The abdication of Carol II

Early on the morning of 6 September 1940, in the royal palace in Bucharest, Carol II signed an act transferring the throne to his eighteen-year-old son Michael. A few hours later the young king took his oath before General Ion Antonescu, who the day before had received full powers from Carol and was now “leader of the state”. That same day the former monarch left Bucharest on a special train with Magda Lupescu; at the station in Timișoara legionaries fired on the train, and Carol crossed the Yugoslav border lying on the floor of his carriage. So ended the ten-year reign – dictatorial since 1938 – of a king who in a single summer had surrendered a third of his country to its neighbours without firing a shot. It is not uncommon to read that “Marshal Antonescu” took over the government. In September 1940, however, he was a major general. Ten days after the abdication he promoted himself to lieutenant general (general of an army corps), and he received the baton of a Marshal of Romania only in August 1941, after the recovery of Bessarabia.

A summer of defeats

Romania entered 1940 as a neutral state, covered by the Anglo-French guarantee of April 1939 and ruled by a king who had exercised a dictatorship since February 1938. The fall of France deprived it of its only serious protector. On 26 June 1940 the Soviet Union demanded Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and Carol II, advised by Berlin and Rome to give way, surrendered both provinces without a fight. The king then tried to buy Hitler’s goodwill: on 1 July he renounced the guarantee of the Western powers and asked for a German military mission, and on 4 July he appointed the pro-German government of Ion Gigurtu, which included legionaries of the fascist and antisemitic Iron Guard. In August the government issued decrees modelled on the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jews of their rights and banning mixed marriages.

The concessions did not help. Adolf Hitler, who distrusted Carol and remembered his manoeuvring between Paris, London and Berlin, demanded that Romania come to terms with Hungary and Bulgaria. The negotiations with Hungary broke down, and on 30 August Joachim von Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano announced in Vienna the Second Vienna Award, which gave northern Transylvania to Hungary. That night the Crown Council accepted the verdict in exchange for a German–Italian guarantee of the rest of the country. Romanians, brought up on the myth of the Greater Romania united in 1918, received the news as a national catastrophe. By Romanian reckoning, between June and September the country lost nearly 100,000 square kilometres with almost seven million inhabitants, roughly a third of its territory and population.

The street against the king

In the last days of August demonstrations against the Vienna diktat had already broken out in Bucharest, Cluj and other cities. They were started by supporters of Iuliu Maniu’s National Peasants’ Party, but the legionaries quickly took them over, and the crowd’s anger turned against the king and his camarilla, regarded as the chief culprits of the disaster. On 1 September the leader of the Guard, Horia Sima, who had left the Gigurtu government in July, called on Carol to abdicate. On the night of 3–4 September the legionaries attempted an armed revolt, attacking public buildings in Bucharest and several other cities. The coup failed, but it showed that the government was losing control of the country.

The Guard had personal scores to settle with the king. In November 1938 gendarmes had killed its founder, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, and after the murder of Prime Minister Armand Călinescu by legionaries in September 1939 the authorities had shot more than two hundred members of the movement without trial. In the spring of 1940 Carol sought an understanding with the surviving leaders, but no one in the Guard had forgotten the repression.

Those around the monarch began to look for a way out. According to historians, as early as 2 September the courtier Valer Pop, one of the most influential men in the camarilla, advised the king to appoint General Antonescu prime minister. He believed that only someone seen as Carol’s victim and the legionaries’ friend could calm the street, while as a member of the elite he would not turn against the existing order. When the king hesitated, Pop visited the German legation on the night of 4 September and asked the minister, Wilhelm Fabricius, to telephone the palace with the message that the Reich wished to see Antonescu at the head of the government. Fabricius did so.

The general from the monastery

Ion Antonescu was then 58. He had been a gifted staff officer in the First World War, military attaché in Paris and London, Chief of the General Staff in 1933–1934 and Minister of Defence in the government of Octavian Goga. He had been at odds with the king for years, and kept in touch with the Guard, although he did not belong to it. In July 1940 he sharply criticised the surrender of Bessarabia, for which he was arrested and interned in the monastery at Bistrița in Wallachia. From the monastery, through a trusted lawyer, Mihai Antonescu (no relation), he made contact with the Germans, and in August he simply walked out of internment, according to some historians thanks to German intercession. By the beginning of September he was a man acceptable at once to Berlin, to the legionaries and to some of the old politicians.

On 4 September Gigurtu resigned, and Carol II charged Antonescu with forming a government of national unity. The general approached the leaders of the democratic parties, the National Peasant Maniu and the Liberal Dinu Brătianu. Both refused to join the government and demanded the king’s abdication as a precondition. Antonescu, who had no political base, demanded power for himself instead. On 5 September Carol signed a decree that “invested” the general, as President of the Council of Ministers, “with full powers to lead the Romanian state”. The king kept supreme command of the army, the prerogative of mercy, and the rights to confer decorations, receive envoys, conclude treaties and appoint the prime minister. The same day the 1938 constitution was suspended and parliament dissolved.

Carol hoped that by giving up power he would keep his crown. Antonescu had no intention of leaving it to him. The new prime minister’s first decision was to dismiss the commander of the capital’s garrison, General Gheorghe Argeșanu, who was loyal to the king, and replace him with General Dumitru Coroamă. When a crowd gathered outside the palace demanding abdication, the king ordered the troops to fire on the demonstrators; according to Romanian historians both Antonescu and Coroamă refused. Rumours also reached the general that Generals Gheorghe Mihail and Paul Teodorescu, loyal to Carol, were planning to kill him. On the evening of 5 September Antonescu demanded that the king abdicate and leave the country. Years later, talking to one of the National Peasant leaders, he boasted that he had forced the abdication at gunpoint; there is no other evidence for this. Most of the courtiers, and even part of the camarilla, advised the king to step down.

