The
Romanian mass
fascist movement founded by
Corneliu Codreanu in
1927, also known during the 1930s as the
Iron Guard or, when running for elections, the
All for the Fatherland Party. Their few months in power after September
1940 arguably made them the only fascists outside
Germany or
Italy to take over without direct foreign aid.
Violent, nationalistic
anti-Semitism was at the heart of the Legion's beliefs, inherited from their early patron
Alexandru Cuza. Cuza, in fact, was one of Codreanu's professors at the University of
Iasi, where Codreanu formed his group's nucleus in the early 1920s among students engaged in
pogroms against the Jewish
shopkeepers of the town.
Although typically fascist in this respect, the Legion stands out among other movements of its kind for the intense
religious mysticism running through its ideology. The decision to make the link supposedly came to Codreanu while he was in jail over the winter of 1923-24, although one can probably take his claim that he had the
revelation before a statue of the
Archangel Michael as backdated
iconography. The crossed-bars emblem of the Legion and Guard may well refer back to this
epiphany.
Legionaries, who were organised in cells or 'nests' of up to thirteen men, wore a bag of Romanian
soil around their necks and were devoted to a
cult of death probably rooted in
macabre Romanian folklore with a touch of post-
First World War nihilism.
Attracting students who had failed to obtain
sinecures in the state
bureaucracy and all the
graft that would have come with it, Codreanu also made an effort from
1930 onwards to reach out to Romania's poorest
peasants, unrepresented by any existing party and suspicious of the entire political system.
In the run-up to elections, Codreanu would ride into villages
on a white horse, accompanied by Legionaries whose
turkey feathers in their hats consciously recalled the Romanian
haiduks, the
bandits of popular tradition who were idealised in much the same way as American
cowboys. Such treks out to remote villages where urban politicians - even the so-called
National Peasant Party - rarely set foot must have made an impression in themselves, and the vague pledge of a
hectare of land for every man can't have done too much damage either.
At the same time, however, the Legion dedicated itself to
assassinations of democratic politicians (including the prime minister
Ion Duca in
1933), and local officials who had obstructed them on campaign. In
1929, in fact, Codreanu had murdered the
police prefect of Iasi for breaking up one of his pogroms; his trial and acquittal made him something of a
folk hero to traditionally anti-Semitic Romanians in his own right.
By the elections of December
1937, relatively free by Romanian standards, the Legion had emerged as the third largest party, comfortably eclipsing a rival party on the far right led by Cuza and the ageing nationalist poet
Octavian Goga.
Romania's trend towards the far right had already been recognised by
King Carol II, who ever since returning to the country in
1930 had been much less enthusiastic about democracy than he was about making money out of
industrialisation, designing his own
uniforms and romancing his notorious mistress
Magda Lupescu. When the incumbent
National Liberals failed to reach their re-election threshold in 1937, Carol invited the Cuza-Goga duo to form a government, on a purely anti-Semitic and nationalist programme which lasted less than two months before Carol assumed power in his own right.
Since the royal
Front of National Rebirth had all the
style of fascism and none of its
dynamism, Carol was well aware the Legion were likely to outflank him and ensured that Codreanu and two famous groups of Legionary assassins would be
shot while trying to escape that November. As if the response the year before to the deaths of leading Legionaries
Ion Mota and
Vasile Marin while fighting on
Franco's side in the
Spanish Civil War hadn't been enough, the mass mourning for Codreanu showed off the Legion's enthusiasm for gigantic
funerals six years before
Evita had even been thought of.
After two and a half years of
royal dictatorship, the Legion, now led by
Horia Sima and abandoning any interest it might once have shown in
social justice, forced Carol to abdicate in September
1940 when the
Second Vienna Award returned half of
Transylvania, Romania's major gain from the First World War, to
Hitler's other Danubian fascist favourites,
Hungary. Several months of reprisals against the Legion's enemies followed before Marshal
Ion Antonescu, who had assisted their takeover, turned on them in January
1941 and ushered in a
military dictatorship. Antonescu's regime collaborated in the expulsion of some 200,000 Jews, until the entry of the
Red Army and his arrest by the young
King Michael on
August 23, 1944.