Ion Antonescu

• 1. Introduction

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  Ion Antonescu was executed by a military firing squad on the 1st of June 1946, at a site outside Jilava called Valea Piersicilor, the Valley of the Peach Trees. He refused a blindfold. When the order came, he raised his hat in salute. His final written words were a letter to his wife, urging her to enter a convent, and accusing Romanians of ingratitude while expressing his conviction that posterity would vindicate him.

  The man who died that day had served as Prime Minister and Conducator of Romania through most of World War II. He had led his country into a military alliance with Nazi Germany, ordered his troops across the Prut River into Soviet territory, and presided over policies responsible for the deaths of as many as 400,000 people, most of them Jews and Romani Romanians. He had also, at certain moments, refused to hand Romanian Jews over to the German machinery of extermination. He was, in the assessment of historians, an atypical figure among Holocaust perpetrators.

  How does a career officer who earned praise from King Carol I for handling a peasants' revolt become one of the architects of mass murder in eastern Europe? What drove Antonescu's obsessive hatreds, and what constrained them? And why did the country he called ungrateful come, in some quarters, to treat him as a national hero long after his death?

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• 2. The Red Dog

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  Antonescu was born in Pitești, a town north-west of Bucharest, into an upper-middle class Romanian Orthodox family with military roots. His father was an army officer who sent him to the Infantry and Cavalry School in Craiova. The divorce of his parents, which led his father to marry a Jewish convert to Orthodoxy, was a traumatic rupture that Antonescu never stopped referencing. He consistently depicted his stepmother as a femme fatale who had destroyed what he regarded as a happy family.

  By one account, Antonescu briefly attended school alongside Wilhelm Filderman, who would later become a prominent Romanian Jewish community activist. Their paths would cross again decades later under far grimmer circumstances. After graduating in 1904 with the rank of Second Lieutenant, Antonescu spent two more years at the Special Cavalry Section in Targoviste. Reportedly impatient with slow promotions, he compensated for his short stature through sheer toughness. His reddish hair and his reputation as a hard and unsparing commander earned him the nickname Cainele Rosu, or The Red Dog.

  His handling of the 1907 peasants' revolt, where he commanded a cavalry unit in Covurlui County, drew mixed judgments. Some historians consider him an unusually violent participant; others see his role as no different from that of any officer carrying out orders. Crown Prince Ferdinand was nonetheless sent to congratulate him in front of the whole garrison on behalf of King Carol I. Antonescu was promoted to Lieutenant the following year, attended the Advanced War School between 1911 and 1913, and served as a staff officer during the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria.

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• 3. Ambition in Wartime

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  After Romania entered World War I on the Allied side in 1916, Antonescu became chief of staff under General Constantin Prezan. When enemy forces crossed into Wallachia, he was tasked with designing a defence plan for Bucharest. The royal court, army, and government were pushed back into Moldavia, and Antonescu rose with them. As Prezan was elevated to Chief of the General Staff that December, Antonescu, by then a major, was named head of operations.

  His influence on Prezan became so pervasive that General Alexandru Averescu, in his memoirs, adopted the formula "Prezan (Antonescu)" to denote Prezan's plans and decisions. A contemporary described Antonescu as "a talented if prickly individual." He contributed to the tactics used at the Battle of Marasesti between July and August 1917, when Romanian forces under General Eremia Grigorescu stopped the advance of German forces commanded by Field Marshal August von Mackensen.

  Two events during this period left lasting marks on Antonescu's character. First, when Russia left the war and Romania was forced to make a separate peace with the Central Powers, he advocated for what he called "the most rational solution." Second, in 1918, Crown Prince Carol abandoned his army posting to marry a commoner. Antonescu was outraged. The contempt he developed for the future King Carol II proved enduring, personal, and politically consequential. After the war, politician Ion G. Duca recorded that Antonescu's intelligence and activity had brought credit on himself and invaluable service to the country.

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• 4. The Paris Years and Their Debts

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  Antonescu's interwar career combined nationalist advocacy with diplomatic posting. He participated in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference campaign for recognition of Romania's gains in Transylvania, publishing an essay whose title translated as "The Romanians. Their Origin, Their Past, Their Sacrifices and Their Rights." The booklet advocated Romanian rule beyond the current borders of Greater Romania, including the annexation of all Banat areas and the Timok Valley, even at the risk of war with the emerging Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

  In 1922, he became military attache in Paris, where he negotiated 100 million French francs in credit to purchase French weaponry. Working alongside diplomat Nicolae Titulescu, the two became personal friends. Through the conservative writer Marthe Bibesco, Antonescu was introduced to the ideas of Gustave Le Bon, a researcher of crowd psychology whose work had influenced fascism. Bibesco herself compared Antonescu to 19th-century French nationalist Georges Boulanger and introduced him as such to Le Bon.

