Codreanu, like many fascists, was a born ham; he often swept into Legion gatherings riding a white horse and clad in peasant garb. But there was nothing rustic about Codreanu’s organisation – it was a terrorist cult of death. One of Codreanu’s ‘Brotherhood’, General Zizi Cantacuzino, remarked casually that the only way to solve Romania’s ‘Jewish problem’ was to kill the Jews.8 A striking photograph of Codreanu, ‘a god descended among mortals’ according to his disciple Horia Sima, shows the ‘Captain’ squatting among the relics and remains of Romanians disinterred by Legion archaeologists.9 Codreanu grasps a worm-eaten regimental banner and gazes solemnly into the empty eye sockets of a dead Romanian warrior. The image is both a macabre tableau and a threatening prophecy. Destruction, Codreanu proclaims, will be the fate of those his mentor Professor Cuzu denounced as the ‘dirty beasts and enemies of the country’.
Codreanu cultivated powerful friends. He had studied in Germany in the mid 1920s (his mother’s family came from Munich) and in 1928 he contacted Herman Esser, the NSDAP’s first head of propaganda. Nothing much came of their meeting, but he soon became well known in German circles. In 1934, Hitler met with his foreign policy advisor Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess and Himmler at the German Foreign Ministry to discuss ‘Romanian internal problems and the Iron Guard’. Soon afterwards, Codreanu and his successor Horia Sima acquired a number of high-ranking German admirers – including Himmler and Goebbels. The SS poured money into Legion coffers. In the short term, however, what would transform Codreanu into a big player was not a flood of Reich marks, but the return of the king.
King Carol II has been judged the most corrupt crowned head in Europe. No other king ‘abused to such an extent the sincere love and faith with which the people surrounded him’.10 He was lascivious, cynical, corrupt and ravenous for power. Carol inspired lists: according to one historian he was also ‘profoundly corrupt, unscrupulous, superficially educated, perverse and depraved … an opportunist’. A scandal had forced him to renounce the throne in 1925 but he had made a come-back in June 1930 and taken power in a constitutional coup. Romanian ministers tried to force him to discard his ‘Jewish mistress’ Magda Wolf-Lupescu. (In point of fact, Magda had mixed ancestry – her father was Jewish, but her mother was a Catholic Austrian.) But the king refused. The woman anti-Semites called the ‘Red Witch’ or ‘Jewish Wolf’ became to all intents and purposes the Romanian queen.
In any case, Carol was as anti-Semitic as he was venal and had become fascinated by the legionary movement and the alluring ‘Captain’ Codreanu. Once he was securely installed in Bucharest’s opulent royal palace, Carol’s instinct was to do away with troublesome political parties altogether; in other words, follow the example set by King Alexander in Yugoslavia. But he soon realised that the Yugoslavian strategy would gain little support from Romania’s military elite, which had supported his coup. Instead, Carol chose to meddle and manipulate, at the cost of destabilising Romania’s fragile democratic institutions. After 1931, thanks in large part to King Carol’s devious and divisive tactics, Romania endured a dizzying succession of governments that pulled ever closer to the legionary right. It was the Romanian reprise of the Weimar period in Germany. Chronic volatility suited the revolutionary nationalists like the legion just fine. Many Romanians were drawn to the despotic certainties of the legion. Codreanu took full advantage of the feebleness of the Romanian state and police. He recruited death squads (echipa mortii) that carried out a succession of gruesome assassinations of prominent critics and Jews. When a Legionary squad bungled an attack on a Jewish journalist and were arrested, Codreanu remarked, ‘What was illegal about trying to put a hole in the head of this snake with a kike rattle?’
The journals of Mihail Sebastian, an ambitious young Jewish writer, provide a chilling sense of the overwrought, frightening atmosphere in Bucharest, where he lived and worked. On 24 June 1936, he anxiously noted that ‘We may be heading for an organised pogrom. The evening before last Marcel Abromovici was knocked down in the street by twenty of so students who then dragged him unconscious into the cellar and only released him a couple of hours later.’11 In his own mind, the liberal, agnostic Sebastian did not doubt that he was a Romanian. But his Christian peers, even those who became close friends and colleagues, could not accept that Sebastian the Jew was truly one of them: a Jew would always be a Jew, not a proper Romanian. Sebastian admired Nae Ionescu, who had helped to get his first books published. He believed he was a friend. But Ionescu, as mentioned before, revered Codreanu and was a prolific Legionary propagandist. When he agreed to publish Sebastian’s second book in 1934, he inserted his own preface which admonished his young disciple: ‘Remember that you are Jewish!’ Many assimilated Romanian Jews had to negotiate such intimate betrayals. The Iron Guard and their allies, the playwright Eugen Ionescu wrote, had created a ‘stupid and horrendous reactionary Romania’.
