Ion Antonescu
Ion Antonescu (/ˌæntəˈnɛskuː/; Romanian: [i'on antoˈnesku] ⓘ; 14 June [O.S. 2 June] 1882 – 1 June 1946) was a Romanian military officer and marshal who presided over two successive wartime dictatorships as Prime Minister and Conducător during most of World War II. Having been responsible for facilitating the Holocaust in Romania, he was tried for war crimes and executed in 1946.
Ion Antonescu
Position established
Position abolished
Horia Sima (1940–1941)
Mihai Antonescu (1941–1944)
Himself
Himself
Himself
Himself
Himself
14 June 1882[1]
Pitești, Argeș County, Kingdom of Romania
1 June 1946 (aged 63)
Jilava, Ilfov County, Kingdom of Romania
None[a]
Soldier
Câinele Roșu ("Red Dog")
1904–1944
A Romanian Army career officer who made his name during the 1907 peasants' revolt and the World War I Romanian campaign, the antisemitic Antonescu sympathized with the far-right and fascist National Christian and Iron Guard groups for much of the interwar period. He was a military attaché to France and later Chief of the General Staff, briefly serving as Defense Minister in the National Christian cabinet of Octavian Goga as well as the subsequent First Cristea cabinet, in which he also served as Air and Marine Minister. During the late 1930s, his political stance brought him into conflict with King Carol II and led to his detainment. Antonescu nevertheless rose to political prominence during the political crisis of 1940, and established the National Legionary State, an uneasy partnership with the Iron Guard's leader Horia Sima. After entering Romania into an alliance with Nazi Germany and ensuring Adolf Hitler's confidence, he eliminated the Guard during the Legionary Rebellion of 1941. In addition to being Prime Minister, he served as his own Foreign Minister and Defense Minister. Soon after Romania joined the Axis in Operation Barbarossa, recovering Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Antonescu also became Marshal of Romania.
An atypical figure among Holocaust perpetrators, Antonescu enforced policies independently responsible for the deaths of as many as 400,000 people, most of them Bessarabian, Ukrainian and Romanian Jews, as well as Romanian Romani. The regime's complicity in the Holocaust combined pogroms and mass murders such as the Odessa massacre with ethnic cleansing, and systematic deportations to occupied Transnistria. The system in place was nevertheless characterized by singular inconsistencies, prioritizing plunder over killing, showing leniency toward most Jews in the Old Kingdom, and ultimately refusing to adopt the Final Solution as applied throughout German-occupied Europe. This was made possible by the fact that Romania, as a junior ally of Nazi Germany, was able to avoid being occupied by the Wehrmacht and preserve a degree of political autonomy.
Aerial attacks on Romania by the Allies occurred in 1944 and Romanian troops suffered heavy casualties on the Eastern Front, prompting Antonescu to open peace negotiations with the Allies, ending with inconclusive results. On 23 August 1944, the king Michael I led a coup d'état against Antonescu, who was arrested; after the war he was convicted of war crimes, and executed in June 1946. His involvement in the Holocaust was officially reasserted and condemned following the 2003 Wiesel Commission report.
Biography
Early life and career
Born in the town of Pitești, north-west of the capital Bucharest, Antonescu was the scion of an upper-middle class Romanian Orthodox family with some military tradition.[2] He was especially close to his mother, Lița Baranga, who survived his death.[3] His father, an army officer, wanted Ion to follow in his footsteps and thus sent him to attend the Infantry and Cavalry School in Craiova.[1] During his childhood, his father divorced his mother to marry a woman who was a Jewish convert to Orthodoxy.[4] The breakup of his parents' marriage was a traumatic event for the young Antonescu, and he made no secret of his dislike of his stepmother, whom he always depicted as a femme fatale who destroyed what he saw as his parents' happy marriage.[4]
According to one account, Ion Antonescu was briefly a classmate of Wilhelm Filderman, the future Romanian Jewish community activist whose interventions with Conducător Antonescu helped save a number of his coreligionists.[5] After graduation, in 1904, Antonescu joined the Romanian Army with the rank of Second Lieutenant. He spent the following two years attending courses at the Special Cavalry Section in Târgoviște.[1] Reportedly, Antonescu was a zealous and goal-setting student, upset by the slow pace of promotions, and compensated for his diminutive stature through toughness.[6] In time, the reputation of being a tough and ruthless commander, together with his reddish hair, earned him the nickname Câinele Roșu ("The Red Dog").[6] Antonescu also developed a reputation for questioning his commanders and for appealing over their heads whenever he felt they were wrong.[6]
