpetologist, basically a reptile expert, and preferably
(12:58):
one with a thing for snakes.
Speaker 14 (13:04):
I had a lot of snakes. I mean I was
keeping and breeding snakes at home. I had probably about
two hundred at one time in the seventies.
Speaker 9 (13:12):
Snake experts don't come more expert than Marc O'Shea. He's
a professor of herpetology at the University of Wolverhampton in
the UK. He's got long gray hair and a flowing
white beard. He'd make a brilliant wizard. I can safely
say he knows a thing or two about snakes, and
absolutely everything about snakes from Asia.
Speaker 14 (13:37):
Around the world. Every year, up to one hundred and
thirty eight thousand people die of snake bite. Out of
one hundred and thirty eight thousand, the majority the lion's
share die in South Asia. Tropical Asia has a horrendous
snake bite death rate.
Speaker 9 (13:51):
Can you name the venomous snakes in Asia? Just a
short you know five or six of them?
Speaker 7 (13:57):
Oh?
Speaker 12 (13:57):
Shortlist?
Speaker 14 (13:58):
Well, the big four common cobra, common crate, Russell's viper,
saurscale viper. That's the big four. But there's plenty of others,
and there are several species of cobras. There are several
species of crites.
Speaker 9 (14:10):
At last, I feel we're getting somewhere. I've just looked
up a picture of the Indian creed it's glossy jet
black with milky white bands. According to Mark, it's highly
toxic venom makes it an efficient killer. But the cobra,
she's an even better murder weapon because she sinks her
(14:31):
fangs far more deeply into flesh. A precision killing.
Speaker 14 (14:35):
My favorite snakes, my favorite species of king cobra. There's
something going on behind those eyes. Anyone who's worked with
kings will tell you that. And I've met king cobra's
in India, and I had a king cobra for many years.
Sleeping beauty, She's my wallpaper on my computer.
Speaker 9 (14:52):
Is the king cobra, the one that stands up and
looks at you?
Speaker 11 (14:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 14 (14:56):
Oh, all cobras will rise up and hood spitching go
much less than non spitters because they tend to raise
the head a bit, spit and drop again.
Speaker 9 (15:05):
Oh the poetic irony, a king killing the king. Now
in Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, snakes themselves are used
as murder weapons, and Mark has actually given evidence in
homicide trials where snakes were involved.
Speaker 14 (15:24):
I do think that some snakes are more intelligent than
we used to think.
Speaker 9 (15:31):
So before his Majesty arrived at the Wolf's layer. Could
Hitler or one of his henchmen have hidden the snake
in the bunker under the King's bed, and then that
night as the king slept, could the venomous serpent have
slithered across the floor up onto the King's bed and
(15:54):
bitten him as he slept?
Speaker 11 (15:58):
Couldn't happen?
Speaker 14 (15:59):
Really, if you want to kill somebody, they're going to say,
can you guarantee this is going to work?
Speaker 7 (16:05):
Well?
Speaker 14 (16:05):
Sorry?
Speaker 6 (16:06):
No?
Speaker 9 (16:07):
Oh right?
Speaker 14 (16:09):
I doubt very much whether Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle
interviewed her petologists when they were thinking of murdering somebody
with snake venom.
Speaker 9 (16:18):
Of course, there's James Bond as well. There's always a
snake in the bed. There isn't there doing some you
know ready with his venom?
Speaker 12 (16:24):
Yes?
Speaker 14 (16:25):
But I saw a cobra up at the Liverpool School
of Tropical Medicine quite a few years ago. It was
quite a monkey specimen with an odd eye, which was
supposed to have been put into a hotel room to
kill somebody. Oh my god, you could you could stay
in that hotel room for a fortnight and never see
the snakes killed up behind the wastebasket. You know, it's
(16:45):
just if you got a snake in a room and
expected to kill somebody, you better have a lot of
time to wait, because the chances of that happening a
snake hides.
Speaker 9 (16:56):
They could die of natural death and the snake could
just continue living there.
Speaker 14 (17:00):
Yes, or the maid comes in and turns the bed
and she gets bitten. So it's really it's just it
sounds great in theory, but killing people with snakes is
not it's not guaranteed, it's not efficient, and it's fought
with problems.
Speaker 9 (17:17):
Okay, so you can't just put a snake in a
room and instruct it to kill someone. But then to
kill someone with a snake, you don't need the actual serpent.
You just need its venom.
Speaker 14 (17:31):
When you milk a snake, you get what looks like
where it's a liquid. It may be yellow, maybe slightly orange.
You may be a clear and that is the liquid venom,
and generally that would be a freeze dried to get
a dry weight.
Speaker 9 (17:47):
Yes, Mark milks snakes, just to be clear, he's not
doing it with an eye to murdering anyone. He sends
the extracted venoms to a lab which then produces anti
venoms to help save those who've been bitten. But milking
a snake is not for the fainthearted.
Speaker 14 (18:06):
You hold a snake, and you hold a receptacle and
retort stand and you encourage the snake to bite through
a latex membrane which folds back the fang sheaths along
the fangs, and then if gently squeeze in the venom glands,
the snake should produce venom into the receptacle underneath, and
that's your liquid venom.
Speaker 9 (18:26):
Please don't try that at home. But if we're to
believe that entry in Gerbel's diary, someone did try it.
Someone milked a snake and extracted deadly venom. But once
you've got that venom, how do you turn it into
a murder weapon.
Speaker 14 (18:45):
If you're going to administer venom, the only way you're
going to be able to do that is by injection.
Speaker 9 (18:51):
By injection, remember what Professor Slatarski found out from reading
Gerbel's diary.
Speaker 13 (18:57):
Hitler said, it is quite sure that the king was poisoned.
Speaker 12 (19:02):
That is what he had heard from the doctors.
Speaker 9 (19:06):
Doctors. Doctors have syringes, Doctors perform injections, And we now
know one thing for certain. If you get the method right,
it's perfectly possible to kill a king with snake venom.
I think it's time to find out a bit more
about the king's doctors. And remember, they weren't Bulgarian doctors.
(19:32):
So who were they and what were they doing in
the king's sick room in August nineteen forty three.
Speaker 13 (19:39):
Actually, first came Professor Rudolfzidz from Berlin, Professor Hanst Eppinger
os Vienna, and they decided to call the Turtlan Professor
Maximilian de Grinis neurologists.
Speaker 9 (19:54):
Okay, so three highly specialized doctors, all known to Hitler
the king in his sick room. Let's start with the
last one. To Crinis was a celebrated shrink. He was
also a high ranking SS officer, but he only flew
in at the very last minute. So even if he
(20:17):
was in on some Nazi plot to kill the king,
it couldn't have been to Crinis who administered the venom.
The damage was done before he showed up. So let's
have a look at Eppinger. He was a highly sought
after professor of internal medicine. His speciality was the liver.
(20:38):
He treated quite a few celebrity patients in his time,
including the Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin and Queen Marie of Romania.
And it was Eppinger who first raised the alarm after
the doctors examined.
Speaker 12 (20:52):
The king because of what they see on the body.
Speaker 9 (20:56):
Which was a very peculiar rash.
Speaker 13 (21:00):
They seen a brown kind of spots.
Speaker 9 (21:04):
Brown spots. We know this because Professor Eppinger spoke to
the German Air Force attache in Sofia. Just like Goebels,
that attache kept a diary and in it he wrote
that he'd met with doctor Eppinger, who told him the
brown spots on Boris's skin indicated the absorption of poison.
Speaker 13 (21:26):
Eppinger described it as a typical Balkan depth.
Speaker 9 (21:31):
What do you mean by a typical Balkan death.
Speaker 13 (21:35):
I mean in the Balkans there were more political murders
than in the rest of Europe.
Speaker 12 (21:39):
For this period.
Speaker 9 (21:42):
Basically, the Balkans at the time went hand in hand
with assassinations. And it's one of those other typical Balkan
deaths that particularly interests me because it has a striking
similarity to Boris's death. In January nineteen forty one, the
Greek Premier Johannis Metaxas died very suddenly, and just a
(22:06):
few weeks earlier, Matexas had refused to let Germany's ally
Italy occupy his country.
Speaker 5 (22:13):
The news of the sudden death of Premier John Metaxas
of Greece has been received with deep regret, both at
home and abroad. General Metaxis is said to have died
of a streptocoggal throat infection which led to sepsis. Rumors
circulating in the Balkan press suggests the Greek general did
not meet a natural death, though we have been unable
to confirm such reports. Before he became a politic.
