Hitler's Foreign Executioners

by Christopher Hale

  The king hoped that a deal with Antonescu would allow him to remain on the throne. But outside the palace, news of the Carol’s offer set off loud volleys of rifle fire. The guardist mob surged close to the palace insisting that the king abdicate. Horia Sima had by now returned to Bucharest. On the evening of 4 September, Antonescu met Sima and a ‘Legionary Forum’ to discuss ways of ending the stalemate. On 5 September, the guardists returned to the streets in even greater numbers. At 9.30 a.m. Antonescu returned again to the palace to deliver a final ultimatum. It was at last checkmate. At dawn the following morning, King Carol II, that much unloved monarch, handed Romania’s poisoned crown to his son Michael. Two weeks later, Antonescu, prompted by the German minister Fabricius, proclaimed himself Conducător (leader) of the Romanian state and chief of the Legionary Party.

  The reactionary Legion finally held the reins of power. Romania was ruled by a ‘National Legionary State’. Antonescu appointed Horia Sima vice-president of the Council of Ministers – in effect his deputy. On 23 November, the Legionary state of Romania joined the Tripartite Pact with Germany, Italy and Japan. A few days later, Antonescu authorised the exhumation of the remains of Codreanu and other martyrs from beneath the courtyard of Jilava prison and gave them a grand state burial. Peasants and workers journeyed from all over Romania to celebrate the posthumous triumph of their heroes. A vast procession wound its way to the Bellu cemetery, known to many Romanians as the ‘Garden of Souls’. Marshall Antonescu and Sima marched side by side. The sight of Codreanu’s decayed remains provoked a hysterical reaction from some of the mourners. An enraged Legionary gang broke into Jileva prison and began hacking to death inmates whom they believed to be linked to Codreanu’s murder. When he heard about this bloody episode, Himmler sent Sima a congratulatory telegram: he was doing what needed to be done. Legionary propagandists promised that the new Romanian state would ‘make the country seem like the holy sun in heaven’.15

  But as Legionary violence escalated, threatening to topple the new pro-German regime, Hitler faced a dilemma. The planned attack on the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, depended on Romanian oil. Wehrmacht strategy assumed Romanian troops would join the invasion in the south-east. Hitler observed the chaos unfolding in Romania with alarm. He concluded that General Antonescu needed to apply the lessons of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ – when Hitler, in league with the SS, had eliminated the leadership of the troublesome Brownshirts. In short, Antonescu must do away with Sima and his volatile Legionaries.

  Hitler’s backing for Antonescu was either not communicated to Himmler or the SS chief and his paladins chose to ignore it and persisted in stoking up anti-Antonescu factions. Sima, for his part, plainly mimicked SS strategy. On 6 September, he had established a new ‘Legionary Police’ to defend the regime and take vengeance on its enemies. He reorganised Codreanu’s Corps of Legionary Workers as a paramilitary unit – the Garnizoana. Sima regarded these new squads as Romanian versions of German Einsatzgruppen. In late October 1940 Himmler sent RSHA representatives to Bucharest to reinforce bonds with the Iron Guard and bolster the new Legionary Police. Sima promised that ‘the time of revenge on all opponents of the Iron Guard’ was near.16

  The Legionary terror began on 27 November.17 Murder squads began assassinating former members of King Carol’s administration, including the Prime Minster Nicolae Iorga. Shortly afterwards, Sima’s squads began to take ‘revenge’ on Romanian Jews: the legionary state, which was infested with Iron Guard ministers and officials, imposed illegal fines and taxes, and Legionary police units carried out arbitrary arrests, then torture, rapes and public degradations inspired by German practice in occupied Poland. In rural areas, army units also took part in anti-Jewish actions. While Antonescu was, of course, no friend to Romanian Jews, and would demand the deportation of ‘foreign Jews’ before the end of the year, he could not afford to let Sima’s terror campaign destabilise the legionary state, and at the end of November he ordered the Legionary Police to disarm. This was not a humanitarian gesture. As well as public mayhem, Antonescu feared that the legion was growing rich on the plunder and pillage of Jewish businesses and homes. A Legion with bloated coffers would be a dire threat indeed to his own grip on power. Addressing Legion ministers Antonescu ranted: ‘Do you really think we can replace all Yids immediately? Challenges to the state should be addressed one by one, as in a game of chess.’