During the repression of the 1907 peasants' revolt, he headed a cavalry unit in Covurlui County.[1][6] Opinions on his role in the events diverge: while some historians believe Antonescu was a particularly violent participant in quelling the revolt,[6][7] others equate his participation with that of regular officers[6] or view it as outstandingly tactful.[1] In addition to restricting peasant protests, Antonescu's unit subdued socialist activities in Galați port.[7] His handling of the situation earned him praise from King Carol I, who sent Crown Prince (future monarch) Ferdinand to congratulate him in front of the whole garrison.[1] The following year, Antonescu was promoted to Lieutenant, and, between 1911 and 1913, he attended the Advanced War School, receiving the rank of Captain upon graduation.[1] In 1913, during the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria, Antonescu served as a staff officer in the First Cavalry Division in Dobruja.[1]
Legacy
Consequences of the Antonescu trial
The period following Antonescu's fall returned Romania to a democratic regime and the 1923 Constitution, as well as its participation in the war alongside the Allies. However, it also saw the early stages of a communist takeover—which culminated with King Michael's forced abdication on 30 December 1947 and the subsequent establishment of Communist Romania. The Antonescu trial thus fit into a long series of similar procedures and political purges on charges of collaborationism, instrumented by the Romanian People's Tribunals and various other institutions.[489] During the rigged general election of 1946 and for years after Ion Antonescu's execution, the Romanian Communist Party and its allies began using the implications of his trial as an abusive means of compromising some of their political opponents.[148][490] One such early example was Iuliu Maniu, by then one of the country's prominent anti-communists, who was accused of being a fascist and an Antonescu sympathizer, mainly for having shaken his hand during the trial.[148] The enlistment of ethnic Germans into Nazi German units, as approved by Antonescu, was used as a pretext for a Soviet-led expulsion of Germans from Romania.[287][491] On similar grounds, the Soviet occupation forces organized the capture of certain Romanian citizens, as well as the return of war refugees from Romania proper into Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Both the arrestees and the returnees were often deported deeper into the Soviet Union.[492] As part of its deteriorating relationship with Romanian Roman Catholics, and urged on by the Soviets, the communist cabinet of Petru Groza also deemed Apostolic Nuncio Andrea Cassulo a collaborator of Antonescu and a persona non grata, based on transcripts of the Cassulo-Antonescu conversations.[493] It also used such allegations to pressure several Greek-Catholic clergymen into accepting union with the Romanian Orthodox Church.[218]
Nevertheless, Romanian-born Holocaust historian Radu Ioanid notes, few Romanians involved in organizing the Holocaust were prosecuted, and, of those, none were executed after the Antonescu trial. He attributes this to nationalist resistance within the administrative and judicial apparatus, to communist fears of alienating a too large number of people, to the emigration of Zionist survivors, and to the open hostility of some communists toward liberal Jewish community leaders.[494] Jews also faced conflict with the new authorities and with the majority population, as described by other researchers.[495] There were, nonetheless, sporadic trials for Holocaust-related crimes, including one of Maria Antonescu. Arrested in September 1944 and held 1945–1946 in Soviet custody, she was re-arrested at home in 1950, tried and ultimately found guilty of economic crimes for her collaboration with the Central Jewish Office.[496] Five years later, she was sent into internal exile, and died of heart problems in 1964.[497] After 1950, a large number of convicted war criminals, even some sentenced to life imprisonment, were deemed fit for "social cohabitation" (that is, fit to live amongst the general population) and released, while some suspects were never prosecuted.[498]
In communist historiography
Although the Marxist analytical works of the increasingly marginalized communist figure Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu make isolated mentions of the Holocaust,[499] the heavily politicized official discourse inspired by Soviet historiography interpreted Romania's wartime evolution exclusively based on the Marxist-Leninist idea of class conflict.[500] In this context, the main effort to document and expose the Antonescu-era massacres came from Jewish Romanians. This began in 1945, when Jewish journalists Marius Mircu and Maier Rudrich contributed first-hand testimonies.[501] In 1946–1948, the Jewish community leader Matatias Carp published Cartea neagră ("The Black Book"), a voluminous and detailed account of all stages of the Holocaust.[502] After forming a secondary element in Antonescu's indictment, the deportation of Romani people was largely ignored in official discourse.[503]
