Horia Sima

Horia Sima was a philosophy teacher from the Banat who, after the murder of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in 1938, became the leader of Romania’s Iron Guard, the fascist and antisemitic Legion of the Archangel Michael. In the autumn of 1940, after the fall of King Carol II, he became deputy prime minister of the “National Legionary State”, in which he shared power with General Ion Antonescu. Under his rule the Legionaries expropriated and terrorised the Jews, and in November 1940 they massacred dozens of political prisoners of the former regime. In January 1941 he led an unsuccessful rebellion against Antonescu, accompanied by a bloody pogrom in Bucharest. Defeated, he fled to Germany, where Hitler kept him as a bargaining chip in his dealings with Romania, and after Romania switched to the Allied side in 1944 he headed a collaborationist “government” in Vienna. He died in exile in Spain, convinced to the end of the rightness of his cause.

Youth and the road to the Legion

He was born on 3 July 1906 in the village of Mândra near Făgăraș in Transylvania, which then belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; some sources wrongly give Făgăraș itself as his birthplace and 1907 as the year. He came from a Romanian family and spent his childhood in the years when, after the First World War, Transylvania passed to Romania. In 1926 he graduated top of his class from the lycée in Făgăraș and began studying at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Bucharest, from which he graduated in 1932. He was active in the nationalist union of Christian students, a milieu in which antisemitism was then widespread.

In October 1927, while still a student, he joined the Legion of the Archangel Michael, founded a few months earlier by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and known from 1930 as the Iron Guard. The movement combined extreme nationalism, Orthodox mysticism and a cult of death and sacrifice with hatred of the Jews, whom it portrayed as enemies of the Romanian nation, and of “corrupt” politicians. After his studies Sima taught logic, Latin and philosophy at lycées in Caransebeș, Lugoj and Timișoara, while building up the movement’s organisation in the Banat. He took part in the Legion’s “expeditions to the people”, in which young Guardists campaigned in the countryside. In 1935 Codreanu appointed him commander of the Legion’s Banat region, and in the December 1937 election, in which the Guard’s party won almost 16 per cent of the vote, he stood as a candidate in the Severin constituency.

Leader underground

In February 1938 Carol II introduced a royal dictatorship and began a crackdown on the Guard. In April Codreanu was arrested and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. The leadership of the movement passed to a group of activists that included Sima, and as the others were arrested one after another, by the summer of 1938 he was in practice the only leader still at large. He was responsible for rebuilding the decimated organisation underground and for hiding those who were being hunted. In the autumn of 1938 the Legionaries carried out a series of attacks and arson attempts. The authorities responded during the night of 29–30 November 1938 by murdering Codreanu and more than a dozen other prisoners, supposedly “while trying to escape”. Some Legionaries later blamed Sima for having provoked this crime with his reckless tactics.

At the beginning of 1939 Sima fled through Yugoslavia to Germany, where exiled Legionaries enjoyed the support of some Nazi agencies. In the summer he returned to Romania illegally. On 21 September 1939 a group of Legionaries shot Prime Minister Armand Călinescu in Bucharest, the chief executor of the royal repression. Many historians believe Sima shared responsibility for preparing the assassination. The reprisal was the execution of hundreds of Legionaries without trial. Sima fled to Germany again, and in May 1940 he once more crossed the border illegally, was arrested and, to the astonishment of contemporaries, released in mid-June. The Romanian intelligence historian Cristian Troncotă claims that he was an informer of the intelligence chief Mihail Moruzov; the claim remains disputed.

Summer 1940 and the Legionary State

After the fall of France, Carol II turned towards Germany and sought an understanding with the Guard. At the end of June 1940 Sima became under-secretary of state at the Ministry of Education in the government of Gheorghe Tătărescu, and on 4 July Minister of Religious Affairs and the Arts in the pro-German government of Ion Gigurtu. He resigned after four days, because many Legionaries regarded cooperation with the king, who was guilty of Codreanu’s death, as betrayal. When protests swept the country after the Second Vienna Award, on 1 September he called on Carol to abdicate, and during the night of 3–4 September the Legionaries attempted an armed revolt which failed but hastened the king’s downfall. After Carol II’s abdication on 6 September, a forum of the movement’s leaders formally confirmed Sima as commander of the Legion.

On 14 September 1940 Romania was proclaimed the “National Legionary State”. Antonescu became “Leader of the State” (Conducător) and Sima deputy prime minister and “leader of the Legionary movement”. The Legionaries took over, among others, the ministries of the interior, education and foreign affairs (the last of these went not to Sima, as some Polish accounts state, but to Mihail Sturdza), as well as the posts of prefects. Sima organised a Legionary police. The movement installed “Romanianisation commissioners” in Jewish businesses, who took them over for the benefit of Legionaries, while its squads extorted ransoms, looted and beat people. During the night of 26–27 November 1940 the Legionaries murdered 64 political prisoners from Carol II’s time in Jilava prison, among them Moruzov, and the next day the historian Nicolae Iorga and the economist Virgil Madgearu. Sima claimed he had not ordered the massacre, but its perpetrators went unpunished.

