March 28, 2024 • 50 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 1 (00:04):
September 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 all heads about. Many
(00:27):
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, the king's younger brother and
(00:49):
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 2 (01:04):
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 1 (01:25):
They've never seen a dead person before, and now protocol
demands that they embraced their father one last time.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
There 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 to this very day. I don't like to
talk about it, but you brought it up. I'm sorry, no, no,
because people should.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Know, and you remember it clearly as it was yesterday.
Is it never gone?
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Never forget it.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
And it must have been really hard for your brother
as well.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
He was even smaller.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yeah, he was four years long, so it was six still,
you know, you go to a funeral and it all
comes back.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
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
(02:38):
Harry as they walk behind Princess Diana's coffin.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
It was such a gruesome or terrible feeling to kiss
his forehead being icy cold, that I've got this to
this day, and God knows I'm all this stage, but
I still avoid going to burials were one can.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
See the dead person.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
It's just something which has shocked me so deeply that
I can hardly take it.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
It's ridiculous, but there it is.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
It's lest something that psychiatrists would probably find all sorts
of explanations.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
It must be an unimaginable trial for the children's mother,
Queen Giovanna too.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
My mother was heroic.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
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 1 (03:43):
But on top of all the pain and grief 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, your Doxia shares that unch. Your
doctier is convinced the Nazis poisoned him. Specifically, she blames
(04:06):
one of 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 docteer did mention the name doctor Sites, the Queen's
blood must have frozen in her veins.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Seits was the head of a clinic where my mother
had gone.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
She was almost like a sort of private physician.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Doctor sites was not just any old doctor. He was
a personal friend at the queen's And so I have
to ask did he use that friendship to infiltrate the
palace and commit the ultimate act of treachery the murder
of the king? From Lanchad House and exactly right, media,
(05:02):
this is the Butterfly King. I'm Becky Milligan, Chapter three,
(05:47):
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
about Boris's death. Our route to his office takes us
(06:10):
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.
Speaker 6 (06:20):
And it's where he died.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
I think, I think so. It's right in the middle,
isn't it. That is quite grand. That's grander than the
palace that we've been to.
Speaker 6 (06:33):
It's quite yellow, freezing.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
I forgot to put on another help. So far, we've
only been to Varana palace, the family's country retreat. But
it's this one, the one in downtown Sofia, that was
King Boris's main residence, and it's here he was taken
ill and died. Was built in the late nineteenth century,
(07:02):
but after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union
invaded and abolished the monarchy, it became an art gallery.
Speaker 6 (07:10):
Pity it's a national gallery. Yeah, mind you if you
think about Buckingham Paris, I mean that passed the way
open up to visitors.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
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 6 (07:26):
Well, poor old Simeon doesn't have much choice, does it,
because this is no longer a royal palaces. The art
gallery and that's just it.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
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 okay.
It is handsome, large palace like, but not extraordinary in
my view.
Speaker 6 (07:51):
Right, I wake bite for your birthday.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
The historian we've come to meet, Professor vladimir' Latarski, is
a forensic researcher you know, the.
Speaker 7 (08:07):
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 burhists step by step.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
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
(08:44):
that was never meant to be shared, completely off the record,
and the evidence came from this.
Speaker 7 (08:51):
Man, the diary of Joseph Jobbels, the Minister of the
Propaganda Joseph Gebels.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
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 Latarwski read copies in Berlin,
(09:28):
and in one particular entry he spotted a very intriguing passage.
It talks directly about the death of King Boris and
about how he was killed.
Speaker 7 (09:40):
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 Goobbos.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
And Hitler told Gerbels that the doctors had revealed to
him the cause of the king's death.
Speaker 7 (10:00):
Said to gorb Bills, it is quite sure that the
king was poisoned. That is what he had heard from
the doctors.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
But the doctors went much further than that. They actually
named the poison.
Speaker 7 (10:15):
It was some kind of poison from India, probably snake poison.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
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
(10:43):
one with a thing for snakes.
Speaker 8 (10:49):
I had a lot of snakes. I mean I was
keeping and breathing snakes at home. I had probably about
two hundred at one time in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Snake experts don't come more experts. The marc O Sha
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 8 (11:22):
Around the world. Every year, up to one hundred and
thirty eight thousand people die of snake bite. Out of
the 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 1 (11:37):
Can you name the venomous snakes in Asia? Just a
short You know five or six of them?
Speaker 7 (11:42):
Oh?
