Ilarion Ţiu, The Legionary Movement after Corneliu Codreanu: From the Dictatorship of King Carol II to the Communist Regime (February 1938-August 1944), Boulder (CO, USA), East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press, New York), 2010, 304 p. ISBN-10: 0880336595; ISBN-13: 978-0880336598
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► Table of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Internal Crisis
1.1. The Dictatorship of King Carol II
1.2. The Arrest of the “Political Leaders”
1.3. The Death of Corneliu Codreanu
Chapter 2. The New Elite
2.1. “The Persecution Commandments”
2.2. “The Declarations of Submission”
2.3. The Failed Coup
2.4. The First “Exile” in Germany
Chapter 3. The Clandestine Period
3.1. Without Internal Leaders
3.2. The Arrested Legionaries
3.3. The Berlin “Commandment”
3.4. The Assassination of Armand Călinescu
3.5. The Restoration of the Local Organizations
Chapter 4. The Governing of the Legionary Movement
4.1. The Relaxation Process
4.2. The Internal Fight for Power
4.3. Political Alternatives in the Summer of 1940
4.4. The Abdication of King Carol II
Chapter 5. The National-Legionary Government
5.1. The Legionary Ministries
5.2. The Fight for Power with Ion Antonescu
5.3. Abuses Committed by the Legionaries
Chapter 6. “The Legionary Rebellion”
6.1. The Events of 21-23 January 1941
6.2. The Leaders’ “Exile” in Germany
6.3. “The Rebellion Trials”
Chapter 7. The Eastern Front
7.1. “The Group from the Prisons”
7.2. “The Collaborators”
7.3. The Power Centers
7.4. The Relations with Ion Antonescu
Chapter 8. “The Exiled”
8.1. The Locations in Germany
8.2. The Relations with the Nazis
8.3. The Power Centers
Conclusions
Abbreviations
Bibliography
► Introduction
© Ilarion Ţiu
More than 80 years after its establishment, the Legionary Movement[1] still arouses as many controversies today as it did during the interwar period. If in the 1930s the young legionaries were associated with political extremism and street violence, today in some cultural circles in Romania people try to “rinse out” several intellectuals that were close to the Legion of the “Archangel Michael”, such as the religion historian Mircea Eliade, the philosophers Emil Cioran and Constantin Noica, or the writer Vintilă Horia.
The Legionary movement was the local version of the National Fascist Party from Italy, of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or of the Spanish Phalanx. The organization was not an imitation of its western “sisters”. It formed on the basis of an extremist nationalism with anti-Semitic and antidemocratic connotations that had existed since the end of the 19th century. The young legionaries brought to Romanian political life the assassination and the radical discourse but, at the same time, they were also the victims of the authorities’ abuses. The Iron Guard was dissolved several times due to the popularity it had gained over time although it was not the only organization conveying a nationalist-extremist message. For instance, in December 1933 Prime Minister Ion Gheorghe Duca outlawed the organization right before the elections. The legionaries responded with violence, assassinating Duca on the platform of the train station in Sinaia.
The rebellious act had not led to a disapproval wave for the Movement, quite on the contrary, the Legion strengthened with the establishment of the “Everything for the Country” Party (10 December 1934), the political expression of the organization. And thus, the legionaries began the electoral campaign of 1937 having great ambitions and hoping that if they had a good result, they would be asked to join in forming the government. However, this was not likely to happen because the Movement had come into conflict with King Carol II who also had totalitarian ambitions and was waiting for the political class to compromise itself: at the time the Romanian constitution stipulated that a party could form the government only if it obtained at least 40% of the votes in the elections. Because no party managed to reach this threshold, the King took over the rule of the state and in February 1938 established his own regime with the support of several politicians who he had gained on his side.
