German pressure on Romania in October

In the autumn of 1939 neutral Romania mattered to Germany above all as a source of oil, and Berlin kept watch to ensure that its neutrality did not tilt towards France and Britain. Two episodes from October show well how far this tutelage extended. On 11 October the Reich’s envoy in Bucharest, Wilhelm Fabricius, reported that King Carol II was asking Germany, as a personal favour, to agree to the departure for Switzerland of the interned former President of Poland, Ignacy Mościcki. Berlin refused. On 20 October, according to popular chronologies, Fabricius tried in vain to persuade Romania to renounce the guarantee given to it by Britain and France in April 1939.

The interned President

On the night of 17–18 September 1939, after the Red Army had marched in, President Mościcki, the government and the Commander-in-Chief crossed the Romanian border, counting on safe passage to France. Romania, which as early as 14 September had announced under German pressure that it would intern the Polish authorities, kept its word. Mościcki was placed under guard at Bicaz in the Eastern Carpathians. Bucharest’s position, however, was not entirely clear. According to a dispatch from Fabricius of 14 September, the Foreign Minister, Grigore Gafencu, had then announced that the military would be disarmed and interned, but that civilians wishing to travel abroad could not be prevented from doing so, since once across the border they were private persons and not members of a government.

Berlin had no intention of accepting this interpretation. On 19 September Joachim von Ribbentrop instructed that the Romanian government be told that the Reich welcomed the “unequivocal application” of neutrality – that is, the internment of the members of the Polish government and the prevention of their departure. On 22 September he had Fabricius declare to Gafencu that permission for the Polish ministers to leave would be regarded as an unfriendly act and a breach of neutrality, and that the continued existence of a Polish government would delay the “pacification” of the region, contrary to the interests of Germany and Russia. According to Fabricius’s later account, the Prime Minister, Armand Călinescu, promised him that any departure of Mościcki would first be agreed with Germany.

A week later, however, the situation changed. On 29 September Mościcki resigned his office, and on 30 September in Paris the new President, Władysław Raczkiewicz, was sworn in and appointed the government of Władysław Sikorski. From then on Mościcki was a private person, an ailing professor of chemistry over seventy years of age. He wished to go to Switzerland, to which he was bound by many years of scientific work in Fribourg and of which he had been a citizen in 1908–1920.

The King’s request

Carol II decided to back this request in person. According to a dispatch from Bucharest of 11 October, the King asked Germany for its consent as a favour to himself. Fabricius later wrote that the King’s wish had also been conveyed to the Germans by the new Prime Minister, Constantin Argetoianu, who had headed the government since 28 September, following the murder of Călinescu by the Iron Guard. The very fact that the monarch of a neutral state was asking a foreign power for permission to release an interned old man said a great deal about Romania’s position.

The answer came on 14 October. The telegram from Berlin left no doubt that Germany was “irrevocably opposed” to Mościcki’s departure. For the Reich the issue was not the former President himself, who no longer played any political role, but the precedent. Mościcki might be followed by the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły and dozens of other Polish politicians and officers, and every one of them who reached France would strengthen the government-in-exile, whose existence Germany did not recognise. Berlin treated the internment of the Polish authorities as the touchstone of Romanian neutrality, and the refusal as a reminder of who dictated terms in eastern Europe.

The April guarantee

On 13 April 1939, a week after the Italian invasion of Albania, Britain and France announced a guarantee of the independence of Romania and Greece, modelled on the guarantee to Poland. Carol II accepted it gladly, although his government did not want to bind itself to the Western powers by an alliance or to join the “peace front” that London was building. After Poland’s defeat the value of the guarantee was more than doubtful, but it remained the only formal commitment of the Western powers towards Romania.

In October 1939 the guarantee took on new significance. On 19 October in Ankara, Britain, France and Turkey signed a treaty of mutual assistance. Its Article 3 provided that, for as long as the British and French guarantees to Greece and Romania of 13 April 1939 remained in force, Turkey would give Britain and France all the aid in its power should they become involved in war on their account. The guarantee was ceasing to be an empty declaration: it tied Romania, if only indirectly, to a coalition that Germany regarded as aimed against itself.

It is in this context that chronologies place under 20 October Fabricius’s attempt to induce Bucharest to give up the guarantee. The selection of German Foreign Ministry documents from this period published after the war contains no record of such a conversation, but it does show that the matter was on Berlin’s agenda. On 24 October Ernst Woermann, director of the Political Department, told the Romanian envoy, Radu Crutzescu, that Germany was “greatly displeased” at Romania’s inclusion in the Turkish–British–French pact. He recalled that as recently as June Gafencu, returning from Ankara, had boasted to Fabricius that Turkey had promised to leave Balkan matters out of the treaty. Crutzescu solemnly assured him that Turkey’s undertaking had been written in without the Romanian government’s knowledge and did not concern Romania. Gafencu said the same in Bucharest and, instead of renouncing the guarantee, promoted a plan for a bloc of neutral Balkan states, towards which Berlin remained reserved.

Romania did not renounce the guarantee. The King and his ministers knew that the Soviet threat in the east was growing. For twenty years the Soviet Union had refused to recognise Bessarabia as part of Romania, and in those same weeks it was imposing bases on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and presenting demands to Finland. To give up the West’s only commitment would have meant placing itself entirely at the mercy of Germany, which, as Bucharest rightly suspected, had come to an understanding with Stalin over eastern Europe. Carol II preferred to manoeuvre: he sold the Reich ever more oil and grain, but formally held on to the old ties with France and Britain.

Its place in the war

Mościcki did not leave Romania until Christmas 1939. On 23 December the Romanian government concluded that on humanitarian grounds it had to allow the departure of the gravely ill former President, for whom doctors had recommended treatment in a Swiss sanatorium. According to Fabricius, the decision had been forced by the persistent efforts of Swiss and American diplomats. On 25 December Mościcki, with his wife and daughter, left in a sleeping car via Yugoslavia and Italy. Gafencu informed Fabricius only on the day of departure, and the envoy protested, calling the decision an affront and a broken promise. Ribbentrop instructed him to declare that any repetition of such conduct would not remain without consequences. The other Polish leaders remained interned: Beck died in Romania in 1944, and Rydz-Śmigły escaped to Hungary in December 1940.

The guarantee survived until the fall of France. At the end of June 1940 the Soviet Union forced Romania by ultimatum to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and on 1 July Carol II, in a radio address, renounced both the alliance with France and the Anglo-French guarantee, announcing that Romania was seeking a place in the new, German order in Europe. This saved neither its borders nor his throne. After the Second Vienna Award of 30 August 1940 the King abdicated and power passed to General Ion Antonescu. On 23 November 1940 Romania joined the Tripartite Pact, and in June 1941 it marched with the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union. Fabricius, who throughout the Phoney War had been the chief executor of German pressure in Bucharest, was recalled at the beginning of 1941.