THE IRON GUARD AS PART OF THE EUROPEAN FASCIST NETWORK1 TRAIAN SANDU
Abstract. The main point of this paper is the pre-eminence of the ideology over Realpolitik in international relations and thus of the specificity of Fascism over the other nationalist and anti-Semitic movements and regimes in both phases, before and after the seizure of power. For me, fascist States are not Westphalian States, they do not evolve in the so-called “international disorder”, but rather in ideology driven geopolitics system. Therefore, we can analyze multi-scalar international relationships between Fascists through a social network theory and not only through an empirical approach based on international relations among free States pattern. Keywords: Fascism; Network; Romania; Interwar relations; Iron Guard; Michael Archangel Legion.
At first glance, this kind of international relations approach of the Fascist phenomenon is not the one privileged by scholars, for many reasons, but mainly because their efforts in the case of the so-called “small fascism”, in fact what I call great Fascisms in small countries, consisted in demonstrating the autonomy of home-grown Fascisms out of domestic social and cultural dynamics, and not they being inspired or manipulated by greater fascist movements or regimes. In terms of network theory, it means privileging the nodes over the links.
1
This paper has been first presented at the meeting Die faschistische Herausforderung. Netzwerke, Zukunftsverheißungen und Kulturen der Gewalt in Europa 1922 bis 1945, held by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte München – Berlin, in collaboration with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität of München and the University of Constance, 28-30 June, 2012.
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This rightful approach incites first to a comparative, and not to a relational, methodology, in order to build up a definition of the phenomenon out of their multiple nationally framed manifestations, and then subsuming movements and regimes to the definition in order to control if they fit or not. Such a method is certainly indispensable to propose a general discourse on Fascism and leave the nationally limited political and cultural landscape. Nevertheless, it also might, to a certain extent, finish into a circular argumentation – defining as fascist movements, ideologies and regimes first mobilized for the definition – if the back-and-forth pendulum between theoretical definition – mainly founded on ideological, structural and cultural analyses – on the one side, and the national cases – drawing hugely on political history through empirical evidence and archival research – is not correctly fixed. The relational and transfer approaches will certainly prove useful, if wisely handled, to evaluate some comparative conclusions in the view of the actors themselves and the way they considered those ideological and structural commonalties and their relationships. These approaches will also generate some distortions, as the overrepresentation of the elites, mainly intellectual, but also economic and political ones when the movement gains some importance, thus international visibility. So I suggest an approach navigating freely from comparative theory of fascism to multi-scalar empirical analyze of international relations (entangling exchanges between States, movements and individuals) and back to social network theories. The main point of the argumentation is the preeminence of the ideology over Realpolitik in international relations and thus of the specificity of Fascism over the other nationalist and anti-Semitic movements and regimes in both phases, before and after the seizure of power. For me, fascist States are not Westphalian States, they do not evolve in the so-called “international disorder”, but rather in ideology driven geopolitics system. Therefore, we can analyze multi-scalar international relationships between Fascists through a social network theory and not only through an empirical approach based on international relations among free States pattern.
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I propose a three leveled presentation: • the first level is the plain transfer through direct contact with other kindred milieus, mainly French and German; • the second one is the active linking role of legionary personalities as go-between in the rapprochement between German nationalsocialists and Italian Fascists, thanks to their integration in the far right European net during the mid-thirties, still a period of tension between the two Fascist Powers; • the third level is the interference of Fascist ideology in the multi-leveled relations between States, parties and individuals, playing a dramatic role during the international crisis, mainly the Second W.W.
“Paris und Berlin als Lernort für die Legionäre” The first level integrating the pre-fascist leaders to the radical nationalist European network is the mere transfer of ideological and mobilization skill. I will not develop the crossed intellectual transfers of the Action française and the Italian Fascism on the legionary doctrinaires as I have done it elsewhere (Sandu 2004, 2009), but I will rather concentrate on the topic of the conference, which deals with concrete contacts, and on the two main legionary personalities, Codreanu and Moța. They were differently influenced in their prime, Moța by Maurras and Codreanu by the German radical Burschenschaften during the Ruhr crisis.
The French Evanescent Connections Florin Țurcanu published two letters of Ion Moța to Charles Maurras dating from 1925, when he belonged to the Romanian Action, a radical anti-Semitic group which pretended to be an equivalent of the prestigious French model (Țurcanu 2002). Țurcanu commented the information, also found in Constantin Petculescu’s book, that Moța had been a so-called “foreign member” of the Action Française as a young student in Paris, between 1920 and 1922 (Țurcanu 2002, 539). Even if that
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status does not exist within the AF, Moța was probably one of his many foreign sympathizers; he also took the opportunity to translate into Romanian The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1922, only one year after its publication in France, where the most popular translation belonged to a member of the AF. So the transfer seems obvious here. The letters of April 1st and June 9th 1925 include explicit references to an exchange of correspondence with Maurras of which only the letters of Moța were retained by his nephew, Jacques Maurras. These letters narrate the first trial – and acquittal – of the students members of the League of National-Christian Defense of Professor Cuza following an October 1923 plot to assassinate personalities from political and economic sphere. Moța had also seriously wounded an accomplice suspected of having betrayed and Codreanu had murdered in 1924 the Prefect of Police in charge of interrogations, accompanied by torture, and all were acquitted in March and September 1924 for the first two charges. The letter of April 1925 to Maurras announced the pending trial of Codreanu planned in May and in the letter of June, he announced the acquittal of the one he already called “our leader”, who was since 1923 the chief of the youth wing of the League. However, at the end of 1925, when Moța and Codreanu traveled to Grenoble to write their law thesis, their correspondence does not keep track of relationships with Maurras. Presumably, the radicalization of the youth section of the League of National-Christian Defense of Professor Cuza, with which Codreanu was in charge, began to separate the two men not only on the problem of violence, but also on the structure of the movement – the young leader’s desire was to create a mass movement permanently mobilized – and on the ideology – as Codreanu wanted to add to the monomaniac anti-Semitism of his aging mentor elements of a new affirmative ideology, built upon national myths, but turned to a new bright future as an utopia serving mainly his generation. All these converging choices – activism, strong, centralized structure, hostility to the previous generation – would soon lead to the break with theorists such as Maurras or Cuza, and the creation of the Legion in June 1927. Nevertheless, a second manifestation of interest for Maurras reappeared at the beginning of 1934, during the trial for the assassination
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of Prime Minister Duca. The letter was addressed to Maurras by Vasile Marin, another organic intellectual of the Iron Guard, fluent in French, with a thesis about Italian Fascism, and he intended to remind to Maurras the ideological debt of the Iron Guard and to appease him about the accusations brought to the Iron Guard of having murdered Duca on Hitler’s orders. These accusations were by the way unfounded, but the French press, and specially the Action Française, was persuaded that the Iron Guard was a German instrument and had eliminated a pro-French head of government in order to play Hitler’s game. In fact, Marin also intended not only to reverse Maurras’ opinion, but also the unacknowledged motive to obtain some French support during the trial: “I do not write this to you, French people, to complain about the barbarous way we are treated in our own country, I do not either try to wake in your soul the echoes we have not found, alas!, in the soul of our compatriots. No! We love too much our country for that, and have enough dignity to bear without weakness a persecution we do not deserve and which is the last effort of a rotten and exhausted world to stop our movement, where the finest blossom of our youth and our elites has set the best part of their soul, of their faith and of their character.” (Marin 1997, 91)
