The Legionnaires’ rebellion and the Bucharest pogrom

On 21 January 1941 in Bucharest, armed Legionnaires of the fascist Iron Guard seized police headquarters, ministries, the city hall and other public buildings and renounced their allegiance to General Ion Antonescu, with whom they had shared power since September 1940. At the same time the movement’s squads and their supporters fell upon the Jewish quarters of the capital. For three days, while the army surrounded the buildings held by the rebels but did not attack, the Legionnaires burned synagogues, looted homes and shops, tortured and murdered. According to the count of the Federation of Jewish Communities, on which the report of the international commission of historians chaired by Elie Wiesel relies, 125 Bucharest Jews were killed. Under 21 January, war chronologies record “reports that Romanian fascists of the Iron Guard are shooting Jews in Bucharest”. Such reports did indeed reach the outside world at the time; in reality these were not executions in the strict sense but a planned pogrom that accompanied an attempted coup. The revolt, known to historians as the Legionnaires’ rebellion (PL), collapsed on 23 January, when Antonescu, sure of the backing of Adolf Hitler, sent the army in against the Legionnaires.

A state with two leaders

Since 14 September 1940 Romania had been the “National Legionary State”. After the abdication of Carol II, General Antonescu, who had no party of his own, had leaned on the Iron Guard, or Legion of the Archangel Michael, a movement that was extremely nationalist, mystically Orthodox and antisemitic from the outset. The Guard’s leader, Horia Sima, became deputy prime minister; Legionnaires took over the ministries of the interior, education and foreign affairs, and their men the posts of prefect in every county. The army, finance, justice and intelligence remained with the general. The formal head of state, the nineteen-year-old King Michael I, had no say in this arrangement.

The joint government grated from the start. The Legionnaires set up their own police and installed in Jewish businesses so-called Romanianisation commissars, who took over property and ran it for the benefit of the movement and its members. The squads extorted ransoms, beat people and looted, and on the night of 26–27 November 1940 Legionnaires murdered 64 political prisoners from Carol II’s time in Jilava (PL) prison, among them the former intelligence chief Mihail Moruzov, and the following day the historian and former prime minister Nicolae Iorga and the economist Virgil Madgearu. This was revenge for the killing of the movement’s founder, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, in 1938 and for the executions with which the king had responded to the assassination of Prime Minister Armand Călinescu in September 1939.

Antonescu did not object to the dispossession of the Jews. He differed from the Legionnaires over the method and over who was to profit. The Wiesel commission’s report stresses that this was not a dispute between brutal and “moderate” antisemitism: the Legionnaires wanted everything at once, while the general, pursuing the same goal, preferred to proceed gradually, by legislation and for the benefit of the state rather than of an organisation. He told the Guard’s ministers so openly: “Do you really think all the Jews can be replaced at once? Affairs of state are settled one move at a time, as in chess.” A man of military order, the general also loathed the chaos into which the country was sinking – stripped of a third of its territory in the summer of 1940, flooded with refugees and struck on 10 November by a devastating earthquake.

Hitler chooses the general

The outcome of the dispute was to be decided in Berlin. Germany needed Romania above all as a source of oil from Ploiești and as a base for the coming war in the east: a German military mission had been stationed in the country since October, and on 23 November Antonescu had signed in Berlin Romania’s accession to the Tripartite Pact. In December Hitler signed Directive No. 21, which provided for Romania’s participation in the attack on the Soviet Union. The Legionnaires had sympathisers in the Reich, especially in party circles and in the SS, but in Hitler’s eyes something else counted: calm, order and an army, which Sima’s movement could not give him.

On 14 January 1941 Antonescu met Hitler at the Obersalzberg. Sima had also been invited to the talks but excused himself. According to German diplomatic documents cited in the Wiesel commission’s report, the general then obtained consent to deal with the Legion; in return he assured Hitler that Romania was ready to take part in a war against the USSR. On his return he went into action. Around 18–19 January he abolished the posts of Romanianisation commissars, and the Legionary press, the only press still appearing in the capital, responded with a campaign against “Jews and Freemasons” and their “tools”, by which the general himself was meant. The Legionnaires pointed out that his stepmother and his wife’s first husband had been Jewish.

The spark was an assassination. On the evening of 19 January (some sources say 20 January), outside the Ambasador hotel in the centre of Bucharest, a Greek national shot dead Major Helmuth Döring of the German military mission. According to some historians the assassin was acting on the orders of British intelligence; the affair was never fully cleared up. Both sides used it as a pretext. On 20 January Antonescu dismissed the Legionary Minister of the Interior, General Constantin Petrovicescu, ostensibly for failing to ensure the safety of the German officer, and with him the heads of the Siguranța, the political police, and of the capital’s police. He appointed military men in their place, and the army occupied the telephone exchanges and other key installations.