  The Israeli historian Jean Ancel noted that Antonescu's famously erratic moods, which could swing from rage to calm and back within minutes, were linked to syphilis he had contracted as a young man. A German diplomatic report written years later would confirm this to Berlin, noting that the condition produced severe attacks every several months. In 1923, back in Paris, Antonescu made the acquaintance of lawyer Mihai Antonescu, who would become his closest political associate, legal representative, and eventual co-defendant at the war crimes tribunal that ended both their lives.

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• 5. Iron Guard, Carol II, and the Road to Power

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  During his tenure as Deputy Chief and then Chief of the General Staff in the early 1930s, Antonescu first grew interested in the Iron Guard, a fascist and antisemitic movement led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. He ordered the Army's intelligence unit to compile a report on the group, but also established a connection to Codreanu that would deepen into something resembling friendship. When defence minister Paul Angelescu questioned his weapons modernization projects, and when a report Antonescu submitted on embezzlement of Army funds indirectly implicated King Carol II, the king ordered him out of office. The Interior Ministry placed him under surveillance. Carol's intelligence service kept him closely monitored.

  The conflict between Antonescu and Carol intensified through the late 1930s. When Carol appointed Octavian Goga as Prime Minister over a far-right cabinet in late 1937, Antonescu became Defence Minister. His mandate coincided with Romania's agonizing choice between its traditional alliance with France and Britain on one side, and alignment with Nazi Germany on the other. When Carol then proclaimed his own authoritarian regime and had Codreanu arrested, Antonescu resigned in protest. He served as a celebrity defence witness at both of Codreanu's trials, at the second of which he vouched for his friend's honesty by shaking his hand in front of the jury. Codreanu was convicted of treason nonetheless, and later killed by gendarmes acting on Carol's orders in November 1938.

  By 1940, Romania faced territorial catastrophe. Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were lost to Soviet occupation. Hungary received Northern Transylvania. Southern Dobruja went to Bulgaria. Carol's popularity collapsed. When Antonescu sent the king a note of protest, he was arrested and interned at Bistrita Monastery, from which he commissioned Mihai Antonescu to open contacts with German officials, offering to advance German economic interests, particularly in Romania's oil industry, in exchange for German endorsement. Hitler's minister in Romania, Wilhelm Fabricius, wrote to Berlin: "I am not convinced that he is a safe man." On the 5th of September 1940, Carol transferred most of his dictatorial powers to Antonescu, and abdicated shortly after.

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• 6. The National Legionary State

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  The regime formally proclaimed on the 14th of September 1940 was called the National Legionary State. The Iron Guard became the only legally permitted party in Romania, and Antonescu was named its honorary commander while Horia Sima became his Deputy Premier. Antonescu also signed Romania into the Tripartite Pact in Berlin on the 23rd of November, and two days later the country adhered to the Anti-Comintern Pact. German troops entered Romania to defend the oil industry and train Romanian forces in Blitzkrieg tactics.

  From the start, the partnership between Antonescu and Sima was brittle. Antonescu was concerned with reviving an economy stripped by Carol's departure, during which Carol had taken most of the national treasury with him into exile. Sima favored populist economic measures Antonescu considered unaffordable. Tensions peaked in late November 1940, when the Iron Guard, after uncovering the circumstances of Codreanu's death, carried out the Jilava Massacre, assassinated historian Nicolae Iorga and economist Virgil Madgearu, and committed other acts of violence. Antonescu's public condemnation of the killings was limited and discreet. That same month, he joined Sima at a burial ceremony for Codreanu's newly discovered remains.

  The conflict within the Axis's leadership in Berlin mirrored the conflict in Bucharest. Heinrich Himmler, Baldur von Schirach, and Joseph Goebbels supported the Legionaries. Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Wehrmacht backed Antonescu, worried that internal disorder would threaten Romania's oil production, which was vital to the German war effort. The January 1941 Legionary Rebellion, during which Guardists killed approximately 120 Bucharest Jews over two days of violence, forced a decision. Antonescu sent in the Army under General Constantin Sanatescu. With German assistance operating on Hitler's orders, Antonescu suppressed the Iron Guard and eliminated Sima as a political force inside Romania.

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• 7. Holocaust and the Eastern Front

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  On the 12th of June 1941, at a summit with Hitler, Antonescu was briefed on the ideological character of the coming war against the Soviet Union. Hitler described it as a war to annihilate "Judeo-Bolshevism" and showed Antonescu the guidelines he had issued to his troops about the "special treatment" of Soviet Jews. Antonescu embraced this framing entirely, telling Hitler that Romania as a Latin people had an inborn hatred of Slavs and Jews and could serve as an anti-Slavic buffer for Germany. On the 18th of June 1941, he issued orders to his generals about "cleansing the ground" of Jews as Romanian forces entered Bessarabia and Bukovina.

