Mościcki leaves Romania

On Christmas Eve 1939 the Romanian government, with the knowledge of King Carol II, finally agreed to let the interned former President of Poland, Ignacy Mościcki, leave for Switzerland. It did so in defiance of Germany, which since September had been insisting that no member of the Polish authorities should leave Romania, and without warning the German minister. According to a dispatch from the Reich’s minister in Bucharest, Wilhelm Fabricius, the matter was discussed at a cabinet meeting on 23 December, and the decision to permit the journey was taken on the evening of 24 December. During the night the passage of a sleeping car was arranged with Belgrade and Rome, and on 25 December Mościcki left with his wife and daughter by way of Yugoslavia and Italy. The train was due to cross the Romanian border that evening. The Germans learned of it all when it was already too late.

An interned president

Mościcki had arrived in Romania on the night of 17–18 September 1939, when, after the Red Army marched in, the President, the government and the Commander-in-Chief crossed the bridge over the Czeremosz at Kuty. They had counted on travelling through an allied country to France, but Romania, under pressure from Germany, interned them. The President was placed under guard at Bicaz in the Eastern Carpathians, where he lived in a forester’s lodge. Unable to exercise his office from there, on 29 September he resigned it in favour of Władysław Raczkiewicz, who was in Paris; the next day Raczkiewicz took the oath and appointed a government under General Władysław Sikorski. Thanks to this Poland retained legal authorities recognised by the Allies, and Mościcki became a private individual.

He was a sick man of over seventy and wanted to go to Switzerland. He had spent some fifteen years there as a scientist, at the University of Fribourg and in the chemical industry; he had held Swiss citizenship from 1908 to 1920, and the city of Fribourg had made him an honorary citizen. Everything suggested that as a former president he no longer posed a threat to anyone. For Berlin, however, it was a matter of principle.

The German veto

Prime Minister Armand Călinescu, assassinated on 21 September by legionaries of the Iron Guard, had had time to promise Fabricius that any departure of Mościcki would first be agreed with Germany. On 22 September Joachim von Ribbentrop instructed that Bucharest be told that consent to the departure of members of the Polish government would be regarded as an unfriendly act and a breach of neutrality. In October Carol II asked Berlin, as a personal favour, to agree to the former president’s release, and Prime Minister Constantin Argetoianu passed on his request as well. On 14 October Germany replied that it was irrevocably opposed. The refusal was part of broader German pressure on Romania, which that autumn also concerned the British guarantee to that country.

What the Germans cared about was not Mościcki himself but the precedent. Had the former president been let go, it would have been hard to refuse the others: the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, the Prime Minister, Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski, and dozens of generals and officials. Each of them could have strengthened the government in France, whose existence the Reich did not recognise. For Berlin the internment of the Polish authorities was a test of Romanian neutrality and at the same time a reminder of who dictated the terms in that part of Europe.

The Christmas Eve decision

Others, however, interceded for Mościcki. According to Polish studies, the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, offered him hospitality in America, and American diplomacy, like Swiss diplomacy, persistently pressed for his release in Bucharest. General Sikorski instructed the Polish embassy in Bucharest to give the former president every assistance, although the new authorities in exile, who blamed the Sanation regime – the ruling camp of the pre-war years – for the defeat, did not want to see him in France. Switzerland, a neutral country, was a solution that could satisfy everyone except the Germans: Mościcki would leave internment but would not go where the war against the Reich was being fought.

By December the Romanian government was headed by Gheorghe Tătărescu, while Grigore Gafencu remained foreign minister. The cabinet decided that on humanitarian grounds it had to allow a seriously ill man, whose doctors had recommended treatment in a Swiss sanatorium, to leave – all the more so as there was no legal basis for interning someone who had definitively withdrawn from politics. The timing was carefully chosen. The King and the entire government had left Bucharest for the holidays, and the decision was carried out so quickly as to present the Germans with a fait accompli.

Late in the evening of 25 December Gafencu summoned Fabricius and informed him that Mościcki had already left. The minister protested sharply, called the decision an affront and reminded him of Călinescu’s promise. Gafencu argued that it was a humanitarian matter, and to the ironic question whether Beck and the other ministers would be treated in the same way, he replied that this was out of the question. When Fabricius demanded that the train be stopped at the border, the minister replied that this was no longer possible. On 28 December Ribbentrop gave the minister his full backing and instructed him to state on his behalf that the breaking of a given word had caused great astonishment in Berlin and that a similar case in future would not be without consequences.

The date usually given, 24 December, thus corresponds to the day on which the final decision was taken. The departure itself took place on Christmas Day, 25 December, and that is the date given by German sources.

Switzerland

Mościcki reached Switzerland by way of Milan, where he met the Polish ambassador to Italy, General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski, whom in September he had designated as his successor before objections from the French and the opposition forced him to choose Raczkiewicz instead. He settled in Fribourg, where for five months he taught at the university and wrote his memoirs, which he brought up to 1932 and which were printed in the New York journal Niepodległość. The money at his disposal he gave to Polish soldiers in France and to prisoners of war and camp inmates. In 1940, obliged to earn a living, he moved to Geneva and worked in a chemical laboratory. The authorities in exile kept him out of politics, and he himself showed no eagerness to return to it.

Place in the war

Other interned leaders were less fortunate. The Germans, humiliated by Mościcki’s departure, watched even more closely to ensure that Romania did not release Beck and Rydz-Śmigły. Beck, suffering from tuberculosis, died in Romanian internment in June 1944. Rydz-Śmigły escaped to Hungary in December 1940 and in the autumn of 1941 made his way to occupied Warsaw, where he died a few weeks later. Tens of thousands of Polish soldiers, on the other hand, made their way from Romanian camps to France, often with the tacit consent of the Romanian authorities.

Romania itself went on manoeuvring for another six months. After the fall of France, under the pressure of a Soviet ultimatum, it ceded Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the USSR in June 1940 and renounced the Anglo-French guarantee, and after the Second Vienna Award Carol II abdicated. Power passed to General Ion Antonescu, who tied the country to Germany and in June 1941 led it into war against the Soviet Union. The December decision was one of the last gestures of independence in Romanian policy towards Berlin.

Mościcki survived the war in Switzerland. After 1943 his health deteriorated sharply. He died on 2 October 1946 at Versoix near Geneva and was buried in the local cemetery. In 1993 his remains were brought back to Poland and laid in the crypt of St John’s Archcathedral in Warsaw. His departure from Romania finally closed the chapter of pre-war authority: from then on Poland’s affairs were decided in exile by Sikorski’s government, in which opponents of the camp Mościcki had led predominated.