Speaker 8 (11:42):
Shortlist? Well, the big four common cobra, common crate, Russell's viper,
sourscale viper. That's the big four. But there's plenty of others,
and there are several species of cobras. There are several
species of crits.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
At last, I feel we're getting somewhere. I've just looked
top of 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
(12:16):
fangs far more deeply into flesh. A precision killing.
Speaker 8 (12:21):
My favorite snake's 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 1 (12:38):
Is the king cobra, the one that stands up and
looks at you?
Speaker 5 (12:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 8 (12:41):
Oh, all cobras will rise up and hood spitting cobras
much less than non spitters because they tend to raise
their head a bit, spit and drop again.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
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 8 (13:10):
I do think that some snakes are more intelligent than
we used to think.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
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
(13:40):
bitten him as he slept?
Speaker 8 (13:43):
Couldn't have the Really, if you want to kill somebody,
they're going to say, can you guarantee this is going
to work?
Speaker 7 (13:50):
Well?
Speaker 8 (13:50):
Sorry, no?
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Oh right.
Speaker 8 (13:54):
I doubt very much whether Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle
interviewed her ptologists when they were thinking of murdering somebody
with snake venom.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
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 8 (14:10):
Yes, I saw a cobra up at the Liverpool School
of Tropical Medicine quite a few years ago. It was
quite a mankey specimen with an odd eye, which was
supposed to have been put into a hotel room to
kill somebody. Oh my god, you you could stay in
that hotel room for a fortnight and never see the
snake is killed up behind the wastebasket.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
You know.
Speaker 8 (14:30):
It's 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
the snake hides.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
They could die of natural death and the snake could
just continue living.
Speaker 8 (14:44):
There potentially, 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 1 (15:02):
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 8 (15:17):
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 bit clear, and that is the
liquid venom. And generally that would be you have a
freeze dried to get a dry weight.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
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 8 (15:52):
You hold the snake and you hold a receptacle and
a retort stand, and you encourage the snake to bite
it through a latex membrane which folds back the fang
sheaths along the fangs, and then, if gently the squeeze
in the venom glands, the snake should produce venom into
the receptacle underneath, and that's your liquid venom.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
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 8 (16:30):
If you're going to administer venom, the only way you're
going to be able to do that is by injection.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
By injection, remember what professor Slatarski found out from reading
Gerbel's diary.
Speaker 7 (16:43):
Hitler said, it is quite sure that the king was poisoned.
That is what he had heard from the doctors.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
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,
(17:17):
so who were they and what were they doing in
the King's sickroom? In August nineteen forty.
Speaker 7 (17:23):
Three, actually, first came Professor Rudolfzidz from Berlin, Professor Chust
Eppinger os Vienna, and they decided to call the Turtlan
Professor Maximilian de Grinis neurologists.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Okay, so three highly specialized doctors, all known to Hitler,
surround the King in his sick room. Let's start with
the last one. Decrinis, 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
(18:03):
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.
(18:23):
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 the.
Speaker 7 (18:37):
King because of what they see on the body.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Which was a very peculiar rash.
Speaker 7 (18:45):
They seen a brown kite of.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Spots, brown spots. We know this because Professor Eppinger spoke
to the German Air Force attache in Sofia. Just like Goebels,
that attache kept diary, and in it he wrote that
he'd met with Dr Eppinger, who told him the brown
spots on Boris's skin indicated the absorption of poison. Eppinger
(19:12):
described it.
Speaker 7 (19:12):
As a typical Balkan death.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
What do you mean by a typical Balkan death?
Speaker 7 (19:20):
I mean in the Balkan there were more political murders
than in the rest of Europe for this period.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
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 Johannas Matexas died very suddenly, and just a
(19:51):
few weeks earlier, Matexas had refused to let Germany's ally
Italy occupy his country.
Speaker 9 (19:59):
The news of the and death of Premier John Matexas
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.
Speaker 10 (20:18):
Before he became a politic.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
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
(20:44):
the autopsy of General Metaxas. Coincidence or is there something
more sinister going on?
Speaker 7 (20:53):
Here?
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Were the Austrian doctor and his German colleagues hired as
Hitler's hit men, 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
(21:16):
put 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.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
This doctor Zeits Dzeites who came from Berlin, was I
mean there was something suspicious about him.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
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 2 (21:58):
Zeits was the head 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 Sides, and he came obviously because
she was almost like a sort of private physician.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
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 Sights. When Simeon was born on June sixteenth, nineteen
thirty seven, there was a national celebration. Four thousand prisoners
(22:43):
were released, fines were pardoned, and every school child and
students in the country had 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 Sykes was flying in to
(23:03):
help her ailing husband, I imagine she must have felt relieved.
