Hitler's Foreign Executioners (16 page)

By 1927 Codreanu, thanks to Cuzu’s enthusiastic patronage, had proved himself a competent and charismatic political organiser. He was not afraid to use violence and a campaign of assassinations led to several appearances in court and a prison sentence. But Codreanu soon returned in triumph to Iaşi – and as his train passed through stations, priests held masses and children threw flowers. He had long out-grown even Cuza’s fanatical National Christian Union and his old mentor too. Cuzu’s own thinking was brutish, but Codreanu, thrilled by the success of Mussolini and Hitler, his ego inflated by the adulation of student acolytes, demanded a new party of action. We must assume that the archangel had paid his fateful visit to Codreanu’s cell in Turnu Severin, for on 24 June 1927 Codreanu issued ‘Order No 1’ to found the Legion of the Archangel Michael.

He called his handful of followers ‘Legionaries’ and kitted them out in green shirts, Sam Browne belts and high black boots. The ‘Roman salute’ was de rigueur. Codreanu appointed himself captain and many Romanians simply referred to him as ‘the Captain’. In Iaşi, Codreanu began to recruit cells or nests (
cuiburi
) of converts, and to begin with the legion was unashamedly a kind of devotional sect – and deliberately so. It had all the dark ritualistic attraction of elite university fraternities. By 1929, Codreanu had attracted just 1,000 followers, but in those early years that was enough. For his followers, he conjured up the ideal of the
omul nou
(new man): ‘Everything depends on will,’ he proclaimed. The Legion, Codreanu said, was a ‘form of life’ devoted to the ‘spiritual resurrection of the nation’. Its task was ‘to
hand out justice to the righteous and death to the wicked’. Action followed rhetoric. In December 1927, at a Legion conference in Oradea, delegates took time off to set synagogues on fire and incinerate their ancient Torah scrolls. As the legionaries travelled home, they stopped at Huedin, Târgu Ocna and finally at Iaşi, where they gleefully set Jewish households alight and pillaged property.
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Cultist ritual reinforced absolute devotion. Codreanu initiated Legionaries into a ‘Brotherhood of Christ’ at bizarre ceremonies reminiscent of Freemasonic rites. Aspirants slit their arms to fill a communal cup with blood which was passed from hand to hand and eagerly slurped.
⁷
Codreanu, it was said, resembled the handsome American actor Tyrone Power. An Italian admirer who met him at his headquarters, the Green House, recalled that the ‘Captain’ had ‘an uncommon nobility of expression, frankness and energy imprinted on his face, azure eyes, open forehead, a genuine Roman-Aryan type’. Codreanu showed his visitor his version of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
– a bulging volume called
The Iron Guard
. Page after page, Codreanu assailed ‘the filthiest tyranny, the Talmudic, Israelite tyranny’. He denounced what he called Mussolini’s ‘implicit’ anti-Semitism. Romania must be ‘de-toxified’: Judaism had to be purged.

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:

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, abolished 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’.