The assassination of Armand Călinescu

In the early afternoon of 21 September 1939, in Bucharest, a group of legionaries of the fascist Iron Guard shot dead the Romanian prime minister, Armand Călinescu. The assassins stopped his car on his way home, killed his bodyguard and finished the prime minister off with a hail of bullets. They then burst into a radio station and managed to announce into the microphone that the prime minister had been “executed”. That same evening they were shot without trial, and their bodies were put on public display at the scene of the assassination. Over the following days the Romanian authorities killed, again without trial, at least several hundred members of the Legionary movement. The assassination robbed Romania of the politician who had most consistently tied its future to the victory of France and Britain, at a moment when the country was trying to maintain its neutrality between Germany and the Soviet Union.

“The man of steel”

Armand Călinescu was born on 4 June 1893 in Pitești. He studied law and philosophy in Bucharest and took his doctorate in economics in Paris. He entered politics in the ranks of the Peasants’ Party, later the National Peasants’ Party, and as early as the beginning of the 1930s, as under-secretary of state at the Ministry of the Interior, he was fighting both the Communists and the rising Legion of the Archangel Michael, or Iron Guard, led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. The movement combined extreme nationalism, Orthodox mysticism and antisemitism with a cult of violence. In December 1933 legionaries murdered the prime minister, Ion Duca, and Călinescu called the Guard “an association of murderers and vile desecrators of graves”.

When in the autumn of 1937 the National Peasants’ Party concluded an electoral pact with the Guard, Călinescu broke with it and went over to the side of King Carol II. As minister of the interior he was the chief executor of the royal dictatorship introduced in February 1938, and its hardest arm. Codreanu was arrested and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. On the night of 29–30 November 1938 gendarmes murdered him, together with a dozen or so other legionary prisoners, while they were being transported, and the authorities announced that they had been killed “while trying to escape”. The legionaries held Călinescu chiefly to blame and from then on hunted him. The police foiled several assassination attempts, among them a planned attack in the building of the Romanian Athenaeum.

On 7 March 1939, after the death of Patriarch Miron Cristea, Călinescu became prime minister, keeping the portfolios of the interior and defence. According to many historians he had by then already been the de facto head of government for some time. In foreign policy he looked to France and Britain, and after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact he tried to persuade the king that the real danger was Germany and that salvation could come only from its defeat. In September 1939 his government maintained neutrality, but allowed the gold of the Bank of Poland to pass through Romania, and on 18 September it received the Polish authorities who had crossed the border fleeing the Red Army, although under German pressure it had announced that they would be interned.

The conspiracy

After Codreanu’s death the leadership of the movement passed to Horia Sima, who had taken refuge in Germany with a group of legionaries. Romanian and Western historians, among them the German scholar Armin Heinen, point out that the legionaries in exile enjoyed the support of Alfred Rosenberg’s NSDAP Foreign Policy Office and probably of the SD security service. Sima returned illegally to Romania in the summer of 1939.

The group of assassins was led by a lawyer from Ploiești, Dumitru “Miti” Dumitrescu. In February 1939, after the police had uncovered a legionary terrorist cell, he fled across the border to Czechoslovakia, returning secretly to Bucharest by way of Hungary only on 17 September. His men, students and young legionaries from the Ploiești area, kept a store of grenades and pistols, and with money from Dumitrescu they bought a car with which they intended to ram the prime minister’s vehicle. According to Romanian sources, the authorities received some information about the preparations from a legionary who had broken with the movement, but were unable to prevent the attack. According to Romanian literature, the conspirators had at first considered a simultaneous attack on the prime minister, the king and the capital’s prefect of police, General Gabriel Marinescu.

The assassination

At about half past one in the afternoon of 21 September the prime minister’s car was taking its usual route to his home in the Cotroceni district. Near the Elefterie Bridge over the Dâmbovița a horse-drawn cart pulled out onto the road, and at the same moment the assassins’ car rammed the prime minister’s car from behind. The driver could not get round the cart and stopped. Six assassins leapt out of their car. First they shot the security agent Radu Androne, who was reaching for his gun, and then they opened fire on the prime minister through the windows and the open door. Călinescu was killed on the spot, hit by more than a dozen bullets – more than twenty, according to the post-mortem. The driver ran off and raised the alarm with the guard at the prime minister’s residence.

The assassins did not flee. They stopped a passing car, forced the driver at gunpoint to take them to the headquarters of Romanian radio in General Berthelot Street, shot the porter, disarmed the sentry and broke into the studio, where a concert was being broadcast. One of them managed to shout into the microphone that Prime Minister Armand Călinescu had been “executed by a team of legionaries”. According to the station’s staff, its manager managed to cut the broadcast, and the rest of the statement never went on air. According to one account, after a few minutes of silence listeners heard only that “a regrettable circumstance has interrupted the regular programme”. The assassins surrendered to the guards and were taken to the police prefecture.

