ABSTRACT
Throughout the pleasant and triumphant winter there was the feeling of what would happen when the Germans came to the rescue of the Italians. It seemed certain that they must do so in the Spring. During February and March I was able to follow the move forward of German divisions into Rumania and Bulgaria. To some extent it was an intellectual pastime, for we were well informed about the enemy progress and also about the carrying capacity of Balkan roads and railways so that a calculation of the time at which the Germans would be deployed in force behind the Bulgarian–Greek border was not difficult to make and if I remember ours came out fairly accurately. There was also the interest of conjecturing the likely attitude of the Jugoslavs. To begin with it seemed that they were completely cowed. They rejoiced in the reverses suffered by the Italians at the hands of the Greeks but the Crown Prince and his Prime Minister Stojadinovic had been too thoroughly indoctrinated in the belief of German greatness to allow them to do anything but repress the natural feelings of the people. The last bit of good news that Spring came when the movement led by General Simovic at the end of March overthrew the government and proclaimed the young King Peter. A month earlier it would have been valuable. By then it was too late, for the Germans were in position. Hitler’s reaction to the Jugoslav coup d’état demonstrated what a thorough Austrian he was. His inherited hatred for the Serbs led him to take far more violent steps than were strictly necessary, disrupting more than he need have done the preparations for the invasion of Russia.