The declaration of the royal dictatorship did not create instability in Romania because the democratic parties did not oppose it openly. Moreover, some of their leaders were given positions in the state’s new administrative structures. The legionaries however did not enjoy the same “peaceful” treatment, and its most important leaders were arrested and trialed for fabricated crimes. At that point, an authority crisis was triggered within the Legionary Movement because Corneliu Codreanu had not thought of establishing a hierarchy within the organization. The leadership was taken over by the regional “cadres” of the organization’s second echelon, that were insufficiently prepared from a political point of view and neither were they inclined to give priority to radical actions. The movement’s new leaders chose to respond violently to the authorities’ provocations, thus generating a wave of attempts to state security in the fall of 1938. The King did not risk the emergence of anarchy in the country and therefore ordered the assassination of Corneliu Codreanu on the night of 29/30 November 1938. Left without a spiritual leader, the legionaries looked for new ways of preserving the organization and set off the mechanism of the generation change. The new leaders decided to defy Carol II and tried to assassinate him several times in December 1938 and January 1939. Their plans failed and thus they chose to go into exile in Hitler’s Germany. They went there on their own, without any assistance from the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and waited for a good moment to return to Romania and settle the score with King Carol II. Among the new leaders, the most active proved to be Horia Sima, who returned to Romania in the spring of 1940, once again without the Nazis’ support. Although he got caught, he knew how to take advantage of his exile in Germany by lying that he had had a close relationship with Hitler. And because the Romanian secret services were not quite sure what Sima had been doing in Germany, they believed him. Thus, he was co-opted in the government after the Soviet ultimatum of June 1940 due to which Romania had to give up Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union. Horia Sima realized that other territorial claims would follow from Hungary and Bulgaria and decided to resign from the government, thus entering a semi-opposition to the King (actually, during that troubled summer, it was not very clear who was in power and who was part of the opposition!).
After conceding the north-western part of Transylvania to Hungary, the dictatorship of Carol II collapsed. The King abdicated in favor of his son Michael and went into exile. General Ion Antonescu ended up governing the state (having more important attributions than the new king as the “Head of the State”), and was backed up equally by the Germans and by local political forces. The legionaries came to govern alongside Antonescu, but the general did not trust them because he knew about the crisis that the organization was facing following the assassination of Corneliu Codreanu. However, the Germans wanted to have within the government a political force that was loyal to them ideologically, and therefore they pressured Antonescu to accept the legionaries’ presence in the government. In the new “national legionary state” it was not all that clear who was the master of the situation. During the following five months Antonescu and the legionaries had led a harmful struggle for power which ended in the civil war of 21-23 January 1941. With the Germans’ assistance the General came out victorious and organized a tough repression against his opponents.
Thus, after having held the power the Legionary Movement became a clandestine organization again. The participants in the 21-23 January events were arrested and the movement’s leaders took refuge in Germany once more. Throughout the war the Nazis gave credit to Ion Antonescu, keeping the legionaries vegetating on the territory of the Third Reich, either under house arrest or in concentration camps. In Romania the organization faded out because there were just a few legionaries who managed to resist to Antonescu throughout the war. However, on 23 August 1944 the Romanian-German alliance took a fatal blow as Ion Antonescu was arrested and Romania switched to the Allied side. Thus, the legionaries were reactivated by the Germans to resist in front of the Red Army.
In the eight chapters of the book, I will analyze this period starting with the institution of the dictatorship of King Carol II and ending with the Palace coup that took place on 23 August 1944, marking the moment Romania entered the Soviet sphere of influence and the legionaries became a live target for the new communist regime that was envisaged after the end of the war.
The bibliography related to the subject is rather poor. The first book dealing with that period was published shortly after the collapse of the national legionary state, as a reaction to the failure of the collaboration between general Ion Antonescu and the Legionary Movement, and was entitled On the Verge of the Abyss. 21-23 January 1941[2]. The work places the entire responsibility for the failure of the collaboration exclusively on the legionaries, as part of the “propaganda material” of the “Antonescu regime”.