One have certainly to understand the opposite: the Iron Guard looks both, for a moral caution of the French nationalism and for a support in the international opinion to avoid the rigor of the trial: “Thus, in order to justify the arbitrary measures, the unprecedented abuses committed, the government headed by I.G. Duca has spread the information abroad, and specially in France, […] of the calumnies according to which the Iron Guard were a terrorist organization, supported by the money and the ideas of Hitlerian National-Socialism and which worked to install a dictature sold and devoted to Germany; once in place, that regime would break our friendly relations with France and would submit the country to Germanic interests. […] [W]e never sent no representative to Germany and […] we never received at home no Hitlerian missionary.” (Marin 1997, 92-94) Things were not as clear as that in the relationships between the Iron Guard and National-Socialist Germany, but true is that until Moța’s and Marin’s death in Spain in January 1937, Hitler preferred Cuza’s
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Party (Hillgruber 1994, 45; Petculescu 1997, 162-163)2 as a much more obedient partner, ready to realize Germany’s aims of merging all the right parties in order to give Germany easier manipulative possibilities. This was also King Carol’s objectives, for the same reasons. And the Iron guard, at least from the mid-thirties on, resisted those attempts, certainly not in order to please French interests – in spite of a lasting sympathy of Ion Moța for the French system of alliances3 opposite to Codreanu’s views – but in order to safeguard Legionary Movement’s political independency. Nevertheless, even if Duca’s murder had not been ordered by Berlin, it was a warning by the Legionaries towards Romanian politicians tempted by using repression against the Iron Guard as a guarantee offered to France regarding anti-Nazi policy. As far as this conference’s subject is concerned, we see no more connection between the old French doctrinaire and his revolutionary pupils on the banks of Danube. To a certain extent, Maurras belongs to the generation of the old world criticized by Vasile Marin, whereas the Action Française, with articles by Jacques Bainville, supported the traditional French alliance system and the murdered Prime minister, so no visible reaction to Marin’s letters was to be registered. In fact, older far right leaders as Nichifor Crainic were invited to maurrassian manifestations in France as the Occitan Felibrige meetings, but the ideology founding this kind of international net was more traditional and regionalist monarchism rather than Fascism. For example, theologian and publicist Nichifor Crainic, theorist of the ethnocratic state and an Orthodox fundamentalist, also mentor of the Iron Guard between 1931 and 1933 before breaking with it after Duca’s murder, kept in memory with emotion his participation in the Centenary of the birth of Mistral in 1930 and a speech that Maurras had particularly enjoyed (Crainic 1991, 218-219).
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Cuza’s son, Gheorghe, had met Hitler and Rosenberg in München in the Spring of 1933. In a memorandum addressed to party leaders in early 1934, Moța subscribed to Romania's traditional international policy: “It is indisputable that today Romanian foreign interests are best guaranteed by traditional politics alongside France and Little Entente” (Petculescu 1997: p. 115).
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The visit of brothers Tharaud from the Action Française to the Romanian nationalists after their huge success in the December 1937 elections was quite common, as some others representatives of the European far right visited Romania, for example Julius Evola or a leader from a Baltic State, curious to know what was happening in Romania. Brothers Tharaud visit ended in a book, “sent by the Archangel” (Tharaud 1939), which acknowledged the diversity of the Romanian rights and the specificity of the populist, palingenetic and political religious Fascism of the Iron Guard. They were not enthusiastic with the Iron Guard’s success, as they knew its pro-German trend, but their political diagnosis was accurate. But very soon Codreanu was imprisoned, tried and condemned to a long sentence. At the beginning of this episode takes place the visit of Lucien Rebatet, journalist at the far-right and anti-Semitic journal Je suis partout and married to a Romanian lady. “I have known closely enough and long enough the Iron Guard of Paris, all students who have their cells, their “nest” in a very humble sixth floor of the Quartier Latin.” “A few weeks after the incarceration of Codreanu, I could hold a circular addressed to all the lieutenants of the Guard and proving that the movement was neither decapitated nor dismembered.” (Rebatet 1938, 22) He travelled to Romania with “journalistic curiosity”, but more likely on duty for the editor as “Gaxotte and Brasillach had asked him to narrate the facts here [in Je suis partout]”. He meets activists of all the spectrum of the local right, including the Iron Guard, which makes on him an excellent impression and deliver a copy of a book denouncing the conditions of Codreanu’s trial and which exposed the holder of it to three years in prison (Rebatet 1938, 23). So, Rebatet takes some risks investigating, thus creating a situation of complicity with the protagonists, but not of complacency. In 1938, his French nationalism was still quite anti-German. Thus, the centre France represented for the young Romanian nationalists at the beginning of the period faded away and the link lost much of its density during the thirties as their ideological references shifted from the Maurrassian “monarchisme de la chaire” to Fascism. Does that mean that there is no French Fascism? I will not enter this
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tricky debate, but what is certain is that it is not represented by Maurras, rather by Rebatet in its intellectual hypostasis, but there is no evidence, at least for me, that the Iron Guard had any relations with the mass movement of the “Ligues” and of the Parti social français, much more able to complete the unacknowledged French Fascist missing node in the European Fascist constellation.
German Organizational Skill The evidence I have about direct German influence on the Iron Guard are scarce: the scarcer the better, because it will demonstrate the strength of the ideological link between Fascist nodes in spite of weak concrete Realpolitiker links. At the end of 1922, Codreanu went to Germany in a student trip to the University of Berlin, but in reality he would “study the German and Austrians students’ organisation of the anti-Semitic activity”4. This journey, which also seems to prove that Codreanu spoke German, as his father was a German teacher at the secondary level and her mother had German origins, was of huge importance for the organization of the anti-Semitic movement in Romania: Codreanu’s memories as well as archival evidence prove it. When he came back from revolutionary mood Germany after the beginning of the French occupation of the Ruhr and of the great inflation, swastikas would flourish on the Romanian students’ coats to mark the adepts and money gathered to support the autonomy of a movement soon to be born in March 1923, the League of National-Christian Defense (LANC): “As a matter of fact, we observe that many young people of the city [certainly Iaşi] bear as tie pins as badges with the distinctive hallmark of the anti-Semitic association. These badges were brought by the student Zelea Codreanu who, during his stay in Berlin, in contact with German anti-Semitic and nationalist students, studied their
4
Reports of the Siguranța of November7 and 17, 1922, doc. nr. 24 and 25, (Scurtu et al. 1996, 256-257).
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organization in order to organize also here student centers, according to the model there. The badges are sold in order to increase the anti-Semitic propaganda fund, etc.”5
Finally, the very narrative that Codreanu makes of his trip to Germany gives particular importance to this contact. Interrogated about the preparation of a failed attack against prominent politicians and leaders of the Jewish community in October 1923, Codreanu returns to its meaning: “The goal of my travel was only studies, but arriving in Germany, I naturally turned to the Semitic issue, buying every book that had a link to this question. As soon as I got home I went to Iaşi, through Cernăuți, where I stopped one day and met the students. I took the lead of the student movement in Iaşi and then I tried through various student centres to introduce my opinion, namely: The transformation of the university student movement into a great national movement outside the university, because our struggle interested the whole nation.”“This proposal was accepted by the centers of Iaşi and Cernăuți, the other recognizing its effectiveness only after four months, at the Student Congress of Iaşi.”6
This influence of a frustrated and ready to radical and organized upheaval of the German youth certainly had an impact on the vantage Codreanu took upon his Francophile comrades like Moța, Marin or Polihroniade, formed in the entourage of the right wing Parisian salons of the French winner. After the Machtergreifung, Codreanu had shown a friendly attitude, organizing a counter-boycott of the Jewish stores against the Jewish boycott of the German products7 at a meeting at Rădăuți also attended by the Nazionalsozialistische Deutschen Rumäniens8. This demonstration was probably also intended to counteract the much more noisy proHitler demonstrations from AC Cuza and his son Gheorghe, who was 5
6
7
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Reports of the General Inspectorat of the Police and Security of Chişinău of February 20, 1923, doc. nr. 36, (Scurtu et al. 1996, 311). See also the explanation he gives about it during his interrogation following the plan of attack of October 1923 (document nr. 72 of 31 October, 1923). Additional interrogation taken from Corneliu Zelea Codreanu on October 31, 1923, doc. nr. 72, (Scurtu & al. 1996, 387-388). Article without title appeared in Axa, 9 April 1933, doc. nr. 66 (Scurtu & al. 2002, 169-170). Report of the General Prosecutor of the Court of Appeal of Cernăuți to the Minister of Justice of April 24, 1933, doc. nr. 68 (Scurtu and al. 2002, 71-172).
