The coup in Romania

On the afternoon of 23 August 1944, at the Royal Palace in Bucharest, the twenty-two-year-old King Michael I demanded that Marshal Ion Antonescu conclude an armistice with the Allies immediately. When the dictator refused, an officer of the palace guard and a few soldiers arrested him on the spot, together with the Foreign Minister, Mihai Antonescu. At around 10 p.m. the King announced on the radio that Romania was ceasing hostilities against the United Nations, and appointed General Constantin Sănătescu as Prime Minister. Three days earlier the Soviet offensive at Iași and Kishinev had begun, and within two days it had shattered the German-Romanian front.

War chronologies record under 23 August that Romania broke with the Axis, capitulated to the Soviet Union and joined the Allies. That is a fair summary, but the three things did not happen on a single day. On 23 August came the coup, and the new government unilaterally announced the end of the war with the Allies and its acceptance of their terms. Romania declared war on Germany only on 25 August, after German air raids on Bucharest. The formal armistice – in practice a surrender on Allied terms – was signed in Moscow during the night of 12–13 September 1944. Until then the Red Army treated Romania as an enemy country.

Romania at Hitler’s side

Romania had ended up in the Axis camp as a result of the disasters of 1940. In June that year, after a Soviet ultimatum, it ceded Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the USSR; in August the Second Vienna Award gave northern Transylvania to Hungary; and in September Bulgaria regained southern Dobruja. King Carol II abdicated in favour of his son, and power passed to General Antonescu as Conducător, the “leader” of the state. In the autumn a German military mission arrived in the country, and in June 1941 the Romanian army marched with the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union to recover the lost provinces – and went further, as far as Odessa, the Crimea and Stalingrad.

Economically, Romania was Germany’s most valuable ally. The oilfields around Ploiești supplied most of the crude oil the Reich could import from beyond its borders, which is why from 1943 they were one of the main targets of Allied air power – from Operation Tidal Wave in August 1943 to the bombing campaign from Italy in the spring and summer of 1944. The defeat at Stalingrad, where the Romanian Third and Fourth Armies were destroyed, shook faith in victory even in ruling circles. From 1943 the war grew ever more unpopular in Romania: the country paid for it with inflation, shortages and mounting losses, while the Germans did not pay promptly for most of what they received.

In the spring of 1944 the front approached the country’s borders. In March Soviet troops crossed the Dniester and the Prut and reached Romania’s frontier; in April they entered northern Moldavia and halted before Iași. On 2 April Vyacheslav Molotov declared that the USSR did not intend to acquire any Romanian territory beyond the 1940 border or to change Romania’s existing social order. For several summer months the front along the Iași–Kishinev–Dniester line was relatively quiet, while in Bucharest a game was being played over who would take the country out of the war, and on what terms.

Peace feelers: Cairo and Stockholm

The search for a way out of the war began after Stalingrad and was pursued on two tracks at once. The government – chiefly the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Mihai Antonescu, with the marshal’s knowledge – sounded out the Allies through legations in neutral countries. The opposition, above all the leader of the National Peasants, Iuliu Maniu, maintained its own contacts with the British. For a long time these efforts foundered on the demand for unconditional surrender to all three powers and on the fact that London and Washington referred the Romanians to Moscow: the future of a country whose army was fighting on the Eastern Front was to be decided first and foremost by the Soviet Union.

Cairo became the most important channel. In March 1944 Prince Barbu Știrbey, a former prime minister and confidant of Queen Marie, arrived there, sent with Antonescu’s consent but also acting in concert with Maniu. According to his biographers, on 17 March – the same day the Red Army reached the Dniester – he began talks with representatives of the three powers: Britain’s Lord Moyne, the Soviet ambassador Nikolai Novikov and the American Lincoln MacVeagh. In April the Allies passed their armistice terms to the Romanians: a break with Germany and fighting alongside the Allies, a return to the Soviet-Romanian border of 1940, reparations to the USSR, the release of prisoners, freedom of movement for Soviet troops, and Soviet support for the annulment of the Vienna Award, that is, the return of northern Transylvania. Later the opposition’s envoy, Constantin Vișoianu, joined the talks in Cairo. Antonescu did not accept the terms.

The second channel was Stockholm. There the Romanian minister, Frederic Nanu, held talks with the Soviet ambassador, Alexandra Kollontai. According to some historians, in June 1944 the Soviet side signalled its readiness to soften the terms – there was talk, among other things, of leaving part of the country free of Soviet troops and of spreading the reparations over time – but this channel too brought no decision. Antonescu temporised: he did not want to surrender to the USSR, he hoped for better terms from the Western Allies, and he feared that the Germans, who had strong forces in the country, would immediately occupy Romania, as they had occupied Hungary in March 1944. According to accounts of his meeting with Adolf Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair on 5 August 1944, he avoided giving any unequivocal assurance that Romania would stay in the war to the end, but he did not break with him either.

