Bulgaria

This article is considered accurate for the current version of the game.

Bulgaria

Capital province

Sofia

Government type

Monarchy/Dictatorship

Faction

Axis

Bulgaria is a major power in South Eastern Europe , even rivaling Yugoslavia. After the failure of the Italian invasion of Greece, Nazi Germany demanded that Bulgaria join the Tripartite pact and permit German forces to pass through Bulgaria to attack Greece in order to help Italy. While the Bulgarian government was reluctant to get involved in the war, the threat of a German invasion, as well as the promise of Greek territories, led Bulgaria to sign the Tripartite Pact on 1 March 1941 and join the Axis bloc. With the Soviet Union in a non-aggression pact with Germany, there was little popular opposition to the decision.

On 6 April 1941, despite having officially joined the Axis Powers, the Bulgarian government did not participate in the invasion of Yugoslavia and the invasion of Greece. The Yugoslav government surrendered on 17 April and the Greek government surrendered on 30 April. On 19 April, the Bulgarian Land Forces entered Yugoslavia and on 30 April Greece. Bulgaria occupied most from Yugoslav Macedonia, Pomoravlje, Eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace, which had already been captured by the German forces. The Bulgarians occupied territory between the Struma River and a line of demarcation running through Alexandroupoli and Svilengrad west of Maritsa. Included in the area occupied were the cities of Alexandroupoli (Дедеагач, Dedeagach), Komotini (Гюмюрджина, Gyumyurdzhina), Serres (Сяр, Syar), Xanthi (Ксанти), Drama (Драма) and Kavala (Кавала) and the islands of Thasos and Samothrace, as well as almost all of what is today the Republic of Macedonia and much of South-Eastern Serbia. In the Greek territories, the Bulgarian government pursued a policy of Bulgarisation, leading to an exodus of the Greek population, especially after the brutal suppression of the Drama Uprising in September 1941.

During the spring of 1943, the Bulgarian government, after protests led by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and Dimitar Peshev M.P., succeeded in saving Bulgarian Jews from being sent to Nazi concentration camps. However, the German troops were allowed to round up most of the Jews in Greek Macedonia and Vardar Macedonia and sent them to concentration camps. Bulgaria did not join the German invasion of the Soviet Union that began on 22 June 1941 nor did it declare war on the Soviet Union. However, despite the lack of official declarations of war by both sides, the Bulgarian Navy was involved in a number of skirmishes with the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, which attacked Bulgarian shipping. Besides this, Bulgarian armed forces garrisoned in the Balkans battled various anti-German resistance groups.

The Bulgarian government was forced by Germany to declare a token war on the United Kingdom and the United States on 13 December 1941, an act which resulted in the bombing of Sofia and other Bulgarian cities by Allied aircraft.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union caused a significant wave of protests, which led to the activation of a mass guerrilla movement headed by the underground Bulgarian Communist Party. A resistance movement called Fatherland Front was set up in August 1942 by the Communist Party, the Zveno movement and a number of other parties to oppose the then pro-Nazi government, after a number of Allied victories indicated that the Axis might lose the War. Partisan detachments were particularly active in the mountain areas of western and southern Bulgaria. In August 1943, after a visit to Germany, Bulgarian Tsar Boris III died suddenly, believed to have been poisoned. According to the diary of the German attache in Sofia at the time, Colonel von Schoenebeck, the two German doctors who attended the king – Sajitz and Hans Eppinger – both believed that the king had died from the same poison that Dr. Eppinger had allegedly found two years earlier in the postmortem examination of the Greek prime minister Ioannis Metaxas. His six-year-old son Simeon II succeeded him to the throne; a council of regents was set up because of the Simeon's age. The new Prime Minister, Dobri Bozhilov, was in most respects a German puppet.

Bulgaria had maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union while being a member of the Axis Powers. In the summer of 1944, after crushing the Nazi defences around Iași and Chișinău, the Soviet Army was approaching the Balkans and Bulgaria. On 23 August 1944, Romania left the Axis Powers and declared war on Germany, and allowed Soviet forces to cross its territory to reach Bulgaria. On 26 August, the Bulgarian government announced that it was neutral in the German-Soviet war and ordered German troops to leave the country. On the same date the Fatherland Front made the decision to incite an armed rebellion against the government. On 2 September Bozhilov's government fell and was replaced by a government led by Konstantin Muraviev made up of the opposition parties which were not members of the Fatherland Front. Support for the government was withheld by the Fatherland Front, accusing it of being composed of pro-Nazi circles attempting to hold on to power. On 5 September, the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria and three days later the Soviets crossed the border and occupied the north-eastern part of Bulgaria along with the key port cities of Varna and Burgas by the next day. The Bulgarian Army did not offer resistance by an order of the government. On 8 September, the Bulgarians changed sides and joined the Soviet Union in its war against Nazi Germany.