The Iron Guard (Garda de Fier, also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael, the Legionary Movement) was the Romanian fascist movement founded by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in 1927. It was the most violent inter-war fascist movement in Europe outside Italy and Germany, marked by political assassinations, religious mysticism, and a programme of antisemitism that was theological rather than racial in its language but operationally indistinguishable. The Guard had a brief period of power in late 1940 and early 1941, during which it conducted the Bucharest pogrom of 21 to 23 January 1941, one of the most savage urban anti-Jewish operations of the entire pre-war and wartime period. It was suppressed by Antonescu in February 1941 and ceased to be a political force, but its members continued to participate in the Romanian killings of 1941 and 1942 in the regular army and the gendarmerie.
The pre-war background
The Iron Guard’s antisemitism was articulated in religious-nationalist language. The Jews, in Codreanu’s formulation, were the principal threat to Orthodox Christian Romania. The movement combined the antisemitic theme with a programme of national renewal through violence, organised political assassination, and mass mobilisation of young Orthodox Romanians around an ascetic and mystical ideal. Several senior Romanian intellectuals, including the religious philosophers Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade, were Guard sympathisers in the 1930s. The Guard established a substantial youth movement and conducted political assassinations of opponents, including the assassination of Prime Minister Ion Duca in December 1933 and Prime Minister Armand Călinescu in September 1939.
The 1940 government
After King Carol II’s abdication on 6 September 1940 in the wake of the Vienna Awards (which had transferred Northern Transylvania to Hungary and southern Dobruja to Bulgaria), the new strongman Antonescu formed a National Legionary State in coalition with the Iron Guard. The Guard was given control of the Interior Ministry, several other ministries, and the police. Horia Sima, the Guard’s leader after Codreanu’s killing in November 1938, became deputy prime minister. The arrangement lasted four months. The Guard used its position in the Interior Ministry to conduct anti-Jewish violence and to extort property from Jewish owners across the country.
The Bucharest pogrom
The Bucharest pogrom of 21 to 23 January 1941 was the climax and end of the Iron Guard’s period in government. The Guard had attempted, on 20 January 1941, to take full power from Antonescu in a coup. Antonescu, with German backing, suppressed the coup over three days. During the suppression the Guard turned on the Jewish population of Bucharest. Around 125 Jews were killed by Guard members in the city, including those killed at the Băneasa forest north of Bucharest, where Guard members shot Jewish detainees, and the most notorious incident, at the Bucharest abattoir, where Guard members murdered Jews and hung the bodies on meat hooks marked kosher meat
. Photographs of the abattoir killings were taken by Guard members themselves and survive. The Bucharest synagogues, including the Great Synagogue and the Sephardic Cahal Grande, were attacked and burned. The pogrom is one of the documented case studies of unrestrained urban anti-Jewish violence in Europe in 1941.
The suppression and the Iași pogrom
Antonescu suppressed the Iron Guard on 23 January 1941 and removed it from government. Sima escaped to Germany and the Guard ceased to be a political force. Many of its members, however, remained in the Romanian army, the gendarmerie, and the Romanian Special Information Service, and participated as individuals in the Romanian state’s subsequent killings, including the Iași pogrom of June 1941, in which the Romanian army and gendarmerie killed around 13,000 Jews in three days, and the Bessarabia and Bukovina operations of 1941, and the Transnistria killings of 1941 and 1942. The Iron Guard as an organisation did not run those operations; the Antonescu regime did. But individual former Guardists were among the perpetrators.
The post-war
The post-war communist Romanian regime prosecuted Guard leaders extensively. Sima had escaped to Germany and from there to Spain, where he lived under Franco’s protection until his death in Madrid in 1993. Other senior Guard figures who returned to Romania, or were extradited, were tried and executed or imprisoned. The pre-war Guard leadership had largely been killed by Carol II’s suppression of the movement in 1938 to 1939; Codreanu had been strangled by his guards on 30 November 1938 while being transferred between prisons.
Post-1989 Romania has had a complicated relationship with the Iron Guard legacy. The Guard’s religious-nationalist language has appealed to some currents of post-communist Romanian nationalism, and Codreanu has been the subject of ongoing rehabilitation efforts in some quarters. The Wiesel Commission report of 2004 documented the Iron Guard role in the Bucharest pogrom and in the wider Romanian killings, and the Romanian government accepted the report’s findings. The 2002 law against fascist propaganda has been used to prosecute attempts to rehabilitate the Guard.
What it was
The Iron Guard is the case of the religiously-framed fascist movement whose antisemitic violence had a particular character: it was theological, mystical, and conducted as a sort of public ritual. The Bucharest abattoir killings, where bodies were hung as meat with mocking labels, were not a one-off horror but the operational expression of a movement that understood the Jews as a religious and metaphysical enemy and the killings as a sacred act. The Guard’s political operation lasted four months. Its members’ participation in the wider Romanian killings of 1941 and 1942 lasted longer. The case is the European far right’s most religious-mystical wartime expression.
See also
Sources
- Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (the Wiesel Commission), 2004
- Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth, Cornell University Press, 2015
- Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel, Columbia University Press, 1990
- Constantin Iordachi, Charisma, Politics and Violence: The Legion of the Archangel Michael, Trondheim, 2004
- USHMM: Romania, the Iron Guard