She would have felt her husband was in safe hands.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
Or was he?
Speaker 1 (23:14):
What could have made aren't you doxy a doubt? Doctor sits.
After the war he moved to Spain, where the Queen,
Simeon and Maria 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
(23:35):
of Simeon's eldest son.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
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 1 (23:53):
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 3 (24:06):
One day, I asked him, you know, the professor sides,
what do you know and he said that, you know,
Papa just died.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
That seems a bit of a cop out to me.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
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 7 (24:27):
But he just was evasive.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
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, but that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Did it make you suspicious?
Speaker 3 (24:36):
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.
Speaker 5 (24:46):
He didn't want to reveal anything.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
This is what he meant that he had given his
word to.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
But no, I don't see it there and I'll never
see it there. So we're all dealing with here's see,
that's the word.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
There'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 7 (25:13):
From this trio two people have committed suicides at the
end of the war. So Professor Zeitz, he's the only
person that they a lived after the war.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
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
(25:49):
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 of
all of this. The king was already very sick when
the three doctors arrived, So if Boris was injected with
(26:11):
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 Lutarski said, I can't get out
(26:32):
of my head, something that the doctors told Hitler when
he summoned them to a meeting after King Boris's death, it.
Speaker 7 (26:39):
Is quite sure that the king was poisoned.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Were they informing the furor that they'd accomplished 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, Maria Louisa can find no
proof the Germans killed King Boris.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
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 1 (27:24):
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, Professor Latarski agrees with
Maria Louisa.
Speaker 7 (27:40):
There are no logical signs that Kitler wanted to make revenge. Actually,
they have a good connection until very last moments.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
So the jury is out on whether Hitler and the
Nazis were behind Boris's untimely death. Not because it looks
like Hitler was genuinely concerned for the alien king, but
also because, Okay, there's something I haven't told you about
King Boris something really important to many Bulgarians. Boris is
(28:17):
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.
(28:38):
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 burials. The
(29:01):
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, Foxy Ferdinand,
(29:22):
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,
(29:49):
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
(30:12):
was paid for by the deaths of thousands of Jews.
Speaker 5 (30:17):
We are doomed and we knew it. All our relatives
from macedon Or were killed.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
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 5 (30:49):
Oh, definitely. I have a very negative attitude, told Sir
King Boris. People need fairy tales, people like to hear stories.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
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 force to board trains. They were
taken through Bulgaria and onto the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland.
(31:30):
Only a handful that 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 5 (31:49):
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 1 (32:01):
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.
(32:23):
But neither can he absolve him from blame. Had Boris lived,
he says, he'd have found himself on trial for war crimes.
Speaker 5 (32:33):
If he had survived, he would be in the Neuremberg process.
Really well, it's quite a lot of blood for me.
He is a criminal.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
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
(33:07):
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 7 (33:30):
MASSI didn't give these territories to Bulgaria.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
They didn't didn't, but they occupied.
Speaker 5 (33:38):
That lack that.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
Occupied occupation is a military action is another matter.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
But he could have stepped in and said, hang on
a moment, I, as king, say that deportation mustn't happen.
He could have done he could have saved them.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
No, no, because he has not power, the real power
over this territories.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
But did King Boris have enough power to try to
stop the deportation? Simeon believes his father's hands were.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
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. It's something so.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Simeon can't finish his sentence. He just stares at the
floor and shakes his head. But if you subscribe to
Aaron Solomon Barli's theory that King Boris really didn't care
about the fate of those eleven thousand Jews from Thrace
in Macedonia, then why would the Nazis murder him. I'm
(35:01):
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 too. I
warned you at the start of this investigation that we'd
(35:24):
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 not holding
anything back, but I think in this part of the story,
(35:48):
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, anti Jewish laws
were passed in the country which seriously restricted Jewish citizens civil.
Speaker 11 (36:12):
Rights, and one of his friends all of a sudden
just slapped him in the face and call him a
dirty Jew out of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
You remember meeting Elaine Asa 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 Bulgaria's fifty thousand Jews. And yet when
(36:43):
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 11 (36:56):
They had to wear the yellow star. Really yeah, his
father had to have a non jewel run his business.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
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 11 (37:14):
And one day there was a bunch of I guess
Nazis that came and took his father.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
And the people who took Him's father were Bulgarians, Bulgarian Nazis.
