Wars and Holocaust

One of Europe's brightest cultural scenes — Brâncuși, Enescu, Eliade, Cioran — and, simultaneously, a mystical right capable of killing. Interwar Romania is both face and reverse at once.

Interwar Romania: brilliance and fracture

On paper, Romania of the 1920s and 1930s is a modern European country: bicameral parliament, democratic constitution (1923), universities, a diverse press. Greater Romania doubled the territory in 1918 — Transylvania, Bucovina, Bessarabia, Banat — but also added to the population millions of Hungarians, Germans, Ukrainians, Jews and others who had not asked to become Romanian. A third of the country belongs to minorities. Bucharest earns the nickname “little Paris” — boulevards, cafés, theatrical scene — and exports an intellectual generation that will dominate Europe.

The roster is disproportionate: Constantin Brâncuși reinvents modern sculpture from Paris with pieces like The Endless Column; George Enescu conducts and composes with worldwide standing; Eugène Ionesco, born in Slatina and educated between Bucharest and France, will found theatre of the absurd with The Bald Soprano; Mircea Eliade will give the history of religions a phenomenological turn from the University of Chicago; Emil Cioran will write in French some of the most ruthless aphorisms of the 20th century. The rare creative density of those years has not been repeated — and it is no coincidence that almost every name ends up writing from exile.

The Iron Guard

Beneath that brilliance lies a deep fracture. The peasant majority lives in near-feudal conditions despite the reforms. Antisemitism is endemic: an entire intellectual current, from A. C. Cuza to Nichifor Crainic, articulates an “Orthodox and rural” nationalism that sees the Jews — 4% of the country, but overrepresented in commerce and the professions — as the culturally foreign enemy.

In 1927, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu founds the Legion of the Archangel Michael, later known as the Garda de Fier, the Iron Guard. It is not a derivative of Italian fascism: it is a specifically Romanian phenomenon that combines Orthodox Christian mysticism, a cult of voluntary death for the homeland, biblical antisemitism and esoteric teaching. Its militants — including some of the country’s great young intellectuals, the young Eliade among them — wore green shirts and prayed before each action. They assassinated prime ministers (I. G. Duca in 1933, Armand Călinescu in 1939) and pulled the country toward radicalization.

King Carol II — back from exile in 1930 — establishes a royal dictatorship in 1938 to halt them. He orders Codreanu’s killing in November of that year (strangled in a van and buried under cement, officially “shot while trying to escape”). But repression does not destroy the organization; it only radicalizes it further.

Loss of territories and Antonescu

In the summer of 1940, the whole system collapses. The Soviet Union, applying the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, annexes Bessarabia and northern Bucovina. Hungary, with German and Italian backing, receives northern Transylvania through the second Vienna Award. Bulgaria recovers southern Dobruja. Within weeks, Greater Romania loses a third of its territory without firing a shot. Carol II abdicates on 6 September 1940 and leaves the throne to his son Michael (Mihai), an 18-year-old. Real power is taken by General Ion Antonescu, a prestigious soldier, first as prime minister and then as Conducător.

Antonescu initially governs with the Iron Guard as junior partner, but the legionnaire rebellion of January 1941 — which includes a pogrom against Bucharest’s Jewish community with 125 dead, some tortured in slaughterhouses — is crushed by the army. The Guard disappears from power; many of its leaders flee to Berlin. Antonescu remains as sole military dictator.

The war and the Holocaust

In June 1941, Romania enters the war against the USSR alongside the Wehrmacht. It recovers Bessarabia and advances to Odessa, occupying the region between the Dniester and the Bug that it will call Transnistria. There, Antonescu’s regime organizes on its own the deportation and systematic extermination of the Jews of Bessarabia, Bucovina and Transnistria. The numbers are what they are: approximately 280,000 Romanian Jews and 11,000 Roma murdered, half of them in camps administered by the Romanian regime itself (Bogdanovka, Domanevka, Acmecetca). Other pogroms — Iași in June 1941, with at least 13,000 dead in a few days — were documented unambiguously. It is the Holocaust outside Auschwitz. The figure makes Romania the second country by number of Jews killed by its own regime, after Germany.

Paradoxically, there were Romanian Jews who survived precisely because Antonescu, from 1942 onward and seeing the war turn, halted deportations to the German camps. The Jews of the Old Kingdom — Wallachia and western Moldavia — were not deported to Auschwitz, though they suffered expropriations, forced labor and constant violence. None of those late decisions offsets responsibility for the crimes of 1941-1942.

King Michael’s coup

The summer of 1944 marks the turning point. With the Red Army at the eastern border and the German front collapsing, King Michael I — still formally head of state — prepares, together with army officers, the clandestine democratic parties and the communists, for a risky operation. On 23 August 1944, Michael summons Antonescu to the royal palace, personally arrests him and locks him in the palace safe. He announces the change of sides on the radio.

The coup accelerates the end of the war: the Germans lose overnight their most solid ally on the eastern flank, Romania starts fighting alongside them against the Wehrmacht in Transylvania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the operation is estimated to have shortened the war by at least six months. Michael I — the only European monarch to have arrested his own dictator — would receive the Soviet Order of Victory after the war. Three years later, Stalin would dethrone him.