Speaker 9 (22:34):
Word had spread that Metaxas had also been poisoned. And
get this, his skin was covered with brown blotches, and
we know that from a first hand witness, none other
than Professor Hans Eppinger. It turns out that the same
doctor who tended King Boris on his deathbed also attended
(22:58):
the autopsy of General or Texas. Coincidence or is there
something more sinister going on?
Speaker 12 (23:07):
Here?
Speaker 9 (23:08):
Were the Austrian doctor and his German colleagues hired as
Hitler's hitman with a brief to kill off anyone who
crossed him. But on the other hand, if Eppinger had
poisoned both King Boris and the Greek general, why would
he draw attention to those telltale brown blotches. Let's put
(23:30):
Eppinger to one side for a moment and examine the
last of this trio who flew in to be at
the king's bedside, Doctor Sites. He's the medic who Boris's sister,
Princess Eudoxia didn't trust. See me in recall, she wrote
to him that this.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Doctor zeits Rudelites who came from Berlin, was I mean
there was something suspicious about him.
Speaker 9 (23:58):
Now, Doctor Sites knew the royal family literally inside out.
He was their go to medic because he'd help the
king and his wife on the most intimate and important
of their royal duties, providing an heir.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Sights was ahead of a clinic where my mother had
gone because she had problems in being able to have
a second child yours truly, So she was there and
she knew Professor Sites, and he came obviously because she
was almost like a sort of private physician.
Speaker 9 (24:33):
So if Sites was responsible for the King's murder, that
would be an incredible act of treachery. After all, you
can imagine how grateful the King and Queen were to
doctor Sites. When Simeon was born on June sixteenth, nineteen
thirty seven, there was a national celebration. Four thousand prisoners
(24:57):
were released, fines were part garden, and every school child
and student in the country have their exam papers increased
by one grade. Thanks to doctor Sites, the Bulgarian throne
was secure. He was a hero in the royal family.
So when the Queen heard that doctor Sites was flying
(25:18):
in to help her ailing husband, I imagine she must
have felt relieved. She would have felt her husband was
in safe hands. Or was he What could have made
aren't you doxy a doubt? Doctor Sites. After the war
he moved to Spain, where the Queen, Simeon and Maria
(25:39):
Louisa were living in exile, and there he soon won
the trust of the family all over again. He became
the family doctor and even attended the birth of Simeon's
eldest son.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
He was always so attached to us that this man
should have been the I mean, archvillain is something that
I just can't It doesn't sort of fit in my mind.
Speaker 9 (26:08):
It doesn't make sense. No, but something must have worried
Maria Louisa because many years later she confronted doctor Sites
what went on in her father's sick room.
Speaker 10 (26:21):
One day, I asked him, you know, the professor sides,
what do you know and he said that, you know,
Papa just died.
Speaker 9 (26:29):
That seems a bit of a cop out to me.
Speaker 10 (26:31):
Well, he said, you know, he had given his word
and he didn't. He wasn't alone, you know, there were
three of them, so he didn't blame anybody else.
Speaker 11 (26:41):
But he just was evasive.
Speaker 10 (26:43):
I mean, you know, but he was an old man
and I was very young, and said he didn't want
to talk about it.
Speaker 9 (26:48):
Well that's what did it make you suspicious?
Speaker 10 (26:51):
No, no, no, because he used to be Papa's doctor
in Berlin too. Papa used to go to him and
he was a friend. But you know, he didn't just
he didn't.
Speaker 11 (27:01):
Want to reveal anything. This is what he meant that
he had given his word to.
Speaker 10 (27:07):
But no, I don't see it there and I'll never
see it there. So we are all dealing with karsa.
Speaker 12 (27:15):
That's the word.
Speaker 9 (27:16):
That's a strange PostScript to the tale of the Three Doctors.
We know that doctor Sites went to live in Spain
after nineteen forty five. But the others.
Speaker 13 (27:28):
From this trio two people have committed suicide at the
end of the war, So Professor Zeitz, he's the only
person that they a lived after the war.
Speaker 9 (27:42):
Actually, make of that what you will. But Simeon and
Maria Louisa are adamant that doctor Sites would never have
harmed their father. He certainly seemed incredibly loyal to the
royal family. Apparently he even arrived at the King's bedside
covered in plaster dust. That morning, his Berlin clinic had
(28:03):
been flattened by an Allied air raid attack. Yet he
leapt on a plane to Bulgaria the minute he heard
the king was sick. Not really the actions of a
callous killer. And there's something else, that's the timing.
Speaker 12 (28:18):
Of all of this.
Speaker 9 (28:19):
The king was already very sick when the three doctors arrived,
so if Boris was injected with snake venom, then it
couldn't have been one of them wielding that needle. That
must have been done by someone who was already there. Plus,
Hitler didn't force his doctors on the palace. The Bulgarians
actually asked Germany to send help. And there's something Professors
(28:44):
Lutarski said, I can't get out of my head something
that the doctors told Hitler when he summoned them to
a meeting after King Boris's death.
Speaker 12 (28:53):
It is quite sure that the king was poisoned.
Speaker 9 (28:57):
Were they informing the furor that they'd acomplished their mission,
that they'd somehow poisoned King Boris as they'd been ordered
to do, or were they simply reporting their suspicions that
someone else must have poisoned the king. And unless it's
typed in code or invisible ink, Maria Louisa can find
no proof the Germans killed King Boris.
Speaker 10 (29:20):
Nothing was ever found in the German archives, and Germans
were very precise, you know, everything was sealed and stamped
and signed ten times. Whatever they did, you know, nothing
was ever found in Nurnberg about it. So I'm convinced
it wasn't It wasn't the Germans.
Speaker 9 (29:38):
The Nuremberg Trials took place after the war, high ranking
Nazis were put on trial for crimes against humanity, and
after scouring the German archives himself, Professors Latarski agrees with
Maria Louisa.
Speaker 13 (29:54):
There are no logical signs that Kitler world to make revenge.
Actually they have a good connection until very last moments.
Speaker 9 (30:08):
So the jury is out on whether Hitler and the
Nazis were behind Boris's untimely death, not just because it
looks like Hitler was genuinely concerned for the ailing king,
but also because, Okay, there's something I haven't told you
about King Boris, something really important To many Bulgarians. Boris
(30:31):
is revered as the savior of Bulgaria's Jews, but to others,
he's reviled as just the opposite. And in terms of
his murder, this is extremely significant because it points us
away from the theory that Hitler signed Boris's death warrant.
(30:52):
Let's go back to September nineteen forty three. After the
memorial service at the cathedral, Boris's coffin was taken through
the streets of Sofia to the railway station, where it
was transported by train to the mountains for burial. The
(31:16):
crowds wept to see their hero go. They called him
the Unifier King, not because he brought the Bulgarian people
closer together. It was because he'd won back the land
Bulgaria had lost after the First World War. Remember, as
part of the peace treaty signed by Boris's father, Foxey Ferdinand.
(31:36):
Bulgaria lost lots of territory Thrace, which became part of Greece,
and Macedonia, which became part of Yugoslavia. But in nineteen
forty one, a month after Boris allied with Nazi Germany,
Hitler's army overran those countries, and as a reward for
Bulgaria's corporation, Hitler allowed Bulgaria to occupy Thrace and Macedonia again,
(32:03):
and that was a moment of huge national pride. Basically,
Boris had restored Bulgaria's dignity, her international standing. But at
what price. Because everything comes at a price, someone always
has to pay, and in some people's eyes, that achievement
(32:26):
was paid for by the deaths of thousands of Jews.
Speaker 15 (32:31):
We are doomed and we knew it. All our relatives
from macedon Or were killed.
Speaker 9 (32:39):
Aaron Solomon Balley was only three when King Boris signed
an alliance with Nazi Germany. He's Jewish and he's lived
all his life in mainland Bulgaria, and he doesn't buy
the stories about King Boris being the savior of the Jews.
He thinks King Boris made a very simple pact with
the devil that land in exchange for these Jews.
Speaker 15 (33:03):
Oh, definitely. I have a very negative attitude toll Sir
King Boris. People need fairy tales. People liked to hear
nice stories.
Speaker 9 (33:19):
And Aaron believes Boris's story is not a nice one
at all. In March nineteen forty three, eleven thousand Jews
from Thrace and Macedonia, which Bulgaria had just got back,
were rounded up and forlls to board trains. They were
taken through Bulgaria and onto the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland.
(33:45):
Only a handful of those eleven thousand people survived. Many
of Aaron's family were on those trains. He lost thirty
four relatives. It's still hard for him to talk about
what happened. He calls it a deep wound.