Speaker 11 (37:28):
So they brought him back with oliver 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 1 (37:40):
But most Bulgarians met these changes with anger. Jewish writer
Michael bar Zoha also grew up in Bulgaria.
Speaker 10 (37:49):
There was a kind of civil revolt against these laws.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
He says. There were petitions to Parliament and the Prime
Minister's office signed by Bulgarians from all walks of life, starting.
Speaker 10 (38:03):
With doctors and engineers and lawyers, and going down to
restaurant waits, to cobblers, to even the peasants who didn't
know to like who signed the petitions with their fingers.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
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
his father had an easy life in the camp and
(38:43):
that they were given back their property after the war.
For Aaron, Solomon Barley's father had a very different experience.
Aaron believes those camps have been misrepresented.
Speaker 5 (38:57):
It's a story, it's a false, fine 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, buy some food and send it to
my father because they didn't have enough food, for example.
(39:19):
And it was a problem how to maintain the family
because there were many people depending on his income so
that they can survive.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
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
(39:52):
owned had been stolen.
Speaker 5 (39:55):
We were poor enough, but well they had some proper
when they came back from the countryside, they didn't have anything.
What did the King do? Nothing? Nothing.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
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 4 (40:24):
To excuse my father inventedly.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
You know 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 getting Italian passports and arranging with
the Catholic Church, and she was a team with my father.
(40:47):
You know, it's a matter of saving lives.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
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
(41:12):
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, Peshev had been the King's advisor. Aaron Solomon
Barley believes Bulgaria's Jews definitely oh thanks to Peshev and
(41:37):
to certain individuals in the church and community, but he
feels no gratitude to the King or the Bulgarian people
more widely.
Speaker 5 (41:47):
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
(42:09):
property and who put us these yellow badges. No, I
cannot think took them. And they were fascists here, they
were anti symmates, and they were in power.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
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
comments about Bulgaria's Jews and their financial interests, but the
(42:45):
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 either.
Speaker 5 (43:02):
He was not a fascist, but his hands are not clean.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
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,
(43:28):
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 11 (43:48):
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 1 (44:01):
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 12 (44:27):
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
now because he had been snuffed out much earlier. He
knew that he had to do some dirty staff. He
(44:48):
lived in a dirty world.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
But for Aaron Solomon Bali, Boris was too much a
part of that dirty world.
Speaker 5 (44:59):
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 1 (45:14):
And this fox certainly was killed. But by whom I think.
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
(45:36):
happening in isolation. We're in the middle of a war here,
the biggest war in history, and in the summer of
nineteen forty three, Germany really needed all the friends she
could get abroad, She'd lost major battles on the Eastern Front,
and at home cities were being pummeled by Allied are
(46:00):
The Germans had other things to think about than Boris.
So I have to widen the search for my suspects.
We think we know the means now, a poison of
Asiatic origin, probably snake poison. But who else had a motive? Well,
(46:21):
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
not only in league with Hitler, he's signed a symbolic
declaration of war against America and Britain. And one man
(46:46):
hated him more than anyone, Winston Churchill.
Speaker 7 (46:52):
And we will finish the job.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Yes, I'm serious. Could the cigar chomping British Prime minister
have signed the order to assassinate Boris when he was murdered?
Speaker 12 (47:06):
Churchill apparently said, oh see what happens if you support Hitler?
In other words, nothing good comes as getting into Bedwick, Germany.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
Churchill, the irascible British bulldog hero of the Allies, certainly
had beef with Boris. And Simeon thinks so too.
Speaker 4 (47:23):
You can see it.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
In the different writings and things of Churchill that he
was no fan.
Speaker 4 (47:28):
Of my father's.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
What do you think of that?
Speaker 4 (47:32):
Well, I think of it as I said, So Whenston's pilrivilege,
you may he rest in peace.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
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
(48:01):
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
(48:22):
Butterfly King, the British target the Bulgarian royals.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
A huge bomb fell in the garden, the roof was burning,
there was wounded people, other people panicked and were screaming.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
And a disturbing discovery in the archives. Casts are investigative
net far wider. It's really quite dramatic, isn't it.
Speaker 6 (48:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
Decoded, And here it is for me that that adds
a whole new dime mention to this. The Butterfly King
(49:19):
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 Mattamoon. Sound design and engineering
(49:40):
by Toby Mattamoon 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 Lawrence Grizsell. For
(50:01):
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 hal Spencer.