The sixth of September

Carol signed the act at six in the morning on 6 September. The word “abdicate” does not appear in it: the king declared that he was “today passing to his son” the burden of rule, which, according to his biographers, allowed him to believe that he would one day return. Michael ascended the throne for the second time; he had already been king once, as a five-year-old, in 1927–1930, until his father took the crown from him. Now he was eighteen (he was born on 25 October 1921) and had sat in the Senate for a year as heir to the throne.

The new king could not swear an oath on the constitution, because there was none, or before parliament, because it had been dissolved. A special decree of 6 September provided for an oath to the nation, taken in the presence of “the head of the Romanian state, the President of the Council of Ministers”, the patriarch and the president of the Court of Cassation. Michael therefore swore fidelity to the nation and to defend the integrity of its territory before Antonescu, Patriarch Nicodim and the newly appointed president of the court, Dimitrie Lupu. The ceremony was broadcast on the radio. Antonescu, who was to have made a speech, said just one sentence: “May God help the nation, Your Majesty and me.” The same day the patriarch anointed Michael and placed the steel crown on his head in the patriarchal cathedral.

The new king’s first decrees confirmed the balance of power. Decree no. 3067 repeated the provisions of 5 September and entrusted Antonescu with full power in the state, while decree no. 3072 limited the monarch’s prerogatives to those Carol had kept the day before. The general took the title Conducătorul Statului, “Leader of the State”, the Romanian counterpart of the Italian Duce and the German Führer. The monarchy survived, but as decoration: the king was not told of the government’s decisions and his court was under constant watch. On 8 September Antonescu gave the king’s mother, Princess Helen, whom Carol had exiled to Florence, the title of Queen Mother. She returned to Bucharest on 14 September.

The flight

Antonescu kept his promise to ensure the former king a safe departure. On 6 September Carol, Lupescu, the Marshal of the Court Ernest Urdăreanu and a few trusted companions boarded a special train in Bucharest which, according to some sources, carried the king’s possessions in thirty wagons: paintings, collections, cars and money. The legionaries believed that Carol should not escape unpunished for the death of Codreanu. As the train passed through the station at Timișoara, a group of legionaries opened fire on it. The soldiers escorting it fired back, and the train did not stop. Carol and Lupescu, according to eyewitnesses hiding on the floor of the carriage, crossed the Yugoslav border on 7 September. The details of the episode vary from account to account, and the sources give no figures for casualties in the shooting, but the attack itself is confirmed by both Romanian and Western historians. Carol travelled through Yugoslavia and Italy to Spain. He never saw his son again.

Dobruja and the National Legionary State

The abdication did not end the list of losses. On 7 September, at Craiova, delegates of Romania and Bulgaria signed a treaty under which Romania returned to Bulgaria southern Dobruja, the so-called Quadrilateral (Cadrilater), won after the Second Balkan War in 1913: some 7,400 square kilometres with about 360,000 inhabitants, mostly Bulgarians and Turks. Romania concluded the treaty in the name of the new king, but it was ratified on 13 September not by Michael but by Antonescu as President of the Council of Ministers. The treaty provided for a compulsory exchange of populations: according to various tallies, between 80,000 and over 100,000 Romanians, many of them settlers brought in after 1913, were removed from southern Dobruja, and some 60,000–65,000 Bulgarians from the north. Unlike the Vienna Award, this border change survived the war and remains in force today.

Unable to win over the democratic parties, Antonescu relied on the legionaries. On 14 September a royal decree proclaimed Romania a “National Legionary State”. The Legionary Movement became “the only movement recognised in the new state”, Antonescu “Leader of the Legionary State and head of the Legionary regime”, and Sima “leader of the Legionary Movement” and deputy prime minister. The decree’s last article declared that from then on “all strife between brothers ceases”. The legionaries took over the ministries of the interior, education, religious affairs and foreign affairs, their men became prefects in every county, and the Guard took control of the press and propaganda. This two-headed regime, in which the general’s army shared power with a fascist movement, stepped up the persecution of Jews from its first days: in the autumn they were deprived of their land, forests and businesses, and legionary squads robbed and beat them with impunity.

Its place in the war

The September upheaval in Bucharest ended twenty years of a policy in which Romania had sought security at the side of France and Britain. Antonescu at once staked everything on Germany. The request for a German military mission, which Carol had sent back in July, was granted under his rule: in October the first German soldiers arrived in Romania, officially to train the army and guard the oilfields of Ploiești, the Reich’s most important source of oil. On 23 November 1940, in Berlin, Antonescu signed Romania’s accession to the Tripartite Pact.

The alliance with the legionaries proved short-lived. At the end of November 1940 legionaries murdered more than sixty dignitaries of the old regime in Jilava prison, and then the historian and former prime minister Nicolae Iorga. In January 1941, when the general began to push them out of power, the Guard attempted a putsch combined with a bloody pogrom of the Jews of Bucharest. Antonescu crushed the rebellion (PL) with the backing of Hitler, who preferred order in Romania to revolution, and from February 1941 ruled as a military dictator. On 22 June 1941 he took the country into war against the Soviet Union, counting on recovering Bessarabia and, as a reward for loyalty, northern Transylvania. His regime bears responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Roma.

Michael, whom Antonescu treated as an ornament of the state, played his part only in 1944. On 23 August, after the Red Army had broken through the front in Moldavia, the king had the dictator arrested in the palace and announced that Romania was changing sides and joining the Allies. Carol II never returned to his country: he died in exile in Portugal in 1953.