While in exile, the participants in the events of 1938-1944 had initiated rather quickly a polemic regarding the responsibilities for the “deviation” of the Legionary Movement from the teachings of Corneliu Codreanu. The debate was launched in 1951 when the work of priest Ştefan Palaghiţă was published in Buenos Aires with the title The Iron Guard for the Resurrection of Romania[3]. At the beginning of the 1990s the book was published in Romania as well[4], maintaining a certain vision about the events in question. Ştefan Palaghiţă was the first to divide the Legionary Movement into two segments: the first, the “codrenist” segment, followed the political line of Corneliu Codreanu, and the other, the “simist” segment, adopted the radical line promoted by Horia Sima. Sima was held responsible for all the negative events that followed the arrest of Corneliu Codreanu in May 1938, while the rest of the leaders headed by Constantin Papanace apparently tried to stop the “radical impulse”. Palaghiţă also claimed in his book that Horia Sima had acted on the orders of the secret services as early as 1928 because he was collaborating with Mihail Moruzov, the director of the Special Intelligence Service. According to the author, Horia Sima had also been involved in the attempt of overthrowing Corneliu Codreanu from his position of leader of the Legionary Movement. This action was undertaken by Mihail Stelescu, at the authorities’ order channeled through the Royal Palace. Palaghiţă accused Horia Sima of having had a plan of taking over power in 1938 and thus contributing to the arrest of other clandestine leaders (Ion Belgea, Ion Antoniu, Iordache Nicoară, Constantin Papanace, Alexandru Cantacuzino etc.), and also of having asked Mihail Moruzov to assassinate other legionaries (Corneliu Codreanu, Vasile Cristescu, Nicoleta Nicolescu). Many of the author’s statements will be repeated in other books as well without first checking the documentary support of the claims.
In Romania the first synthesis book on the Legionary Movement was published in 1971[5] by two of the official historians of the Romanian Communist Party, Mihai Fătu and Ion Spălăţelu. The non-objective intentions of the authors are obvious from the very title of the book: The Iron Guard. A Fascist-Type Terrorist Organization. Although the two historians had access to the archives of the State Safety Department*, they did little to sort out some of the “legends” about the Legionary Movement. As regards the period analyzed in this book, many of the stereotypes brought out by Ștefan Palaghiţă, especially those denigrating Horia Sima, were reiterated. However, the other leaders were not “exonerated” either. The two authors categorize the Legionary Movement as “terrorist” since its establishment, a feature that was accomplished by the action of Horia Sima. According to them, the legionaries had constantly been sustained by the Germans politically and financially. To support this assertion they elaborate statements that had never been proved yet: Adolf Hitler asked Carol II to bring the legionaries into the government in November 1938 and that is why Corneliu Codreanu was assassinated (p. 242); the legionaries that took refuge in Germany in the winter of 1938/1939 had German passports (p. 248); the assassins of Armand Călinescu had been trained by the Gestapo, left Berlin under the commandment of Horia Sima, and stopped in Szeged, the “center of Hortist terrorism” (pp. 254-255) etc. The accusations of Ştefan Palaghiţă according to which Horia Sima collaborated with the Special Intelligence Service were strengthened by the two historians with new statements: Sima organized the coup of December 1938 to hide his involvement in the death of Corneliu Codreanu (p. 242); Sima was the King’s favorite as opposed to Vasile Noveanu to lead the Legionary Movement (the summer of 1940) because he was collaborating with Mihail Moruzov (p. 258) etc.
The most important works on the Legionary Movement were published in the 1980s by the Spanish Francisco Veiga and the German Armin Heinen, and translated into Romanian in the 1990s[6]. Francisco Veiga wrote his book without taking any documentation trips to Romania. He used only publications and some archive resources to be found in libraries in Western Europe. The book is important from the perspective of the analysis of the Legionary Movement within the European context. However, as regards the period 1938-1944 little was said because of the lack of information.
