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Iron Guard
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The Iron Guard is the name most commonly given in English to a Far-right ultra-nationalist, antisemitic, and fascist movement and political party in Romania in the period from 1927 into the early part of World War II.
Originally founded by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu on July 24, 1927 as the Legion of the Archangel Michael ("Legiunea Arhanghelul Mihail"), and led by him until Codreanu's death in 1938, adherents to the movement continued to be widely referred to as "legionnaires" (sometimes "legionaries"; ) and the organization as the "Legion" or the "Legionary Movement" ("Miscarea Legionara"), despite various changes of the (intermittently banned) organization's name.
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The Iron Guard is the name most commonly given in English to a Far-right ultra-nationalist, antisemitic, and fascist movement and political party in Romania in the period from 1927 into the early part of World War II.
Originally founded by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu on July 24, 1927 as the Legion of the Archangel Michael ("Legiunea Arhanghelul Mihail"), and led by him until Codreanu's death in 1938, adherents to the movement continued to be widely referred to as "legionnaires" (sometimes "legionaries"; ) and the organization as the "Legion" or the "Legionary Movement" ("Miscarea Legionara"), despite various changes of the (intermittently banned) organization's name. In March 1930 Codreanu formed the "Iron Guard" ("Garda de Fier") as a paramilitary political branch of the Legion; this name eventually came to refer to the Legion itself. Later, in June 1935, the Legion changed its official name to the "Totul pentru Tara" party, literally "Everything for the Country", but commonly translated as "Everything for the Fatherland" or occasionally "Everything for the Motherland".
Description
Ideology
Historian Stanley G. Payne writes in his study of Fascism, "The Legion was arguably the most unusual mass movement of interwar Europe." The Legion contrasted with most other European fascist movements of the period in its overt religiosity (in the form of an embrace of the Romanian Orthodox religion). According to Ioanid, the Legion "willingly inserted strong elements of Orthodox Christianity into its political doctrine to the point of becoming one of the rare modern European political movements with a religious ideological structure." The movement's leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, was a religious mystic who aimed at a spiritual resurrection for the nation. According to Codreanu's heterodox philosophy, human life was a sinful, violent political war, which would ultimately be transcended by the spiritual nation. In this schema, the Legionnaire might have to perform fanatical and violent actions that would condemn him to damnation- which was considered the ultimate sacrifice for the nation! In addition to its regenerative nationalism and heretical-Christian doctrines, the Legion promulgated a biological conception of the Romanian nation. Like many fascist movements, the Legion called for a revolutionary "new man". As for economics, there was no straightforward program, but the Legion generally promoted the idea of a communal or national economy, rejecting capitalism as overly materialistic. The movement considered its main enemies to be present political leaders and the Jews.
Style
Its members wore green uniforms (meant as a symbol of renewal, and the origin of the occasional reference to them as the "Greenshirts" - "Camasile verzi"), and greeted each other using the Roman salute. The main symbol used by the Iron Guard was a triple cross (a variant of the triple parted and fretted one), standing for prison bars (as a badge of martyrdom), and sometimes referred to as the "Archangel Michael Cross" ("Crucea Arhanghelului Mihail").
The mysticism of the Legion led to a cult of death, martyrdom, violence, and self-sacrifice. Its action squads were called echipa mortii, or "death squads". A chapter of the Legion was called a cuib, or "nest," and was arranged around the virtues of discipline, work, silence, education, mutual, aid, and honor. These groups observed rituals that included writing oaths in blood and drinking blood.
History
Founding and rise
In 1927, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu left the number two position (under A.C. Cuza) in the Romanian political party known as the National-Christian Defense League (NCDL). He then founded the Legion of the Archangel Michael.
The Legion also differed from other fascist movements in that it had its mass base among the peasantry and students, rather than among military veterans. However, the legionnaires shared the fascist penchant for violence, up to and including political assassinations.
