The liberation of Romania

On the evening of 24 October 1944 the Romanian VI Army Corps, made up of four divisions, attacked Carei, a small town near the pre-1940 Hungarian–Romanian border, while the 2nd Infantry Division of II Corps simultaneously advanced on Satu Mare. By nightfall soldiers of the 9th Infantry Division had entered Carei and were fighting in its streets; by the morning of 25 October the town was in Romanian hands, and a gendarmerie detachment hung the national flag on the obelisk in the centre. That same day the last Hungarian and German units were driven out of Satu Mare; Romanian accounts attribute this mainly to their own divisions, Soviet accounts to the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, which attacked the town together with the Romanians. This ended the fighting for northern Transylvania, ceded to Hungary in 1940. The victory was dedicated to King Michael I, who turned 23 on 25 October, and in 1959 the day was made Romania’s Armed Forces Day; it is still celebrated today.

It is often said under this date that Romania was liberated in its entirety by the Red Army and Romanian troops. This is a shorthand that calls for two reservations. First, “in its entirety” here means the territory of present-day Romania: Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, occupied by the USSR in 1940 and recovered by Romania in 1941, were once again within the borders of the Soviet Union, and Bucharest had no say in the matter. Second, driving out the Germans and Hungarians did not mean regaining freedom of action. Under the armistice of 12 September the country remained under the control of the Allied Control Commission – in practice a Soviet one – and the Red Army stayed in Romania until 1958.

From the coup to Turda

The Transylvanian campaign was a consequence of the coup of 23 August. When the King had Marshal Antonescu arrested and Romania stopped fighting the Allies, the German front on the Prut and the Dniester collapsed within a few days (the Jassy–Kishinev offensive). On 25 August Romania declared war on Germany, and its troops also took up arms against Hungary. The armistice signed in Moscow on the night of 12–13 September obliged it to field at least twelve divisions against Germany and Hungary. In return, Article 19 stated that the Allies regarded the Second Vienna Award as null and void, and that Transylvania, or “the greater part” of it, was to be returned to Romania, subject to confirmation in the peace treaty.

The region had been fought over since the first days of September. On 5 September General Lajos Veress’s Hungarian Second Army launched an offensive in southern Transylvania, hoping to seize the passes of the Southern Carpathians before the Red Army reached them. It was halted after a few days, and at Turda, south of Cluj, a battle flared up that lasted until 8 October, in which the Hungarians and the German Eighth Army held out against the Soviet 27th Army and the Romanian Fourth Army. Both sides suffered heavy losses. Meanwhile, in the east, Soviet and Romanian troops occupied the land of the Székelys, including Târgu Mureș.

October: Cluj, Debrecen, Carei

The decision came with the great offensive of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Ukrainian Front, which on 6 October set off from around Oradea and Arad towards Debrecen. The Romanian First Army attacked on its left wing, along the Tisza, and General Gheorghe Avramescu’s Fourth Army, together with the Soviet 27th Army, on its right, in Transylvania. When Soviet cavalry and tanks broke out onto the Hungarian Plain, into the rear of the troops defending Transylvania, the German-Hungarian defence began to fall back. On 8 October the Germans and Hungarians abandoned Turda, and on 11 October Soviet and Romanian troops entered Cluj, the historic capital of Transylvania. Oradea fell on 12 October and Debrecen on 20 October.

From 9 October the Romanian Fourth Army was advancing on the last, north-western strip of the lands lost in 1940. It first entered the Someș valley; in the second phase (14–20 October) it crossed the Meseș and Făget mountains, and on 21 October it began the final stage. Facing it was the Hungarian Second Army, which after the Arrow Cross coup in Budapest was now commanded by General Jenő Major – its previous commander, General Veress, had been arrested as a supporter of the Regent, Horthy. Autumn rain, mud, blown bridges and mined roads slowed the march more than the resistance of an enemy whose chief aim was to withdraw across the Tisza before his line of retreat was cut. On 22 October General Issa Pliyev’s Soviet cavalry-mechanised group took Nyíregyháza and reached the rear of the troops in northern Transylvania; a German counter-attack did push it back a few days later (the course of this fighting is described in Battle of Debrecen), but the Germans and Hungarians speeded up their retreat all the same. On 25 October Carei and Satu Mare were free.

Romanian accounts state that in the fighting to restore the pre-1940 borders the Romanian army lost more than 58,000 killed, wounded and missing; some relate this figure to the whole period from 23 August, others to October alone. Soviet and German-Hungarian losses in the fighting for Transylvania are not precisely known; they are usually given together with those of the whole Debrecen operation.

Violence and changes of power

The fighting for Transylvania was also a war between two nations over land that both regarded as their own. After 1940 the Hungarian authorities expelled or forced to flee tens of thousands of Romanians, and in the spring of 1944, after the German occupation of Hungary, most of the roughly 150,000 Jews of northern Transylvania were deported to Auschwitz; most of them were killed. In September and October 1944, during their retreat, Hungarian units murdered Romanian and Jewish inhabitants of several villages. When the Romanians arrived, volunteer paramilitary units known as the “Maniu Guards”, after Iuliu Maniu, the leader of the National Peasants’ Party, in turn murdered Hungarian peasants and abused the Hungarian population. The numbers of victims on both sides are disputed and are given differently in Romanian and Hungarian historiography.

These events gave Moscow a pretext for a political game. In November 1944 the Soviet command expelled the Romanian administration from northern Transylvania, and the region remained under Soviet military administration until March 1945. Stalin made the return of the Romanian authorities conditional on the formation of a government he trusted: on 6 March 1945, after heavy Soviet pressure on the King, Petru Groza became prime minister, and only a few days later Moscow agreed to restore Romanian administration in Transylvania. The recovery of the province thus became one of the arguments the Communists used to justify their rise to power.

Place in the war

25 October closed the Romanian chapter of the fighting on the Eastern Front, but it did not end Romania’s part in the war. Its First and Fourth Armies fought on alongside the Red Army in Hungary and, in 1945, in Czechoslovakia and – in smaller strength – in Austria; by May 1945 some 540,000 Romanian soldiers in all had fought against Germany and Hungary, of whom, according to Romanian figures, about 170,000 were killed, wounded or missing. The peace treaty signed in Paris in February 1947 confirmed the return of northern Transylvania to Romania and restored the Hungarian–Romanian border of 1 January 1938. At the same time it recognised the Soviet gains of 1940. Romania recovered Transylvania, but emerged from the war as a country dependent on the USSR: at the end of 1947 King Michael I was forced to abdicate and left the country.