Speaker 15 (34:04):
I don't like this subject. I don't like it because
you see that I have a wound here. Don't touch it.
It's a pain.
Speaker 9 (34:16):
Why didn't King Boris stop those trains? We know he
managed to cancel two other deportations of Jews from mainland Bulgaria,
and we know the king always had the final say
on any political decision. Aaron Solomon Barley doesn't accuse Boris
of being a fully paid up member of the Nazi Party,
(34:38):
but neither can he absolve him from blame. Had Boris lived,
he says, he'd have found himself on trial for war crimes.
Speaker 15 (34:47):
If he had survived, he would be in the Neuremberg process. Really, well,
it's quite a lot of blood for me. He's a criminal.
Speaker 9 (35:00):
This is an ugly chapter in the Reign of Boris
the Third, but it's also a contested chapter. It's true
eleven thousand Jews from Thrace and Macedonia were sent to
concentration camps. Bulgarian soldiers did help load the trains, but
what we don't know is whether the king could have
(35:21):
stopped it. How much power did he really have over
those territories. Hitler allowed Bulgaria to occupy Thrace and Macedonia,
he didn't actually hand them back. Bulgaria's leading historian, George Bosdeganov,
says the whole question of ownership was supposed to be
discussed later after the war.
Speaker 16 (35:45):
NATSI didn't give these territories to Bulgaria.
Speaker 9 (35:50):
They didn't didn't, but they occupied that lag occupied.
Speaker 16 (35:54):
Occupation is a military action is another matter.
Speaker 9 (35:58):
But he could have stepped in and said, on a moment, I,
as king, say that deportation mustn't happen. He could have done,
He could have saved them.
Speaker 16 (36:09):
No, no, because he has not power, the real power
over these territories.
Speaker 9 (36:16):
But did King Boris have enough power to try to
stop the deportation? Simeon believes his father's hands were.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Tied command and everything else was in the Nazis. This
wasn't directly under us. With that, you can see how
much she can blame King Boris for those eleven thousand
people made they really rest in peace.
Speaker 11 (36:44):
It's something so.
Speaker 9 (36:52):
Simeon can't finish his sentence. He just stares at the
floor and shakes his head. But if you subscribe to
Aaron Solomon Barley's theory that King Boris really didn't care
about the fate of those eleven thousand Jews from Thrace
and Macedonia, then why would the Nazis murder him. I'm
(37:15):
beginning to feel less and less convinced about the theory
that Hitler killed the king because the king seemed to
be towing Nazi Germany's line in other ways.
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Speaker 9 (40:40):
I warned you at the start of this investigation that
we'd be delving into the darkest depths of the Second
World War, where the truth is often questionable and murky,
or very hard to come by at all. I also
promised you that you can always trust me, and that's
why I'm giving you all the facts I have. I'm
(41:02):
not holding anything back, but I think in this part
of the story, I really have to leave it to
you to decide where the truth lies. Boris's government was
distinctly pro German, and in nineteen forty one, a few
months before Bulgaria officially became a partner of Nazi Germany,
(41:25):
anti Jewish laws were passed in the country which seriously
restricted Jewish citizens civil.
Speaker 19 (41:32):
Rights, and one of his friends all of a sudden
just slapped him in the face and call him a
journey Jew out of nowhere.
Speaker 9 (41:41):
You remember meeting Elaine Aso in our last episode. Her
late husband, Rabbi Hayen, grew up in Bulgaria. He was
ten when those laws were passed. As an adult, he
campaigned to get King Boris recognition, recognition for his role
in saving mainland bulgarias fifty thousand Jews. And yet when
(42:03):
he was a child in Bulgaria, the anti Semitic laws
got tougher and tougher. Jews lost the right to vote
and had taxes imposed on their property and possessions, and then.
Speaker 19 (42:16):
They had to wear the yellow star. Really, yeah, his
father had to have a non Jewel run his business.
Speaker 9 (42:25):
Like all the Jews who lived in the big cities,
Him's family were forced to move out of their home
to a much smaller place out of town.
Speaker 19 (42:34):
And one day there was a bunch of I guess
Nazis that came and took his father.
Speaker 9 (42:40):
And the people who took Him's father were Bulgarians, Bulgarian Nazis.
Speaker 19 (42:48):
So they brought him back with all of his bones
broken in his body, and then took him about nine
months to recover, and at that point he says, I'm
out of here.
Speaker 9 (43:00):
Most Bulgarians met these changes with anger. Jewish writer Michael
bar Zoha also grew up in Bulgaria.
Speaker 6 (43:08):
There was a kind of civil revolt against these laws.
Speaker 9 (43:13):
He says. There were petitions to Parliament and the Prime
Minister's office, signed by Bulgarians from all walks of life.
Speaker 6 (43:22):
Starting with doctors and engineers and lawyers, and going down
to restaurant waits, to cobblers, to even the peasants who
didn't know to write, who signed the petitions with their fingers.
Speaker 9 (43:42):
Michael's father was one of the thousands of Jews sent
to work in Bulgaria's so called road building camps. You'll
remember that was the king's ruse to keep Bulgaria's fifty
thousand Jews safe from the threat of deportation. Michael says
had an easy life in the camp and that they
(44:03):
were given back their property after the war. But Aaron,
Solomon Barley's father had a very different experience. Aaron believes
those camps have been misrepresented.
Speaker 15 (44:17):
It's a story, it's a falsifying history. The reality was
that they were suffering, that they were not paid at all.
My mother, grandmother and so on had to collect some
money and buy some food and send it to my
father because they didn't have enough food, for example. And
(44:39):
it was a problem how to maintain the family because
there were many people depending on his income so that
they can survive.
Speaker 9 (44:51):
Really, and remember this was all happening in Bulgaria itself,
where King Boris did hold power, and things got even
worse for Aaron's family when they were eventually allowed to
return home, they found little comfort there. Every possession they
(45:11):
owned had been stolen.
Speaker 15 (45:14):
Oh we were poor enough, but oh they had some property.
And when they came back from the countryside, they didn't
have anything. What did the king do? Nothing?
Speaker 9 (45:31):
Nothing, now that's very hard to hear. For her Royal
Highness Maria Louisa, she's met hundreds of Jewish people who
say her parents helped them.
Speaker 10 (45:44):
To excuse my father invented, you know, is that they
had to work in construction and the country needed them.
They were not concentration camps. And after that, you know
a lot of them managed to leave. My mother helped
Pike get Italian passport and arranging with the Catholic Church,
(46:04):
and she was a team with my father. You know,
it's them as saving lives.
Speaker 9 (46:09):
But even Maria Louisa says that King Boris wasn't acting alone.
The Orthodox Church put huge pressure on King Boris to
protect Bulgaria's Jews. One of the Orthodox bishops, Archbishop Kirol,
actually threatened to lie across the railway tracks to make
sure those deportation trains could never depart, and the vice
(46:32):
President of the Parliament, Dmitri Peshev constantly petitioned the King,
begging him to give the Jews protection, and the King
clearly listened to these individuals. In fact, before he got
into politics, Peschev had been the King's advisor. Aaron Solomon
Barley believes Bulgaria's Jews. Definitely, oh thanks to Peshev and
(46:56):
to certain individuals in the church and community, but he
feels no gratitude to the king or the Bulgarian people
more widely.
Speaker 15 (47:06):
I feel offended that I have to say thank you
to the Bulgarian nation as a whole. No, No, it
was personal act, and there are too few people who
did it. But I cannot honor the people who were
guarding our fathers in the camps, and who took our
(47:28):
property and who put us these yellow badges. No, I
cannot thank to that. And there were fascists here. They
were antisemates, and they were in power.
Speaker 9 (47:42):
The anti Jewish law that passed in nineteen forty one
was signed off by King Boris. It was called the
Law for the Protection of the Nation, as if Jews
somehow threatened Bulgaria's future, and King Boris did make antisemitic
moments about Bulgaria's Jews and their financial interests, but the
(48:04):
reports are conflicting. He also expressed concern for their safety
and well being under the new law. Aaron Solomon Balley
doesn't think Boris deserves any thanks, but he doesn't think
the king was a Nazi.
Speaker 15 (48:20):
Either he was not a fascist, but his hands are
not clean.
Speaker 9 (48:28):
But did Boris make the best of the hand he
had been dealt? Across Europe, the Jewish population was decimated
during the war, around six million were killed, but Bulgaria's
Jewish population actually increased during the Second World War. Elaine's husband,
(48:48):
Rabbi Haim, was convinced that they would have been wiped
out had it not been for King Boris. Haim recognized
that protecting Bulgaria's Jews was very much a collective effort,
but he also insisted that King Boris played a significant role.
