Bulgaria joins the Tripartite Pact

On 1 March 1941, in the Belvedere in Vienna, the Prime Minister of Bulgaria, Bogdan Filov, signed the protocol of his country’s accession to the Tripartite Pact. Alongside him the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, and the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Hiroshi Ōshima, added their signatures. Adolf Hitler attended the ceremony. Bulgaria became the seventh member of the pact, after Germany, Italy, Japan and the three states that had joined it in November 1940: Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The signature ended a year and a half of Bulgarian neutrality and opened the road to Greece for the Wehrmacht. The next morning the German Twelfth Army, which had been waiting on the Danube for weeks, officially entered Bulgaria.

Tsar Boris III and his government gave way at the last moment, when refusal was no longer possible. Bulgaria had no means of stopping several hundred thousand German soldiers on the far side of the river, and Hitler was offering it what Bulgarian politicians had craved since 1913: access to the Aegean and the prospect of recovering lands lost after two lost wars. The price was binding the country’s fate to the Reich.

A country that wanted its lands back

Bulgaria entered the Second World War as a state defeated in the two previous ones. In the Second Balkan War of 1913 it lost southern Dobruja to Romania, while most of Macedonia, which the Bulgarians regarded as land inhabited by their compatriots, went to Serbia and Greece. After the First World War, in which Sofia fought on Germany’s side, the Treaty of Neuilly took away Western Thrace with its Aegean coastline and small strips of land in the west. Revision of these borders was the aim of every Bulgarian government between the wars, and Bulgaria was the only state in the region that did not join the Balkan Pact, which guaranteed its neighbours’ borders.

When war broke out in September 1939, Sofia declared its neutrality. The country was economically dependent on Germany, which accounted for some two-thirds of Bulgaria’s foreign trade, and the officer corps sympathised with the Reich. Society, which remembered Russia as the liberator from Turkish rule in 1878, was rather Russophile. For a time the German–Soviet pact of August 1939 made it possible to reconcile these sympathies. The first fruit of neutrality came in September 1940: under pressure from Berlin and with Moscow’s blessing, Romania ceded southern Dobruja to Bulgaria under the Treaty of Craiova. The Bulgarian government took this as proof of German goodwill and later invoked this gratitude to explain its accession to the pact.

Four months of delay

When Germany, Italy and Japan concluded the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, Berlin at once began working to bring in the Danubian states. Bulgaria mattered more to it than before, because after the Italian attack on Greece and the Italian defeats in Albania Hitler had decided to strike at Greece from the north, and the only convenient route led through Bulgaria. On 18 November 1940 Boris III visited Hitler at the Berghof and refused to join the pact, citing the threat from Turkey and the Soviet Union and the weakness of his army. According to German documents, however, he privately agreed that the Germans could use his country as a base for a campaign against Greece. On 23 November the Bulgarian minister in Berlin, Petar Draganov, conveyed that Sofia agreed in principle to join the pact but wished to postpone signing.

The delay had its reasons. Moscow regarded Bulgaria as part of its security zone. In Berlin Vyacheslav Molotov had already asked Hitler about it; on 25 November Arkady Sobolev, sent to Sofia, offered Bulgaria a pact of mutual assistance, and that same day Molotov included Bulgarian bases among the Soviet conditions for joining the Tripartite Pact. The Bulgarian government rejected the offer, and when the communists began collecting signatures in support of it, treated this as an attempt to apply pressure from the street. On 26 December parliament in turn rejected a motion by the far-right Aleksandar Tsankov to join the pact immediately.

Over the winter the Germans quietly prepared their passage. Officers and Luftwaffe signals personnel in civilian clothes were at work in Bulgaria, and on the other side of the Danube Field Marshal Wilhelm List’s Twelfth Army was assembling. At the beginning of January 1941 Filov went to Vienna, officially for medical treatment but in fact for talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop on the Obersalzberg. Hitler brushed aside all his concerns except the Soviet one and warned that delay might bring Bulgaria the fate of the Baltic states. Filov gave assurances that his country would join the pact when doing so no longer risked complications, and in Sofia it was decided that this would happen just before the Germans marched in, so that opponents would have no time to react. The last obstacle was removed by the Bulgarian–Turkish non-aggression declaration of 17 February 1941: Boris and his ministers could no longer plead the threat of Turkish intervention. On 28 February German engineers began building pontoon bridges across the Danube, and the first German anti-aircraft units crossed into Bulgaria to protect the Black Sea ports.