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received by Hitler; the youth wing of the LANC formed assault battalions, the “Lancers”, on the German model9, for molesting the Jewish population10 and fight against the legionary competitor11. Other leaders of small radical groups as Ştefan Tătărescu, head of the Romanian National-Socialist Party, met Hitler in Berlin in August-September 1933 and brought back a powerful impression, but also a servility12 one could not find by Codreanu. He seemed right while rejecting the accusations of submission, including financial one, to the two Great Fascist Powers (Codreanu 1972, 416-418). Therefore, the repression envisaged by Duca against the Iron Guard in order to reassure French diplomacy seemed unfair. Nevertheless, Codreanu had understood the importance of the new German element in the European diplomacy. Romanian diplomacy was preparing its integration into the Paris-Moscow axis in gestation since the arrival of Hitler and the democratic parties gave pledges to Paris in this sense. Codreanu gave a double answer, of independence and sympathy towards Hitler's Germany. Independence was dealt with about the sensitive subjects of the territorial revisionism and German funding: “Suppose Hitler wants war with us, and take Transylvania. We Romanians, in order to defend Transylvania against the Germans, we must first be strong. And to be strong, we must get rid of the Jews, that we resolve, we too, the Jewish problem, that we give to our people exhausted by the Jews and unable to defend itself its courage back. With a jewry which poisons our hearts and sucks our blood, we can have neither weapons, nor soul or strength.”
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11 12
Order of Armand Călinescu to the prefects of the counties of April 21, 1933, doc. nr. 67 (Scurtu & al. 2002, 170). Report of the Army Corps War Council 4 to the Minister of Defense of April 28, 1933, doc. nr. 70 (Scurtu &al. 2002, 173-174). Report of the same to the same, same day, doc. nr. 69, (Scurtu &al. 2002, 172-173). « Colonel Tătărescu în Germania » [Colonel Tătărescu in Germany], in Deutsche Zeitung Bessarabiens of September 30, 1933, doc. nr. 90 (Scurtu &al. 2002, 211-212): ”your leader ... is called to save not only Germany, but the whole world”. See also a note from the Secret Service concerning information sent by the German journalist Ferdinand Gruber: when he mentions the link that Tătărescu wants to establish with Germany, he uses the term "Anschluss", which had no territorial meaning, but means the dependence sought (doc. nr. 95; Scurtu & al. 2002, 218-219). See also the summary note of the General Directorate of Police and Security of October 30, 1934, doc. nr. 13 (Scurtu & alii, 2003, 67-70).
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“[…] Finally, we receive money, we are ‘hirelings’, we are ‘sold to’ Germany. We answer: ‘A. C. Cuza attacks Jews since 1890, we since 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, when it was no question of Hitler.’” (Codreanu 1972, 418)
This fierce assertion of independence meant nevertheless a beginning of mutual interest. Germany could the less ignore the Romanian political scene that the German minority owned a representation that the Nazis were trying to infiltrate and that Hitler’s policy of autarky had a special mention for cereals and especially for the Romanian oil. Quite early, Hitler sought a rapprochement between right-wing parties to hold a lever of pressure on the Romanian power. From this point of view either, Codreanu could not give him any satisfaction, according even to police reports and not only pro domo declarations: “About a merger of the ‘Iron Guard’ with one of the parties or political groups, it is out of question. I cannot even admit a discussion on this topic because I cannot receive that the unique political command of the ‘Iron Guard’ be amended in the sense that another person excepting me would also have the right regarding the decisions or the instructions to subordinate organizations.”13
What better proof of the political autonomy of the Romanian fascism if not the accusations of the Action Française against Nazi Germany of having ordered the murder of Duca and the defense of the outraged German press? One week after the attack, Jacques Bainville did not hide his concern about the Nazi activism in Central Europe: “Jean Duca was not only hit because he disbanded the league of the Iron Guard, but because he was firmly committed to the Little Entente and France. Thus, equivalently, he struck this Hitlerian association because he followed the same line as Mr. Titulescu for the foreign policy of Romania.” (Bainville 1937 : 228). But while “none of the newspapers of Fascist Italy did not find a word to condemn the assassination of former Prime Minister Duca”, the German press reacted with condemnation and outrage against the charges of collusion:
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Information note from the Directorate of the Security Police, October 20, 1933, doc. nr. 96, (Scurtu & al. 2002, 219-220).
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“In long telegrams from Budapest and Bucharest, the German press has carefully described the circumstances in which the murder was committed against the Minister I.G. Duca, showing that it is the work of the anarchic organization Iron Guard. [...] Unanimously, the German newspapers have condemned the killing and showed all measures taken by the Romanian government to maintain order and tranquility in the country. (...) Berliner Zeitung Börsen (31.XII.933). After showing that the killing of I.G. Duca would not jeopardized the authority of the Romanian state, it rejects some comments made by the French press that the attack was attributed to the direct influence of German National Socialism and stressed that good relations between Germany and Romania cannot be affected by such reprehensible attempts.” (Scurtu & al. 2002, f18, 219-220).
These official reactions were certainly sincere and demonstrated a real lack of implication in the murder. Direct German influence upon an ancillary Iron guard was never to be noticed and certainly not at the level of the leader of the movement. Some radical leaders like Alexandru Cantacuzino would adopt an admiring and imitative attitude, for example at the student’s Congress of Craiova of April 1935, where he declared: “Already stand a few races in Europe with imperial and dominating souls. These are Italy and Germany. Do we want to be among the creatures of masters?”14 True is also that after the sacrifice of two of the Guard’s leaders in Spain, Germany displays more interest in the Legion. But not a sort of dominating attitude, rather an equal one which would last through the war in spite of the uncomfortable exile of the legionary leaders after January 1941. The German-Romanian rapprochement was rather founded, as we will see, on the Romanian services of go-between for the German-Italian rapprochement in the European far-right network and, even more important, on the ideological proximity among the three ideologies.
Italian Ineffective Prestige At the beginning of the twenties, in Romania as elsewhere in Europe, a lot of movements, claimed to follow the Italian model, but without any
14
Alexandru Cantacuzino, « Românul de mâine » [The Romanian of tomorrow], conference held at the student general congress of April 1935 in Craiova, doc. nr. 39 (Scurtu & alii 2003, 99-105; 100).