  A large-scale pogrom was carried out in Iasi with Antonescu's agreement, killing thousands of Jews. Romanian forces, formally organized as a General Antonescu Army Group under German general Eugen Ritter von Schobert, entered the war without a formal declaration. The conquest of Bessarabia was popular among Romanians who remembered the Soviet occupation of 1940, but Antonescu's decision to push beyond the Dniester into territory that had never been part of Romania was more controversial. On the 30th of August 1941, Romania occupied a region it designated Transnistria, formerly part of the Ukrainian SSR. This area became the site of the main component of the Holocaust in Romania: mass deportations of Bessarabian and Ukrainian Jews, later joined by transports of Romani Romanians and Jews from Moldavia.

  The fall of Odessa in October 1941 was celebrated with a parade through Bucharest's Arcul de Triumf. But it came at enormous cost: the ill-equipped 4th Army had suffered losses of roughly 100,000 men during a two-month siege Antonescu had insisted on conducting without German assistance. The Odessa massacre that followed, ordered by Antonescu as retaliation for a bombing that killed Romanian officers including General Ioan Glogojeanu, became one of the defining atrocities of the Romanian occupation. When Wilhelm Filderman, Antonescu's one-time schoolmate, wrote to protest the killing of Jews in Odessa, Antonescu wrote back blaming Jewish commissars for Romanian casualties and holding the entire Romanian Jewish community morally responsible for the losses at Odessa.

  The system Antonescu built was characterized by what historians have noted as singular inconsistencies. His regime combined pogroms and mass murder with selective leniency toward most Jews in the Old Kingdom. He ultimately refused to adopt the Final Solution as Germany defined it. Romania, as a junior partner that was never occupied by the Wehrmacht, retained a degree of political autonomy that made this partial resistance possible. Antonescu was able to enforce policies independently responsible for the deaths of as many as 400,000 people while simultaneously declining to hand the remaining Jewish population of the Old Kingdom to German extermination camps. Killinger, the German ambassador, told Antonescu to deport Old Kingdom Jews to the death camps in Poland rather than to Transnistria, and threatened reduced arms supplies if Antonescu proceeded otherwise. Antonescu, dependent on German weapons, had little choice but to comply with Killinger's direction.

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• 8. Collapse, Coup, and the Firing Squad

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  The Battle of Stalingrad, fought between June 1942 and February 1943, cost Romania some 150,000 men dead, wounded, or captured. More than half of Romania's divisions were wiped out. By 1943, the combination of heavy losses, German contempt for Romanian troops, and declining living standards had made the war deeply unpopular inside Romania. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that broken German promises, disregard for warnings about Soviet offensive preparations, and a pattern of blaming allies for German miscalculations all combined to produce a genuine crisis in German-Romanian relations.

  Antonescu authorized his Deputy Premier and new Foreign Minister Mihai Antonescu to begin peace contacts with the Allies. Romanian diplomats approached British and American counterparts in Portugal and Switzerland. The answer they received was consistent: no armistice was possible that did not include the Soviet Union, a condition Antonescu refused. In March 1944, the Soviet Red Army broke through on the Southern Bug and Dniester fronts. British Supreme Allied Commander Field Marshal Henry Maitland Wilson presented Antonescu with an ultimatum. After visiting Hitler one more time in Germany, Antonescu chose to keep fighting, persuaded by Hitler's promise that Northern Transylvania would go to Romania if the Axis prevailed.

  On the 5th of August 1944, Antonescu met Hitler for the last time at Ketrzyn. On the 23rd of August, King Michael I summoned him to the Royal Palace, presented him with a demand to take Romania out of its Axis alliance, and had him arrested when he refused. General Constantin Sanatescu, who had commanded the forces that suppressed the Legionary Rebellion in 1941, replaced him as Premier. Romania declared war on Nazi Germany two days later. Antonescu was placed in the custody of Romanian Communist Party militants, then handed to Soviet forces, who transported him to Moscow alongside Mihai Antonescu, Governor of Transnistria Gheorghe Alexianu, defence minister Constantin Pantazi, Gendarmerie commander Constantin Vasiliu, and Bucharest Police chief Mircea Elefterescu. After Germany's surrender, the group was moved to Lubyanka prison. SMERSH operatives, among them Viktor Abakumov, interrogated Antonescu there, but the transcripts were never returned to Romania.

  At the May 1946 People's Tribunal in Bucharest, Antonescu was tried on charges of war crimes, crimes against the peace, and treason. The procedures were drafted by coup participant Lucrețiu Patrascanu of the Romanian Communist Party. PNT leader Iuliu Maniu, appearing as a witness, pushed back against the accusatory atmosphere: "We were political adversaries, not cannibals," he said, then walked to Antonescu and shook his hand. Antonescu was found guilty. Appeals were rejected within six days. King Michael, under pressure from the Soviet-backed Petru Groza government, signed the execution decree. Antonescu was shot at the Valley of the Peach Trees on the 1st of June 1946 alongside Mihai Antonescu, Alexianu, and Vasiliu. His involvement in the Holocaust was officially reasserted and condemned following the 2003 Wiesel Commission report.

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