bulmodww2

BULGARIA

Balkan monarchy with a population of 6,341,000 (1940) which by September 1939 was the only power defeated in 1918 not to have received some territorial redress. This plus the predominance of Germany in Bulgaria's external trade and as a supplier of arms, acted as a strong impulse driving Bulgaria towards the Axis.

However King Boris II (1894-1943), who dominated foreign policy-making was not prepared to make a definite commitment to either side. He wanted to keep Bulgaria neutral and hoped the Anglo-German settlement might be achieved before the Balkans were affected by the conflict. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 eased his position in that his predominantly Russophile people and his mainly pro-German officer corps were content with this uncommitted policy.

On 7 September 1940 Bulgaria received its first territorial compensation when the Treaty of Craiova returned to it Southern Dobruja. Thereafter the pressures from Germany to join the Tripartite pact increased sharply. Bulgarian receptivity to such pressure also increased when it became known that the November talks between Ribbentrop and Molotov had raised the prospect that Bulgaria be included in the Soviet sphere of influence.

The possibility of British intervention in Greece and Hitler's preparations for the attack on the Soviet Union increased Bulgaria's strategic significance and King Boris's government committed itself to joining the Axis at an unspecified future date.

When the Germans became involved in the Balkan campaign by invading Greece (Operation MARITA), they first had to cross Bulgaria and therefore on 1 March 1941 Minister President Bogdan Filov signed an agreement in Vienna whereby Bulgaria entered the Tripartite Pact and the following day German troops crossed the Danube en route to Greece.

As a result the UK severed diplomatic relations with Bulgaria on 5 March, but it was not until 13 December that Bulgaria declared war on both the UK and the USA; Sofia hoped, in vain, that this would be a 'platonic war'. Bulgaria never declared war on the USSR, King Boris insisting that his army was not equipped for a modern, mechanized conflict, and that its peasant conscripts would not fight effectively far from their Balkan homes; furthermore, Bulgarian troops would be needed to contain any possible forward move by the Turks, and to counter partisan activity and any projected Allied landing in the Balkans. Boris also feared that the extreme right might use a successful Bulgarian military leader to impose a republican, fascist regime.

Although a member of the Axis, Bulgaria's interests and activities remained purely Balkan.

Bulgarian troops took part in the invasion of Yugoslavia, and in the subsequent partition of that country Bulgaria was given the right to administer a large share of Yugoslav Macedonia; full ownership was to await a peace treaty at the end of the war.

When Greece was conquered the Bulgarians were given similar rights in eastern Macedonia and most of western Thrace, though much of Macedonia, including Salonika, remained under German control.

The Bulgarians had always regarded Macedonia as theirs by right. Their rule therefore saw the introduction of Bulgarian education, including the establishment of a university in Skoplje, and the incorporation of Macedonia into the Bulgarian Church, However, they overplayed their hand: excessive centralization, graft, and corruption eventually made Sofia's emissaries as unpopular in Macedonia as their Serbian predecessors had been.

In Thrace there was not even an initial honeymoon.

By September 1941 the harshness of Bulgarian rule enabled local opposition to stage a rising, based on Drama, which was suppressed with great ferocity.

In military terms Bulgaria's contribution to the German conquest of the Balkans was a minor one.

The Bulgarians, with the help of the an armoured German division, were to guard the Wehrmacht's left flank during MARITA, and after the defeat of Yugoslavia and Greece three divisions of the Bulgarian Second and Fifth Armies were moved into Macedonia and Thrace to allow the Germans to concentrate their forces elsewhere.

German attempts to persuade Boris to commit men, even volunteers, to the German-Soviet war were resolutely resisted, particularly after Stalingrad, and in the summer of 1943 the king even refused to extend Bulgaria's commitment against the partisans in Yugoslavia and Albania.

In the Black Sea, Bulgaria's few minor warships were restricted to escorting convoys.

Just as it refused to make a full commitment to the Nazi war effort, so in its internal affairs Bulgaria rejected some important aspects of Hitler's New Order in Europe. But compromises were inescapable.

In July 1940, partially to parry German pressure to sign the Tripartite Pact, Bulgaria promised to institute measures against its Jews.

The Free-masons were ordered to dissolve their lodges which occasioned not a little embarrassment as many Bulgarian politicians, including Filov and most of his cabinet, were Masons.

The Jewish question did not allow of such an easy solution. There was little anti-Semitism in Bulgaria, where Jews formed only 1% of the population. German pressure forced the Bulgarian government to promulgate a 'Defence of the Nation Act' in October 1940, the bill being passed by parliament in December. The Bill forbade sexual relations, inside or outside marriage, between Jews and non-Jews, Jews were not to hold land, they were to be banned from the army, and certain industries, including publishing, and were to be subjected to a 'numerus clausus' in the free professions.

The definition of 'Jewish' was, however, religious rather than racial and rapid conversion offered an escape for many Jews.