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Italian official or unofficial support. It existed a Fascia Națională Română created on the Italian model and combining modernist, macabre features, but was actually very discreet and legal. After the murder of Duca, the Romanian minister in Rome asked Mussolini for a advice on the Romanian “fascists” of the Iron Guard, Mussolini answered that these were Romanian internal problems he was not interested in and had to be treated by that the government of Bucharest.15 Francesco Guida, using Italian diplomatic archives and articles by Theodor Armon (Armon 1972, 1976, 1980), reminded of the erroneous opinion of Minister of Foreign Affairs Titulescu about an Italian responsibility in the attack; but Titulescu had himself to hide a huge guilt in this affair, as he had pressed Duca to give anti-Hitlerian guarantees to Paris and promise to repress the Iron Guard. Theodor Armon underpinned the Italian lack of interest towards the Romanian far right until the German challenge. And even after 1933, the Iron Guard and its anti-Semitic stance placed it rather on the German side, as we will see about its tense participation to CAUR’s Montreux Congress in 1934, and the Italian minister in Bucharest, Ugo Sola, doubted about the interest to finance the Legionaries16. The Italians maintained some relationships with the theologian Nichifor Crainic (Guida 2006), who was until the murder of Duca some sort of doctrinal counselor of Codreanu, but he left the Movement after the trial, in 1934. Francesco Guida does believe that even the slight Legionary participation to the Spanish war did not contribute much to a rapprochement between Italian legation in Bucharest and the Iron Guard, as the Italian side believed that it was rather pro-German and that any right wing Romanian party would be as pro-Italian as the Iron Guard pretended it was and with the indispensable support of the King, denied to the Legionaries (Guida 2006). The latter were represented in some Italian organs as the science and literature Institute called Europa Giovane, created in 1938 inside the National institute of Fascist culture, and whose honorary members were very different right wing personalities 15
16
Documenti Diplomatici Italiani (DDI), série VII, vol. XIV, pp. 613-614, Conference of January 9, 1934, (Guida, 2006) Francesco Guida, about a correspondence from Sola to Mussolini of July 9th 1934, DDI, série VII, vol. XV, pp. 534-535 (Guida 2006).
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as Nicolae Iorga, Codreanu and Mihail Manoilescu, the Romanian proItalian specialist of corporatism and a former minister, freshly elected representative on the Iron Guard’s lists, but as an independent personality and an outsider. He was also president of the CAUR in Romania (Guida 2006), but his rapprochement with the Iron Guard was rather intended to reconcile it with the King, even if an Italian support for Codreanu in order to avoid too harsh a repression is also a possible interpretation. Thus, the concrete links between the Iron Guard and the Fascist Great Powers were weak, the best witness being that Codreanu could not really decide to flee there when he very well understood that the end was near. Many other motives entered in his decision, but the weakness of the link certainly was one of them.
The Iron Guard’s Effective Role in the European Fascist Net One important question is the consciousness about ideological similarity as a condition for a good relationship: the theoretical background of this problem is that the kind of nationalism developed by Fascism is not a traditional 19th century one, framed in a country-State-people nationalism; thus the oppositions and even hostility among nationalisms are not the core of Fascist nationalism, and the ideological transnational commonalties and convergence do matter, and I will try to exemplify it. Very paradoxically, Fascism looks much more like the progressive revolutionary forty-eighter mazzinian nationalism, repressed by the reactionary monarchical regimes and when Mazzini envisaged a nationalist international, so the concept of a Fascist international is not that disturbing. On the same pattern of “international nationalism”, but on the reactionary side of it, we find the personality of Msgr. Benigni, the so-called “bad genius” of Pope Pius the 10th and organizer of a sort of secret service to counterbalance freemasonry and liberal thought, dismantled after the Pope’s death in 1917. Msgr. Benigni went on collaborating with the fascist secret services, as he had gathered a lot of information on their common opponents and had begun an activity of network building among the reactionary and far right Europe grace to his Corrispodenza
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Romana, later Correspondance de Rome. He met Ion Moța during the anti-Semitic meeting organized by Gyula Gömbös in 192517. The Iron Guard also developed from the start, id est 1927, an international section in Paris called “the nuclei of the Romanians abroad”, sort of legionary nest but without numeric limitation as were the other nests18, as they would not be submitted to administrative and police pressure. We have more than scarce information about their activity, but it is very possible that Rebatet’s allusion to legionaries in Paris concerned that structure. The first attempts in a high-level rapprochement with Germany are founded in an interview by Codreanu with the Berliner Illustrierte Nachtausgabe in May 1934, after the acquittal at the Duca’s murder trial, in which “the future man of Romania” – as the newspaper presented him – sent “to Hitler and the German people [his] greeting”19. But the network activity was maintained by Moța through the relations established grace to Mgsr. Benigni’s relations in far right Europe. They permitted the young Romanian leader to play a role as a go-between for anti-Semitic German National-Socialists and not yet antiSemitic Italian Fascists in the mid-thirties, also after the Austrian crisis of July 1934, when Italy and Germany were close to a conflict over the Austrian buffer State. Not only the correspondence was held in perfect French, but the expertise asked by the Welt-Dienst correspondent to Moța was on the trial held in Switzerland about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Nicault 1997; Rollin 1991; Cohn 1967). The Welt-Dienst was financed by Goebbels since 1933 in hope to transform it in an international propaganda office. Its director, the retired Oberstleutnant Ulrich Fleischhauer20, had established headquarters in Erfurt and was posing as an expert in the trial of Bern brought by Swiss Jews in 1934-1935 against anti-Semitic propaganda based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Moța’s correspondent in the Welt-Dienst was Georg de Pottere – sometimes signing his letters 17 18
19
20
Letter from Moța to Pottere, February 5, 1935 (Moța 2000, 34-39). Article without title, Codreanu, Moța, Gârneața, Georgescu, Mironovici, October 1, 1927, doc. nr. 22 (Scurtu & alii, 1996, 70-72). Press kit of May 14, 1934, Central Historical National Archives of Romania (CHNAR), CR, vol. 72/1934, f.8. See the Wikipedia page of Richard Alan Nelson consulted April 22, 2010: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Fleischhauer
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with the pseudonym Farmer –, a former Austro-Hungarian consul in Moscow, born in the Banat in 1865 and working for the Welt-Dienst from the Winter of 1933 on21, thus a former compatriot of Transylvanian Moța and knew well the Russian context of the anti-Semitic forgery of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Moța was his contact because of his good international network, but the final destination of the information that Pottere often reminded at the end of the letters were “the two [Zelea] Codreanu”, father and son, or at least one of them. It is not impossible that Pottere had heard about the father before the war, as he was a Romanian nationalist and anti-Semite militant. Moța proposed as an expert in the Bern trial Ioan C. Cătuneanu, who was professor of Roman law at the Cluj University22. The Welt-Dienst wrote to Cătuneanu in order to have a Romanian witness in the Bern trial, as there already were witnesses from fifteen countries and no one from Romania, in spite of its acknowledged importance for the Jewish question23. After the Iron Guard’s leaders’ acquittal in April 1934, de Pottere expressed his satisfaction and asked for more intense diffusion of the Welt-Dienst paper in Romania; he also tried to penetrate in France grace to Moța’s relations, asking about Henri Coston (Moța 2000, 55), at that time director of the satirical newspaper Le Porc épic (the porcupine), antiSemitic and antimasonic. We do not know if Moța intervened, but during that year, it seems that Coston became affiliated to the WeltDienst and highly praised by Fleischauer in his correspondence with Rosenberg (Millman 1992: 195). At that time, the Welt-Dienst paper was sent in three languages in thirty-three countries24, but was forbidden in Romania in March 1934 after having defended the Iron Guard, and an intervention of Cuza in its favor in the Parliament had no result, so Pottere wanted Moța to have the paper sent by a French intermediary25. On this German-Romanian link articulates Ion Moța’s attitude at the Congress of the Committees for the universality of Rome in Montreux in December 1934, where he was invited as representative of the Iron Guard. 21 22 23 24 25
See the Ulrich Fleischhauer page on the German Wikipedia, consulted on June 18, 2012. Letter from Moța to Pottere, February 5, 1935 (Moța 2000, 39). Letter from O. F[armer], alias Pottere, to Moța, February 27, 1935 (Moța 2000, 55). Letter from Pottere (O.F.) to Moța, June 26, 1934 (Moța 2000, 47-50). Letter from Pottere to Moța, December 28, 1934 (Moța 2000, 55).
