Romania declares neutrality

On 6 September 1939 the Crown Council met in Bucharest. The highest advisory body of King Carol II, it brought together members of the government, former prime ministers and royal advisers. The council resolved unanimously that Romania would observe strict neutrality towards the belligerents, in keeping with the rules of international law. A state that had been Poland’s ally since 1921 thus did not stand at its side as Poland entered the sixth day of resisting the German invasion. Yet the decision was not simply a washing of hands. Romania left open the route by which equipment from the Western Allies was to reach Poland, and a few days later the gold of the Bank of Poland, the country’s government and tens of thousands of Polish soldiers and refugees passed across its territory.

Between Germany and the Soviet Union

Romania in the 1930s was the largest state in south-eastern Europe, but also one of the most vulnerable. After the First World War it had doubled in size, acquiring Transylvania, which Hungary coveted; Bessarabia, whose loss the Soviet Union had never recognised; and Southern Dobruja, which Bulgaria claimed. Three neighbours were demanding land from it. The country’s security rested on the alliance with France, on the Little Entente with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, on the Balkan Pact of 1934 and on the alliance with Poland. The Munich Agreement and the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 showed how much French guarantees were worth, and the Little Entente ceased to exist.

King Carol II, who had ruled as a dictator since February 1938, and Armand Călinescu, his prime minister from 7 March 1939, pursued a policy of manoeuvre. On the one hand, in March Romania signed an economic agreement with the Reich that gave Germany access to its oil and grain. On the other, on 13 April it accepted the guarantee of independence announced by Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier, and in May it concluded a trade and credit agreement with Britain. At the same time the foreign minister, Grigore Gafencu, kept assuring Berlin of Romania’s friendship, and Romania, like Poland, refused to let the Red Army onto its territory – one of the reasons why the Allies’ talks with Moscow failed.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August came as a shock to Bucharest. The Romanians knew nothing of the secret protocol in which Germany acknowledged the Soviet Union’s “interest” in Bessarabia and declared that it had no interests of its own in the region, but they could easily guess that an understanding between their two largest neighbours boded nothing good for them. Călinescu now argued to the king that the real danger was Germany, that an alliance with it would mean becoming a protectorate, and that salvation could therefore come only from Germany’s defeat in a war with France and Britain. Meanwhile, on 27 August, Gafencu assured the German minister in Bucharest, Wilhelm Fabricius, that if Poland were attacked Romania would declare neutrality, and offered Germany increased oil deliveries.

The alliance with Poland

The Polish–Romanian alliance went back to the Polish–Soviet War. The Convention on a Defensive Alliance, signed in Bucharest on 3 March 1921, bound both parties to armed assistance should either be attacked “on its present eastern borders”. It was thus aimed at Soviet Russia. Its chief architect is considered to have been General Tadeusz Rozwadowski. In 1926 it was replaced by a treaty of guarantee that spoke of assistance against any external attack, and this was renewed in 1931, but the secret military convention that gave the alliance its practical substance still applied only to the east. Throughout the interwar years Bucharest held that the Polish–Romanian alliance applied solely to the Soviet Union. When Gafencu held talks with the Polish foreign minister, Józef Beck, in the spring of 1939, both men took care not to give the alliance an edge directed against Germany.

After 1 September, therefore, Romania could say that the German invasion of Poland created no obligation for it to go to war, and that is how it presented the matter. In the view of historians, however, something else mattered more. The Polish government itself did not press for Romanian military assistance. Some Romanian historians do write that Beck asked in the first days of September for the alliance to be honoured, but the prevailing view in Polish scholarship is that Warsaw cared more about a neutral Romania than about the weak Romanian army appearing at the front. A neutral neighbour offered the only route by which supplies from Britain and France could reach Poland: by ship across the Mediterranean and through the Turkish Straits to Constanța, and from there by rail through Bukovina to eastern Lesser Poland. This was the basis of the Romanian Bridgehead concept, under which the Polish Army was, as a last resort, to hold out until help arrived.

From communiqué to Crown Council

From the first day of the war Bucharest weighed every word. On 1 September the Romanian authorities agreed to the passage to Poland of a consignment of arms and aircraft accompanied by British officers, and on 3 September the Romanian government asked Turkey to allow supplies for the Polish army through the Straits. On 4 September, the day after Britain and France declared war on Germany, the government issued a communiqué stating that Romania wished to maintain its peaceful stance and good relations with all its neighbours, but would watch over the security of its national interests and was capable of defending its borders. On the same day many other states declared their neutrality.

Berlin made sure that Romania went no further. On 5 September the Reich foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, let Bucharest know that Germany would not tolerate any hostile action against Romania. According to the British historian Rebecca Haynes, author of a monograph on Romanian policy towards Germany, this referred above all to Hungary, which might use the war to seize Transylvania. It was a promise and a warning at once: the Reich’s protection would extend to Romania only for as long as it remained strictly neutral and gave no support to Poland.

The Crown Council of 6 September was meant to give neutrality the highest sanction. The king, Călinescu’s government and former prime ministers sat at one table, among them the historian Nicolae Iorga, who warned that Romania must not pursue a “policy of fear”. The resolution spoke of maintaining neutrality towards the parties to the present conflict and of securing the borders. Romanian historians stress that the council also agreed in principle to the transit of war materials destined for Poland across the country’s territory. The government further hoped to build a common neutrality with its partners in the Balkan Entente, above all Turkey and Yugoslavia, and to create in south-eastern Europe a bloc of states that the war would pass by.

A neutrality friendly to Poland

In practice, for the first two weeks of the war Romanian neutrality was well disposed towards Poland. The Polish ambassador in Bucharest, Roger Raczyński (PL), was dealing with a government whose prime minister openly tied the country’s future to an Allied victory. Constanța was to become the port to which the aircraft, tanks and ammunition Poland had ordered in France and Britain would be shipped. Most of these deliveries, however, never arrived in time. The ships needed weeks, while the front in Poland was collapsing within days. On that same 6 September the Germans took Kraków, and the Polish command was pulling its forces back behind the Vistula.

Poles would soon be relying on Bucharest’s goodwill in a far more serious matter. In the first days of September the gold reserve of the Bank of Poland, several dozen tonnes of bullion, had been taken out of Warsaw to the east, and it was through Romania that it was to reach the West.

Significance

The decision of 6 September set Romania’s policy for the next nine months. Neutrality did not, however, shield it from pressure from Berlin, which as early as 12 and 14 September forced Bucharest to restrict transit and to announce that the Polish authorities would be interned. When the Red Army entered Poland on 17 September, the Polish government did not call on Romania to honour the alliance, even though this time it was precisely the case foreseen by the convention of 1921. President Ignacy Mościcki, the government and the Commander-in-Chief, Edward Rydz-Śmigły, crossed the border during the night of 17–18 September and were interned. Even so, several tens of thousands of Polish soldiers passed through Romania, and many of them made their way from Romanian camps to France and fought on in the Polish Armed Forces. On 21 September legionaries of the fascist Iron Guard assassinated Prime Minister Călinescu, the most pro-Allied politician in the king’s circle.

Romania kept to its neutrality until the summer of 1940. The fall of France destroyed the foundations on which it had rested. In June 1940 the Soviet Union took Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania by ultimatum; in August the Second Vienna Award gave northern Transylvania to Hungary; and in September Bulgaria regained Southern Dobruja. Carol II abdicated, power passed to General Ion Antonescu, and on 23 November 1940 Romania joined the Tripartite Pact. In June 1941 its troops marched with the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union. A country that in September 1939 had hoped to sit out a war between the great powers became one of Hitler’s most important allies and the chief supplier of oil to the German war machine.