September 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 all heads about. Many
(00:27):
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, the king's younger brother and
(00:49):
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 2 (01:04):
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 1 (01:25):
They've never seen a dead person before, and now protocol
demands that they embraced their father one last time.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
There 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 to this very day. I don't like to
talk about it, but you brought it up. I'm sorry, no, no,
because people should.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Know, and you remember it clearly as it was yesterday.
Is it never gone?
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Never forget it.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
And it must have been really hard for your brother
as well.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
He was even smaller.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yeah, he was four years long, so it was six still,
you know, you go to a funeral and it all
comes back.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
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
(02:38):
Harry as they walk behind Princess Diana's coffin.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
It was such a gruesome or terrible feeling to kiss
his forehead being icy cold, that I've got this to
this day, and God knows I'm all this stage, but
I still avoid going to burials were one can.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
See the dead person.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
It's just something which has shocked me so deeply that
I can hardly take it.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
It's ridiculous, but there it is.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
It's lest something that psychiatrists would probably find all sorts
of explanations.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
It must be an unimaginable trial for the children's mother,
Queen Giovanna too.
Speaker 4 (03:28):
My mother was heroic.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
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 1 (03:43):
But on top of all the pain and grief 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, your Doxia shares that unch. Your
doctier is convinced the Nazis poisoned him. Specifically, she blames
(04:06):
one of 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 docteer did mention the name doctor Sites, the Queen's
blood must have frozen in her veins.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Seits was the head of a clinic where my mother
had gone.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
She was almost like a sort of private physician.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Doctor sites was not just any old doctor. He was
a personal friend at the queen's And so I have
to ask did he use that friendship to infiltrate the
palace and commit the ultimate act of treachery the murder
of the king? From Lanchad House and exactly right, media,
(05:02):
this is the Butterfly King. I'm Becky Milligan, Chapter three,
(05:47):
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
about Boris's death. Our route to his office takes us
(06:10):
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.
Speaker 6 (06:20):
And it's where he died.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
I think, I think so. It's right in the middle,
isn't it. That is quite grand. That's grander than the
palace that we've been to.
Speaker 6 (06:33):
It's quite yellow, freezing.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
I forgot to put on another help. So far, we've
only been to Varana palace, the family's country retreat. But
it's this one, the one in downtown Sofia, that was
King Boris's main residence, and it's here he was taken
ill and died. Was built in the late nineteenth century,
(07:02):
but after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union
invaded and abolished the monarchy, it became an art gallery.
Speaker 6 (07:10):
Pity it's a national gallery. Yeah, mind you if you
think about Buckingham Paris, I mean that passed the way
open up to visitors.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
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 6 (07:26):
Well, poor old Simeon doesn't have much choice, does it,
because this is no longer a royal palaces. The art
gallery and that's just it.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
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 okay.
It is handsome, large palace like, but not extraordinary in
my view.
Speaker 6 (07:51):
Right, I wake bite for your birthday.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
The historian we've come to meet, Professor vladimir' Latarski, is
a forensic researcher you know, the.
Speaker 7 (08:07):
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 burhists step by step.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
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
(08:44):
that was never meant to be shared, completely off the record,
and the evidence came from this.
Speaker 7 (08:51):
Man, the diary of Joseph Jobbels, the Minister of the
Propaganda Joseph Gebels.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
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 Latarwski read copies in Berlin,
(09:28):
and in one particular entry he spotted a very intriguing passage.
It talks directly about the death of King Boris and
about how he was killed.
Speaker 7 (09:40):
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 Goobbos.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
And Hitler told Gerbels that the doctors had revealed to
him the cause of the king's death.
Speaker 7 (10:00):
Said to gorb Bills, it is quite sure that the
king was poisoned. That is what he had heard from
the doctors.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
But the doctors went much further than that. They actually
named the poison.
Speaker 7 (10:15):
It was some kind of poison from India, probably snake poison.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
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
(10:43):
one with a thing for snakes.
Speaker 8 (10:49):
I had a lot of snakes. I mean I was
keeping and breathing snakes at home. I had probably about
two hundred at one time in the seventies.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Snake experts don't come more experts. The marc O Sha
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 8 (11:22):
Around the world. Every year, up to one hundred and
thirty eight thousand people die of snake bite. Out of
the 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 1 (11:37):
Can you name the venomous snakes in Asia? Just a
short You know five or six of them?
Speaker 7 (11:42):
Oh?