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A priori, the territorial revisionism of any of the two Fascist regimes would suit him, but Italian politics was repugnant to him for two reasons: it was too pro-Hungarian and not enough anti-Semitic. As the diplomatic question was too delicate to be treated, Moța chose the easier Jewish field to fight. The motion on the Jewish question which he presented at Montreux ended in an ambivalent statement: in the Italian line, “Congress declare[d] that the Jewish question [could not] lead to an universal campaign of hate against Jews”, but the anti-Semites obtained recognition of the Jewish problem as that of “a state within the state” and an internationalist revolutionary minority, resulting in the decision to fight it26. Thus Moța could display some support to the German thesis in the CAUR Congress intended to balance the German influence. Nevertheless, the final motion was a compromise which Moța asked his German counterpart to accept as a fair basis of reconciliation with the Italians: “Even an Italo-German agreement on this issue will be easier to do if we did not present the Jewish question as explainable only by the racist doctrine and thus claim the indissoluble connection of anti-Jewish and racist actions. I admit, I am a racist, with some reserve, for example, I do not accept that religion is based on the specificity of the race, it may have specificity in its external forms, in its ritual, but not in its content, which is not of human essence, but divine, come down to us by revelation, not by the genius of the race and then I think, excepting the Jews, the search for purity of the national blood should not be pushed beyond a certain moderate limit because the assimilation of non-Jewish people is a reality and that, apart from exceptional cases, is not harmful to a people to the point that we try to avoid it completely in the future – without admitting, of course, an action of forced denationalization, unnatural, etc.” (Moța 2000, 74-78)
It is thus to a certain “moderation” that the Transylvanian Moța invites his correspondent in order to comply to the Italian organizers’ position (Armon 1972, 530-532). The multicultural environment of the region certainly explains his attitude, in spite of his resentment towards the denationalization acted by the Magyars which his father, among others, had fought. Similarly, the religious dimension of Romanian fascism obviously plays a moderating role towards biological racism, with the
26
Note from the Directorate General of the Police, January 21, 1935, doc. nr. 24 (Scurtu & al., 2003, 81).
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noticeable exception of the Jews. Thus, the aggressive anti-Christianity of Mussolini or Hitler is seldom found in Romanian fascists, and their political religion, although obvious, leads to a greater ambiguity with traditional religion whose aura it tries to vampirize. Other legionaries, like Alexandru Cantacuzino, proved more influenced by biological racism and the theory of races hierarchy. But compared ideology is not the point here, so I rather come back to the linking role of the seemingly more moderate Moța. Pottere had a clear conscience that he had not been invited to Montreux because of his pronounced anti-Semitism27, but as in fact the Romanian Iron Guard was as anti-Semite as he was, his German personality was certainly more “non grata” than his anti-Semitism, even if he could not acknowledge it. Significant was his warm desire to know about the compromise reached between Fascism and anti-Semitism, in view of a rapprochement at a period when Mussolini had a lot of prestige among his German counterparts (Moța 2000, 53). He complained that the Fascist movements would not recognize the importance of ant-Semitism in the palingenetic ideological formula: “Any national regeneration movement is condemned to death if it neglects the Jewish question.”28 But he agrees with Moța that the racial criterion must be limited to the Jews: “Let’s not forget that there is not a German or a Romanian race – there is only the Aryan race (divided among several nations) and the Jewish race.”(Moța 2000, 57-58). Thus he sent him his “pan-Aryan greetings”29 and informed him of his Belgian and Polish successes in weaving the Fascist network (Moța 2000, 61), asking him once more to use his French connections in order to give a huge publicity in Romania to a pro-German article appeared in Paris in two numbers of the Revue Hebdomadaire of November 1935. The aim of Moța as a go-between Germans and Italians is not only, in my opinion, to nurture the anti-Semitic network and reconcile the two Fascist powers. He had something more important for the Iron Guard in view as far as relations with Germany were concerned, and it was its
27 28 29
Letter from Pottere to Moța, December 28, 1934 (Moța 2000, 53). Letter from O. F[armer], alias Pottere, to Moța, February 27, 1935 (Moța 2000, 55-56). Letter from O. F[armer], alias Pottere, to Moța, August 24, 1935 (Moța 2000, 60).
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refusal to merger with other far right parties in order to give Germany a lever of action in Romania. A first distinction is introduced in a letter dated 18 August 1934, when Moța refuses to take part to a Welt-Dienst Congress of the 26th of August gathering twenty countries because of lack of money for the travel – whereas the Italians would pay the expenses of the CAUR Congress – but in fact because the Romanian anti-Semitic movement was already represented by the old rival A.C. Cuza, from whom Moța distinguishes the Legionaries reminding that they “envisaged as the only possibility a solution intimately linked to an action of moral rebirth of our people”30, thus what Roger Griffin calls the palingenetic ideological tendency of Fascism, totally confirmed here. Pottere was really sorry with the Iron Guard’s absence, so in a letter dated September 1934 he asked Moța “to set his conditions” for a next Congress; he insisted heavily on a rapprochement between Cuza’s LANC and the Iron Guard: “I want so much that the two movements in Romania would unite themselves! If separated, neither one will have the wished success.”31 He resumed this hope with great insistence in May 193532, but Moța’s firm refusal next month was even more explicit: “All other movements, Cuza, Goga, Vaida, have no value: they may, in the best case, be an introduction to the legionary victory, the only one that will solve the Jewish problem radically. (...) I've been clear, I think, why I'm against a merger of organizations, because it alters the unity when not done with men of the same spiritual content in the sense of the heroic struggle. Our strength lies in our unity and spirit of sacrifice, in the total belief in our leader. A merger would destroy all this, believe me, even if a letter does not allow me to enlighten you further. We remain friends only with those who are in good faith, but without a full union with them, precisely to avoid future compromises, betrayals and weaknesses.”33
Further correspondence confirmed this position, for example the absence of Moța or any member of the Iron Guard at the Nazi Party’s
30
31 32 33
Letter from Moța to Pottere, August 18, 1934 answering to a letter from P[ottere] to Moța dated August 8, 1934, (Moța 2000, 33; 50). Letter from O. F[armer], thus Pottere, to Moța, September 11, 1934 (Moța 2000, 52). Letter from O. F[armer], thus Pottere, to Moța, May 6, 1935 (Moța 2000, 58-60). Lettre de Moța du 15 juin 1935 à Farmer (de Pottere) de la direction du Welt-Dienst (Moța 2000, 42).