  On 14 January 1941 Antonescu was summoned to meet Hitler. Sima refused to accompany him – rank-and-file Legionaries had never forgiven the Germans for handing over Bessarabia and Bukovina to Stalin. This was a mistake: Antonescu’s plan was secretly to get Hitler’s backing to crush the legion. At the Berghof, Antonescu demanded: ‘What am I supposed to do with the fanatics?’ As the two dictators watched storm clouds gather over the mighty flanks of Mt Watzman, Hitler replied without hesitation, ‘You have to get rid of them … revolution is not a condition to be perpetuated’. He reminded Antonescu that in the summer of 1934 he had been forced to quash the troublesome Brownshirts: ‘You have to get rid of fanatical militants who think that by destroying everything they are doing their duty.’18 Later at a conference in the Berghof’s great hall, Hitler’s counsel was reinforced by Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and OKW Supreme Commander Wilhelm Keitel, who warned Antonescu that he could not afford to let the Iron Guard ‘infection’ spread to the Romanian army. SS Chief Himmler had not been invited.

  As Antonescu bonded with Hitler, Sima agitated against Antonescu, egged on by Himmler. On 21 January he ordered a call-up of all the legionary militias. As thick snow fell on Bucharest, armed workers seized government buildings and the radio station and threw up barricades in the streets. As the legionary uprising gripped Bucharest, Sima and the Iron Guard vented their fury on Jews. On 22 January, the Minister of the Interior ordered the burning of Jewish districts in Bucharest. Legionaries, students, priests, the anti-Semitic intelligentsia and even women and children descended on the Jewish districts.19 Vigilantes raped Jewish women in front of their families. They beat, tortured and killed rabbis, community leaders and gentile citizens caught by the mobs and denounced as ‘Yids’. Sima’s squads detailed at least 2,000 Jews, aged from 15 to 85, in police stations, the Prefectura, the legion headquarters, the town hall and the old Codreanu farm. Many were tortured. In his journal, Mihail Sebastian described in detail the most egregious incident. In the Bucharest suburb of Straulesti, a Legionary mob rounded up some 200 Jews and hauled them into a farm abattoir: ‘[they] hanged [them] by the neck on hooks normally reserved for beef carcasses. A sheet of paper was stuck to each corpse: “Kosher meat”’20 Later, it was reported, Sima’s Legionary killers ‘chopped up the bodies’.21

  The Legionaries rampaged at will through Bucharest’s Jewish quarter; the Romanian authorities took no action for at least seventy hours. Rabbi Tzwi Gutman and ninety other Jews were dragged to the Jilava Forest, stripped naked in freezing snow then shot at point-blank range. The Legionaries hacked at their victims’ mouths to find gold fillings. Astonishingly Rabbi Gutman, who had been shot twice, survived. His two sons died. The Legionary mobs incinerated one of the most beautiful of all European synagogues; the Cahal Grande was consumed by a raging inferno that ‘lit the capital’s sky’. Legionaries danced around the flames and pushed three Jewish women into the inferno.22

  But as Sima’s Legionary hordes ran amok, Antonescu had little difficulty reasserting his authority. Hitler backed his ally with force: ‘I don’t need any fanatics. I need a sound Romanian army.’ On Friday 24 January, Sebastian reported that ‘long motorized German columns, with machine guns and rifles at the ready’ rumbled into Bucharest; ‘they certainly made an impression. And it was crystal clear that the German army was on the side of General Antonescu.’23 On Thursday 23 January, Sebastian reported, Legionary squads gathered outside Sima’s headquarters on the Strada Roma. With a deafening roar, German motorised units suddenly appeared. The demonstrators greeted them: ‘Heil Hitler! Duce! Duce! Duce! Sieg Heil
! Sieg Heil!’ But the German troops ignored the crowds. Instead they took up positions at each of the entrances to the square. More German troops arrived, again to the delight of the Legionaries. ‘But then what a stunning blow!’ Sebastian went on. Once all the exits had been closed, a German officer ordered everyone to leave the square. ‘And everyone left. Just like that.’24