The revolt

On the morning of 21 January the new chiefs arrived to take up their posts, but the dismissed officials had barricaded themselves in the Siguranța building and the police prefecture together with armed Legionnaires. Sima called on the movement to fight. During the day the Legionnaires seized police stations, the city hall and several ministries – according to Romanian sources including the Ministry of Justice – as well as the buildings of the National Bank and the main post office; they failed to take the radio building, guarded by gendarmes, although according to some accounts they took over one of the transmitting stations. They had the means to fight: according to figures gathered after the revolt was crushed, in the capital alone they had about 5,000 firearms, grenades, nearly 200 lorries and even a few armoured vehicles. At the Guard’s call, peasants from the surrounding villages poured into the city, persuaded that the country had to be defended against Jews and Freemasons. On the evening of 21 January the Legionnaires also rose in several other towns, most seriously in Brașov, where they seized public offices, the post office and the telephone exchange.

Antonescu did not attack at once. He brought units from the provinces into the capital, tanks among them, had the occupied buildings surrounded and ordered the soldiers to return fire only if fired upon. On the night of 21–22 January he dismissed all the Legionary prefects by telegram and replaced them with local military commanders. The Wiesel commission explains this “active defensive” by caution towards Berlin: the general wanted the Legionnaires to discredit themselves before he used force. The price was that for a day and a half the squads could rampage through the Jewish quarters unhindered.

The pogrom

The attacks on the Jews were not a by-product of the disturbances. The Wiesel commission’s report describes the pogrom as part of a plan prepared by the Legion, not a spontaneous outburst or the exploitation of momentary anarchy. As early as 20 January Legionnaires began rounding up Jews en masse and taking them to the police prefecture. At noon on 21 January the squads struck at the Dudești and Văcărești districts, home to the poorest part of Bucharest’s Jewish community, which then numbered about 100,000 people. On 22 January the Legionary minister Vasile Iașinschi gave the order to set fire to the Jewish quarters. When one of the movement’s activists tried to stop him, fearing that the whole city would burn, he was reportedly told that it was too late, since the arsonists had already set out.

Taking part in the pogrom were Legionnaires, squads of the Legionary Workers’ Corps, police officers and gendarmes subordinate to the Guard, student and secondary-school organisations, and ordinary townspeople, criminals among them. The army and the police loyal to the general did not take part. According to the Wiesel commission, the Legionnaires abducted nearly 2,000 Jews, men and women aged from fifteen to eighty-five, and held them in fourteen places of torture: police stations, the prefecture, the movement’s premises, seized Jewish buildings, the town hall in Jilava and the municipal slaughterhouse. The victims were beaten and tortured to make them reveal hidden money and valuables; women were raped, often in front of their families.

The worst crimes were committed in the last hours of the revolt. About ninety Jews, picked from among those tortured at the Workers’ Corps headquarters, were taken by lorry to the forest near Jilava, stripped and shot at close range. Eighty-six naked bodies were later found in the snow; the mouths of victims with gold teeth had been mutilated. Only a few survived, among them Rabbi Zwi Gutman, shot twice, whose two sons were killed. On 23 January fifteen Jews were taken from the prefecture to the municipal slaughterhouse, where all of them were tortured to death or shot. The military prosecutor whom Antonescu appointed to investigate recognised three acquaintances among the bodies, among them the lawyer Millo Beiler, and recorded that the corpses had been hung on butchers’ hooks. According to the secretary Mihai Antonescu, some of the victims were hung up while still alive; the sign “kosher” was placed on the bodies. The American minister in Bucharest, Franklin Mott Gunther, citing a second-hand account, reported to Washington on 30 January sixty bodies on hooks; the records of the investigation speak of fifteen murdered in the slaughterhouse.

At the same time the Legionnaires attacked every synagogue in the city. They wrecked the interiors, stole ritual objects and money, and burned Torah scrolls and books. In the Choral Temple they broke up the evening prayers and abducted those present, who were later murdered near Jilava. Two synagogues burned to the ground, among them the Sephardic Cahal Grande, one of the most beautiful in Europe, which on the evening of 22 January was doused with petrol from a tanker; the Legionnaires kept the firemen away. The military prosecutor described how they danced around the burning temple, singing the Legionary youth anthem, and pushed three naked women into the fire. The Great Synagogue was saved by a Christian woman who worked there, Lucreția Canjia, who begged the attackers not to set it alight. The Federation of Jewish Communities counted 1,274 homes, shops and workshops destroyed and estimated the losses at 383 million lei. According to the same sources, after the revolt was crushed the army recovered from the Legionnaires some 200 lorryloads of looted property, not counting money and jewellery.

