The German officers in Sofia were still eating dinner when they became prisoners of war.

The Day Bulgaria Switched Sides: When Sofia's Guns Turned on Hitler

A bloodless coup that sent the Wehrmacht reeling across the Balkans

Bulgaria switched from Nazi ally to enemy overnight, stranding 350,000 German troops in Greece.

At 9:00 PM on September 6, 1944, Radio Sofia crackled with an announcement that would have seemed absurd just hours earlier. The Bulgarian government—Hitler's loyal Balkan ally since 1941—had declared war on Nazi Germany.

In the capital, confusion reigned. German officers stationed in Sofia reached for their sidearms, only to find Bulgarian soldiers they had trained and equipped now pointing weapons at them. There was no fighting—just the surreal sight of former allies becoming prisoners in the space of a radio broadcast.

The coup had been building for months. Bulgaria occupied a peculiar position in Hitler's alliance: it had declared war on Britain and the United States but had steadfastly refused to fight the Soviet Union, citing deep Slavic cultural bonds. Bulgarian troops had occupied Yugoslav and Greek territories, freeing German divisions for the Eastern Front, but not a single Bulgarian soldier had fired at a Red Army soldier.

By September 1944, that careful neutrality became untenable. Soviet forces had smashed through Romania and were massing on Bulgaria's northern border. On September 5, Moscow—despite Bulgaria's technical non-belligerency—declared war anyway, a diplom…

💡 Bulgaria was the only Axis power to end World War II with a larger Jewish population than when it started—having refused to deport its 50,000 Jews despite German pressure.