The movement was also riven by internal quarrels. Codreanu’s father, Ion Zelea Codreanu, called Sima a “Satan” and with a group of supporters tried to seize the Legion’s headquarters; Sima had him and Codreanu’s brothers placed under house arrest. At the same time his conflict with Antonescu was growing: the general wanted Jews to be expropriated by law and for the benefit of the state, not through the terror of armed squads. The general had won the confidence of Adolf Hitler, who rated him more highly than the Legionaries. When in January 1941 Hitler invited both Romanian leaders to the Obersalzberg, Sima refused to come. Antonescu went alone and on 14 January obtained consent to move against the Legion.

Rebellion and flight

When Antonescu began pushing the Legionaries out of power, and on 20 January dismissed the Legionary interior minister and the police chiefs, Sima called on the movement to fight. On 21 January 1941 the Legionaries occupied government buildings in Bucharest and their squads began a pogrom in which, according to the report of an international commission of historians, 125 Jews of Bucharest were killed; synagogues and more than a thousand homes and shops were burned. The army went into action on 22 January and quickly crushed the rebels, and Hitler backed the general. On the morning of 23 January Sima called on the Legionaries to stop fighting.

He himself escaped arrest thanks to the SD officer Otto von Bolschwing, who hid him in Bucharest and then, reportedly in disguise, smuggled him through Bulgaria into the Reich. Several hundred Legionaries reached Germany. They were housed in Berlin and at a centre in Berkenbrück near Berlin, under strict supervision from April 1941. They were protected by Heinrich Himmler, and Hitler treated them as hostages: as long as Antonescu remained loyal, the Legionaries were barred from political activity, but if necessary they could be used against him. Romanian military courts sentenced Sima in absentia, in 1941 and 1943, to long terms and then to life imprisonment with hard labour; some Romanian sources state that a death sentence was passed as early as 1941.

Prisoner and collaborator

In December 1942 Sima escaped from Germany to Italy on a false passport. Himmler demanded his extradition, and the foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano advised Mussolini to agree, noting in his diary that Sima’s presence in Italy would set Rome at odds with Antonescu and that, “in the end, it will be one scoundrel less”. After his extradition Sima and other Legionaries were held in a separate, privileged section of Buchenwald concentration camp, and, according to some sources, from 1943 the leader himself was held in Sachsenhausen. In internment the movement split into warring factions, and some of his former associates accused Sima of amateurism and terrorism.

On 23 August 1944 King Michael I had Antonescu arrested and Romania went over to the Allied side. The Germans immediately released Sima, hoping that the Legionaries would help them hold the country. In the last months of 1944 he headed a collaborationist “Romanian National Government” in Vienna, broadcast appeals to Romanians over German radio, and recruited volunteers from among Romanian soldiers interned in Germany and Legionaries for units fighting alongside the Germans, including a Romanian grenadier regiment of the Waffen-SS. The venture was of no real significance: the Red Army was occupying Romania and the Reich was collapsing.

Exile

In the spring of 1945 Sima went into hiding in Altaussee in the Austrian Alps under the name Josef Weber. He then made his way through Italy and France to Francisco Franco’s Spain, which granted him asylum. In 1946 the People’s Tribunal in Bucharest sentenced him to death in absentia as a war criminal. In exile he presented the Legion as an anti-communist movement and courted the West during the Cold War; Legionaries took part in the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and the World Anti-Communist League. He maintained close contacts with Francoists and the Spanish far right, and published the periodical Țara și Exilul as well as books, including a multi-volume history of the Legionary movement, in which he repeated anti-communist, anti-Masonic and antisemitic claims. He presented the 1941 rebellion as a coup by Antonescu against the Legion, and denied or played down the pogrom. Yet the Legionary emigration remained divided, and in 1954 some activists publicly broke with him.

He died on 25 May 1993, in Madrid according to most sources (others point to the area around Augsburg in Bavaria), and was buried beside his wife Elvira in Torredembarra near Barcelona.

Significance

Sima was the leader under whom the Iron Guard moved from the terror of an opposition movement to the terror of the state. His four months of sharing power with Antonescu brought Romania mass looting of Jewish property, political murders and the Bucharest pogrom, one of the bloodiest in the country’s history. His defeat in January 1941 was not a victory over antisemitism but a choice made by Hitler, who preferred a military dictator in Romania to a revolutionary movement. Antonescu then took over the Legionaries’ slogans and carried them out with the means of the state, with far more tragic consequences: between 1941 and 1944 some 280,000 to 380,000 Jews died under his rule. Sima, who survived the war in German internment centres and then spent half a century in Spain, never answered for the crimes of his movement.