For Codreanu and his Legionaries, 1936 would prove a watershed year. Workers and peasants swelled membership lists. A cult became a mass movement party. Codreanu, who wore a little bag of soil around his neck to honour the sons of toil, responded by forming the ‘Legionary Workers Corps’ – these would form the ‘shock troops’ of the pogroms that erupted in 1940. The sudden escalation of support for the legion, now more commonly called the Iron Guard, rattled King Carol who admired Codreanu but feared such a charismatic rival. He tried to counter the corps by forming a rival youth organisation, the Guard of the Nation. But it was swiftly infiltrated by youthful Legionaries. Mihail Sebastian describes how:
university professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, Iron Guard, one after another … one of our friends would say: ‘Of course I don’t agree with them at all, but on certain points, for example the Jews, I must admit …’Three weeks later, the same man would become a Nazi. He was caught up in the machinery, he accepted everything.
The troublesome Legion haunted the nightmares of King Carol. The Iron Guard had somehow to be neutralised, taken in hand. His first move was to inveigle Codreanu to share power. He turned to a popular Legion sympathiser and military strong man General Ion Antonescu to set up a meeting. Antonescu summoned Codreanu to his villa at Predeal – but the discussion led nowhere. Charismatic demagogues rarely share power. So Carol carried out a purge of known Legionaries in the government and, after yet another chaotic election, ordered the radical right-wing Goga-Cuza Party (which had won a pathetic 9 per cent of the vote) to form a coalition government to siphon off some of Codreanu’s support. Antonescu was appointed Minister of War.
In his journal, Sebastian denounced the new regime as a ‘typical government of panic’. Coalition leaders A.C. Cuza and the poet Octavian Goga were of course outspoken anti-Semites and worked hard to take on the populist mantle of Legionary radicalism. For the first time in official speeches, Sebastian noted, ‘one could hear the vocabulary … of “Yid”, “the Jews”, Judah’s domination’. Carol tried to rationalise his new government’s anti-Semitic measures to a journalist from the British Daily Herald; the story was published on 10 January 1938. Carol refused to pull any punches: Romanian Jews must be forced to emigrate. Printed in a populist broadsheet, the king’s comments unsettled British public opinion – and the British minister in Bucharest, Sir Reginald Hoare, conveyed to the king his government’s concern, as did his French counterpart. Moral outrage provoked a flight of capital. Foreign businesses boycotted Romanian trade. The economy stuttered; economic collapse threatened. The government was too fragile to withstand these tremors. On the night of 10 February 1938, Sebastian recorded, ‘the Goga government fell’. It had held on to power for barely a month. For a few days, Sebastian hoped that life might return to what passed for normality. He was wrong. For his friend, Iron Guard enthusiast Mircea Eliade, agreed that the king’s strategy had failed dismally but ‘three quarters of the state apparatus has been “Legionized”’. In his farewell address, Goga proclaimed,‘Israel, you won’. On 20 February, King Carol threw in the democratic towel, a
bolished the constitution and imposed a royal dictatorship and swore in a puppet government led by the Patriach Miron Christea. He banned all other political parties. To the king’s astonishment, Codreanu made no protest and called for the Iron Guard to disband. Ominously, however, he demanded the return of the ‘true king’, Carol’s son Michael. He proclaimed: ‘The hour of our triumph has not come. It is still their hour.’
