Although the devolution of Northern Transylvania to Hungary had been made under the diplomatic pressure of Nazi Germany, the Treaty of Craiova lacked any direct intervention of the Germans although it was also implemented by indication of Adolf Hitler, who, on 31 July 1940, expressed his wish for the south of the region of Dobruja to be returned to Bulgaria, thus restoring the 1912 border between Romania and Bulgaria. The government of Romania received with surprise Hitler's message and expressed the wish to preserve at least the port of Balchik and the city ofSilistra. The German ambassador declared that the Romanian sacrifices to Bulgaria would make Hitler more sympathetic towards Romania in the negotiations between Hungary and Romania on the Transylvania dispute. The Romanians tried, however, to keep both cities, but the government of Bulgaria refused since it was aware of the German support. Formal negotiations began on 19 August 1940 in the city of Craiova after previous contacts had been made in which the positions of the two parties had become clear. The negotiations were not easy, and only in the face of the threat of Italian-German arbitration in the Hungarian-Romanian negotiations on August 29, for which Romania was trying to achieve the benevolence of the Axis powers, the Romanian delegation announced its readiness to cede all of Southern Dobruja. The Romanian delegation also tried unsuccessfully to delay the talks while it tried to convince the Germans of its interest in maintaining the territorial integrity of Romania.
Terms
The Treaty of Craiova finally crystallized in a return to the 1912 borders. The southern part of the Dobruja, which had been conquered by Romania during the Second Balkan War, was returned to Bulgaria and assumed for Romania the loss of a territory with an area of around 7,000 km² and a population of which ethnic Romanians made up 25%. The agreement, signed on 7 September 1940, was ratified on September 13. Nevertheless, the loss of Southern Dobruja did not cause an uproar in Romania, unlike the transfer of Northern Transylvania to Hungary in the almost-simultaneous Second Vienna Award because of the latter's greater importance in the nationalist ideal, with the Romanian governments successively insisting on recovering it. On the insistence of Romania, the treaty involved a population exchange; the 103,711 Romanians who lived in the area were forced to leave their homes and move to Northern Dobruja, and the 62,278 Bulgarians residing in the northern part were forced to move to the south. Most of those Romanians were settlers who emigrated to Southern Dobruja after the Treaty of Bucharest, which gave the region to Romania. The Aromanian settlers, most of whom were native to Greece, were counted as Romanians and also left the zone. Bulgaria had to compensate the displaced Romanians for their losses of equity, and pay Romania 1 million lei for investments made to the region. Although the bilateral treaty involved the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, it was carried out peacefully and in accordance with the international laws of the time. Romania proposed to exchange all members of the respective ethnic minorities residing in the rest of the two countries, but that was rejected by Bulgaria. The forced relocations also affected the Dobrujan Germans, most of whom lived in Northern Dobruja, under Romanian rule, but some of them also lived in the Bulgarian southern part. They were ultimately transferred to Nazi Germany through the Heim ins Reich idea.
