Surviving Leaders of World War II

This doesn’t really have anything to do with Presidents, but I’m currently reading a book about the upheaval in Romania during the last weeks of World War II and found an incredibly fascinating bit of trivia that I would imagine my fellow history buffs would also find interesting.

World War II ended 67 years ago and, sadly, we are losing more-and-more of the veterans who fought the war with the passage of time each and every day. Of course, most of the leaders during World War II – military leaders and the Presidents, Kings, Prime Ministers, Princes, dictators, heads of government, heads of state, and other national leaders – have been long dead.

Except for two. That’s right, there are two World War II-era heads of state still alive in 2012.

The first is the last King of Romania – 91-year-old King Michael. His story is far too interesting to be limited to this short post, so I suggest reading about him, but King Michael was in his 20s during World War II and the head of a largely powerless royal family in a Romania which was led by a military dictator. Romania was also a member of the Axis – or, in other words, on the team with the bad guys (unless you’re a Nazi, Italian fascist, or Japanese imperialist, but Google Analytics shows that those are not really my main demographics). As the Soviet Red Army closed in on Romania and prepared to unleash holy hell on anyone who didn’t have a Stalin teddy bear, King Michael made a power play and overthrew the Nazi-sympathizing military dictatorship and embraced the Soviets. A few years later, King Michael – a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria and, you know, a KING – was a little too bourgeois for the Communists and he was forced to abdicate and has spent most of the last 60 years exiled in Switzerland, although he has been able to return to Romania since the fall of Communism in his native land. Besides being one of the last two surviving heads of state from World War II, the former King Michael is also the last surviving commander-in-chief of military forces from World War II.

Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is 75 years old and was only a child during World War II, but he was technically Bulgaria’s head of state from 1943-1946 though the real power was held by a regency because he was a minor. Simeon was not a President or a King or a Prince or a Marshal – he became the TSAR of Bulgaria upon his father’s death in 1943. The Tsar! Tsar Simeon II was too young to exercise any actual power during World War II, but because of his hereditary privileges as Bulgaria’s Tsar (FYI: Bulgaria was also on the wrong side of the war, aligning with the Axis powers, although the Germans didn’t really give Bulgaria a choice), he was a head of state during World War II. Much like what happened in Romania, the arrival of Soviet troops ended a lot of things for Bulgaria. The three regents who acted in place of the young Tsar Simeon II were executed by the Red Army, and when the people of Bulgaria overwhelmingly “voted” to abolish the monarchy, the displaced, 9-year-old Tsar and his immediate family were exiled, eventually finding a home in Spain.

While the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe allowed the former King Michael to visit Romania once again, the former Bulgarian Tsar had an even more triumphant return when his country emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. In 2001, the man now going by Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha who had once been Tsar was returned to power by the Bulgarian people. It wasn’t to a throne, but as the freely-elected Prime Minister. Few monarchs – particularly those who have been unseated or forced to abdicate – have returned from decades of exile and been elected as a political leader by the people of their country, but the former Tsar Simeon II served as Bulgarian Prime Minister from 2001-to-2005.