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Rally in September 1935 beside the other far right Romanian groups34 or the critics against the merger between Cuza and Goga parties by a letter dated December 193535. Very interesting is that Moța’s answers stopped at the end of 1935, whereas a last letter of the Welt-Dienst came as late as June 1936, as if after the acute crisis with the King begun in April 1936, the Romanian legionaries were in too great a danger to be accused of treacherous relationships with Germany to afford secrete exchanges with the Welt-Dienst. Whatever the Legionaries’ attitude towards the Welt-Dienst, the latter’s role was on a descending slope as the difficult years had passed and the need of ideological solidarity vanished, replaced by the Realpolitik advantages of power. Beginning with 1937, it was transferred from the Ministry of Propaganda to the Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP headed by Alfred Rosenberg and in 1939 it moved to Frankfurt. As Michael Hagemeister puts it about the end of the Welt-Dienst: “The previous staff – who were, according to Adolf Eichmann, ‘more or less dubious characters’ – were all fired. Fleischhauer himself disappeared from the scene. The era of bizarre idiosyncratic conspiracy theorists was over; the time was ripe for pragmatic, professional practitioners of power.” (Hagemeister 2009). Paradoxical and not so paradoxical is that at the same moment, Codreanu placed the international affairs and his pro-Axis stance on the forefront of his propaganda. Thus, secret relationships became useless as they were in the public domain and became in fact one of the most important power lever in the inner politics. The competition between the King and the Legionaries for an international balance between the Western Democracies and the Fascist Axis was delicate to handle for both protagonists: the Legionaries had on their side the ideological link and the King the State apparatus and the Realpolitik. Between the two poles, there was the non-Fascist far right of Cuza, Goga, Vaida-Voevod and Antonescu, which could provide a good compromise for the Germans, combining anti-Semitism and obedience to the State power of the King. 34
35
Invitation letter from O. F[armer], alias Pottere, to Moța, August 27, 1935 (Moșa 2000, 61) and letter from F.M. of the Welt-Dienst to Moța, November 28, 1935 (Moța 2000, 62). Letter from Moța to Pottere, December 21, 1935 (Moța 2000, 46).
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This division of roles functioned quite mechanically in my opinion: in time of crisis and of delicate or adverse situation for the Fascist Powers, Realpolitik would not work and ideology filled the gap interests would not satisfy. Thus the impact of the Legionary network on the decision makers was weak and no true evidence can witness of its influence.
The Crossed-Leveled Relation: Preeminence of Ideological Kinship over the Realpolitik It has often been said that Fascist regimes, but also movements, had a Realpolitik approach to diplomacy and warfare, but it is now obvious that this attitude changed with time and prevailed only partly and mainly in the periods of international quietness. International crises and mainly difficulties during wars drove close to each other Fascist regimes and movements against ideological enemies. For instance, in 1933, the German press criticized harshly the assassination of Duca (but not the Italian press, as Italy was a confirmed Fascist power and had international coordination ambitions), but later on, the Nazi Party and even the German regime acknowledged the importance of the ideological sacrifice of the two legionary leaders killed in Spain on Franco’s side or that of the assassination of Codreanu by King Carol. The most obvious and dramatic entanglement and disentanglement between State and Party, Realpolitik and ideology, great and small powers, certainly took place during the international crises of the second half of the thirties and even more during the war. I will limit this section to some public declarations, mainly by Codreanu, of kinship between his movement and Italian and German fascism in international crisis context. I will leave aside ideological kinship and emphasize concrete international politics, still distinguishing the comparative and the relationship sides of legionary analyses.
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Where Codreanu and His Contemporaries Go Comparative I nevertheless begin with a quotation by the French minister in Bucharest, André Lefèvre d’Ormesson: the comparison between Legionarism and Nazism is penetrating, but its importance is in the diplomatic status of the French analyzer and the pro-German stance it attributes to the Iron Guard, with its immediate consequences of the French pressure on Duca to outlaw the movement and the subsequent murder of the Prime minister: “The program of the ‘Iron Guard’ is especially close, as it seems, to that of Hitler. [T]he main points […] are inspired […] by the principles of authority, of religious and moral regeneration, of purification of the race, of nationalism on the one side, by a preoccupation of national unification and power centralization on the other side, and, finally, by ideas of an extreme demagogy.”36
So, even if we let aside the diplomat’s analyze of the ideology, very close to modern evaluations founded on populism (“demagogy”) and palingenesis, the fascist kinship is supposed to have direct international impact of rapprochement, which is a French obsession about losing the Romanian alliance. But here the international asymmetry plays a role: the movement of the small power is sensitive to the Machtergreifung, whereas the German Fascism become regime relegates the relations with the small countries’ movements to the discreet and unofficial WeltDienst, as Mussolini relegates them to the CAUR or to transnational terrorist organizations. Legionarism is a great Fascism in a small country: to a certain extent, Codreanu acknowledges it in a conversation with Julius Evola come to Bucharest at the beginning of 1938, after the electoral success of the Romanian far right: “In my opinion, in the frame of the Fascist movement dominates the state element, equivalent of the organized form. One can feel the formative valences of antic Rome, unsurpassable in terms of law and political organization, and whose true heir is the Italian people. Reversely, the National-Socialism underpins what is linked to the vital forces: race, instinct of the race, the ethno-national element. In the Romanian legionary 36
Dispatch nr. 413, December 4, 1933, AMAEF, Z Roumanie 171, f.87-89.
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movement, the stress accentuates that part which, in an organism, corresponds to the soul element, thus the spiritual and religious aspect.” (Evola 1998, 42-43).
Conversely, Codreanu had claimed two years ago, in his main book – For My Legionaries – that Legionarism, Fascism and National-Socialism were fundamentally kin movements.37 Several interpretations may be advanced for these distinctions borrowed to legionary intellectuals like Mircea Eliade, Mihail Polihroniade or Ernest Bernea, in spite of the commonalties developed elsewhere, as the pan-Aryanism defended by Moța in the Welt-Dienst frame. Among those interpretations we can certainly find the desire to promote the excellence of Romanian nationalism, placed higher than the others, but also the Italian one, in order to please Evola, author of an idiosyncratic version of Aryo-Roman racism to which he generously annexed the Romanians, at least good looking and one meter ninety tall Codreanu. Another important and contextualized preoccupation was not to appear as a German stipendiary, one of the major accusations during his forthcoming trial. My interpretation of these distinctions among varieties of Fascism is that the legionaries adjusted them to the development degree of the three countries on a descending scale: the more developed the country was the more basic the features. Thus, the most primitive feature, the race, corresponded to the principle of integration of the most developed State, Germany, where an active and large civil society, autonomous towards a recent and federal State, had created science-founded myths at the turning of the century grace to a prolific associative net, before they have been institutionalized by the National-Socialist regime. Less developed, Italian masses were also less politically mobilized, who waited for the Fascist State institutionalized engineering. Finally, Romanian legionarism was born in a developing country whose political communication in view of massification still depended on traditional vectors of the religion and of the monarchic sentiment. Similarly, in terms of major concrete achievements, if all fascists have profoundly changed the political spirit and culture of their nation – 37
“I want to demonstrate that the nationalist movements and regimes in present Europe, as the Legionary movement, the Fascism, the National-Socialism, etc., are neither dictatorial nor democratic”. Corneliu Zelea CODREANU, 1972, 311).
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Ceauşescu widely used historical heroic myths invented by Codreanu and used legionary survivors like Cranic or Noica in the sixties and seventies – only Fascist Great Powers managed to score the fate of Europe in a decreasing gradation of bloody totalitarian social engineering and eliminative of the “unfitted”: the Jewish genocide proceeds of the hyper-modern and Great power German racism (Bauman 2008); the violent and enthusiastic homogenization of a very heterogeneous country was permitted by its main available operator, the Italian State boosted by the fascist movement; developing Romania provided a mixture of modern aggressive state and the religiosity of a traditional society, but ultimately failed to exceed one fifth of the electorate and to wrest power. I will stop here with the comparison between movements based on Codreanu’s or his contemporaries’ declarations. They were intended to demonstrate that analyzing secret network is certainly useful, but even more obvious evidence for kinship and intense, dense, wide-range relationships aspirations – if not the concrete relationships themselves – are easily found and very well known from public and published declarations, as the next section proves.