The signature in the Belvedere

Filov came to Vienna as head of the government of a country that was still officially neutral. The ceremony took place in the Belvedere, the baroque palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy, where half a year earlier Ribbentrop and Ciano had announced the Second Vienna Award. According to the Regional History Museum in Sofia, the Bulgarian Prime Minister signed at 1.35 p.m. The protocol, like those signed in November by Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, stated that Bulgaria acceded to the pact of 27 September 1940. The pact bound its signatories to assist one another by all political, economic and military means if one of them was attacked by a power not yet involved in the European war or the Sino-Japanese conflict – in practice, by the United States. Ribbentrop gave a speech on the significance of the pact, and the German newsreel showed Hitler’s arrival.

In his address Filov explained that Bulgaria was joining the pact out of gratitude for help in recovering southern Dobruja, and because the agreement would secure its peaceful development, its prosperity and a “just and lasting peace”. He gave assurances that this did not affect Bulgaria’s agreements with its neighbours or its traditional friendship with the Soviet Union. That same day Ribbentrop formally confirmed to him in writing that after the defeat of Greece Bulgaria would receive the Aegean coast between the mouths of the Struma and the Maritsa. Salonika, and with it Greek Macedonia west of the Struma, was out of the question: Hitler meant to use it as bait for Yugoslavia, which he still wanted to draw into the pact. Nor did Bulgaria receive any promise of Yugoslav Macedonia. In return, Sofia did not have to take part in the fighting. All the Germans expected of it was to let their troops through and to concentrate its army on the Turkish border to cover the flank of the attack on Greece.

Not even Hitler had any illusions about the mood in Bulgaria. He later admitted that he had been struck by how coolly the people of Sofia received their Prime Minister on his return from Vienna, and attributed this to Bulgaria remaining under the influence of Pan-Slavism and gravitating towards Russia, even Soviet Russia.

The Wehrmacht crosses the Danube

The troops on the other side of the river were waiting for the news from Vienna. At 6 a.m. on 2 March units of the Twelfth Army officially crossed the Danube on pontoon bridges which, according to a post-war American study, had been built at three points, among them opposite Ruse. Some sources, including Bulgarian ones, state that the Germans entered Bulgaria as early as 1 March. The first anti-aircraft units had in fact crossed the river a day earlier still, but the official entry of the main forces took place on 2 March. VIII Air Corps moved to airfields near Sofia and Plovdiv. The columns moved south across the Balkan Mountains, and within a week the leading units stood on the Greek border, facing the fortifications of the Metaxas Line, while the panzer divisions took up positions facing Turkey.

The march passed without incident. In many villages the inhabitants greeted the Germans with the traditional bread and salt, which surprised even the Bulgarian government, and Filov later called this reception a “true plebiscite” in favour of his policy. The American historian Marshall Lee Miller notes, however, that many peasants believed that since Germany and Russia were allies, the German soldiers had come to march together with the Russians.

On 2 March Filov appeared before parliament, summoned to an extraordinary session. Under the Tarnovo Constitution, agreements with foreign states required ratification by the National Assembly, but the government prevented a debate and blocked an interpellation by seventeen opposition deputies. Only one of them, a little-known deputy named Ivan Petrov, managed to ask why parliament had not been consulted beforehand and whether the pact would not drag Bulgaria into the war. Filov replied that the constitution required the government only to submit the agreement for ratification, and as for war, “the risk is small, but those who do nothing take no risks”. The pact was ratified by 140 votes to 20.

Moscow, London and Ankara

What Sofia feared most was the reaction of the Soviet Union. On 1 March the German ambassador in Moscow informed Molotov of Bulgaria’s accession and of the imminent entry of troops. Molotov replied with a statement that the Reich government had taken a decision contrary to the Soviet understanding of the USSR’s security interests, even though Moscow had repeatedly stressed its special interest in Bulgaria, and that the USSR could not remain indifferent to this. On 3 March the Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Andrey Vyshinsky, handed the Bulgarian minister in Moscow a statement that was published the next day in Izvestia. In it the Soviet government declared that it did not share the Bulgarian belief in the peaceful character of this step, since it led not to the strengthening of peace but to the extension of the war zone and to Bulgaria being drawn into it, and that it could give the Bulgarian government no support in pursuing such a policy. Radio Moscow broadcast the text in Bulgarian for several days, and Bulgarian communists distributed leaflets against the government. That was the end of it. Many observers had expected a Soviet ultimatum or even intervention, and were surprised at how mild the protest was.