The communist regime overemphasized the part played by the PCR in King Michael's Coup, while commemorating its 23 August date as a national holiday.[148][504] The Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej faction emerged as the winner of the interior PCR struggles and incorporated nationalist discourse. That faction claimed a decisive role in toppling Antonescu, even though a majority of its members had been jailed for most of the period.[505] In accordance with Stalinist principles, censorship produced historical revisionism that excluded focus on such negative aspects of Romanian behavior during the war as antisemitism and the Holocaust,[506] and obscured Romania's participation on the Eastern Front.[507] Beginning in the mid-1960s, when Nicolae Ceaușescu took power and embarked on a national communist course, the celebration of 23 August as the inception of the communist regime was accompanied by a contradictory tendency, which implied a gradual rehabilitation of Antonescu and his regime.[508] Historians who focused on this period believe that the revival of nationalist tenets and the relative distance taken from Soviet policies contributed to the rehabilitation process.[509] After a period of liberalization, the increasingly authoritarian Ceaușescu regime revived the established patterns of personalized rule, and even made informal use of the title Conducător.[510] Beginning in the early 1970s, when the new policies were consecrated by the July Theses, Ceaușescu tolerated a nationalist, antisemitic and Holocaust denialist intellectual faction, illustrated foremost by Săptămîna and Luceafărul magazines of Eugen Barbu and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, by poet Adrian Păunescu and his Flacăra journal, and by novelist Ion Lăncrănjan.[511] The regime also came to cultivate a relationship with exiled tycoon Iosif Constantin Drăgan, a former Iron Guard member who had come to endorse both Antonescu's rehabilitation and the national communist version of protochronism.[512] In contrast, much of dissident culture and the Romanian diaspora embraced the image of Michael I as its counterpart to the increasingly official Antonescu myth.[513] Lucian Boia described this as "the spectacular confrontation between the two contradictory myths [transposing] into historical and mythological terms a fundamental fissure which divides the Romanian society of today."[514]
Topics relating to the Holocaust in Romania were distorted during the communist era. Ceaușescu himself mentioned the number of survivors of the deportations (some 50,000 people) as a total number of victims, failed to mention the victims' ethnic background, and presented most of them as "communists and antifascists."[515] The regime also placed emphasis on the Holocaust in Northern Transylvania (where the Final Solution had been applied by the Germans and the local Arrow Cross Party).[516] Vladimir Tismăneanu has said Antonescu has a "pseudo-sacred aura" and many Romanians consider the attempts to diminsh this to be an affront to their national dignity: "In post-Communist societies, fantasies of persecution offer immense gratification to large strata of frustrated individuals". These national views are based on propaganda advanced during the Ceaușescu regime.[517]
Earlier accounts of the massacres, which had already been placed under restricted use, were completely removed from public libraries.[518] While a special politicized literature dealt with the Holocaust in Hungary, the entire Ceaușescu period produced only one work entirely dedicated to Romania's participation.[519] Centred on the Iași pogrom, it shifted the blame from Romanian authorities and advanced a drastically reduced death toll.[520] In its preface, official historian Nicolae Minei claimed that Romania was not responsible for any deaths among Jews.[521] Other official texts made more radical claims, openly denying that Antonescu's regime was antisemitic, and that all those killed were victims of Germany or of circumstance.[522]
Debates of the 1990s
Romanians' image of Antonescu shifted several times after the 1989 Revolution toppled communism. Polls carried out in the 1990s show the Conducător was well liked by portions of the general public.[523] This tendency, Lucian Boia argues, was similar to a parallel trend favoring Wallachia's 15th century Prince Vlad III the Impaler, indicating a preference for "authoritarian solutions" and reflecting "a pantheon that was largely set in place in the 'Ceaușescu era' ".[524] It was also popular at the time to see the 1944 Coup exclusively as the onset of communization in Romania,[148][525] while certain sections of the public opinion revived the notion of "Jewish Bolshevism", accusing Jews of having brought communism to Romania.[526] British historian Tony Judt connected such reflexes to growing anti-Russian sentiment and Holocaust denial in various countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and termed them collectively "mis-memory of anti-communism".[527] Vladimir Tismăneanu, a prominent Romanian-born political scientist, referred to Antonescu's "pseudo-sacred" image with the post-1989 public, and to the phenomenon as "fantasies of persecution."[528] The wartime dictator's image appealed to many politicians of the post-1989 period, and sporadic calls for his rehabilitation were issued at the highest levels of authority.[6][148][529] Far right groups issued calls for his canonization by the Romanian Orthodox Church (together with a similar request to canonize Corneliu Zelea Codreanu).[530] Certain neofascist groups claim to represent a legacy of Codrenism from which Sima was a deviationist, and these have also become Antonescu apologists.[531]
