Abstract
Antonescu brought to office the mental hardware of a general, one which placed discipline at the head of his priorities. He was not intent on waging war to maintain power, but the threats to Romania were only too obvious and the options available to him extremely limited. As he himself put it, ‘in today’s circumstances a small country which is under threat, such as ours, does not do what it wishes, but what it can’.1 King Carol had dismantled the existing political structure, so Antonescu did not have to do so himself. He had to put an end to internal disorder and try to establish what external security he could, with forces that were adequate to deal only with Balkan opponents. In essence, after 1940, any Romanian policy was going to be a military policy.2
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Notes
Letter to Constantin Brătianu in Mareşalul Ion Antonescu. Epistolarul Infernului [Marshal Ion Antonescu: Correspondence from Hell], ed. Mihai Pelin (Bucharest: Editura Viitorul Românesc, 1993), pp. 100, 102. The letter was probably written after Yugoslavia was forced to join the Tripartite Pact on 25 March 1941.
Polish diplomatic reports claim that Antonescu was not particularly popular in the army; see ‘Cable from the Polish Embassy in Bucharest to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London, 23 September 1940’, in Vladimir Socor and Yeshayahu Jelinek, ‘Polish Diplomatic Reports on the Political Crisis in Romania, September 1940’, Southeastern Europe/L’Europe du Sud-Est, vol. 6, part 1 (1979), pp. 108–10.
Rebecca Haynes, ‘Germany and the Establishment of the Romanian National Legionary State, September 1940’, The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 77 (October 1999), p. 719.
Mircea Agapie and Jipa Rotaru, Ion Antonescu. Cariera militară. Scrisori inedite [Ion Antonescu. Military Career. Unpublished Letters] (Bucharest: Editura Academiei de inalte Studii Militare, 1993), p. 161.
Rebecca Haynes makes these points in Romanian Policy Towards Germany, 1936–40 (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 159.
Alex Mihai Stoenescu, Armata, Mareşalul şi Evreii (Bucharest: RAO, 1998), p. 108.
Maurice Pearton, Oil and the Romanian State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 233.
Paul D. Quinlan, Clash over Romania. British and American Policies towards Romania: 1938–1947 (Los Angeles: American Romanian Academy, 1977), p. 66.
Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and Others. A History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1970), p. 318.
R. G. Waldeck, Athene Palace, with an introduction by Ernest H. Latham, Jr. (Iaşi, Oxford and Portland: The Center for Romanian Studies, 1998), p. 227.
Andreas Hillgruber, Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu. Die Deutsch-Rumänischen Beziehungen, 1938–1944 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1965), p. 99.
Mark Axworthy, Cornel Scafeş and Cristian Craciunoiu, Third Axis, Fourth Ally. Romanian Armed Forces in the European War, 1941–1945 (London: Arms and Armour, 1995), p. 26.
Andreas Hillgruber, Les Entretiens secrets de Hitler, septemhre 1939-decembre 1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1969), pp. 372–3; Antonescu-Hitler. Corespondenţă şi întîlniri inedite (1940–1944) vol. l,p. 53.
This point is made by Andreas Hillgruber, Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu. Die Deutsch-Rumänischen Beziehungen, 1938–1944 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1965), p. 113.
Henry L. Roberts, Rumania. Political Problems of an Agrarian State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 233, n. 13.
Ottmar Traşca and Ana-Maria Stan, Rebelitine legionară în documente străine (Bucharest: Albatros, 2002), p. 56, n. 135.
Paul Schmidt, Statist auf diplomatischer Bühne, 1923–45: Erlebnisse des Chefdolmetschers im Auswärtigen Amt m0it den Staatsmännern Europas (Bonn: Athenäum-Verlag, 1949), pp. 511–12.
V. Blănaru-Flamură, Generalul Antonescu în cămaşa verde legionară [General Antonescu in the Green Shirts of the Legionaries] (Bucharest: Sepco, 1995), p. 88.
Aurel Simion, Regimul Politic din România în perioada sept. 1940-ian. 1941 (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1976), p. 247; see also Hillgruber, Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu, p. 119.
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© 2006 Dennis Deletant
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Deletant, D. (2006). Antonescu and the National Legionary State. In: Hitler’s Forgotten Ally. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230502093_4
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