Speaker 19 (49:08):
He was part, not the only one, but part of
the story that was responsible for saving the Jews of Bulgaria.
He played an important part.
Speaker 9 (49:21):
The thing is, it might be far easier to exonerate
Boris if only he'd been a little more overt in
his efforts to save the Jews, or even a little
more consistent. But historian Tessa Dunlop thinks that's naive. The
king was flitting and darting in and out of allegiances
like a butterfly, and that's a life saving skill.
Speaker 20 (49:46):
He is a moderate man in an immoderate world, which
is either fascist or communist and he walks the tightrope,
and I think we have to commend him for that.
If he had actually said, you know, treat Jews as
he called Bulgarian citizens, we wouldn't be talking about him.
Because he had been snuffed out much earlier.
Speaker 12 (50:06):
He knew that he had.
Speaker 20 (50:07):
To do some dirty staff. He lived in a dirty world.
Speaker 9 (50:11):
But for Aaron Solomon Bali, Boris was too much a
part of that dirty world.
Speaker 15 (50:18):
He was a very sneaky person, very very sneak, and
it's right to call him the fox of the Balkans.
He was a fox. But foxes are sometimes killed.
Speaker 9 (50:34):
And this fox certainly was killed. But by whom.
Speaker 11 (50:40):
I think.
Speaker 9 (50:41):
I am going to take Hitler out of the frame
at this point, not just because we've seen that King
Boris wasn't a completely disloyal ally of the Nazis, but
also because we have to remember none of this is
happening in isolation. We're in the middle of a war here,
the biggest war in history, and in the summer of
(51:03):
nineteen forty three, Germany really needed all the friends she.
Speaker 12 (51:07):
Could get.
Speaker 9 (51:09):
Abroad. She'd lost major battles on the Eastern Front, and
at home, cities were being pummeled by Allied air raids.
The Germans had other things to think about them Boris,
So I have to widen the search for my suspects.
We think we know the means now a poison of
(51:32):
Asiatic origin, probably snake poison. But who else had a motive? Well,
I think I can tell you who. We might not
want to go there, but maybe we have to. I mean,
the Allies hated Boris. Remember this is a man who's
(51:54):
not only in league with Hitler. He signed a symbolic
declaration of war against America and Britain, and one man
hated him more than anyone. Give him the Winston Churchill.
Speaker 6 (52:12):
And we will finish the job.
Speaker 9 (52:15):
Yes, I'm serious. Could the cigar chomping British Prime minister
have signed the order to assassinate Boris when he was murdered?
Speaker 20 (52:25):
Churchill apparently said, oh, see what happens if you support Hitler.
In other words, nothing good comes as getting into bed
with Germany.
Speaker 9 (52:33):
Churchill, the irascible British bulldog hero of the Allies, certainly
had beef with Boris, and Simeon thinks so too.
Speaker 1 (52:43):
You can see it in the different writings and things
of Churchill that he was no fan of my father's.
Speaker 9 (52:49):
What do you think of that?
Speaker 11 (52:51):
Well, I think of it as I said, So Whenston's
privilege you may he rest in peace.
Speaker 9 (52:57):
So the British do have a motive to them. King
Boris was a snake in the grass, and with thousands
of British and Commonwealth troops deployed in Asia and in
the Asian Jungles, the British had ready access to a
means snake venom. Now this puts me being British, in
(53:20):
a bit of an awkward position with King Simeon and
Princess Maria Louisa. But I have to ask the question
did the British kill King Boris? Next time on the
(53:42):
Butterfly King, the British target the Bulgarian royals.
Speaker 10 (53:49):
A huge bomb fell in the garden, the roof was burning,
the was wounded people other people panicked and were screaming.
Speaker 9 (53:56):
And a disturbing discovery in the archives. Gusts are investigative
net far wider. It's really quite dramatic, isn't it. No
wonder it's marked, must never be taken from the office,
to be kept always under lock and key, and yet
it was intercepted, decoded decoded and here it is for
(54:17):
me that that adds a whole new dimension to this.
(54:37):
The Butterfly King is a production of Blanchard House and
Exactly Right Media, hosted by me Becky Milligan. It's written
and produced by Emma Jane Kirby. Original music is by
Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis nank Manell and Toby Matamol. Sound
(54:57):
design and engineering by Tob Mattamong and Daniel Lloyd Evans.
Artwork by Vanessa Lilac. The managing producer is Amka Schortino Nolan.
The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye. The
executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is
(55:18):
Lawrence Grizzell. For Exactly Right Media, the executive producers are
Karen Kilgareth Georgia Hardstark, and Daniel Kramer, with consulting producer
Kyle Ryan. The Butterfly King is inspired by the book
Hitler and the King by John Paul Spencer.
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Speaker 9 (02:13):
Goodbye September the fifth, nineteen forty three the state funeral
of King Boris, the third of Bulgaria, and the nation
is united in grief. The streets outside Saint Alexander Nevsky
Cathedral are packed with weeping crowds. No one speaks and
(02:38):
all heads about. Many here have waited hours already, but
everyone wants to enter the church to pay their last
respects to their beloved king. Inside the cathedral for the
service is the royal family, the widowed Queen Giovanna Kirol,
(03:03):
the king's younger brother and his two sisters. And standing
in front of the open casket are two small frightened children,
Princess Maria Louisa and the boy King Simeon.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
We first saw him in the chapel of the Palace Chapel,
and then in the cathedral where I was laying in state.
As a matter of fact, Queen Elizabeth sooner they had
brought me back some memories of what occurs after the
death of his sovereign.
Speaker 9 (03:40):
They've never seen a dead person before and now protocol
demands that they embraced their father one last time.
Speaker 10 (03:48):
That was my father, So it just kissed him, and
I knew it for a ten year old, you know,
you kissed your father's forehead and it's cold and it
wasn't easy.
Speaker 11 (04:01):
So it's very dear.
Speaker 10 (04:03):
I don't like to talk about it, but you brought
it up. I'm sorry, no, no, because people should know, and.
Speaker 9 (04:11):
You remember it clearly as though it was yesterday. Is
it never gone?
Speaker 11 (04:16):
Never forget it?
Speaker 9 (04:18):
And it must have been really hard for your brother
as well. He was even smaller.
Speaker 10 (04:21):
Yeah, he was for years, angam, so it was six still,
you know, you go to a funeral and it all
comes back.
Speaker 9 (04:31):
They're both wearing white knee socks and black armbands. Maria
Louisa is in a pleated skirt and jacket. Little Simeon
has on shorts and a frock coat. They clutch at
their mother's hand. They looked so vulnerable, so achingly bereft.
You can't help thinking of the young Princess William and
(04:53):
Harry as they walked behind Princess Diana's coffin.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
It was such a gruesome or terrible feeling to kiss
his forehead being icy coal that I've got this to
this day and God knows all the stage, but I
still avoid going to burials where one can.
Speaker 11 (05:15):
See the dead person.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
It's just something which has shocked me so deeply that
I can hardly take it. It's ridiculous, but there it is.
That's left something that psychiatrists would probably find all sorts
of explanations.
Speaker 9 (05:37):
It must be an unimaginable trial for the children's mother,
Queen Giovanna too.
Speaker 11 (05:43):
My mother was heroic.
Speaker 10 (05:44):
She was standing there, never shed a tear in front
of us, never, never, ever, she was stoic. That's all
I can see. And then of course she was on own.
Speaker 9 (05:58):
But on top of all the pain and of that day,
there's also a deep sense of disquiet about how the
king comes to be lying there at all. The queen
already suspects her husband didn't die a natural death, and
King Boris's sister Eudoxia shares that hunch. Your Doxia is
convinced the Nazis poisoned him. Specifically, she blames one of
(06:21):
the German doctors who tended the monarch on his sick bed.
She doesn't trust him. Did she share that intuition with
the queen, because if she did, if your docta did
mention the name doctor Sites, the Queen's blood must have
frozen in her veins.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Seits was the head of a clinic where my mother
had gone.
Speaker 11 (06:44):
She was almost like a sort of private physician.
Speaker 9 (06:48):
Doctor Sites was not just any old doctor. He was
a personal friend of the queen's And so I have
to ask did he use that friendship to in filtrate
the palace and commit the ultimate act of treachery, the
murder of the king from Blanchard House And exactly right, media,
(07:17):
this is the Butterfly King. I'm Becky Milligan, chapter three,
(08:01):
Snake in the Grass. Remember that lead on the Asiatic Poison. Well,
I'm back in Bulgaria with my producer EJ following it up.