Speaker 8 (11:42):
Shortlist? Well, the big four common cobra, common crate, Russell's viper,
sourscale viper. That's the big four. But there's plenty of others,
and there are several species of cobras. There are several
species of crits.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
At last, I feel we're getting somewhere. I've just looked
top of 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
(12:16):
fangs far more deeply into flesh. A precision killing.
Speaker 8 (12:21):
My favorite snake's 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 1 (12:38):
Is the king cobra, the one that stands up and
looks at you?
Speaker 5 (12:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 8 (12:41):
Oh, all cobras will rise up and hood spitting cobras
much less than non spitters because they tend to raise
their head a bit, spit and drop again.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
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 8 (13:10):
I do think that some snakes are more intelligent than
we used to think.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
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
(13:40):
bitten him as he slept?
Speaker 8 (13:43):
Couldn't have the Really, if you want to kill somebody,
they're going to say, can you guarantee this is going
to work?
Speaker 7 (13:50):
Well?
Speaker 8 (13:50):
Sorry, no?
Speaker 1 (13:53):
Oh right.
Speaker 8 (13:54):
I doubt very much whether Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle
interviewed her ptologists when they were thinking of murdering somebody
with snake venom.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
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 8 (14:10):
Yes, I saw a cobra up at the Liverpool School
of Tropical Medicine quite a few years ago. It was
quite a mankey specimen with an odd eye, which was
supposed to have been put into a hotel room to
kill somebody. Oh my god, you you could stay in
that hotel room for a fortnight and never see the
snake is killed up behind the wastebasket.
Speaker 4 (14:29):
You know.
Speaker 8 (14:30):
It's 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
the snake hides.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
They could die of natural death and the snake could
just continue living.
Speaker 8 (14:44):
There potentially, 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 1 (15:02):
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 8 (15:17):
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 bit clear, and that is the
liquid venom. And generally that would be you have a
freeze dried to get a dry weight.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
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 8 (15:52):
You hold the snake and you hold a receptacle and
a retort stand, and you encourage the snake to bite
it through a latex membrane which folds back the fang
sheaths along the fangs, and then, if gently the squeeze
in the venom glands, the snake should produce venom into
the receptacle underneath, and that's your liquid venom.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
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 8 (16:30):
If you're going to administer venom, the only way you're
going to be able to do that is by injection.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
By injection, remember what professor Slatarski found out from reading
Gerbel's diary.
Speaker 7 (16:43):
Hitler said, it is quite sure that the king was poisoned.
That is what he had heard from the doctors.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
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,
(17:17):
so who were they and what were they doing in
the King's sickroom? In August nineteen forty.
Speaker 7 (17:23):
Three, actually, first came Professor Rudolfzidz from Berlin, Professor Chust
Eppinger os Vienna, and they decided to call the Turtlan
Professor Maximilian de Grinis neurologists.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Okay, so three highly specialized doctors, all known to Hitler,
surround the King in his sick room. Let's start with
the last one. Decrinis, 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
(18:03):
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.
(18:23):
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 the.
Speaker 7 (18:37):
King because of what they see on the body.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Which was a very peculiar rash.
Speaker 7 (18:45):
They seen a brown kite of.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Spots, brown spots. We know this because Professor Eppinger spoke
to the German Air Force attache in Sofia. Just like Goebels,
that attache kept diary, and in it he wrote that
he'd met with Dr Eppinger, who told him the brown
spots on Boris's skin indicated the absorption of poison. Eppinger
(19:12):
described it.
Speaker 7 (19:12):
As a typical Balkan death.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
What do you mean by a typical Balkan death?
Speaker 7 (19:20):
I mean in the Balkan there were more political murders
than in the rest of Europe for this period.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
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 Johannas Matexas died very suddenly, and just a
(19:51):
few weeks earlier, Matexas had refused to let Germany's ally
Italy occupy his country.
Speaker 9 (19:59):
The news of the and death of Premier John Matexas
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.
Speaker 10 (20:18):
Before he became a politic.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
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
(20:44):
the autopsy of General Metaxas. Coincidence or is there something
more sinister going on?
Speaker 7 (20:53):
Here?
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Were the Austrian doctor and his German colleagues hired as
Hitler's hit men, 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
(21:16):
put 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.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
This doctor Zeits Dzeites who came from Berlin, was I
mean there was something suspicious about him.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
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 2 (21:58):
Zeits was the head 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 Sides, and he came obviously because
she was almost like a sort of private physician.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
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 Sights. When Simeon was born on June sixteenth, nineteen
thirty seven, there was a national celebration. Four thousand prisoners
(22:43):
were released, fines were pardoned, and every school child and
students in the country had 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 Sykes was flying in to
(23:03):
help her ailing husband, I imagine she must have felt relieved.