The figure of 125 dead covers Jews from Bucharest whose bodies were found or whose deaths were confirmed; it is not known how many people from outside the city were killed. Isolated killings of Jews also occurred in the provinces, and their number varies from one tally to another. Historians regard it as the bloodiest pogrom in the history of Wallachia.

The suppression

On 22 January, as the picture of the pogrom became ever clearer and the rebels were disarming, beating and, according to some accounts, even burning captured soldiers, Antonescu decided that the time had come. In the afternoon he ordered the army to crush the resistance and arrest the rebels. In the evening the troops went into the attack, shelling the Legionnaires’ barricades, and within a few hours had taken control of most of the city. The Legionnaires stood no chance against artillery and tanks; they abandoned the buildings they had been holding and fled. On the morning of 23 January Sima issued a communiqué ordering the Legionnaires to stop fighting. The army eliminated the last pockets of resistance by the morning of 24 January, which the Wiesel commission regards as the end of the revolt.

Casualty figures for the fighting vary. According to Romanian data, about thirty soldiers were killed and more than a hundred wounded. The number of Legionnaires killed is estimated at about 200; Sima later spoke of 800 victims in the movement’s ranks. According to an official tally cited in some accounts, which combines the dead on all sides, the three days cost more than 400 lives.

The German troops stationed in Romania did not fight on either side. On the evening of 21 January the military mission put its units on alert and forbade its soldiers to become involved in internal political disputes. Hitler, however, made it clear that he backed the general, not the Guard. When it was all over, Antonescu asked the Germans for a public show of support: German units marched through Bucharest to the building of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, where they cheered the general. Another German institution behaved quite differently. The SD officer in Bucharest, Otto von Bolschwing, hid Sima and his closest associates and then smuggled them through Bulgaria to the Reich. There the Legionnaires were given refuge under the protection of Heinrich Himmler. Several hundred members of the movement fled to Germany in all; from then on Hitler held them as hostages in case Antonescu should prove disloyal.

The end of the Legionary State

Once the revolt had been crushed, Antonescu addressed the nation on the radio. He spoke of treason and anarchy but did not mention the pogrom. On 27 January he formed a new government made up mainly of military men, and on 14 February 1941 he abolished the National Legionary State by decree. From then on he ruled as a military dictator, without a party and without a parliament. The Iron Guard was outlawed. Some 9,000 people suspected of taking part in the revolt were arrested, of whom, according to Romanian figures, nearly 2,000 were sentenced to terms ranging from a few months to life imprisonment. Sima was sentenced in absentia by military courts. Officers who had shown sympathy for the movement were arrested and later sent to the front line.

For Romania’s Jews the fall of the Guard brought no relief. Antonescu announced that he would continue to remove them from the economy, only by state means: legislation, expropriation and forced labour instead of the terror of the squads. The press, which had stopped supporting the Legionnaires, remained antisemitic and warned the Jews not to delude themselves that the general had crushed the revolt in their defence. Many of the perpetrators of the pogrom were never punished. The leader of the Legionary students, Viorel (later Valerian) Trifa, who on the eve of the revolt had made inflammatory speeches against “Freemasons and Jews”, emigrated to the United States after the war and became an archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church there. Only in the 1980s, after his past had been exposed, was he forced to leave the country.

Its place in the war

The Legionnaires’ rebellion was a clash between two varieties of Romanian fascism, from which the one more useful to Hitler emerged victorious. For Germany Antonescu, with an army behind him and without ideological fervour, was a more reliable ally than a movement that had plunged the country into chaos within four months. Crushing the revolt with German approval bound the general to Berlin even more tightly. In the following weeks German divisions being readied for the attack on Greece passed through Romania into Bulgaria, and in June 1941 the Romanian army marched with the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union.

The Bucharest pogrom was also a portent of what was to come. Only five months later, at the turn of June and July 1941, in the Iași pogrom, soldiers, police officers and local people – this time on the orders of Antonescu’s authorities and with German participation – murdered more than 13,000 Jews, according to Romanian findings. Then came mass killings in Bessarabia and Bukovina and deportations to Transnistria. In 2004 the international commission of historians concluded that under the rule of the general who in January 1941 had passed for the vanquisher of an antisemitic militia, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews perished. Horia Sima survived in Germany and later in Franco’s Spain, and until his death in 1993 presented the revolt as a coup by the general against the Legion.