There's a historian here who's promised us some new information
(08:21):
about Boris's death. Our route to his office takes us
right past the royal Palace, the one where he spent
his final days. The palace is over there. That's where
they all lived, the royal family, and it's where he died.
I think, I think so. It's right in the middle,
isn't it. That is quite grand. That's grander than the
(08:46):
palace that we've been to. It's quite yellow, freezing. I
forgot to put on another help. So far we've only
been to Varana Palace, his country retreat, but it's this one,
the one in downtown Sofia that was King Boris's main residence,
(09:07):
and it's here he was taken ill and died. The
palace was built in the late nineteenth century, but after
the Second World War, when the Soviet Union invaded and
abolished the monarchy, it became an art gallery. Hity, it's
a national gallery. Yeah, why do you if you think
(09:29):
about Buckingham Paris, I mean that has to open up
to visitors. Yes, it does. Yeah, Actually he doesn't like it,
does he, the king. He doesn't want to live there,
so maybe it will become more open.
Speaker 12 (09:41):
Well, poor old.
Speaker 9 (09:41):
Simeon doesn't have much choice, does it, because this is
no longer a royal palace.
Speaker 12 (09:45):
It's the art gallery and that's just it.
Speaker 9 (09:47):
I wonder if he did have his eye on it
and they just you know, he couldn't get it back
after he came back after the communist regime. Yeah, it's
it's okay. It is hand some large palace like but
not extraordinary, my fear, might I make bite for your birthday.
(10:14):
The historian we've come to meet, Professor vladimirs Latarski, is
a forensic researcher.
Speaker 13 (10:21):
You know, the work of the historian is that you
start with an article, a document, and you are trying
to make the whole story concerning the death of King
burhis step by step.
Speaker 9 (10:36):
So step by step, he's turned the archives inside out
looking for evidence about the King's murder. Not the Bulgarian
archives we already know those were stolen when the Communists
occupied Bulgaria after the war. The German archives. He discovered
some very interesting things among the Nazis' personal papers, information
(10:59):
that was never meant to be shared, completely off the record,
and the evidence came from this man.
Speaker 13 (11:12):
The diary of Joseph Jobbels, the Minister of the Propaganda
Joseph Gebels.
Speaker 9 (11:19):
Gebels was Hitler's right hand man. As propaganda minister, he
was effectively the voice of the Nazi party. His diaries
are full of twisted anti Semitic dogma, but they also
give us access to some of the most secret goings
on within the regime. The originals are kept in the
Hoover library in Iowa, but professors Latarski read copies in Berlin,
(11:42):
and in one particular entry he spotted a very intriguing passage.
It talks directly about the death of King Boris and
about how.
Speaker 12 (11:52):
He was killed.
Speaker 13 (11:54):
After the death of the king, there was a meeting
between the doctor team and Hitler. But after the conversation
of obviously, Hitler spoke with Giobbels.
Speaker 9 (12:08):
And Hitler told Gebels that the doctors had revealed to
him the cause of the king's death.
Speaker 13 (12:14):
Hitler said to Goobbels, it is quite sure that the
king was poisoned.
Speaker 12 (12:20):
That is what he had heard from the doctors.
Speaker 9 (12:24):
But the doctors went much further than that. They actually
named the poison.
Speaker 13 (12:29):
It was some kind of poison from India, probably snake poison.
Speaker 9 (12:36):
Snake poison from India. Now that adds up because India
plus snakes equals asiatic poison. So is snake venom what
killed King Boris, the third of Bulgaria. I need to
speak to a herpetologist, basically a reptile expert, and preferably
(12:58):
one with a thing for snakes.
Speaker 14 (13:04):
I had a lot of snakes. I mean I was
keeping and breeding snakes at home. I had probably about
two hundred at one time in the seventies.
Speaker 9 (13:12):
Snake experts don't come more expert than Marc O'Shea. He's
a professor of herpetology at the University of Wolverhampton in
the UK. He's got long gray hair and a flowing
white beard. He'd make a brilliant wizard. I can safely
say he knows a thing or two about snakes, and
absolutely everything about snakes from Asia.
Speaker 14 (13:37):
Around the world. Every year, up to one hundred and
thirty eight thousand people die of snake bite. Out of
one hundred and thirty eight thousand, the majority the lion's
share die in South Asia. Tropical Asia has a horrendous
snake bite death rate.
Speaker 9 (13:51):
Can you name the venomous snakes in Asia? Just a
short you know five or six of them?
Speaker 7 (13:57):
Oh?
Speaker 12 (13:57):
Shortlist?
Speaker 14 (13:58):
Well, the big four common cobra, common crate, Russell's viper,
saurscale viper. That's the big four. But there's plenty of others,
and there are several species of cobras. There are several
species of crites.
Speaker 9 (14:10):
At last, I feel we're getting somewhere. I've just looked
up a picture of the Indian creed it's glossy jet
black with milky white bands. According to Mark, it's highly
toxic venom makes it an efficient killer. But the cobra,
she's an even better murder weapon because she sinks her
(14:31):
fangs far more deeply into flesh. A precision killing.
Speaker 14 (14:35):
My favorite snakes, my favorite species of king cobra. There's
something going on behind those eyes. Anyone who's worked with
kings will tell you that. And I've met king cobra's
in India, and I had a king cobra for many years.
Sleeping beauty, She's my wallpaper on my computer.
Speaker 9 (14:52):
Is the king cobra, the one that stands up and
looks at you?
Speaker 11 (14:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 14 (14:56):
Oh, all cobras will rise up and hood spitching go
much less than non spitters because they tend to raise
the head a bit, spit and drop again.
Speaker 9 (15:05):
Oh the poetic irony, a king killing the king. Now
in Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, snakes themselves are used
as murder weapons, and Mark has actually given evidence in
homicide trials where snakes were involved.
Speaker 14 (15:24):
I do think that some snakes are more intelligent than
we used to think.
Speaker 9 (15:31):
So before his Majesty arrived at the Wolf's layer. Could
Hitler or one of his henchmen have hidden the snake
in the bunker under the King's bed, and then that
night as the king slept, could the venomous serpent have
slithered across the floor up onto the King's bed and
(15:54):
bitten him as he slept?
Speaker 11 (15:58):
Couldn't happen?
Speaker 14 (15:59):
Really, if you want to kill somebody, they're going to say,
can you guarantee this is going to work?
Speaker 7 (16:05):
Well?
Speaker 14 (16:05):
Sorry?
Speaker 6 (16:06):
No?
Speaker 9 (16:07):
Oh right?
Speaker 14 (16:09):
I doubt very much whether Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle
interviewed her petologists when they were thinking of murdering somebody
with snake venom.
Speaker 9 (16:18):
Of course, there's James Bond as well. There's always a
snake in the bed. There isn't there doing some you
know ready with his venom?
Speaker 12 (16:24):
Yes?
Speaker 14 (16:25):
But I saw a cobra up at the Liverpool School
of Tropical Medicine quite a few years ago. It was
quite a monkey specimen with an odd eye, which was
supposed to have been put into a hotel room to
kill somebody. Oh my god, you could you could stay
in that hotel room for a fortnight and never see
the snakes killed up behind the wastebasket. You know, it's
(16:45):
just if you got a snake in a room and
expected to kill somebody, you better have a lot of
time to wait, because the chances of that happening a
snake hides.
Speaker 9 (16:56):
They could die of natural death and the snake could
just continue living there.
Speaker 14 (17:00):
Yes, or the maid comes in and turns the bed
and she gets bitten. So it's really it's just it
sounds great in theory, but killing people with snakes is
not it's not guaranteed, it's not efficient, and it's fought
with problems.
Speaker 9 (17:17):
Okay, so you can't just put a snake in a
room and instruct it to kill someone. But then to
kill someone with a snake, you don't need the actual serpent.
You just need its venom.
Speaker 14 (17:31):
When you milk a snake, you get what looks like
where it's a liquid. It may be yellow, maybe slightly orange.
You may be a clear and that is the liquid venom,
and generally that would be a freeze dried to get
a dry weight.
Speaker 9 (17:47):
Yes, Mark milks snakes, just to be clear, he's not
doing it with an eye to murdering anyone. He sends
the extracted venoms to a lab which then produces anti
venoms to help save those who've been bitten. But milking
a snake is not for the fainthearted.
