THE 1941 APRIL WAR IN THE BULGARIAN DAILY NEWSPAPER MIR

Abstract

The success of the Nazi troops in Europe and the accession of the Kingdom of Bulgaria to the Axis in March 1941 put the neutral Kingdom of Yugoslavia in a difficult military and political position. The attempt to resolve the sensitive geopolitical situation by signing the protocol to join the Tripartite Pact by the representatives of the Yugoslav government on March 25, 1941, provided no concrete results because only two days later, a coup d’état was performed in Belgrade. The Yugoslav coup d’état and the forceful overthrowing of the Yugoslav government were interpreted by Nazi Germany as an act of belligerence. With the Führer Directive 25, Adolf Hitler ordered an attack on Yugoslavia, and the Axis invasion began in the early morning of April 6, 1941. Our point of interest is the reports of the Bulgarian daily newspaper Mir about the events in Yugoslavia the day before the invasion began, as well as the state of the Yugoslav theater of war until the surrender of the Yugoslav armed forces and the end of the April war. The research was conducted on the corpus consisting of ten issues of one of the most popular daily newspapers in Bulgaria. The analyzed issues were published between April 5 and April 17, 1941. The units for analysis were all the individual texts that discussed the military or political affairs in Yugoslavia in the given period.