Armin Heinen studied in Romania for his book, but generally he only had access to press articles and the archives of the Romanian Academy Library. The archive of the State Security Department was not accessible to him but he succeeded in interviewing several legionaries who had participated in the events. The period I focused on in this book was not detailed by Heinen due to lack of information. In general, he used memoirs and documents found in the German archives regarding the relation between the Romanian legionaries and various circles in the Reich. Armin Heinen studied more thoroughly the political-financial relation of Nazi Germany with the Romanian legionaries. Based on archive documents, Heinen demonstrated that there were no significant connections between the two parties. Among the historians that analyzed the Legionary Movement, Heinen observed the most objectively and with the greatest attention to detail the events of the period 1938-1944, and the majority of his suppositions were confirmed by the archive documentation I carried out.
During the 1990s the studies regarding the Legionary Movement enjoyed publishing freedom in Romania and the majority of the archives were made available to the researchers. Furthermore, the former legionaries reorganized themselves institutionally in non-governmental organizations or foundations and edited numerous studies about the movement. However, not many referred to the period 1938-1944. In general, partisan perspectives were maintained – either “codrenist” or “simist” -, which affected even more the works’ objectivity. Among the specialized studies, the most important one that helped me a lot was the book by Dragoş Zamfirescu, The Legion of Archangel Michael. From Myth to Reality[7]. The research is well done, the author restraining himself from making statements without having documentary support. However, the analysis of the mechanisms of the generation change is shallow as the author chose to adopt some of the theories regarding the “diabolical” plan of Horia Sima to assume power.
Throughout this study I used special terms, whose meaning differs from their standard meanings. Thus, the extremist nationalist organization founded by Corneliu Codreanu in 1927 will appear under the name Legionary Movement, regardless of the phase to which I am referring. In its first years the organization was called the Legion of “Archangel Michael”, after the name chosen by its founding members on 24 July 1927. However, the formation had gradually extended its chapters to more regions of the country and it aligned itself to the current of right-wing organizations that had emerged throughout Central and Eastern Europe, such as the Hungarian Arrow Cross Movement. In 1929 Corneliu Codreanu tried to establish an anti-Semitic paramilitary organization, “The Iron Guard”, in which he would also integrate the Legionary Movement. His call was not followed by other young nationalists and therefore, “The Iron Guard” identified with the Legion of the “Archangel Michael”. Generally, this term was used to cover the organization’s radical component. In 1930 because of several anti-Semitic violent acts, the government dissolved “The Iron Guard” and the Legion of the “Archangel Michael”, which actually did not exist institutionally. The extremist nationalists took part in the 1931 and 1932 elections under the name “The Group Corneliu Zelea-Codreanu”, and in 1933, prior to the assassination of I.G. Duca, the official decision of dissolving “The Iron Guard” was reiterated. After the expiration of the functioning interdiction that followed the assassination of Duca, on 10 December 1934 the nationalist extremists founded their first political organization, the “Everything for the Country” Party, which existed until its self-dissolution in February 1938. Apart from all these transformations, the extremist ideology of the young nationalists did not disappear but consolidated around the idea of Legionary Movement. Hence, to avoid any terminology confusions, I will use only one name for the period between 1927 and 1944, namely the Legionary Movement.
Likewise, nationalism and its derived words do not have the traditional meaning formulated during the birth of the nations (in line with which the term “emphasized the importance of nations in explaining historical processes and in analyzing contemporary political life, and promotes the idea according to which «national character» is a key aspect in differentiating people”[8]). Especially in the 1930s, the notion underwent various transformations: “as principle of political action it imports the concept of «good» or «evil» that is measured in social-political efficacy. Thus, nationalism was massacred by extremist ideologies or by other ideologies based on the metaphor of social solidarity”[9]. In this study, by using the term nationalist extremist and its derived words, I will be referring to extreme right-wing currents or political personalities which in other studies are denoted by the terms fascist/Nazi or its derived terms.