A particular case in this process was that of forces gathered around the Greater Romania Party, a group often characterized as merging xenophobic or neofascist messages and the legacy of Ceaușescu's national communism.[532] Founded by party leader and former Săptămîna contributor Corneliu Vadim Tudor, România Mare magazine is known to have equated Antonescu and Ceaușescu, presenting them both as "apostles of the Romanian people".[533] In his bid for the office of President during the 1996 election, Vadim Tudor vowed to be a new Antonescu.[534] Boia remarks that this meeting of extremes offers an "extraordinary paradox".[535] Drăgan also openly resumed his activities in Romania, often in collaboration with Vadim Tudor's group,[536] founding three organizations tasked with campaigning for Antonescu's rehabilitation: the media outlet Europa Nova,[537] the Ion Antonescu Foundation and the Ion Antonescu League.[538] His colleague Radu Theodoru endorsed such projects while accusing Jews of being "a long-term noxious factor" and claiming that it was actually ethnic Romanians who were victims of a communist Holocaust.[539] Ion Coja and Paul Goma notably produced radical claims relying on fabricated evidence and deflecting blame for the crimes onto the Jews themselves.[540] Several journals edited by Ion Cristoiu repeatedly argued in favor of Antonescu's rehabilitation, also making xenophobic claims;[541] similar views were sporadically present in national dailies of various hues, such as Ziua, România Liberă[542] and Adevărul.[543]
Various researchers argue that the overall tendency to exculpate Antonescu was endorsed by the ruling National Salvation Front (FSN) and its successor group, later known as Social Democratic Party,[544] who complemented an emerging pro-authoritarian lobby while depicting their common opponent King Michael and his supporters as traitors.[545] Similar attempts to deny the role of Antonescu in the Holocaust were also made by the main opposition parties, the Christian Democratic National Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party, with Radu Câmpeanu, the latter party's president, publicly describing the wartime leader as a "great Romanian" who tried to defend the Jews.[546] Sections of both governing and opposition groups contemplated the idea of rehabilitating the wartime leader, and, in May 1991, Parliament observed a moment of silence in his memory.[547] The perceived governmental tolerance of Antonescu's rehabilitation raised international concern and protests.[148][548] While the FSN-supported Romanian President Ion Iliescu publicly opposed attempts to rehabilitate Antonescu and acknowledged the "crimes he committed against the Jews", it was his successor, Emil Constantinescu, a representative of the Democratic Convention, who in 1997 became the first Romanian officeholder to recognize the collective responsibility of Romanian authorities.[549][546] Nevertheless, during the same period, Attorney General Sorin Moisescu followed a since-deprecated special appeal procedure to overturn sentences passed against Antonescu and other 1946 defendants, which he eventually withdrew.[550]
To a certain degree, such pro-Antonescu sentiments were also present in post-1989 historiography. Reflecting back on this phenomenon in 2004, Maria Bucur wrote: "the perverse image of Antonescu is not the product of a propaganda campaign led by right-wing extremists, but a pervasive myth fed by historical debates and political contests, and which the public seems indifferent to or accepts unproblematically."[551] After the Revolution, archival sources concerning Antonescu, including those in the National Archives of Romania, were made more available to researchers, but documents confiscated or compiled by Soviet officials, kept in Russia, remained largely inaccessible.[552] Although confronted with more evidence from the newly opened archives, several historians, including some employed by official institutions, continued to deny the Holocaust in Romania, and attributed the death toll exclusively to German units.[553] In parallel, some continued an exclusive focus on Northern Transylvanian massacres.[554] Local authors who have actively promoted Antonescu's image as a hero and wrote apologetic accounts of his politics include historians Gheorghe Buzatu[555] and Mihai Pelin,[556] and researcher Alex Mihai Stoenescu.[557] Larry L. Watts published a similarly controversial monograph in the United States.[558] Although criticized for denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust and downplaying Antonescu's complicity, Dinu C. Giurescu was recognized as the first post-communist Romanian historian to openly acknowledge his country's participation,[559] while his colleagues Șerban Papacostea and Andrei Pippidi were noted as early critics of attempts to exculpate Antonescu.[560] The matter of crimes in Transnistria and elsewhere was first included within the Romanian curriculum with a 1999 state-approved alternative textbook edited by Sorin Mitu.[561]