  The Legionary revolt had backfired, bolstering Antonescu’s power and binding Romania closer to the Reich. That bond would endure until Red Army troops smashed Romanian armies at Stalingrad. The news of the fall of Horia Sima was not well received at SS headquarters in Prinz Albrecht Strasse; Himmler’s Auβenpolitik (foreign policy) was applied racial hatred, and it was logical to back murderous anti-Semites like Sima. Antonescu, to be sure, shared the legion’s hatred of Jews and Bolshevism but he was Ribbentrop’s man. Himmler hesitated to speak out against Hitler, but he would never forgive the Foreign Minister for the humiliation of ‘his’ Iron Guard. In the aftermath of the revolt, Heydrich’s agents found sanctuary for Sima and other Iron Guard leaders in the home of Romanian ethnic German leader Andreas Schmidt (who it will be recalled was Gottlob Berger’s son-in-law). Shortly afterwards, Sima fled to Italy, while the SS spirited other Legionaries to a special unit at the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar. Many hundreds of lower ranking Iron Guard men found refuge in Germany.25

  Goebbels noted: ‘The Führer is on Antonescu’s side. He wants an agreement with a state not a world view.’ He added: ‘Still, my heart is with them [the Iron Guard]’ and a week later when he heard about Antonescu’s triumph: ‘the Führer … needs Antonescu … for military reasons. One point of view. But it wasn’t necessary to wipe out the Legion.’26 Hitler had more astute insight than either his SS chief or Propaganda Minister. Antonescu was not only a military strong man. He was, to be sure, a political pragmatist, but he was just as loyal to the murderous spirit of Codreanu as Horia Sima. At the Berghof meeting in January, Hitler and Keitel had informed Antonescu that Germany planned to attack the Soviet Union that spring. In exchange for Romanian military assistance, Hitler promised to return to Romania the lost territories snatched away by Stalin. Scattered across Bukovina and Bessarabia were large Jewish communities. Once the attack on the Soviet Union was under way, these would fall into German and Romanian hands. Both the Germans and Antonescu understood that reclaiming territory would also provide a fresh opportunity to solve the Romanian ‘Jewish problem’. Antonescu’s pact with Hitler was much more than a strategic alliance – it represented a shared understanding about shared ideological objectives.27

  Antonescu was indebted to Hitler for reinforcing his rule and taming the legionary movement, at least for now. In the aftermath of the revolt, Antonescu deported representatives of the SS, the RSHA and the Abwehr who had helped Sima and other Legionary conspirators escape – and may well have helped stir up the revolt. But in March, according to Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mihai Antonescu, ‘special emissaries of the Reich and of Himmler’ led by SS-Hauptsturmführer Gustav Richter, an expert on ‘Jewish matters’ arrived in Bucharest to discuss the ‘handling of Romania’s Jews’. Plainly, with 680,000 German troops already on Romanian soil, Richter expected that (as Mihai Antonescu reported) ‘responsibility for the handling of Romania’s Jews be handed over to the Germans exclusively’. General Antonescu refused. The dictator had no interest in protecting Jews, but wanted to retain control of strategy.

  The Germans, and in particular Himmler’s SS, did not give up. On 21 February, Himmler met with the former SD representative in Bucharest, Otto-Albrecht von Bolschwing, and a handful of other SS bureaucrats.28 At the end of April, RSHA emissary Richter returned to Bucharest and held more meetings with Mihai Antonescu with ‘excellent results’, he reported to Ambassador Manfred von Killinger. At last Himmler had an agreement with Antonescu’s regime that harmonised SS plans with Romanian strategy. Later that year, Mihai Antonescu made a remarkable statement to his Cabinet: ‘I can report to you that I have already conducted intensive negotiations with a high ranking German representative: they understand that the Jewish problem will ultimately require an international solution, and they wish to help us prepare this international solution.’ (My italics.)29 Given that when Mihai Antonescu made this statement many thousands of Jews had already been murdered by Romanians and German squads in Eastern Europe, it implies that the idea of a ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’, i.e. liquidation of Jews on an international scale, was already well advanced by the late summer of 1941 – and not months later as many historians assume.

  On 12 June 1941 Hitler met Antonescu again, this time in Munich.30 Antonescu later informed Ambassador von Killinger that Hitler had presented him with a document titled ‘Richtlinien für die Behandlung der Judenfrage’ (Guidelines for the Handling of the Jewish Question – in some versions Ostjuden). Killinger reported that ‘there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of General Antonescu’s assertion’.31 The meeting with Hitler had an immediate impact on Romanian anti-Jewish plans, especially with regard to the ‘lost provinces’. Antonescu began promulgating a radical new policy which he called ‘Cleansing the Land’. This would require identifying ‘all Jidani [Jews], communist agents or sympathisers … in order to enact whatever orders I may transmit at a given time’.32 A few days before 22 June, Antonescu ordered the Romanian Serviciul Special de Informaţiuni (the Special Intelligence Service or SSI) to begin forming Escalon Special (Special Echelons) modelled on Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen. On 22 June, the leader of Special Task Force D, Otto Ohlendorf, arrived at Romanian military HQ at Piatra Neam? in Moldavia – and remained there until the beginning of August, acting as (to borrow an American term) a special advisor. The Romanian Special Echelons were charged with ‘defending the army rear area’ and, like Heydrich’s execution squads, split into teams (echipe). These Special Echelons would spearhead the Romanian assault on the ‘Jewish enemy’.33