The National Democratic Bloc and the conspiracy around the King

Throughout the dictatorship the opposition operated semi-legally: the parties had been dissolved, but their leaders had not been imprisoned. In June 1944 four groupings reached an agreement and formed the National Democratic Bloc: Maniu’s National Peasants’ Party, the National Liberal Party led by Constantin (“Dinu”) Brătianu, the Social Democrats of Constantin Titel Petrescu, and the small, illegal Romanian Communist Party, represented by Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu and Emil Bodnăraș. The communists’ participation was in part a condition set by the Allies, who at Moscow’s wish wanted to see them in a future government.

The court became the centre of the conspiracy. Michael I, formally commander-in-chief but without real power, surrounded himself with advisers who favoured switching sides: the Marshal of the Court, Ioan Mocsony-Stârcea, his secretary Mircea Ionnițiu and the diplomat Grigore Niculescu-Buzești. Generals joined the plot too, among them the head of the King’s military household, Constantin Sănătescu, and Aurel Aldea. According to participants’ accounts, at a secret meeting during the night of 13–14 June 1944 representatives of the court, the army and the communists agreed on a plan: the King would summon Antonescu and demand an armistice, and if he refused would have him arrested, after which a government made up of Bloc politicians and military men would take power. At the same time the army was to neutralise the German units in and around the capital. The coup was provisionally set for 26 August.

Events at the front brought the date forward. On 20 August the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts of Army Generals Rodion Malinovsky and Fyodor Tolbukhin attacked General Johannes Frießner’s Army Group South Ukraine. In many places the Romanian divisions in the front line gave way at once, and the German Sixth Army – rebuilt after Stalingrad – found itself encircled between the Prut and the Dniester. By 22 August it was clear that the front in Moldavia had ceased to exist. Antonescu intended to go to the front, and at the same time – as some writers maintain – he was beginning to lean towards an armistice on his own terms. The conspirators decided they could not wait.

23 August at the palace

On the afternoon of 23 August Antonescu came to the palace at the King’s summons, accompanied by Mihai Antonescu. General Sănătescu was present at the meeting. The marshal reported on the situation at the front. Michael demanded an immediate ceasefire with the Allies and the USSR. According to witnesses, Antonescu replied that an armistice would be possible only after the Germans had been given notice, and that as a soldier he had given Hitler his word; he also refused to open talks directly with Moscow. At that the King left the room, and an officer of the palace guard came in with a few soldiers and informed both Antonescus that they were under arrest. They were locked in the palace strongroom. That same evening other members of the government and senior commanders, summoned to the palace on various pretexts, were also detained.

In the evening the German ambassador, Manfred von Killinger, arrived at the palace. According to some accounts the King, playing for time, assured him that nothing untoward had happened and promised the Germans free passage out of the country if they did not resort to force. At around 10 p.m. the radio broadcast the King’s proclamation. Michael announced that Romania was ceasing hostilities against the United Nations, was accepting the armistice offered by the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States, and would from that moment fight alongside them to recover northern Transylvania. The army was ordered to stop fighting the Red Army and to resist any attempt at German intervention.

General Sănătescu became Prime Minister. His government consisted mainly of military men and experts, with the leaders of the Bloc – Maniu, Brătianu, Petrescu and Pătrășcanu – joining it as ministers without portfolio; Pătrășcanu also took over the justice ministry on an interim basis, and Niculescu-Buzești foreign affairs. During the night the arrested marshal was handed over to the guard of Bodnăraș’s communist fighting squads, who hid him in a house on the outskirts of Bucharest. At the turn of August and September the communists handed him over to the Soviets, who took him to Moscow.

Germany’s response

The Germans were taken by surprise, although there had been no shortage of warnings. Hitler regarded the coup as a putsch by a handful of courtiers that could be reversed. During the night of 23–24 August he ordered it to be put down by force, the King and the traitors arrested, and reliance placed on “loyal” Romanians; émigrés of Horia Sima’s Iron Guard were held in reserve. General Alfred Gerstenberg, commander of the air defences of the Ploiești area, set off for Bucharest with a motorised column on the evening of 23 August. On the morning of 24 August there was fighting on the northern outskirts of the capital; the Germans took the airfield at Otopeni but got no further. Landings by Brandenburg special forces on military airfields were crushed, and the idea of having Otto Skorzeny free Antonescu, on the model of the Gran Sasso operation, came to nothing because no one knew where the marshal was being held.