Codreanu and the Promises of a European Fascist Collaboration Let me first be clear about the term “collaboration”, become pejorative during and after the war: concerning Codreanu, it certainly meant alliance on equal positions and respectful of mutual interests, and not submission to Germany. The legionaries’ position on international relations converged with Germany’s interests (Chiper 2000, 149; Sandu 2004b) but also with King Carol’s and the whole Romanian right opinion about Romania’s integration to the Franco-Soviet axis38. Indeed, the support for soviet red
38
See a later reference in Carol II's diary (March 30, 1937) : « For us, the USSR is still the weak point. All, beginning with me, and excepting some national-peasants and Tituoxi [Titulescu], we are firmly against too close relations with it. But in this position we have, at least, a little tranquility on their part, if not their friendship. If, as some would like, we are getting closer to Germany and Italy, the
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army passage through the Romanian territory in order to converge with the French army against Berlin was scarce outside some narrow circles of the Romanian chief of diplomacy Titulescu and perhaps the left wing of the National Peasant Party and the meager socialist movement. But if the King wanted good but distant relations with the Soviets39, legionaries were progressively involved in crusade propaganda against the Franco-Soviet link. In 1935, Codreanu still seemed quite moderate in his adhesion to the international positions of the Fascist powers, as the latter had not yet formed the axis, Italy even signed a treaty with France in January and above all, the passage of the Soviet army was not yet on the agenda: “Corneliu Codreanu Zelea is in the right note in the country's needs for foreign policy, because it is not a faithful supporter of Hitlerism, as are the cuzists, neither of the Fascism towards which lean Mr. Goga and other nationalists. The head of the Guard, and the other leaders with him, are favorable to a foreign policy dictated only by the superior interests of the country, and not the narrow interests of a group. They are for a rapprochement with Italy and Germany, but on condition that this rapprochement be useful to the country and occurs only after these countries have provided evidence that between Romania and its enemies they would choose friendship with Romania, both in economic issues and in purely political questions.”40
It was thus a conditional friendship that Codreanu intended to propose the Fascist powers. But the French pressure in favor of the red army passage through Romania led to a legionary radicalization against it. Codreanu’s circular letter dated 30th of May 1936 (Codreanu 1981, 74-75)
39
40
situation with regard to the USSR is becoming precarious and also our other alliances. » (Carol II 1995, 160-161) « The opposition, in fact, are the National peasant with Maniu and Codreanu’s Iron Guard. With Maniu it will be difficult and the experiences of the past do not encourage me to appeal to him, and with Codreanu it is impossible, it would mean the complete reversal of the social order and our traditional external policy. […] Nobody, with the exception of the legionaries, would approved this action. For me it was a total and absolute impossibility. The terrorist methods they had adopted, violent anti-Semitism, their ideas visibly decided in foreign policy, the reversal of alliances, the unnatural link of getting closer to Germany, in general all their radical and antisocial methods. » (Carol II 1995, 232) Note, September 24, 1935, CNSAS, vol. D8906, f.103-104, here f.104.
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was clearly hostile to the Romanian diplomacy, held by “the very feeble hands of Mr. Titulescu”, and an ideological rejection of the integration to the antirevisionist Franco-Soviet axis: “The rapprochement with Russia.” “I. It is a treacherous action the Romanian people does towards God and towards the moral order of the world and towards the peoples who are serving this order, in the war against the destructive powers of evil. Honour to these peoples.” (Codreanu 1981, 74-75)
Geostrategic realistic reflexion was not absent in this judgment, with the risks of bolshevisation in case of passage of the Soviet army – supposedly to intervene on the side of Czechoslovakia and against Germany – or of dismemberment by the Fascist powers in case of victory on the Franco-Soviet couple41. But radical ideological motivation at the expense of national strategic thinking and the lack of a more balanced opinion, between both risks, of Russian or of German domination, belonged, however, to Codreanu and the far right – whereas the King and the rest of the Romanian right favored a cautious rebalancing. The legionaries knew as soon as mid-July that the King would get rid of Titulescu42; that happened at the end of August, after having initialed the treaty with Litvinov which permitted to the Soviet army to pass through Romanian territory (Sandu 2004b). But that changed nothing to the severe critics of Codreanu against the Romanian international politics. In his open letter to the King and to the politicians dated 5 November 1936 (Codreanu 1981, 97-101), on an urgent and 41
42
This classical reflexion may be found, inter allia, in the personal letter from Goga to the King of 14 July 1936, CHNAR, Royal House, vol. 7/1936, f.3-9 « A Council of legionary leaders », note nr. 2081, July 14, 1936 from the General Direction of the Police (GDP), CHNAR, GDP, vol. 46/1936, f.221: General Cantacuzino during a legionary meeting: « “Titulescu would like to fulfill the mandate which, for his shame and that of the country, he has received from Leon Blum, but he will not succeed, because the king no longer agrees with him; Seeing the mistakes he made in the country's foreign policy, he is waiting for the moment to remove him from the head of the Foreign Office. It may be that this time again he is holding on to his positions, as he could be replaced by Victor Antonescu.” »
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solemn tone, Codreanu reacted certainly to the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March, the formalization of the Rome-Berlin Axis on the 1st of November 1936 and Mussolini’s declarations against Romanian support to the League of Nations sanctions against Italy during the Ethiopian war. In the first point, he asked that officials, including the King, answer “on their heads” of their foreign policy; in the second and the third points, he threatened with rebellion in case of war “under Devil’s spell”, opposing “the states of the national revolution, who fight for the defense of the Cross and of a millenary civilisation and the bolshevism and its annexes [... which] will be annihilated by the armies of the Cross and of the World’s natural order. If the Romanian politicians bring us to their side, Romania will be erased from Europe’s map.” Point five was quite interesting, as Codreanu compared the animosity against Italy to that against the Romanian young generation, thus assimilating inner and external fronts alongside ideological criteria. Codreanu intended to take advantage of the power shift on the European scene in order to create difficulties to the King. Even if he did not call for foreign support, Codreanu showed to the Axis powers who was their true support on the Romanian political stage and their most fitted counterpart. Foreign policy and international ideological affinity thus became powerful levers used in the inner politics. This was a risky stance and many legionaries secretly disapproved at least the tone of the letter, but Codreanu went unabated on the same path43. Thus the multiscalar approach reveals an ideological radicalization of the head of the Iron Guard which was not shared by every militant, for formal but also political reasons. Codreanu then took an initiative articulating the two plans, interior and exterior: he decided the departure of seven high-level legionary executives, including his brother-in-law Moța, for the Spanish front, where they had to fight for a month44. Moța left a will in the form of letters. In one addressed to his family, he justified his action: “They fired machine guns in the face of Christ! The Christian foundation of the world 43 44
Note, November 11, 1936, from the GDP, CHNAR, GDP, vol. 284/1936, f.311. Letter from Moța to his family, December 1, 1936 (Testamentul lui Ion Moța, 21-24).