She would have felt her husband was in safe hands.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
Or was he?
Speaker 1 (23:14):
What could have made aren't you doxy a doubt? Doctor sits.
After the war he moved to Spain, where the Queen,
Simeon and Maria 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
(23:35):
of Simeon's eldest son.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
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 1 (23:53):
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 3 (24:06):
One day, I asked him, you know, the professor sides,
what do you know and he said that, you know,
Papa just died.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
That seems a bit of a cop out to me.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
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 7 (24:27):
But he just was evasive.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
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, but that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Did it make you suspicious?
Speaker 3 (24:36):
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.
Speaker 5 (24:46):
He didn't want to reveal anything.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
This is what he meant that he had given his
word to.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
But no, I don't see it there and I'll never
see it there. So we're all dealing with here's see,
that's the word.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
There'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 7 (25:13):
From this trio two people have committed suicides at the
end of the war. So Professor Zeitz, he's the only
person that they a lived after the war.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
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
(25:49):
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 of
all of this. The king was already very sick when
the three doctors arrived, So if Boris was injected with
(26:11):
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 Lutarski said, I can't get out
(26:32):
of my head, something that the doctors told Hitler when
he summoned them to a meeting after King Boris's death, it.
Speaker 7 (26:39):
Is quite sure that the king was poisoned.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Were they informing the furor that they'd accomplished 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, Maria Louisa can find no
proof the Germans killed King Boris.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
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 1 (27:24):
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, Professor Latarski agrees with
Maria Louisa.
Speaker 7 (27:40):
There are no logical signs that Kitler wanted to make revenge. Actually,
they have a good connection until very last moments.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
So the jury is out on whether Hitler and the
Nazis were behind Boris's untimely death. Not because it looks
like Hitler was genuinely concerned for the alien king, but
also because, Okay, there's something I haven't told you about
King Boris something really important to many Bulgarians. Boris is
(28:17):
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.
(28:38):
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 burials. The
(29:01):
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, Foxy Ferdinand,
(29:22):
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,
(29:49):
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
(30:12):
was paid for by the deaths of thousands of Jews.
Speaker 5 (30:17):
We are doomed and we knew it. All our relatives
from macedon Or were killed.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
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 5 (30:49):
Oh, definitely. I have a very negative attitude, told Sir
King Boris. People need fairy tales, people like to hear stories.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
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 force to board trains. They were
taken through Bulgaria and onto the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland.
(31:30):
Only a handful that 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 5 (31:49):
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 1 (32:01):
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.
(32:23):
But neither can he absolve him from blame. Had Boris lived,
he says, he'd have found himself on trial for war crimes.
Speaker 5 (32:33):
If he had survived, he would be in the Neuremberg process.
Really well, it's quite a lot of blood for me.
He is a criminal.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
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
(33:07):
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 7 (33:30):
MASSI didn't give these territories to Bulgaria.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
They didn't didn't, but they occupied.
Speaker 5 (33:38):
That lack that.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
Occupied occupation is a military action is another matter.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
But he could have stepped in and said, hang on
a moment, I, as king, say that deportation mustn't happen.
He could have done he could have saved them.
Speaker 3 (33:55):
No, no, because he has not power, the real power
over this territories.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
But did King Boris have enough power to try to
stop the deportation? Simeon believes his father's hands were.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
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. It's something so.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
Simeon can't finish his sentence. He just stares at the
floor and shakes his head. But if you subscribe to
Aaron Solomon Barli's theory that King Boris really didn't care
about the fate of those eleven thousand Jews from Thrace
in Macedonia, then why would the Nazis murder him. I'm
(35:01):
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 too. I
warned you at the start of this investigation that we'd
(35:24):
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 not holding
anything back, but I think in this part of the story,
(35:48):
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, anti Jewish laws
were passed in the country which seriously restricted Jewish citizens civil.
Speaker 11 (36:12):
Rights, and one of his friends all of a sudden
just slapped him in the face and call him a
dirty Jew out of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
You remember meeting Elaine Asa 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 Bulgaria's fifty thousand Jews. And yet when
(36:43):
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 11 (36:56):
They had to wear the yellow star. Really yeah, his
father had to have a non jewel run his business.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
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 11 (37:14):
And one day there was a bunch of I guess
Nazis that came and took his father.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
And the people who took Him's father were Bulgarians, Bulgarian Nazis.
