Andon Kalchev

Andon Kalchev (Bulgarian: Андон Калчев) (1910 – 27 August 1948) was a Bulgarian army officer, one of the leaders of the Bulgarian-backed Ohrana, a paramilitary formation of Bulgarians in Greek Macedonia during World War II Axis occupation. He was active outside the Bulgarian occupied area of Macedonia, under the tolerance of the Italian and German authorities which used him in their fights with rival Greek EAM-ELAS and Yugoslav Communist resistance groups. Because of his collaborationist activity, he was sentenced to death by Greek military tribunal, and was executed by firing squad on 27 August 1948.

He was born in Zhuzheltsi, Ottoman Empire, today Spilia, Kastoria regional unit in Greece in 1910. After the Balkan Wars in 1913, Greece took control of southern Macedonia and began an official policy of forced assimilation which included the settlement of Greeks from other provinces into southern Macedonia, as well as the linguistic and cultural Hellenization of the ethnic Bulgarians. The Greeks expelled Bulgarian Exarchist churchmen and teachers and closed Bulgarian schools and churches. Bulgarian language (including the Macedonian dialects) was prohibited, and its surreptitious use, whenever detected, was ridiculed or punished.

Within Greece, the Macedonian Bulgarians were designated "Slavophone Greeks". After the Balkan Wars and especially after the First World War up to 190,000 Bulgarians from Aegean Macedonia and Western Thrace fled to Bulgaria as refugees. At this time the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) began sending armed combat groups (cheti) into Greek Macedonia and Thrace to assassinate officials and stir up the spirit of the oppressed population. Kalchev came from a well known IMRO Bulgarian local family, which emigrated from Greek Macedonia to Balchik, Bulgaria after the Second Balkan War. Kalchev graduated at a gymnasium in Sofia and then at the Leipzig University. Later he went back to Bulgaria, where he graduated from a military officer's school in Sofia.^{[citation needed]}

The 4th of August Regime in Greece (1936 to 1941) under the leadership of General Ioannis Metaxas was firmly opposed to the pro-Bulgarian factions of the Slavophones of northern Greece, some of whom underwent political persecution due to advocacy of irredentism with regard to neighboring countries. Metaxas' regime continued repression of the use of Slavic languages both in public and in private as well as expressions of Slavic cultural distinctiveness. As a consequence after the German invasion in Greece (6 April 1941) followed also a Bulgarian annexation of Eastern Macedonia and part of Western Thrace.

Bulgaria joined World War II siding with the Axis in an attempt to solve its own "national question" and fulfill the aim of "Greater Bulgaria", especially in the area of Macedonia (where much territory was lost in the Second Balkan War) and Western Thrace (former Bulgarian state international recognized territory lost to Greece in the Treaty of Neuilly). Bulgaria joined the Axis on 1 March 1941, explicitly requesting German support for its territorial claims.

A massive campaign of "Bulgarisation" was launched, which saw all Greek officials deported. A ban was placed on the use of the Greek language, the names of towns and places changed to the forms traditional in Bulgarian. In addition, the Bulgarian government tried to alter the ethnic composition of the region, by expropriating land and houses from Greeks in favour of Bulgarian settlers (former refugees from Macedonia and others), and by the introduction of forced labour and of economic restrictions for the Greeks in an effort to force them to migrate. A spontaneous and badly organized uprising around Drama, Greece in late September 1941 was violently crushed by the Bulgarian Army. By late 1941, more than 100,000 Greeks had been expelled from the Bulgarian occupation zone.

When the Bulgarians occupied eastern Macedonia in 1941 they began also a campaign to win the loyalty of the Bulgarians of Greek Macedonia and to reinforce their Bulgarian ethnic sentiments. While some of these people did greet the Bulgarians as liberators particularly in eastern and central Macedonia (which was under Bulgarian occupation), this campaign was less successful in German-occupied western Macedonia.

Kalchev served as officer first into Bulgarian annexed territories, but later was sent into the German occupied Thessaloniki to found there a Bulgarian military club, when the German High Command approved it in 1941. The Bulgarians soon organized supplying of food and provisions for the Bulgarian population in Central and Western Macedonia in an attempt to gain support. Many Bulgarian political prisoners were released with the intercession of Bulgarian Club in Thessaloniki, which had made representations to the German occupation authorities.^{[citation needed]}