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flickered! Could we be indifferent?”45 In the letter to Codreanu, he concluded by the formula became famous among the legionaries after the death of its author: “And you, Corneliu, make our country as beautiful as the sun.” 46 But he took full responsibility for his act, including the decision to participate in the fighting, leaving to Codreanu the only limitation on the duration of one month of fighting: “The moral victory we will win in Spain – whatever the sacrifice – will be greater for the national struggle that all we could do the rest of our lives, and beyond...”47. On the 13th of January 1937, Moța and Marin were killed during the fighting at Mahadajonda, near Madrid48, accomplishing thus a transnational choice on the side of Fascist powers, in radical ideological opposition to the communist international, but with very light network preparation. After all, the pretext of this limited mission of seven men was to give the general Moscardo, the hero of the Toledo Alcazar, an adorned sword on behalf of the general Cantacuzino, the nominal leader of the Legion’s political façade, the Party All for the Fatherland. But in order to demonstrate that the Iron Guard enacted its ideology, Codreanu decided that the young members of the mission would also fight, so the deaths were neither part of an important international plan, nor had they notable external consequences, as Francesco Guida remarked for the Italian diplomacy. It is true that Germany gave more attention to the funeral convoy as it passed through its territory, and decorated the coffins. In addition to the German military honors, the funeral car carried two wreaths laid by the Nazi Party, and during the ceremony in Bucharest, were added the funeral wreaths sent by Mussolini and by the Polish Beck49. The participation of the German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese diplomatic representatives during the burial ceremonies provoked a diplomatic incident, as it was considered by the government as interference
45 46 47 48
49
Letter from Moța to his family, November 22, 1936 (Testamentul lui Ion Moța, 13-17). Letter from Moța to Codreanu, November 22, 1936 (Testamentul lui Ion Moța, 13-17) Letter from Moța to his family, December 1, 1936, (Testamentul lui Ion Moța) Circular, January 15, 1937, ibid., p. 118. See also Scurtu and al., op. cit., documents nr. 144 et 145, pp. 258-260. Note from the GDP, February 11, 1937, CHNAR, GDP, vol. 264/1937, f.37-55, here f.37 et 51.
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in the inner affairs (Călinescu 1990, 334-336)50. The Prime Minister's response to a parliamentary interpellation was an attempt to save the national dignity against the intrusion of the Axis powers in Romanian politics at benefit of the Iron Guard while sparing those powers: “[T] his is a defeat for all principles and all international usage [...]. The government will seriously consider the situation created. I add that this situation created by the actions of a personal nature, can have no impact on the relations between our country and the countries represented, which we want more and more narrow and more friendly. (Loud and sustained applause from the benches of the majority).” (Monitorul Official 1937, 1036-1037).
This declaration proves that the Prime Minister Tătărescu wanted to minimize the event in order to withdraw the benefit of good relations with the Axis powers to the Iron Guard. In fact, he was certainly right when he asserted that these participations were not yet important for the central administrations of those great powers, but the legations and the parties, at least the NSDAP, began to take into serious consideration the Iron Guard out of ideological motives. In March, the government and the king made it clear in Berlin that support to legionnaires could have serious consequences on the German-Romanian relations (Chiper 2000, 222). In spite of it, a dispatch from Wilhelm Fabricius, the German Minister in Bucharest, proved that he had understood what distinguished the Iron Guard of the rest of the far right whose emissaries succeeded in Berlin to apply for grants and moral support, while “the only ones who deserve the support and encouragement are just [...] the legionaries of the Iron Guard, who precisely because of their harshness of character and ideas, are subject to persecution, imprisoned and prosecuted without mercy.”51 The press attaché Hermann von Rittgen gave an enthusiastic definition of the legionarism as a populist upheaval for which he acknowledged “that he used (...) the words of Corneliu Codreanu, who [had] been
50
51
See also Notes of February, 11 and 13, 1937 from the GDP, CHNAR, GDP, vol. 10/1937, f.181-185 and f.192-196. « Information about a new report by Fabricius », note nr. 30 (621), May 8, 1937 from the GDP, CHNAR, GDP, vol. 17/1937, f.20-21, here f.21.
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transmitted in writing, on the occasion of a recent enquiry provoked by anti-legionnaires trials”52.
Conclusion At first glance, a network interpretation of relations between interwar Fascist movements, moreover from the point of view of a small power, looks rather weak. Its range is limited, as the transfers naturally concerned mainly the elites: or, the importance of Fascist movements lies in the mass mobilization by national myths, thus the transfers of international myths like “the Elders of Zion” might have had a huge weight for the leaders, but it had to be transformed into a popular digest, thus have its range widened and adapted. Otherwise, its impact would have been as limited as before the World War, when the international radical net used to circulate common myths with no mass effect. Its density is also scarce: we have noted that only a few intellectuals were implied in the net and that the node Moța linked three nodes – Action Française, Welt-Dienst and CAUR – who ignored and even detested each other: thus the density is low. Moreover, the linking node came from a small country whereas the separated nodes belonged to important ones, adding to the poorness of the density. Last, its sustainability is very unpredictable: we have seen that the ideological convergence during high international often crisis provoked by Fascists on ideological criteria drew the Fascists nodes close to each other, but this was not a firm rule. For example, after the Vienna Award giving Northern Transylvania to Hungary, some historical Legionary leaders as Corneliu Georgescu or Radu Mironovici would risk a war against Germany; but when Barbarossa was launched, Legionaries fought well on the Eastern front in spite of they have being repressed by Antonescu with Hitler’s approval five months earlier, witnessing the sustainability of the ideological Fascist network.
52
« A new report by Mr. Hermann von Rittgen, the German press officer », note nr. 30 (3295), May 22, 1937 from the GDP, CHNAR, GDP, vol. 17/1937, f.37-38.
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Thus I propose to come back to the ideological kinship, which do not replace Realpolitik relationships between States, but arises each time the Fascist regimes, movements or personalities are in danger. And danger was inherent to Fascism, after all, Mussolini had adopted the nietzschean “vivere pericolosamente”. I propose to finish with two quotations, by Codreanu and by Hitler. At this end of his trial, which he knew it could lead him to death, Codreanu was charged with “treason”, “intrigue against the social order” and “crime of rebellion” 53. His defense rejected those accusations and referred to the commonalties of the Fascist movements: “The accusation carried against me today by the final order, I have already encountered, and it is, it seems, always linked to these movements of moral and national rebirth on which those who hate them throw, with all the invective, all the charges in the world.” 54 I do not want to insist here on the palingenetic reference, but on the sentence “always linked to these movements”, with meta-linguistic value for me, as the link does not lean on the relationships between movements, but rather the palingenetic ideology provides the link between the movements. Thus, Codreanu launches a subliminal threat to the court, reminding that if he was not Hitler’s hireling, some day Hitler might also remember how Carol’s regime had treated a kindred movement. Precisely, less than two years later, Hitler contributed hugely to crush Carol’s regime grace to the second Vienna Award, but on realistic – and not ideological – purposes, because less than five months later, he also gave Antonescu a free hand to repress the Iron Guard, assimilated to the turbulent SA before Barbarossa. In spite of this realism displayed at the beginning of the war, Hitler warned Antonescu not to break with the popular support the legionaries could represent: “From a historic point of view we can say, on the basis of a vast experience, that any regime has to lean on the people. The history showed that there where misses this foundation and the regime leans only on the strength, in the best case it does not survive the exceptional personality who established it.”55
53 54 55
Ibid., p. 94. Codreanu’s Defence, May 23, 1938, (Scurtu & al. 2003, 99). Obersalzburg Meeting, January 14, 1941, Antonescu-Hitler, Corespondență şi întîlniri inedite (1940-1944) (Antonescu-Hitler, unpublished correspondence and meetings
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Thus, if Hitler took advantage of the repression of the Fascist movement in Romania in order to ensure Barbarossa, his long term political thought brought him back to a populist, anticonservative and transnational – the “vast experience” he invokes – legitimization of the regime.
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