Speaker 14 (18:06):
You hold a snake, and you hold a receptacle and
retort stand and you encourage the snake to bite through
a latex membrane which folds back the fang sheaths along
the fangs, and then if gently squeeze in the venom glands,
the snake should produce venom into the receptacle underneath, and
that's your liquid venom.
Speaker 9 (18:26):
Please don't try that at home. But if we're to
believe that entry in Gerbel's diary, someone did try it.
Someone milked a snake and extracted deadly venom. But once
you've got that venom, how do you turn it into
a murder weapon.
Speaker 14 (18:45):
If you're going to administer venom, the only way you're
going to be able to do that is by injection.
Speaker 9 (18:51):
By injection, remember what Professor Slatarski found out from reading
Gerbel's diary.
Speaker 13 (18:57):
Hitler said, it is quite sure that the king was poisoned.
Speaker 12 (19:02):
That is what he had heard from the doctors.
Speaker 9 (19:06):
Doctors. Doctors have syringes, Doctors perform injections, And we now
know one thing for certain. If you get the method right,
it's perfectly possible to kill a king with snake venom.
I think it's time to find out a bit more
about the king's doctors. And remember, they weren't Bulgarian doctors.
(19:32):
So who were they and what were they doing in
the king's sick room in August nineteen forty three.
Speaker 13 (19:39):
Actually, first came Professor Rudolfzidz from Berlin, Professor Hanst Eppinger
os Vienna, and they decided to call the Turtlan Professor
Maximilian de Grinis neurologists.
Speaker 9 (19:54):
Okay, so three highly specialized doctors, all known to Hitler
the king in his sick room. Let's start with the
last one. To Crinis was a celebrated shrink. He was
also a high ranking SS officer, but he only flew
in at the very last minute. So even if he
(20:17):
was in on some Nazi plot to kill the king,
it couldn't have been to Crinis who administered the venom.
The damage was done before he showed up. So let's
have a look at Eppinger. He was a highly sought
after professor of internal medicine. His speciality was the liver.
(20:38):
He treated quite a few celebrity patients in his time,
including the Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin and Queen Marie of Romania.
And it was Eppinger who first raised the alarm after
the doctors examined.
Speaker 12 (20:52):
The king because of what they see on the body.
Speaker 9 (20:56):
Which was a very peculiar rash.
Speaker 13 (21:00):
They seen a brown kind of spots.
Speaker 9 (21:04):
Brown spots. We know this because Professor Eppinger spoke to
the German Air Force attache in Sofia. Just like Goebels,
that attache kept a diary and in it he wrote
that he'd met with doctor Eppinger, who told him the
brown spots on Boris's skin indicated the absorption of poison.
Speaker 13 (21:26):
Eppinger described it as a typical Balkan depth.
Speaker 9 (21:31):
What do you mean by a typical Balkan death.
Speaker 13 (21:35):
I mean in the Balkans there were more political murders
than in the rest of Europe.
Speaker 12 (21:39):
For this period.
Speaker 9 (21:42):
Basically, the Balkans at the time went hand in hand
with assassinations. And it's one of those other typical Balkan
deaths that particularly interests me because it has a striking
similarity to Boris's death. In January nineteen forty one, the
Greek Premier Johannis Metaxas died very suddenly, and just a
(22:06):
few weeks earlier, Matexas had refused to let Germany's ally
Italy occupy his country.
Speaker 5 (22:13):
The news of the sudden death of Premier John Metaxas
of Greece has been received with deep regret, both at
home and abroad. General Metaxis is said to have died
of a streptocoggal throat infection which led to sepsis. Rumors
circulating in the Balkan press suggests the Greek general did
not meet a natural death, though we have been unable
to confirm such reports. Before he became a politic.
Speaker 9 (22:34):
Word had spread that Metaxas had also been poisoned. And
get this, his skin was covered with brown blotches, and
we know that from a first hand witness, none other
than Professor Hans Eppinger. It turns out that the same
doctor who tended King Boris on his deathbed also attended
(22:58):
the autopsy of General or Texas. Coincidence or is there
something more sinister going on?
Speaker 12 (23:07):
Here?
Speaker 9 (23:08):
Were the Austrian doctor and his German colleagues hired as
Hitler's hitman with a brief to kill off anyone who
crossed him. But on the other hand, if Eppinger had
poisoned both King Boris and the Greek general, why would
he draw attention to those telltale brown blotches. Let's put
(23:30):
Eppinger to one side for a moment and examine the
last of this trio who flew in to be at
the king's bedside, Doctor Sites. He's the medic who Boris's sister,
Princess Eudoxia didn't trust. See me in recall, she wrote
to him that this.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Doctor zeits Rudelites who came from Berlin, was I mean
there was something suspicious about him.
Speaker 9 (23:58):
Now, Doctor Sites knew the royal family literally inside out.
He was their go to medic because he'd help the
king and his wife on the most intimate and important
of their royal duties, providing an heir.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Sights was ahead of a clinic where my mother had
gone because she had problems in being able to have
a second child yours truly, So she was there and
she knew Professor Sites, and he came obviously because she
was almost like a sort of private physician.
Speaker 9 (24:33):
So if Sites was responsible for the King's murder, that
would be an incredible act of treachery. After all, you
can imagine how grateful the King and Queen were to
doctor Sites. When Simeon was born on June sixteenth, nineteen
thirty seven, there was a national celebration. Four thousand prisoners
(24:57):
were released, fines were part garden, and every school child
and student in the country have their exam papers increased
by one grade. Thanks to doctor Sites, the Bulgarian throne
was secure. He was a hero in the royal family.
So when the Queen heard that doctor Sites was flying
(25:18):
in to help her ailing husband, I imagine she must
have felt relieved. She would have felt her husband was
in safe hands. Or was he What could have made
aren't you doxy a doubt? Doctor Sites. After the war
he moved to Spain, where the Queen, Simeon and Maria
(25:39):
Louisa were living in exile, and there he soon won
the trust of the family all over again. He became
the family doctor and even attended the birth of Simeon's
eldest son.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
He was always so attached to us that this man
should have been the I mean, archvillain is something that
I just can't It doesn't sort of fit in my mind.
Speaker 9 (26:08):
It doesn't make sense. No, but something must have worried
Maria Louisa because many years later she confronted doctor Sites
what went on in her father's sick room.
Speaker 10 (26:21):
One day, I asked him, you know, the professor sides,
what do you know and he said that, you know,
Papa just died.
Speaker 9 (26:29):
That seems a bit of a cop out to me.
Speaker 10 (26:31):
Well, he said, you know, he had given his word
and he didn't. He wasn't alone, you know, there were
three of them, so he didn't blame anybody else.
Speaker 11 (26:41):
But he just was evasive.
Speaker 10 (26:43):
I mean, you know, but he was an old man
and I was very young, and said he didn't want
to talk about it.
Speaker 9 (26:48):
Well that's what did it make you suspicious?
Speaker 10 (26:51):
No, no, no, because he used to be Papa's doctor
in Berlin too. Papa used to go to him and
he was a friend. But you know, he didn't just
he didn't.
Speaker 11 (27:01):
Want to reveal anything. This is what he meant that
he had given his word to.
Speaker 10 (27:07):
But no, I don't see it there and I'll never
see it there. So we are all dealing with karsa.
Speaker 12 (27:15):
That's the word.
Speaker 9 (27:16):
That's a strange PostScript to the tale of the Three Doctors.
We know that doctor Sites went to live in Spain
after nineteen forty five. But the others.
Speaker 13 (27:28):
From this trio two people have committed suicide at the
end of the war, So Professor Zeitz, he's the only
person that they a lived after the war.
Speaker 9 (27:42):
Actually, make of that what you will. But Simeon and
Maria Louisa are adamant that doctor Sites would never have
harmed their father. He certainly seemed incredibly loyal to the
royal family. Apparently he even arrived at the King's bedside
covered in plaster dust. That morning, his Berlin clinic had
(28:03):
been flattened by an Allied air raid attack. Yet he
leapt on a plane to Bulgaria the minute he heard
the king was sick. Not really the actions of a
callous killer. And there's something else, that's the timing.
Speaker 12 (28:18):
Of all of this.
Speaker 9 (28:19):
The king was already very sick when the three doctors arrived,
so if Boris was injected with snake venom, then it
couldn't have been one of them wielding that needle. That
must have been done by someone who was already there. Plus,
Hitler didn't force his doctors on the palace. The Bulgarians
actually asked Germany to send help. And there's something Professors
(28:44):
Lutarski said, I can't get out of my head something
that the doctors told Hitler when he summoned them to
a meeting after King Boris's death.