Relations with Britain had been deteriorating for weeks. At the end of February the Bulgarian police arrested several dozen people accused of working for British intelligence, several Western correspondents and about thirty opposition activists, and one of the leaders of the opposition Agrarians, Georgi M. Dimitrov, escaped from the country with the help of British intelligence, hidden in a crate. In those days Bulgaria broke off relations with the governments-in-exile of Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland, although it refused to hand their representatives in Sofia over to the Germans, and the Bulgarian minister in London resigned in protest. On 5 March 1941 Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Bulgaria. When Filov told the British minister, George Rendel, that Bulgaria needed no advice on defending its independence, Rendel replied that it would be useful to have it in writing, for the benefit of a future peace conference, that the Prime Minister of Bulgaria had accepted full responsibility for the consequences of his policy. Boris listened to similar warnings and replied only that his country suffered from its geographical position. On 11 March, when the legation staff reached Istanbul, bombs planted in their luggage exploded in the lobby of the Pera Palace Hotel. According to Miller, two members of the staff and two Turkish policemen were killed, and nearly thirty people were injured. Other accounts give a slightly higher death toll.

Turkey, Britain’s ally, whose threat of intervention had served Boris all winter as his best pretext, did not move. On 4 March the German ambassador in Ankara, Franz von Papen, handed President İsmet İnönü a letter from Hitler. In it the Reich Chancellor gave assurances that he had no intention of attacking Turkey and that he had ordered his troops in Bulgaria to be kept away from the Turkish border so as not to create a false impression. İnönü replied on 12 March in an equally courteous tone: Turkey had taken no position against Germany and would not change it unless the Reich forced it to do so by its actions. Thus began a rapprochement that led in June 1941 to a German–Turkish treaty of friendship.

Place in the war

Bulgaria’s accession ended Greece’s last hope that the Germans would not come. The British, who in February had undertaken to send the Greeks an expeditionary force, began shipping it from Egypt to Piraeus on 4 March, while Hitler was still courting Yugoslavia, because without its railways and without the cover of its territory an attack through the Bulgarian mountains was risky. The Bulgarian example and the Bulgarian–Turkish declaration deprived Belgrade of support: Yugoslavia, by now surrounded on almost every side by Axis states and their allies, joined the pact on 25 March, and two days later officers in Belgrade overthrew the government that had signed it. Hitler then decided to destroy Yugoslavia together with Greece.

On 6 April 1941 the Twelfth Army struck at both countries from Bulgarian territory, and the Balkan campaign was over within three weeks. The Bulgarian army took no part in the fighting, but after both states had been defeated, on 19 and 20 April, it marched into most of Yugoslav Macedonia, the Pirot district in eastern Serbia, and Greek Western Thrace and Eastern Macedonia east of the Struma, together with the islands of Thasos and Samothrace. A strip of land along the Maritsa, on the Turkish border, was kept by the Germans. The Bulgarians hailed this as the fulfilment of their dream of national unification, and Boris was given the epithet of “Tsar Unifier”. Yet no treaty ever recognised these borders, and the Germans treated them as provisional. In occupied Thrace the Bulgarian authorities drove out the Greek inhabitants and settled Bulgarians, and in September 1941 they bloodily suppressed an uprising around Drama. In March 1943 the Bulgarian army and police handed over to the Germans 11,343 Jews from occupied Thrace, Macedonia and the Pirot district, almost all of whom were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp. The Jews of Bulgaria within its old borders were not deported.

Bulgaria remained the least committed of the allies. It did not declare war on the Soviet Union when Germany marched east in June 1941 under Operation Barbarossa, and it maintained diplomatic relations with Moscow. On 13 December 1941, however, it declared war on Britain and the United States. This war, which Bulgarians called “symbolic”, made itself felt in 1943–1944, when Allied aircraft bombed Sofia. In September 1944 the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria, the Red Army crossed the Danube, and the communists of the Fatherland Front took power in Sofia. Filov, who had signed the protocol in the Belvedere, was shot in February 1945 on the sentence of the People’s Court. The peace treaty of 1947 restored Bulgaria’s borders of 1 January 1941: the gains of April 1941 were lost, and the only lasting benefit of Bulgarian revisionism proved to be southern Dobruja, obtained before the country joined the pact.