Carol II noted in his diary that Călinescu had been “foully murdered by a gang of Guardists”, adding that a fight “to the death” was beginning, in which it had to be settled “who will destroy whom”. The king also at once pointed to foreign instigation. That same day General Gheorghe Argeșanu became prime minister, and General Gabriel Marinescu minister of the interior.

Reprisals

The reprisals were immediate and lawless. At about 11 p.m. the nine detainees – the six assassins themselves and three accomplices – were shot without trial, and their bodies were brought to the scene of the assassination and dumped on the cobbles beneath a banner reading: “From now on this will be the fate of traitors to the country”. For several days officials and pupils from Bucharest’s secondary schools were marched past them to discourage young people from joining the Guard.

On the night of 21–22 September and over the following days, on the king’s orders (passed on, according to Romanian sources, by the minister of the royal court, Ernest Urdăreanu), gendarmes and police shot legionaries throughout the country: a few, usually two or three, in each county, often chosen at random. Some were hanged from telegraph poles; a group was killed in Ploiești in front of the monument to Duca, the prime minister murdered in 1933. In the camps at Vaslui and Miercurea Ciuc and in the prison at Râmnicu Sărat several dozen of the movement’s leaders, who had been interned there for months, were killed. The number of victims is variously given. Legionary sources list 252 dead by name, and figures ranging from over 240 to over 300 appear in the literature. The repression all but wiped out the Iron Guard’s leadership inside the country at the time, but it did not break the movement. Sima, who survived, strengthened his leadership.

Călinescu was buried with state honours. His coffin lay in state at the Athenaeum, and on 24 September it was taken by train to Curtea de Argeș, where, in accordance with his will, he was laid to rest beside his parents. Condolences were sent by, among others, Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier and the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.

Whose hand?

For most contemporaries Berlin was behind the assassination. The killers came from among the legionaries whose leadership was operating in Germany, and the timing – a few days after the Red Army had entered Poland, when Germany was demanding ever greater concessions from Romania – seemed no coincidence. German propaganda, for its part, claimed that the assassination had been instigated by British and Polish intelligence in order to drag Romania into the war. This version was put about by, among others, the radio commentator Hans Fritzsche.

Historians judge the affair more cautiously. The support that the Guard’s exiled leadership received from the party and police institutions of the Reich is well documented, and some scholars believe that the assassination was prepared with German knowledge and approval. No evidence has been found, however, that the Reich government ordered it, and some historians point out that destabilising Romania in the first weeks of the war was not in the interest of Hitler, who cared above all about an undisturbed supply of Romanian oil. For the legionaries themselves, the motive was above all revenge for Codreanu, as both the assassins on the radio and the movement’s later legend, which called them “the avengers”, made clear.

The Argetoianu government

Argeșanu’s cabinet, appointed to carry out the repression, lasted a week. On 28 September the king entrusted the premiership to Constantin Argetoianu, an experienced politician and former finance minister, known for his sharp tongue and for memoirs in which he described his contemporaries mercilessly. Grigore Gafencu remained foreign minister, and Romania maintained its neutrality. Argetoianu governed for less than two months. At the end of November 1939 he was replaced by Gheorghe Tătărescu. The frequent changes of cabinet showed that after Călinescu’s death Romanian politics had lost its axis and depended more and more on the king’s improvisations.

Significance

The assassination of 21 September weakened the pro-Allied party in Bucharest at the very moment when Romania had to decide how to survive in a world in which Germany and the Soviet Union had divided Poland between them. Throughout the Phoney War Carol II balanced between the powers, but after the fall of France in the summer of 1940 he turned towards Germany and invited the Iron Guard into the government. This saved neither the country’s borders nor his throne. After the loss of Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, northern Transylvania and Southern Dobruja, the king abdicated in September 1940, and on 14 September General Ion Antonescu proclaimed the National Legionary State, in which Horia Sima became deputy prime minister.

The legionaries then took bloody revenge for September 1939. On the night of 26–27 November 1940, in Jilava prison, they murdered 64 political prisoners, among them Generals Argeșanu and Marinescu and the head of the intelligence service, Mihail Moruzov, and the next day they killed the historian Nicolae Iorga, a former prime minister and adviser to the king. They also blew up the Călinescu family tomb at Curtea de Argeș. In January 1941 the Iron Guard rebellion (PL) against Antonescu, accompanied by a pogrom of the Jews of Bucharest, ended with the army crushing the movement, with the tacit consent of Hitler, who preferred a stable ally to fanatical ideologues. Half a year later Antonescu’s Romania marched with Germany against the Soviet Union.