Word: balkanize
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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...
Present Crisis. Boris had died at one of the most uncertain moments in a rule plagued by internal violence and external pressure. His alliance with the Axis, signed in 1941, had gained for Bulgaria portions of Greece and Yugoslavia. It had cost thousands of casualties in Balkan guerrilla fighting. It had meant tighter belts so that Germans could have more of Bulgaria's wheat and potatoes. As the German lines sagged in Russia and the Mediterranean, Berlin demanded greater help from Sofia...
Turkey would naturally like to have the Dodecanese Islands and Western Thrace-but probably not at the expense of a strong, friendly Greece. For the past decade Turkey has considered Greece the cornerstone of her Balkan relations, in 1936 went out of her way to bury the hatchet with her onetime enemy by an exchange of populations that meant considerable sacrifices for Turkey. About a month ago, an editorial in the No. 1 Turkish newspaper Aksam declared that Turkey had no right to interfere with the peace terms, but would support the eviction of Italy from the Balkans...
...vital and active Balkan policy federating the southeastern European states, welding them into a political unit which would serve Turkey for defensive purposes...
Britain and Russia between them can-and may-cross up these plans. The idea of a Balkan campaign alone is disquieting to the Turks; a Balkan campaign which left them out of Balkan settlements would cause alarm in Ankara. With the war so close to their frontiers, Turkey's leaders might well consider that neutrality is not enough, that they can speak with authority at the peace table only on the basis of a comradeship-in-arms...