On 24 August the Luftwaffe bombed Bucharest. Bombs fell on the Royal Palace and the central districts, among other places; civilians were killed and wounded. By then the King was outside the capital, in a safe place in Oltenia. The air raids settled the question of a declaration of war: on 25 August the Sănătescu government announced that Romania was at war with Germany. According to some studies the Romanians also asked the Allies for air support, and on 26 August American bombers struck German positions in the Băneasa forest north of the city. By 28 August Romanian troops had cleared the area around Bucharest, and Gerstenberg had been taken prisoner. Within a week the Romanians had seized the Carpathian passes near Brașov, the Danube port of Giurgiu and Constanța. According to Romanian figures they took some 56,000 Germans prisoner at a cost of 8,600 killed and wounded.

The coup sealed the fate of the German forces in Moldavia. The Romanian armies stopped fighting, the lines of retreat through Romania were cut, and the German Sixth Army and part of the Eighth Army were destroyed in pockets east and west of the Prut. According to Soviet figures the Red Army took more than 100,000 prisoners in the Jassy–Kishinev offensive; German losses are sometimes compared to the defeat at Stalingrad. The Germans also lost Ploiești: the German anti-aircraft garrison, some 25,000 strong, was pushed back by the Romanians to the outskirts of the town, and on 30 August Soviet troops entered Ploiești.

Switching sides or surrender?

For the Romanians, 23 August meant leaving the war and changing alliances; for Moscow, it was the surrender of a defeated enemy. The Red Army did not regard the unilateral ceasefire as binding: until the armistice was signed it disarmed the Romanian units it met along its way and, according to various estimates, took between 100,000 and 140,000 Romanian soldiers prisoner, most of whom were deported to camps in the USSR. The Romanian delegation that flew to Moscow at the end of August was kept waiting a long time for talks. The armistice signed during the night of 12–13 September confirmed the Soviet gains of 1940, imposed reparations of 300 million dollars, placed the country under the supervision of an Allied Control Commission acting under the direction of the Soviet high command, and obliged Romania to field at least twelve divisions against Germany and Hungary. The Vienna Award was declared null and void, and Transylvania, or “the greater part thereof”, was promised to Romania.

The Western Allies, on whom the opposition had pinned its greatest hopes, welcomed the coup with relief but had no intention of quarrelling with Joseph Stalin over Romania. In October 1944, in Moscow, Winston Churchill proposed to Stalin a division of influence in the Balkans under which Romania fell 90 per cent to the USSR.

Significance

The Hungarian-born American historian John Lukacs called the coup of 23 August the most successful coup d’état of the Second World War: a country in which an entire German army was stationed changed sides within a day. Romania escaped fighting over most of its territory, and its infrastructure, including the oil industry, survived largely intact. For Germany it was a double defeat. The loss of the Ploiești oilfields deprived the Reich of its main source of crude oil outside its own borders, which in the last months of the war deepened the fuel shortages of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. The opening of the route through Romania allowed the Red Army to move on Bulgaria – which in September 1944 found itself at war with the USSR and, after another coup, went over to the Allies – and then on Yugoslavia and Hungary. The Germans had to withdraw their troops from Greece and Albania to avoid their being cut off. The Romanian example had an almost immediate effect on Hitler’s other allies: in September Finland left the war, and in October the Regent of Hungary, Miklós Horthy, made an unsuccessful attempt to conclude an armistice.

From the autumn of 1944 the Romanian army fought alongside the Red Army in Transylvania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, losing, according to Romanian figures, nearly 170,000 killed, wounded and missing. At home, however, the winners turned out to be the communists, even though on 23 August they had been the weakest member of the coalition. Backed by Soviet troops and the Allied Control Commission, they secured the appointment of Petru Groza’s government in March 1945. Ion Antonescu, after a year and a half in Soviet captivity, was tried before the Romanian People’s Tribunal and shot on 1 June 1946, together with Mihai Antonescu. Maniu was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947 and died in Sighet prison. Michael I, whom Stalin had decorated with the Order of Victory, was forced to abdicate on 30 December 1947 and went into exile. For decades communist historiography presented 23 August as an “armed uprising” led by the Communist Party, playing down the role of the King and the historic parties; after 1989 Romanian historians restored them to their proper place, although the dispute over whether the coup was primarily a consequence of the Soviet offensive or of the Romanians’ own decision continues to this day.