Todor Angelov

Angelov was born in 1900 in the city of Kyustendil to a mason father and a weaver and laundress mother, both Bulgarian refugees from Macedonia. In 1923 he married Aleksandra Sharlandzhieva; the two had a daughter, the writer Svoboda Bachvarova (b. 1925). Angelov was related to the anarchist left wing of Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and the Bulgarian Communist Party from an early age; in 1923 he took part in the failed and suppressed September Uprising, more specifically in its Pirin Macedonia operations. After the communist St Nedelya Church assault of 1925, he was sentenced to death but managed to escape the country with his family.

After spending some time in Austria and France, Angelov and his family settled in Belgium in 1927. In 1930 they were extradited for "disturbing public peace": Angelov settled in Luxembourg while his wife and daughter returned to Bulgaria. In 1932 he was allowed to return to Belgium. In 1936–1938, he joined the International Brigades' Dimitrov Battalion of Bulgarian volunteers and fought in the Spanish Civil War, siding with the Second Spanish Republic forces.

Upon returning to Belgium Angelov was an active supporter of the Communist Party of Belgium. In 1942, he organized a resistance group, the "Corps Mobile de Bruxelles", under the auspices of the "Partisans Armés" and associated with the "Front de l'Indépendance", the major Belgian underground movement.[1] The Corps itself recruited around 25 people, mostly Central European Jewish immigrants; the group was mostly active around Brussels. Angelov was referred to as Terrorist X by the Nazi authorities and led over 200 actions against the Nazis, including the destruction of a train carrying military machinery and the burning of records of Jews to be deported. During a single year, around half of the group's members were killed or arrested. Angelov was arrested in early 1943 and interned in the prison camp at Fort Breendonk where he was executed in late November 1943.