The Romanian collapse brought the Red Army down on Bulgaria. Although the Bulgarians had refused to declare war on the Soviet Union, they were German allies and were at war with the Western powers. The arrival of Soviet troops on their frontier on 2 September led the Bulgarians to renounce their alliance with Germany and return to full neutrality. That declaration bought little time. The Soviets declared war, and three days later the Bulgarians switched sides to join the Soviets. Soviet troops flooded over the countryside on the way to Macedonia; this advance put the entire Nazi position in the western Balkans and northern Greece in question, while Yugoslav partisans continued to harass the Germans.

Army Group E under Field Marshal Weichs still deployed approximately 300,000 German troops in Greece; the problem now was how to get them out before the Soviet advance and Yugoslav partisans closed off the escape routes. By early November, Weichs had removed a substantial portion of German forces, but only because the Soviets focused on reaching Budapest instead of cutting German escape routes through Macedonia. Linking up with Tito’s partisans, Soviet forces “liberated” Belgrade and ejected the Germans from southern Yugoslavia. Although Soviet troops found themselves crossing countryside over which their socialist Yugoslav brothers had fought and died in great numbers, they looted, burned, and raped their way forward. Such behavior outraged the puritanical partisans; Milovan Djilas even complained to Stalin about the widespread raping of Yugoslav women by Soviet soldiers. The dictator, however, replied that one could hardly deny men who had sacrificed so much in the war a little “fun with a woman.” The criminal acts of Soviet troops against the civilian population drove the first wedge in the Soviet-Yugoslav rift that opened up in the late 1940s.

The Soviet offensive into the Balkans was an impressive achievement—a masterful marriage of military operations to the goals of politics and grand strategy. It destroyed much of Army Group South Ukraine and laid the foundation for Soviet domination of the Balkans in the postwar period. Yet, the Balkan campaign diverted significant Soviet military forces away from central Poland, where a renewed offensive might have led to the defeat of Nazi Germany in late 1944. But then Stalin might not have gained his strategic objectives.