German pressure on Romania

On 14 September 1939 the Romanian government of Prime Minister Armand Călinescu took two decisions that Germany had been demanding. It resolved that if the Polish civil and military authorities took refuge in Romania they would be interned, and it drastically restricted the passage of war materials destined for Poland across the country’s territory. Two days earlier, on 12 September, the Reich foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had demanded that Bucharest immediately stop the free transit of war supplies to Poland. The neutrality that Romania had declared on 6 September, and which in the first days of the war had been well disposed towards its Polish ally, was beginning, under pressure from a victorious Reich, to look more and more like neutrality on German terms.

The Romanian corridor

Poland had gone to war in the hope of receiving help from its Western allies through neutral Romania. Equipment ordered in France and Britain was to be shipped across the Mediterranean and through the Turkish Straits to Constanța, and from there by rail through Bukovina to the border at Śniatyn and Zaleszczyki. Romania, bound to Poland by the alliance of 1921, did not enter the war, but it did allow transit. As early as 1 September it agreed to the passage of a consignment of arms and aircraft accompanied by British officers.

For Germany this was a political rather than a military problem. By mid-September little had reached Poland, since the ships carrying Western aid took weeks to arrive and the Wehrmacht was advancing faster than anyone had foreseen. Berlin, however, had no intention of tolerating the slightest gap in Poland’s isolation, or a precedent that might be repeated in a longer war. It also held strong cards. Romania depended on trade with the Reich and was bound to it by the economic agreement of March 1939, and from 5 September Ribbentrop had been letting Bucharest know that German protection against Hungarian claims to Transylvania depended on strict neutrality. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact Romania could not rule out that the Reich and the USSR had also come to an understanding about it – which was, in fact, the case.

Ribbentrop’s demand

On 12 September, as the Polish armies were withdrawing behind the Vistula and the San and the command was planning the defence of the Romanian Bridgehead in eastern Lesser Poland, Ribbentrop demanded that the Romanian government immediately halt the free flow of war supplies to Poland. Germany’s intermediary in Bucharest was its minister, Wilhelm Fabricius, who had represented the Reich in Romania since 1936 and knew the men around King Carol II well.

Bucharest had little room for manoeuvre. France and Britain had declared war on Germany, but there was no sign that they would come to Poland’s aid, and on 12 September the French commander-in-chief, Maurice Gamelin, halted the Saar Offensive. Romania was surrounded by neighbours laying claim to its lands, and in this situation the Anglo-French guarantee of April 1939 was a mere scrap of paper.

The decisions of 14 September

On 14 September, under heavy German pressure, the Romanian cabinet decided that Polish military and civilian leaders would be interned if they evacuated to Romania. On the same day the foreign minister, Grigore Gafencu, received Fabricius, and the two discussed the wish of members of the Polish government and staff to enter Romanian territory. Romania had a legal basis for this: under the Fifth Hague Convention of 1907 on the rights and duties of neutral powers, a neutral state that admits troops of the belligerents onto its territory is obliged to intern them. The decision did not apply directly to civilians. From 15 September the Romanian border services were preparing to receive women, children, the wounded and political refugees.

At the same time the Romanian authorities drastically restricted the passage of war materials for Poland across the country’s territory. In practice this meant the end of hopes that Western equipment might still reach Poland through Constanța in time. The aid that was on its way never reached the front.

The gold of the Bank of Poland

Despite German pressure, Romania did allow the most valuable cargo Poland had to evacuate to cross its territory. The gold reserve of the Bank of Poland, taken out of Warsaw in the first days of the war, was moved across eastern Poland by lorry and rail under the direction of a former treasury minister, Colonel Ignacy Matuszewski, and Major Henryk Floyar-Rajchman. On 13 September the gold convoy crossed the Romanian border at Śniatyn. Romanian railways carried the cargo to Constanța, where some 75–80 tonnes of bullion were loaded onto the British tanker Eocene (PL). By 16 September the ship was on her way to Istanbul (sources differ as to whether on that day she sailed from Constanța or entered the Bosporus). Her British captain kept as close inshore as possible so that, if torpedoed, he could run her aground and save the cargo. From there the gold travelled by rail to Beirut and on by sea to France. A smaller part, about 3 tonnes, remained in Romania as a deposit with the National Bank of Romania and returned to Poland only in 1947.

When Fabricius protested against the gold being let through, Gafencu feigned ignorance of the shipment and promised to conduct a “proper inquiry”. The German minister warned him that Romania had committed a serious breach of neutrality which must not be repeated. But the gold, with which Poland would later finance its army in the West, was already safe.

Călinescu’s offer

On 16 September Prime Minister Călinescu put a proposal to the Germans that shows clearly how Bucharest tried to turn Poland’s defeat to its own advantage. According to Rebecca Haynes, the British historian of Romanian policy towards Germany, Călinescu offered that if the Reich handed over to Romania weapons captured in Poland, Romania would guarantee far larger deliveries of oil and grain, sufficient for Germany’s wartime needs for years to come. The prime minister, the most pro-Allied politician in the king’s circle, had not changed his views. Romania simply needed arms desperately, and the only state that could now supply them was Germany. Oil, which the Reich needed above all else, was the only currency Bucharest had in hand.

Significance

The decisions of 12–16 September opened the way to the events of the following days. On 17 September the Red Army entered Poland, and during the night of 17–18 September President Ignacy Mościcki, the government and the Commander-in-Chief, Edward Rydz-Śmigły, crossed the Romanian border, counting on free passage to France. As announced, they were interned. Romania did not, however, hand them over to the Germans, and tens of thousands of Polish soldiers, many of whom slipped out of the camps with the tacit consent of the Romanian authorities, made their way to France. On 21 September legionaries of the Iron Guard assassinated Călinescu.

The offer of oil for arms foreshadowed the future. Throughout the Phoney War the Germans, the British and the French fought over Romanian oil, while Bucharest balanced between them. On 27 May 1940, during the German offensive in the West, Romania concluded the so-called Oil Pact with the Reich: oil in exchange for arms, including, according to historians, weapons captured in Poland. A few months later the country that in September 1939 had interned the Polish authorities under German pressure joined the Tripartite Pact, and in June 1941 it marched with the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union.