THE BALKANS
With pomp and prayer and the services of no priests, the body of Boris III was borne from Alexander Nevski Cathedral into Sofia's streets. Behind a cordon of troops the people watched, sullen and restrained, as the funeral cortege rolled by.
In the train of the dead King and Dictator, who had bound his people to their second disastrous alliance with Germany, proceeded the titular and real rulers of Bulgaria: the boy King Simeon II, the royal family, the Cabinet of Germanophile Premier Bogdan Filoff and, not least, the representatives of Adolf Hitler—portly Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, stern Fleet Admiral Erich Raeder.
Order from Berchtesgaden. The Germans were in Sofia to bolster the Festung's uncertain Balkan battlement. Once the Allied invasion armies overran the Italian heel, they would stand 50 miles from the Balkans' Adriatic flank. Chafing Allied forces waited to spring from eastern Mediterranean shores into the Aegean. Inside the Balkan Peninsula 50,000,000 people, hopeful or frightened, stirred.
To hold off the coming Allied blows and to hold down a restive people, the Germans busily reorganized the Balkans:
> Bulgaria was slated for a bigger role. Hungarian sources reported that Premier Filoff had hurried to a Berchtesgaden session with Adolf Hitler; he may also have seen his old acquaintance, Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. No one doubted that he would get Gestapo support to suppress Bulgaria's underground, anti-German, patriotic front. What the Führer needed above all was more manpower, more help from Bulgaria's Army to guard against a possible Turkish thrust and to stiffen Italian garrisons in Greece.
> Greece reacted fiercely to the arrival of additional Bulgarian occupation forces. French sources reported that the underground had called a general strike, unleashed a new wave of sabotage. From London came word that Allied staff officers had returned to Cairo from three audacious days of conference with underground leaders. But around the Aegean port of Salonika, key to the Vardar Valley route to Central Europe, the Germans were strongly entrenched.
> Yugoslavia, through which the Vardar courses, was still a major German worry in the Balkans. Puppet Croatia was in turmoil: desertions mounted in her puppet army, and her politicians sought a safe way from the German camp. Russian sources reported that the Partisans had seized a stretch of the Dalmatian coast below Fiume. Hungarian sources reported that Adolf Hitler, apparently dissatisfied with the puppet Serb Government of General Milan Nedich, had also summoned to Berchtesgaden ex-Premier Dragisha Cvetkovich. Swarthy, ambitious Dragisha Cvetkovich had visited Adolf Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1941, then had allied Yugoslavia with the Axis. A popular revolt had repudiated him. After his country's defeat, he had lived privately and well at a Czech spa. Now, perhaps, he would serve as the most likely Yugoslav quisling.
ITALY
Love and Politic5