In March, Hitler’s armies marched unopposed into Austria. The rapid expansion of the German Reich thoroughly unnerved Carol. The Nazi elite had never hidden its high regard for Codreanu and the legion and the King feared that the guardist movement might become a German Trojan Horse. On 16 April, the Interior Minister Armand Călinescu ordered the arrest of Legionary leaders, starting with Codreanu, who was accused to begin with of insulting a minister, the historian Nicolae Iorga. The ‘Captain’ appointed a fanatical 31-year-old lawyer called Horia Sima, who was much admired by Heinrich Himmler, to take over as acting leader. Codreanu was convicted and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. This did not satisfy King Carol. In May, Codreanu was re-arrested and accused of conspiracy: organising terrorist activities and collaborating with a foreign power – namely, Nazi Germany. When Wilhelm Fabricius, the German minister in Bucharest protested, Călinescu cited as evidence the draft of a letter Codreanu may have sent to Hitler in 1935. By now, Hitler had begun to court General Ion Antonescu, who had been Minister of War in the short-lived Goga government, through the good offices of Veturia Goga. Antonescu was much admired in Berlin as a ‘strong man’ with the right pro-Legionary sentiments. As a favour to his German friends, Antonescu testified at Codreanu’s trial in favour of the accused: ‘I cannot believe that the accused would be guilty of treason,’ he declared as he publicly shook Codreanu’s hand. This gesture infuriated Carol, who had the general banished to a villa attached to the Bistriţa Monastery. In the meantime, Codreanu was convicted and sentenced to ten years’ forced labour.
As Codreanu began serving a long stretch in the Râmnicu Sărat prison, King Carol was summoned to meet Hitler. At their meeting, Hitler tried hard to persuade the king to release Codreanu and form a ‘Guardist Government’ which would draw on Legionary support. The meeting confirmed Carol’s worst fears. When he returned to Bucharest he resolved to be rid of his rival once and for all. On the night of 30 November, a squad of gendarmes marched into Râmnicu Sărat prison. They seized the keys to Codreanu’s cell, dragged him into the prison yard and bundled him into a waiting truck. He was driven to a remote forest road where other kidnapped Legionaries waited, terrified, in the dark. The gendarmes strangled Codreanu and shot the others. On the king’s orders, they secretly buried the ‘Captain’ in the courtyard of Jilava prison and poured concrete over his body. Romanians refer to the bloody events of 30 November 1938 as the ‘Night of the Vampires’. As news of the murders spread, Carl Clodius, a German economics specialist, observed that the ‘The murder of Codreanu and his followers has changed the situation considerably. Condemnation of this murder is equally strong in almost all circles of the population … The murder of Codreanu has shaken [Carol’s] moral position … he will recover from it only very slowly’.12 This was prescient. The king’s prestige was further eroded by the onward march of the German Reich. In September 1938 the British and French (Romania’s traditional allies) capitulated to Hitler over Czechoslovakia. As Romanians digested the implications of the Munich Agreement, many felt bitterly disillusioned. France and Britain had betrayed the Czech government; Romania might be next in line. It was imperative to mend relations with Germany and ‘orientate towards the Axis’.
Martyrdom suited Codreanu. His fanatical disciple and heir, Sima, fled to Germany where he tirelessly promoted the ‘Captain’s’ posthumous political canonisation and sought revenge. On 21 September 1939, he dispatched a guardist squad to the Ministry of the Interior where they shot dead Călinescu, the minister who had ordered Codreanu’s murder. The six assassins fled to the local radio station where they announced: ‘The Captain has been avenged!’ and promptly gave themselves up. The gendarmes took the six men back to the ministry building and executed them, leaving their bodies to rot for several days where Călinescu had been killed.
In the aftermath of the Bucharest bloodbath, King Carol set about tightening his political grip. He ignored his ministers and handed draconian new powers to the secret police. Any potential opponent of the king was put under surveillance. Hidden microphones were installed in private homes and offices. Romania plunged ever deeper into a climate of fear. But the well spring of terror was the king himself. He resembled a Shakespearean monarch haunted by his past misdeeds and the spirits of his victims. And the most disquieting spectre that stalked the king’s nightmares was Corneliu Codreanu. The resilient power of the murdered ‘Captain’ and his Legionary movement would force King Carol ever closer to the Reich.
As Hitler’s armies marched into Poland then began to threaten Belgium and France, Carol conceded the stark truth that to hold the Reich at bay he would need to make peace with the Iron Guard. At the beginning of 1940, the king began releasing Legionary prisoners and in May Codreanu’s anointed successor Horia Sima returned to Romania.