Speaker 12 (28:53):
It is quite sure that the king was poisoned.
Speaker 9 (28:57):
Were they informing the furor that they'd acomplished their mission,
that they'd somehow poisoned King Boris as they'd been ordered
to do, or were they simply reporting their suspicions that
someone else must have poisoned the king. And unless it's
typed in code or invisible ink, Maria Louisa can find
no proof the Germans killed King Boris.
Speaker 10 (29:20):
Nothing was ever found in the German archives, and Germans
were very precise, you know, everything was sealed and stamped
and signed ten times. Whatever they did, you know, nothing
was ever found in Nurnberg about it. So I'm convinced
it wasn't It wasn't the Germans.
Speaker 9 (29:38):
The Nuremberg Trials took place after the war, high ranking
Nazis were put on trial for crimes against humanity, and
after scouring the German archives himself, Professors Latarski agrees with
Maria Louisa.
Speaker 13 (29:54):
There are no logical signs that Kitler world to make revenge.
Actually they have a good connection until very last moments.
Speaker 9 (30:08):
So the jury is out on whether Hitler and the
Nazis were behind Boris's untimely death, not just because it
looks like Hitler was genuinely concerned for the ailing king,
but also because, Okay, there's something I haven't told you
about King Boris, something really important To many Bulgarians. Boris
(30:31):
is revered as the savior of Bulgaria's Jews, but to others,
he's reviled as just the opposite. And in terms of
his murder, this is extremely significant because it points us
away from the theory that Hitler signed Boris's death warrant.
(30:52):
Let's go back to September nineteen forty three. After the
memorial service at the cathedral, Boris's coffin was taken through
the streets of Sofia to the railway station, where it
was transported by train to the mountains for burial. The
(31:16):
crowds wept to see their hero go. They called him
the Unifier King, not because he brought the Bulgarian people
closer together. It was because he'd won back the land
Bulgaria had lost after the First World War. Remember, as
part of the peace treaty signed by Boris's father, Foxey Ferdinand.
(31:36):
Bulgaria lost lots of territory Thrace, which became part of Greece,
and Macedonia, which became part of Yugoslavia. But in nineteen
forty one, a month after Boris allied with Nazi Germany,
Hitler's army overran those countries, and as a reward for
Bulgaria's corporation, Hitler allowed Bulgaria to occupy Thrace and Macedonia again,
(32:03):
and that was a moment of huge national pride. Basically,
Boris had restored Bulgaria's dignity, her international standing. But at
what price. Because everything comes at a price, someone always
has to pay, and in some people's eyes, that achievement
(32:26):
was paid for by the deaths of thousands of Jews.
Speaker 15 (32:31):
We are doomed and we knew it. All our relatives
from macedon Or were killed.
Speaker 9 (32:39):
Aaron Solomon Balley was only three when King Boris signed
an alliance with Nazi Germany. He's Jewish and he's lived
all his life in mainland Bulgaria, and he doesn't buy
the stories about King Boris being the savior of the Jews.
He thinks King Boris made a very simple pact with
the devil that land in exchange for these Jews.
Speaker 15 (33:03):
Oh, definitely. I have a very negative attitude toll Sir
King Boris. People need fairy tales. People liked to hear
nice stories.
Speaker 9 (33:19):
And Aaron believes Boris's story is not a nice one
at all. In March nineteen forty three, eleven thousand Jews
from Thrace and Macedonia, which Bulgaria had just got back,
were rounded up and forlls to board trains. They were
taken through Bulgaria and onto the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland.
(33:45):
Only a handful of those eleven thousand people survived. Many
of Aaron's family were on those trains. He lost thirty
four relatives. It's still hard for him to talk about
what happened. He calls it a deep wound.
Speaker 15 (34:04):
I don't like this subject. I don't like it because
you see that I have a wound here. Don't touch it.
It's a pain.
Speaker 9 (34:16):
Why didn't King Boris stop those trains? We know he
managed to cancel two other deportations of Jews from mainland Bulgaria,
and we know the king always had the final say
on any political decision. Aaron Solomon Barley doesn't accuse Boris
of being a fully paid up member of the Nazi Party,
(34:38):
but neither can he absolve him from blame. Had Boris lived,
he says, he'd have found himself on trial for war crimes.
Speaker 15 (34:47):
If he had survived, he would be in the Neuremberg process. Really, well,
it's quite a lot of blood for me. He's a criminal.
Speaker 9 (35:00):
This is an ugly chapter in the Reign of Boris
the Third, but it's also a contested chapter. It's true
eleven thousand Jews from Thrace and Macedonia were sent to
concentration camps. Bulgarian soldiers did help load the trains, but
what we don't know is whether the king could have
(35:21):
stopped it. How much power did he really have over
those territories. Hitler allowed Bulgaria to occupy Thrace and Macedonia,
he didn't actually hand them back. Bulgaria's leading historian, George Bosdeganov,
says the whole question of ownership was supposed to be
discussed later after the war.
Speaker 16 (35:45):
NATSI didn't give these territories to Bulgaria.
Speaker 9 (35:50):
They didn't didn't, but they occupied that lag occupied.
Speaker 16 (35:54):
Occupation is a military action is another matter.
Speaker 9 (35:58):
But he could have stepped in and said, on a moment, I,
as king, say that deportation mustn't happen. He could have done,
He could have saved them.
Speaker 16 (36:09):
No, no, because he has not power, the real power
over these territories.
Speaker 9 (36:16):
But did King Boris have enough power to try to
stop the deportation? Simeon believes his father's hands were.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Tied command and everything else was in the Nazis. This
wasn't directly under us. With that, you can see how
much she can blame King Boris for those eleven thousand
people made they really rest in peace.
Speaker 11 (36:44):
It's something so.
Speaker 9 (36:52):
Simeon can't finish his sentence. He just stares at the
floor and shakes his head. But if you subscribe to
Aaron Solomon Barley's theory that King Boris really didn't care
about the fate of those eleven thousand Jews from Thrace
and Macedonia, then why would the Nazis murder him. I'm
(37:15):
beginning to feel less and less convinced about the theory
that Hitler killed the king because the king seemed to
be towing Nazi Germany's line in other ways.
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Speaker 9 (40:40):
I warned you at the start of this investigation that
we'd be delving into the darkest depths of the Second
World War, where the truth is often questionable and murky,
or very hard to come by at all. I also
promised you that you can always trust me, and that's
why I'm giving you all the facts I have. I'm
(41:02):
not holding anything back, but I think in this part
of the story, I really have to leave it to
you to decide where the truth lies. Boris's government was
distinctly pro German, and in nineteen forty one, a few
months before Bulgaria officially became a partner of Nazi Germany,
(41:25):
anti Jewish laws were passed in the country which seriously
restricted Jewish citizens civil.
Speaker 19 (41:32):
Rights, and one of his friends all of a sudden
just slapped him in the face and call him a
journey Jew out of nowhere.
Speaker 9 (41:41):
You remember meeting Elaine Aso in our last episode. Her
late husband, Rabbi Hayen, grew up in Bulgaria. He was
ten when those laws were passed. As an adult, he
campaigned to get King Boris recognition, recognition for his role
in saving mainland bulgarias fifty thousand Jews. And yet when
(42:03):
he was a child in Bulgaria, the anti Semitic laws
got tougher and tougher. Jews lost the right to vote
and had taxes imposed on their property and possessions, and then.
Speaker 19 (42:16):
They had to wear the yellow star. Really, yeah, his
father had to have a non Jewel run his business.
Speaker 9 (42:25):
Like all the Jews who lived in the big cities,
Him's family were forced to move out of their home
to a much smaller place out of town.
Speaker 19 (42:34):
And one day there was a bunch of I guess
Nazis that came and took his father.
Speaker 9 (42:40):
And the people who took Him's father were Bulgarians, Bulgarian Nazis.
Speaker 19 (42:48):
So they brought him back with all of his bones
broken in his body, and then took him about nine
months to recover, and at that point he says, I'm
out of here.
Speaker 9 (43:00):
Most Bulgarians met these changes with anger. Jewish writer Michael
bar Zoha also grew up in Bulgaria.
Speaker 6 (43:08):
There was a kind of civil revolt against these laws.
Speaker 9 (43:13):
He says. There were petitions to Parliament and the Prime
Minister's office, signed by Bulgarians from all walks of life.
Speaker 6 (43:22):
Starting with doctors and engineers and lawyers, and going down
to restaurant waits, to cobblers, to even the peasants who
didn't know to write, who signed the petitions with their fingers.