The King accepted this distasteful legislation on the assumption that it was better for Bulgaria itself to introduce it rather than have it imposed from without.

Further restrictions on Jews were to follow in January 1941 and 1942 but Boris, with the demonstrably passionate backing of all but the extreme right-wing, adamantly refused to deport Bulgarian Jews. Those living in areas under Bulgarian occupation could not be saved, but the 55,000 Jews of Bulgaria proper survived, although they had to be sent to provincial labour camps and labouring gangs.

In political terms Bulgaria remained under authoritarian rather than totalitarian rule. Filov and his cabinet were essentially controlled by King Boris and his close circle of advisers and there was little real opposition in parliament.

The government acted severely against attempted communist subversion, which flared up briefly after 22 June 1941, while the extreme right suffered the loss of a prominent leader when General Hristo Loukov, a pro-German hero of the First World War, was murdered in February 1943.

The most important domestic political development came on 28 August 1943 with the death of King Boris. Given his age (he was only 49) and the fact that he had recently had a stormy meeting with Hitler, there were inevitably rumors that he had been poisoned. If that was the case, the instigators of the act have never been revealed.

The king's death made great difficulties for Bulgaria. Boris had already begun to seek and escape from the war; the regency which followed moved along the same path but did not have his skill, his experience, or his authority, both home and abroad.

Filov was replaced as premier on 14 September by Dobri Bozhilov, who intensified negotiations with the western Allies but was at the same time desperate to avoid the fate visited upon Italy and Hungary when they attempted to slip the Nazi noose.

Soon after the death of King Boris the war reached the Bulgarian population. There had been small bombing raids upon Sofia and other centers since 1941 but it was not until 19 November 1943 that the first heavy attack was experienced. More followed and after a huge onslaught on 30 March 1944 on Sofia many of the capital's population fled to the countryside.

By later 1943 the Bulgarian urban population was suffering from increasing food shortages.

In May 1940 the government had set up the Directorate of Civilian Mobilization, which had wide powers to conscript economic enterprises in the event of war; in the following month a Directorate for Foreign Trade was established. A centralized grain purchasing agency, Hranoiznos, had been in existence since the early 1930s and had expanded its operations to include other products. After March 1941 central control of these crops meant requisitioning for sale in Germany and, particularly after the severe drought on 1942, or supplying the Bulgarian Army.

Too much was taken and to make matters worse peasants switched rapidly to unregulated crops such as potatoes and beans where larger products were to be made.

Bread rationing and meatless days were introduced and by 1944 official food prices in Sofia were 563% of their 1939 levels, while on the black market, frequently the only source of supply, they were 738%. Consumer goods were also less plentiful both because Bulgarian industry had moved towards war production and because armaments made up an ever-increasing proportion of Bulgarian imports.

Although the Bulgarian terrain is well-suited to resistance activity, such activity was not widespread.

Some communists were landed in 1941 but they were soon rounded up. Acts of murder and sabotage were isolated and not effective, at least until the spring of 1944.

By that time a maximum of 18,000 partisans, organized into eleven brigades, had enlisted with the forces of the Otechestven Front (Fatherland Front), a coalition formed in 1941 of communists. Left-wing Agrarians, Zvenari (an authoritarian group responsible for a coup d'etat in 1934), and Social Democrats.

Support for the Fatherland Front increased as a result of Allied bombing, the advance of the Red Army, and Soviet diplomatic pressure applied in Sofia after April 1944 demanding that Bulgaria leave the Axis.

By July Bozhilov had given way to Ivan Bagrianov who was known to have pro-western feelings. His attempts to extricate Bulgaria from the war before the red Army arrived on the Danube were wrecked by the Romanian coup of 23 August.

By early September the Soviets were exercising immense pressure for a Bulgarian declaration of war on Germany. This another prime minister, Konstantin Muraviev, conceded on 8 September. On the same day Soviet forces crossed into Bulgaria.

On 9 September the Fatherland front, aided by a partisan detachment, engineered a bloodless coup in Sofia. The communists secured control of the ministries of the interior and Justice whilst in the provinces local Fatherland Front committees instituted savage purges on their former opponents.

After the coup the Bulgarian Army joined the campaign against Germany. Some 339,000 troops of the First, Second, and Fourth Bulgarian Armies were attached to Tolbukhin's Third Ukrainian front (army group) and fought their way through the Balkans and eventually into Hungary and Austria. The cost was 32,000 killed, many of them in the bitter battles for Budapest and, early in March 1945, in the German counter-attack south of Lake Balaton.

The Bulgarian Army was also remodelled on the Soviet pattern. On 20 September 1944 'assistant commanders' i.e. political commissars, were appointed and in the following weeks 800 officers were removed for political reasons.

In December 1944 Colonel Ivan Kinov, who had served for many years in the red Army, was appointed C-in-C. By the end of the fighting in Europe the communists were entrenching their position inside Bulgaria.

R.Crampton,

Oxford Companion to the Second World War (1995), pp.169-171