  General Antonescu had crushed the revolt led by Codreanu’s successor Horia Sima, but in spirit he was a Legionary. Antonescu absorbed Iron Guard chauvinism and cruelty into his own ‘ethnocratic’ state: he and his ministers firmly believed that ‘the Jews pose a permanent threat to every nation state’. At the end of June, Mihai Antonescu, who had been a professor of international law at Bucharest University, echoed Hitler’s speech to his generals before the Polish campaign: ‘I beg you to be implacable. Saccharine and foggy humanitarianism has no place here. The Roman Empire performed a series of barbarous acts … yet is was the greatest political creation … I take full legal responsibility and tell you there is no law!’34

  And it would be in Iaşi, the birthplace of the Legion of St Michael, that the SSI Special Echelons would launch a campaign that Mihai Antonescu (eschewing saccharine and foggy humanitarianism) called ‘total ethnic liberation’.

  At the end of June 1941 Iaşi was a frontier city just 10 miles from the Prut River, which marked the Romanian border with the Soviet Union. Earlier that summer, General Antonescu had pledged to Hitler that Romania would join his crusade ‘against Russian Bolshevism, the arch-enemy of European civilization’. The German 11th Army and the Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies waited on the Prut. Crammed into Iaşi’s barracks and milling about its streets was a flammable mix of Romanian troops, Romanian SSI agents and gendarmerie units, as well as thousands of Iron Guard Legionaries. Stationed here too were German soldiers from the 198th Division of the 30th Army Corps, and the Todt Organisation. Although the Jewish community had endured more than a decade of persecution and harassment by Iron Guard activists and other Romanian anti-Semites, it remained relatively prosperous. Altogether 100,000 people lived in Iaşi – just over 50,000 were Jewish. By the beginning of July, at least 13,266 Jews had been murdered either in the city itself or on the ‘death trains’.35 This abrupt escalation of violence is firm evidence that Antonescu had fully grasped German intentions with regard to European Jewry – and chose to emulate them.

  The full extent of German respon
sibility for inciting and managing the Romanian pogroms of 1941 has only very recently come to light. In 1996 an affidavit written by Captain Ioan Mihail, who took a leading role in the events in Iaşi, revealed that German soldiers stationed in Iaşi collaborated with the Romanian army and robbed, beat and murdered Jews. Although Einsatzgruppe D men did not directly participate in the Iaşi massacre, Himmler still exerted his baleful influence through the Special Echelons modelled directly on the Heydrich’s murder squads. This point can be reinforced by scores of eyewitness accounts that refer to the activities of German troops in Iaşi. SSI Chief Eugen Christescu testified that SS and SD agents had arrived in the city, as well as an Abwehr major, Hermann von Stransky. Although details about the precise role of the SS agents are scant, we know that the SSI Special Echelons went on to collaborate with Einsatzgruppe D elsewhere in Romania. Further evidence of this intertwining of German and Romanian interests comes from their military communications. Both German and Romanian military commanders reported their unease about Jews in the army rear areas and demanded their removal. As German and Romanian troops advanced into Bessarabia later in July, according to historian Matatias Carp, they executed ‘almost the entire Jewish population living in villages’.36

  Carp himself argued that this was a Romanian Holocaust – the culmination of decades of fervent nationalist bigotry and what he called the ‘rotting system of Romanian pseudo-democracy’. But would the destruction of Romania’s Jews have taken place at all if Hitler had not launched his attack on the Soviet Union? Would the Iron Guard and its Legionary militias have wielded such deadly power had they not been promoted by Himmler and Goebbels? And would the Romanian Holocaust have taken place at all had Hitler not levered Ion Antonescu into power? None of these questions is likely to have a simple answer. Nevertheless, we should hold them in mind as we try to piece together the events that took place in Iaşi at the end of June 1941.