The term persecution, although it does not emerge from religious connotations, has its origin in the history of the Church. The legionaries used this term to describe their status during the periods of illegality and repression from the state authorities. Thus, I adopted the term in this study to convey the language of the epoch. According to the position of the Church, persecution refers to “the infliction of suffering, whether it be temporary discomfort or death, upon individuals for holding or advocating religious views, and adopting or propagating religious practices”[10].
I used the term terrorism and its derived words in conformity with the norms of the times, elaborated by the Society of Nations. Thus, at the Conference of the Society of Nations that took place in Paris in 1931 it was decided that “Quiconque aura, en vue de terroriser la population, fait usage, contre les personnes ou les biens, de bombes, mines, machines ou produits explosives ou incendiaries, [….], interrompu ou tenté d’interrompre un service public ou d’untilité publique, sera puni”[11].
Like the term “persecution”, the notion exile will be used more to convey the language of the epoch than due to the events’ realities. According to some definitions, exile means “the removal of a national from his or her country, or the civilized parts of it, for a long period of time or for life. Exile may be a forceful expulsion by the government or a voluntary removal by the citizen, sometimes in order to escape punishment”[12]. The legionaries’ situation matched, to a certain extent, this definition, but the repressions they were subjected to were the result of their having organized violent terrorist acts.
[1] Political organization established on 24 June 1927 by Corneliu Codreanu and a group of close nationalists. The legionary movement is also known in historiography under the names the Legion of “Archangel Michael” or the “Iron Guard”.
[2] ***, Pe marginea prăpastiei. 21-23 ianuarie 1941, vol. I, Bucharest, Monitorul Oficial Imprimeria Statului, 1942, 270 pp.
[3] Palaghiţă, Ştefan, Garda de Fier spre reînvierea României, Buenos Aires, the author’s publishing house, 1951, 384 pp.
[4] Palaghiţă, Ştefan, Garda de Fier spre reînvierea României, Bucharest, Roza Vânturilor, 1993, 366 pp.
[5] Fătu, Mihai; Spălăţelu, Ion, Garda de Fier. Organizaţie teroristă de tip fascist, Bucharest, Editura Politică, 1971, 430 pp.
* The State Safety Department, later named the State Security Department (also known as Securitate), was the secret police in Romania during the communist regime. (translator’s note)
[6] Heinen, Armin, Legiunea “Arhanghelul Mihail”. Mişcare socială şi organizaţie politică. O contribuţie la problema fascismului internaţional, Bucharest, Humanitas, 1999, 552 pp; Veiga, Francisco, Istoria Gărzii de Fier (1919-1941). Mistica ultranaţionalismului, Bucharest, Humanitas, 1995, 384 pp.
[7] Zamfirescu, Dragoş, Legiunea Arhanghelului Mihail. De la mit la realitate, Bucharest, Editura Enciclopedică, 1997, 456 pp.
[8] Enciclopedia Blackwell a gândirii politice, coord. by David Miller, entry “Nationalism”, Bucharest, Humanitas, 2000, pp. 524-528.
[9] Dictionaire des questions politiques. 60 enjeux de la France contemporaine, coord. by Nelly Haudegand and Pierre Lefébure, entry “Nationalism”, Paris, Les Éditions de l’Atelier/Éditions Ouvrières, pp. 153-156.
[10] Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, vol II, coord. by James Hastings, entry “Persecution”, Edinburgh, T.&T. Clark, 1926, p. 168, www.archive.org/stream/dictionaryofapo02hast
[11] Cf. Actes de la Conférence Internationale pour l’unification du droit penal, Paris, 1938, p. 49, http://booksgoogle.com/books.
[12] The Columbia Encyclopedia, entry “Exile”, 2003, www.bartleby.com/65/ex/exile.html (June 1, 2004).
