Behind the Ramparts

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 Fuehrer 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

The Badoglio dictatorship was still mum on Beinto Mussulinis whereabouts. But now it urged the controlled Italian press to talk volubly on Benito Mussolini's love life. Practically every paper added details to a tale familiar to gossips: Quite by chance in a Roman swimming pool, Benito Mussonlini met voluptuous curly haired Claretta Petacci, daughter of an obscure but ambitious Roman family.

His Latin fancy was fired. Swiftly he put aside his other mistresses,* enthroned Claretta ina resident villa linked by private phone to the Palazzo Venezia. The new favorite flaunted her power. She managed the Duce's fan mail, dragged him on shopping tours, hired & fired officeholders in what Corriere della Sera called the manner of a "second-rate Maintenon," responsible for the "intellectual degradation of her passionate friend."

Infatuated Benito Mussolini often followed Claretta's counsel on foreign policy. During the Spanish Civil War General Francisco Franco petitioned Rome for two more divisions. "What shall I do?" the Duce asked his paramour. "Bimbo," she replied, "do send the divisions. General Franco is so simpatico." When the time came to attack Greece, Claretta approved because the Greek Ambassador had snubbed her at diplomatic receptions.

The Petacci family prospered, moved to a palace on Monte Mario. Claretta's physician brother became well-to-do. Claretta's mother became unofficial autocrat of Italian movies. Her sister Maria pleased the Duce, too. She became a radio and film star.

Epilogue. The Italian press reported that the carabinieri, pressing the Badoglio dictatorship's drive against blackshirts, had now arrested the sisters Petacci. Commented the Swiss Neue Zuercher Zeitung: the deliberate blackening of Benito Mussolini's grey reputation is a rebuff to the Nazis, who still pretend that the ex-Duce is a great man; it is also a shift in political attitude that "may point to coming events."

*There were many, including a pink-&-blonde German, of whom the Paris gossip-sheet, Aux Ecoutes, reported: "The new favorite discharges her delicate mission all to well....The doctors are said to have limited the daily....conversations with the Duce to three. The medical profession is rather lenient to a man of 56."

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