Speaker 9 (43:42):
Michael's father was one of the thousands of Jews sent
to work in Bulgaria's so called road building camps. You'll
remember that was the king's ruse to keep Bulgaria's fifty
thousand Jews safe from the threat of deportation. Michael says
had an easy life in the camp and that they
(44:03):
were given back their property after the war. But Aaron,
Solomon Barley's father had a very different experience. Aaron believes
those camps have been misrepresented.
Speaker 15 (44:17):
It's a story, it's a falsifying history. The reality was
that they were suffering, that they were not paid at all.
My mother, grandmother and so on had to collect some
money and buy some food and send it to my
father because they didn't have enough food, for example. And
(44:39):
it was a problem how to maintain the family because
there were many people depending on his income so that
they can survive.
Speaker 9 (44:51):
Really, and remember this was all happening in Bulgaria itself,
where King Boris did hold power, and things got even
worse for Aaron's family when they were eventually allowed to
return home, they found little comfort there. Every possession they
(45:11):
owned had been stolen.
Speaker 15 (45:14):
Oh we were poor enough, but oh they had some property.
And when they came back from the countryside, they didn't
have anything. What did the king do? Nothing?
Speaker 9 (45:31):
Nothing, now that's very hard to hear. For her Royal
Highness Maria Louisa, she's met hundreds of Jewish people who
say her parents helped them.
Speaker 10 (45:44):
To excuse my father invented, you know, is that they
had to work in construction and the country needed them.
They were not concentration camps. And after that, you know
a lot of them managed to leave. My mother helped
Pike get Italian passport and arranging with the Catholic Church,
(46:04):
and she was a team with my father. You know,
it's them as saving lives.
Speaker 9 (46:09):
But even Maria Louisa says that King Boris wasn't acting alone.
The Orthodox Church put huge pressure on King Boris to
protect Bulgaria's Jews. One of the Orthodox bishops, Archbishop Kirol,
actually threatened to lie across the railway tracks to make
sure those deportation trains could never depart, and the vice
(46:32):
President of the Parliament, Dmitri Peshev constantly petitioned the King,
begging him to give the Jews protection, and the King
clearly listened to these individuals. In fact, before he got
into politics, Peschev had been the King's advisor. Aaron Solomon
Barley believes Bulgaria's Jews. Definitely, oh thanks to Peshev and
(46:56):
to certain individuals in the church and community, but he
feels no gratitude to the king or the Bulgarian people
more widely.
Speaker 15 (47:06):
I feel offended that I have to say thank you
to the Bulgarian nation as a whole. No, No, it
was personal act, and there are too few people who
did it. But I cannot honor the people who were
guarding our fathers in the camps, and who took our
(47:28):
property and who put us these yellow badges. No, I
cannot thank to that. And there were fascists here. They
were antisemates, and they were in power.
Speaker 9 (47:42):
The anti Jewish law that passed in nineteen forty one
was signed off by King Boris. It was called the
Law for the Protection of the Nation, as if Jews
somehow threatened Bulgaria's future, and King Boris did make antisemitic
moments about Bulgaria's Jews and their financial interests, but the
(48:04):
reports are conflicting. He also expressed concern for their safety
and well being under the new law. Aaron Solomon Balley
doesn't think Boris deserves any thanks, but he doesn't think
the king was a Nazi.
Speaker 15 (48:20):
Either he was not a fascist, but his hands are
not clean.
Speaker 9 (48:28):
But did Boris make the best of the hand he
had been dealt? Across Europe, the Jewish population was decimated
during the war, around six million were killed, but Bulgaria's
Jewish population actually increased during the Second World War. Elaine's husband,
(48:48):
Rabbi Haim, was convinced that they would have been wiped
out had it not been for King Boris. Haim recognized
that protecting Bulgaria's Jews was very much a collective effort,
but he also insisted that King Boris played a significant role.
Speaker 19 (49:08):
He was part, not the only one, but part of
the story that was responsible for saving the Jews of Bulgaria.
He played an important part.
Speaker 9 (49:21):
The thing is, it might be far easier to exonerate
Boris if only he'd been a little more overt in
his efforts to save the Jews, or even a little
more consistent. But historian Tessa Dunlop thinks that's naive. The
king was flitting and darting in and out of allegiances
like a butterfly, and that's a life saving skill.
Speaker 20 (49:46):
He is a moderate man in an immoderate world, which
is either fascist or communist and he walks the tightrope,
and I think we have to commend him for that.
If he had actually said, you know, treat Jews as
he called Bulgarian citizens, we wouldn't be talking about him.
Because he had been snuffed out much earlier.
Speaker 12 (50:06):
He knew that he had.
Speaker 20 (50:07):
To do some dirty staff. He lived in a dirty world.
Speaker 9 (50:11):
But for Aaron Solomon Bali, Boris was too much a
part of that dirty world.
Speaker 15 (50:18):
He was a very sneaky person, very very sneak, and
it's right to call him the fox of the Balkans.
He was a fox. But foxes are sometimes killed.
Speaker 9 (50:34):
And this fox certainly was killed. But by whom.
Speaker 11 (50:40):
I think.
Speaker 9 (50:41):
I am going to take Hitler out of the frame
at this point, not just because we've seen that King
Boris wasn't a completely disloyal ally of the Nazis, but
also because we have to remember none of this is
happening in isolation. We're in the middle of a war here,
the biggest war in history, and in the summer of
(51:03):
nineteen forty three, Germany really needed all the friends she.
Speaker 12 (51:07):
Could get.
Speaker 9 (51:09):
Abroad. She'd lost major battles on the Eastern Front, and
at home, cities were being pummeled by Allied air raids.
The Germans had other things to think about them Boris,
So I have to widen the search for my suspects.
We think we know the means now a poison of
(51:32):
Asiatic origin, probably snake poison. But who else had a motive? Well,
I think I can tell you who. We might not
want to go there, but maybe we have to. I mean,
the Allies hated Boris. Remember this is a man who's
(51:54):
not only in league with Hitler. He signed a symbolic
declaration of war against America and Britain, and one man
hated him more than anyone. Give him the Winston Churchill.
Speaker 6 (52:12):
And we will finish the job.
Speaker 9 (52:15):
Yes, I'm serious. Could the cigar chomping British Prime minister
have signed the order to assassinate Boris when he was murdered?
Speaker 20 (52:25):
Churchill apparently said, oh, see what happens if you support Hitler.
In other words, nothing good comes as getting into bed
with Germany.
Speaker 9 (52:33):
Churchill, the irascible British bulldog hero of the Allies, certainly
had beef with Boris, and Simeon thinks so too.
Speaker 1 (52:43):
You can see it in the different writings and things
of Churchill that he was no fan of my father's.
Speaker 9 (52:49):
What do you think of that?
Speaker 11 (52:51):
Well, I think of it as I said, So Whenston's
privilege you may he rest in peace.
Speaker 9 (52:57):
So the British do have a motive to them. King
Boris was a snake in the grass, and with thousands
of British and Commonwealth troops deployed in Asia and in
the Asian Jungles, the British had ready access to a
means snake venom. Now this puts me being British, in
(53:20):
a bit of an awkward position with King Simeon and
Princess Maria Louisa. But I have to ask the question
did the British kill King Boris? Next time on the
(53:42):
Butterfly King, the British target the Bulgarian royals.
Speaker 10 (53:49):
A huge bomb fell in the garden, the roof was burning,
the was wounded people other people panicked and were screaming.
Speaker 9 (53:56):
And a disturbing discovery in the archives. Gusts are investigative
net far wider. It's really quite dramatic, isn't it. No
wonder it's marked, must never be taken from the office,
to be kept always under lock and key, and yet
it was intercepted, decoded decoded and here it is for
(54:17):
me that that adds a whole new dimension to this.
(54:37):
The Butterfly King is a production of Blanchard House and
Exactly Right Media, hosted by me Becky Milligan. It's written
and produced by Emma Jane Kirby. Original music is by
Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis nank Manell and Toby Matamol. Sound
(54:57):
design and engineering by Tob Mattamong and Daniel Lloyd Evans.
Artwork by Vanessa Lilac. The managing producer is Amka Schortino Nolan.
The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye. The
executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is
(55:18):
Lawrence Grizzell. For Exactly Right Media, the executive producers are
Karen Kilgareth Georgia Hardstark, and Daniel Kramer, with consulting producer
Kyle Ryan. The Butterfly King is inspired by the book
Hitler and the King by John Paul Spencer.
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