The Press TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1944. Bulgaria Wavers

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24152, 11 January 1944, Page 4

The Press TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1944. Bulgaria Wavers

For several days there have been reports from usually unreliable neutral sources of important political developments in Bulgaria. According to the most persistent of these reports an alliance between urban Communist groups and the peasants’ parties, having for its immediate purpose the loosening of ties with Germany, has been countered by an attempt to transfer power from the three Regents to the proGerman Prince Kyril. Whether or not these reports have any basis in fact, it can at least be said that the approach of Russian armies to the Balkans was certain to create a difficult situation in Bulgaria, where peasantry and workers, as distinct from the upper and middle classes, have strong ties of sympathy, part racial and part political, with Russia. It is equally certain that Hitler will take extreme measures to maintain his power in Bulgaria, which is in a sense the cornerstone of his Balkan edifice. None of the other puppet kingdoms in this edifice has received any appreciable economic or territorial benefit from the association with Nazi Germany. Bulgaria, on the other hand, has been markedly favoured. Since 1939 she has received the Dobruja from Rumania, Eastern Thrace and Western Macedonia from Greece, and from Jugoslavia the provinces she lost in 1918. Hitler had sound reasons for heaping his favours on Bulgaria, which had suffered more than any other Balkan country in the settlement after the war of 1914-18 and had ambitions in the Balkans comparable to Germany’s ambitions in Europe as a whole. Because of her unsatisfied territorial claims she held aloof, in the period between the two wars, from both the Little Entente and the Balkan Entente: and Hitler seems to have intended her to become the steward of German interests in the whole of the Danube valley. Now that his European system is beginning to break asunder it is desperately necessary for him to retain his hold on Bulgaria. The defection of Italy has raised the importance of the Bulgarian army, some 500,000 strong, in policing the Balkans, while Bulgarian wheat, oilseeds, livestock, cotton, and coal help to - sustain the German economy. There is also a moral reason why Hitler will strain every nerve to hold Bulgaria; it was the disaffection of the Bulgarian armies that broke the Balkan front of the Central Powers in the last war and began a train of disasters which led to defeat. An upheaval in Bulgaria at this stage in the present war would sound like the beginning of the same story over again. Hitler, although hard pressed, still has some strong cards to play. The German policy for the last two years has been to disperse the Bulgarian army as widely as possible and at the same time to maintain substantial German forces in Sofia and the main Bulgarian cities. Bulgarian disaffection, therefore, will not easily become sufficiently concentrated to threaten Germany’s position. But Hitler’s strongest card is the antagonism between Bulgaria and Turkey, which brought these two countries to the verge of war when Germany invaded the Balkans and has flared up again with recent hints by Turkish political leaders that their country may shortly move away from a non-belligerent policy. Indeed, the situation between Turkey and Bulgaria is a reminder that, although Bulgaria is Hitler’s headache to-day, she may be a headache for the United Nations before the war is over.