In Bucharest, Sima was summoned to meet the head of the Romanian Intelligence Service, Mihai Moruzov, who intimated that the king wanted to strike a deal. On 13 June, Sima issued orders to the guard to co-operate with the king and, after protracted negotiations, signed a ‘declaration of obedience’. From this union sprang a new government party, the ‘Party of the Nation’, led by the pro-German Ion Gigurtu, who appointed Sima Minister of Cults and Arts. Although two other Sima allies also became ministers, the king had an attack of cold feet and vetoed any further guardist appointments. Three days later Sima resigned. On 1 September he called on the king to resign.
The day after Sima joined the government, the king faced a fresh crisis – also engineered by Germany. Hitler’s pact with Stalin was, by the summer of 1940, fraying as the Soviets stepped up territorial demands in Eastern Europe. On 26 June, Stalin sent an ultimatum to King Carol insisting that Romania cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union. At the same time, he pressed the Hungarian government to reclaim half of Transylvania. These opportunist machinations racked up tensions between the Reich and the Soviets. Hitler had already made the decision to break the pact and attack the Soviet Union but could not yet afford to show his hand. Even though Romanian oil lubricated the German war machine, Hitler, for now, chose to accede to Stalin’s demands and in effect wrench Bessarabia and northern Bukovina out of Romanian hands.
This land grab was a body blow for King Carol, but a death sentence for thousands of Romanian Jews who lived in the ceded territories. As twenty-four Soviet divisions marched into Bessarabia, hard on the heels of the humiliated Romanians, guardists spread tales that Romanian Jews had welcomed the Soviet forces and insulted the Romanian troops. ‘The Jews are to blame! ’cried the Legionaries. As Romanian troops prepared to cross the Pruth River, now the Soviet border, they began to attack Jews and burn their homes. In the town of Dorohoi, a full-scale pogrom erupted. Romanian soldiers even began shooting their Jewish comrades.
Then it was Hungary’s chance to seize a few Romanian morsels. With the connivance of Ribbentrop and the Italian Foreign Minister Ciano, Admiral Miklos Horthy gobbled up vast chunks of Transylvania – the Vienna Award. This was the final straw. On the streets of Bucharest, humiliated Romanians wept openly. The national mood became increasingly volatile. As Romanian divisions retreated to their garrisons, blocking roads and cramming into railway carriages, huge crowds gathered in Bucharest and other cities, demanding that the king, who had caved in so easily to Hitler’s demands, abdicate. Guardist thugs began firing shots under the windows of the royal palace.
From his headquarters in Berlin, SS Chief Himmler followed events in Romania closely. On 31 August, he sent Waffen-SS commander ‘Sepp’ Dietrich to Bucharest, where he had meetings with Sima to thrash out strategy once the
king had been forced to abdicate. At the beginning of September, as the crisis deepened, Sima manoeuvred to seize power. Somewhat ineptly, he tried to persuade the German minister Fabricius that the Gigurtu government intended to resist the Vienna Agreement. We have no evidence that Dietrich had suggested this ruse, but Sima clearly believed that he had German backing. But Himmler was playing a devious game by secretly opposing Hitler. In any event, Sima’s scam was exposed and he once more fled Bucharest. Himmler’s clumsy intervention did not impress Hitler. He had other plans. He needed a strong man, not a fanatic; a strong man with the right ideas. Antonescu was a professed anti-Semite who forged close bonds with Codreanu and the guardist movement. Instead of resenting the loss of Romanian territories, Antonescu looked forward to retrieving them as a military ally of the Reich. He ticked all the boxes.
In Bucharest, at the beginning of a warm and muggy September, King Carol anxiously paced the echoing corridors of the royal palace. He could not shut out the furious chants of the huge crowds that surged along the grand Calea Victoriei into Palace Square. From his window, the king noticed that many demonstrators wore the bright green shirts of the legion – and he called Gigutu and ordered him to execute a few imprisoned Legionaries. He refused.13 One of his advisors Valer Pop, who unknown to Carol was feeding inside information to the Germans, urged him to call on Antonescu for support. On 3 September, the king gave in and summoned Antonescu to the palace. He refused to offer full powers but agreed to ‘take guidance’. Antonescu refused point blank. By now, the palace was to all intents and purposes under siege. Guardist agitators ratcheted up the pressure, and the following day Antonescu was recalled and offered ‘all necessary power’. In the meantime Fabricius cabled Berlin confirming that Antonescu was ‘firmly resolved to carry out our important demands here’.14
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