Bulgaria, a country which since 1941 had played a careful diplomatic hand, was now hopelessly exposed. Soviet troops crossed its borders on 8 September (the USSR having declared war three days earlier), and on the same day Bulgaria rapidly switched sides and declared war on Germany.194 The German control over the entire Balkan region now held by the most slender of threads. The collapse of Romania and Bulgaria, followed by rapid Soviet occupation, meant the urgent withdrawal of German troops from Greece was imperative. This began in September. In mid-October British airborne troops were able to occupy Athens. By that time, Tito’s partisan army was on the verge of entry into Belgrade.195 German troops were meanwhile engaged in the brutal suppression, finally accomplished by the end of October, of a rising, undertaken in the main by Soviet-inspired indigenous partisans alongside a sizeable minority of the 60,000-strong army, in the puppet state of Slovakia.196 Most important of all, from Hitler’s point of view, in the gathering mayhem in south-eastern Europe Hungary, his chief ally, but long wavering, had immediately following the volte-face in Romania begun urgent soundings for peace with the Soviet Union. The consequences would soon be felt with the German takeover of the country in mid-October.197
In these same critical weeks, Hitler was also losing a vital ally in northern Europe. The danger signals about Finland’s position had been flashing brightly for months. The grave setbacks on the north of the German eastern front in the summer boosted the growing feeling in Finland that the country must extricate itself from its German alliance, and from the war. State President Risto Ryti resigned on 1 August and was replaced by the veteran war hero Marshal Carl Gustaf von Mannerheim. It was clear to the Nazi leadership that the next step for Mannerheim would be to seek an armistice with the Soviet Union.198 It was to no avail that Hitler dispatched Colonel-General Ferdinand Schörner to Finland on 3 August in an attempt to stiffen Mannerheim’s resolve; nor that Keitel was sent later in the month to Helsinki to bestow the Oak-Leaves to the Marshal’s Knight’s Cross.199 On 2 September, Mannerheim informed Hitler that Finland was unable to continue the struggle. Relations were to be broken off immediately. German troops were to leave the country by 15 September. On 19 September, Finland signed an armistice with the Soviet Union.200
In these same momentous months, throughout the whole of August and September, the German leadership was also faced with suppressing the dangerous rising taking place in Warsaw. The rising had begun on 1 August, two days after tanks of the Red Army had pushed into the suburbs of Warsaw on the east of the Vistula and Soviet radio had encouraged the inhabitants of the city to rise against their occupiers. General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, head of the Polish underground army (around 25,000 strong) presumed the Red Army was poised to enter Warsaw, and wanted, with an eye on the future, to have the capital city liberated by Poles — and by Poles representing the exiled government based in London, not the ‘Polish Committee for National Liberation’ that Stalin had set up in Lublin. The uprising was not well planned. The Poles were aware that they could reckon with little help from the western powers. But they were unprepared to be left in the lurch by the Soviet Union. However, the Red Army halted at the Vistula and did not enter the city while Stalin — cynically conscious of containing hopes of Polish independence in a post-war order — neither aided the Poles nor, until it was too late, facilitated attempts by the British and Americans to supply the insurgents with weapons and munition.201
Unaware of Stalin’s cynical ploy, the German Chief of Staff Guderian, fearing cooperation between the insurgents and the Red Army, asked Hitler to include Warsaw — still under the aegis of Hans Frank as Governor General — in the military zone of operations and place it thereby under Wehrmacht control.202 Hitler refused. Instead, he handed over full responsibility for the crushing of the rising to SS chief Himmler. As soon as he had heard of the rising, Himmler had hastened to see Hitler. Himmler spoke shortly afterwards of how he had put the news of the rising to Hitler: ‘I said, “Mein Führer, the time is disagreeable. Seen historically [however] it is a blessing that the Poles are doing it. We’ll get through the five, six weeks. But by then Warsaw, the capital, the head, the intelligence of this former 16–17 million Polish people will be extinguished — this people that has blocked the east for us for 700 years and has always stood in our way ever since the first battle of Tannenberg. Then the Polish problem will historically no longer be a big problem for our children and for all who come after us, nor indeed for us.”’203