Speaker 11 (37:28):
So they brought him back with oliver 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 1 (37:40):
But most Bulgarians met these changes with anger. Jewish writer
Michael bar Zoha also grew up in Bulgaria.
Speaker 10 (37:49):
There was a kind of civil revolt against these laws.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
He says. There were petitions to Parliament and the Prime
Minister's office signed by Bulgarians from all walks of life, starting.
Speaker 10 (38:03):
With doctors and engineers and lawyers, and going down to
restaurant waits, to cobblers, to even the peasants who didn't
know to like who signed the petitions with their fingers.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
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
his father had an easy life in the camp and
(38:43):
that they were given back their property after the war.
For Aaron, Solomon Barley's father had a very different experience.
Aaron believes those camps have been misrepresented.
Speaker 5 (38:57):
It's a story, it's a false, fine 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, buy some food and send it to
my father because they didn't have enough food, for example.
(39:19):
And it was a problem how to maintain the family
because there were many people depending on his income so
that they can survive.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
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
(39:52):
owned had been stolen.
Speaker 5 (39:55):
We were poor enough, but well they had some proper
when they came back from the countryside, they didn't have anything.
What did the King do? Nothing? Nothing.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
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 4 (40:24):
To excuse my father inventedly.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
You know 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 getting Italian passports and arranging with
the Catholic Church, and she was a team with my father.
(40:47):
You know, it's a matter of saving lives.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
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
(41:12):
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, Peshev had been the King's advisor. Aaron Solomon
Barley believes Bulgaria's Jews definitely oh thanks to Peshev and
(41:37):
to certain individuals in the church and community, but he
feels no gratitude to the King or the Bulgarian people
more widely.
Speaker 5 (41:47):
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
(42:09):
property and who put us these yellow badges. No, I
cannot think took them. And they were fascists here, they
were anti symmates, and they were in power.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
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
comments about Bulgaria's Jews and their financial interests, but the
(42:45):
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 either.
Speaker 5 (43:02):
He was not a fascist, but his hands are not clean.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
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,
(43:28):
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 11 (43:48):
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 1 (44:01):
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 12 (44:27):
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
now because he had been snuffed out much earlier. He
knew that he had to do some dirty staff. He
(44:48):
lived in a dirty world.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
But for Aaron Solomon Bali, Boris was too much a
part of that dirty world.
Speaker 5 (44:59):
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 1 (45:14):
And this fox certainly was killed. But by whom I think.
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
(45:36):
happening in isolation. We're in the middle of a war here,
the biggest war in history, and in the summer of
nineteen forty three, Germany really needed all the friends she
could get abroad, She'd lost major battles on the Eastern Front,
and at home cities were being pummeled by Allied are
(46:00):
The Germans had other things to think about than Boris.
So I have to widen the search for my suspects.
We think we know the means now, a poison of
Asiatic origin, probably snake poison. But who else had a motive? Well,
(46:21):
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
not only in league with Hitler, he's signed a symbolic
declaration of war against America and Britain. And one man
(46:46):
hated him more than anyone, Winston Churchill.
Speaker 7 (46:52):
And we will finish the job.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
Yes, I'm serious. Could the cigar chomping British Prime minister
have signed the order to assassinate Boris when he was murdered?
Speaker 12 (47:06):
Churchill apparently said, oh see what happens if you support Hitler?
In other words, nothing good comes as getting into Bedwick, Germany.
Speaker 1 (47:13):
Churchill, the irascible British bulldog hero of the Allies, certainly
had beef with Boris. And Simeon thinks so too.
Speaker 4 (47:23):
You can see it.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
In the different writings and things of Churchill that he
was no fan.
Speaker 4 (47:28):
Of my father's.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
What do you think of that?
Speaker 4 (47:32):
Well, I think of it as I said, So Whenston's pilrivilege,
you may he rest in peace.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
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
(48:01):
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
(48:22):
Butterfly King, the British target the Bulgarian royals.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
A huge bomb fell in the garden, the roof was burning,
there was wounded people, other people panicked and were screaming.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
And a disturbing discovery in the archives. Casts are investigative
net far wider. It's really quite dramatic, isn't it.
Speaker 6 (48:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
Decoded, And here it is for me that that adds
a whole new dime mention to this. The Butterfly King
(49:19):
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 Mattamoon. Sound design and engineering
(49:40):
by Toby Mattamoon 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 Lawrence Grizsell. For
(50:01):
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 hal Spencer.
Hosts And Creators
Emma Jane Kirby
Becky Milligan
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