With Codreanu as a charismatic leader, the Legion was known for skillful propaganda, including a very capable use of spectacle. Utilizing marches, religious processions and patriotic and partisan hymns and anthems, along with volunteer work and charitable campaigns in rural areas in support of its anti-Communist, anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, and anti-parliamentary philosophy, the League presented itself as an alternative to corrupt, clientelist parties including the NCDL.
Like other clerical fascist movements of the time, the Iron Guard was vividly anti-Semitic, promoting the idea that "Rabbinical aggression against the Christian world" in "unexpected 'protean forms': Freemasonry, Freudianism, homosexuality, atheism, Marxism, Bolshevism, the civil war in Spain," were undermining society.
On December 10, 1933 the Romanian Liberal Prime Minister Ion Duca banned the Iron Guard. After a brief period of arrests, beatings, torture and even killings, (twelve members of the Legionary Movement were murdered by the police force), Iron Guard members retaliated on December 29, 1933 by assassinating Duca on the platform of the Sinaia railway station.
A bloody struggle for power
In the 1937 parliamentary elections the Legion came in third, behind the Liberal and the Peasant Parties, with 15.5 percent of the vote. King Carol II was strongly opposed to the Legion's political aims (not, as some claim, simply due to the influence of his mistress Elena "Magda" Lupescu, a Roman Catholic whose father had been Jewish) and successfully kept them out of government until he himself was forced to abdicate in 1940. During this period, the Legion was generally on the receiving end of persecution. On February 10, 1938 the King dissolved the government, taking on the role of a royal dictator.
Codreanu was arrested and imprisoned in April 1938, and ultimately strangled to death along with several other legionnaires by their Gendarmerie escort on the night of November 29-30, 1938, purportedly during an attempt to escape from prison. It is generally agreed that there was no such escape attempt, and that Codreanu and the others were killed on the King's orders, probably in reaction to the November 24, 1938 murder by legionnaires of a relative (some sources say a "friend") of Armand Calinescu, then Minister of the Interior in the King's cabinet.
The royal dictatorship was brief. On March 7, 1939 a new government was formed with Calinescu as prime minister; on September 21, 1939 he, in turn was assassinated by legionnaires avenging Codreanu. Further rounds of mutual carnage ensued.
In addition to the conflict with the king, an internal battle for power ensued in the wake of Codreanu's death. Waves of repression almost completely eliminated the Legion's original leadership by 1939, promoting second-rank members to the forefront. According to a secret report filed by the Hungarian political secretary in Bucharest in late 1940, three main factions existed: the group gathered around Horia Sima, a dynamic local leader from the Banat, which was the most pragmatic and least Orthodox in its orientation; the group composed of Codreanu's father, Ion Zelea Codreanu, and his brothers (who despised Sima); and the Mota-Marin group, which wanted to strengthen the movement's religious character. After a long period of confusion, Sima, representing the Legion's less radical wing, overcame all competition and assumed leadership, being recognised as such on 6 September 1940 by the Legionary Forum, a body created at his initiative. On 28 September the elder Codreanu stormed the Legion headquarters in Bucharest (the Green House) in an unsuccessful attempt to install himself as leader.
Sima's brief ascendancy
In the first months of World War II, Romania was officially neutral. However, especially after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, which stipulated, among other things, the Soviet "interest" in Bessarabia, earlier French and British pledges were worth no more to Romania than to Poland. When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland, Romania granted refuge to members of Poland's fleeing government, and even after the assassination of Calinescu, King Carol tried to maintain neutrality, but France's surrender and Britain's retreat from Europe rendered meaningless their assurances to Romania. A lean toward the Axis Powers was probably inevitable.
This political alignment was obviously favorable to the surviving legionnaires. Ion Gigurtu's government, formed July 4, 1940 was the first to include a Legion member, but by the time the movement achieved any formal power, most of its charismatic leadership were already dead: Horia Sima, a strong anti-Semite who had become the nominal leader of the movement after Codreanu's murder, was one of the few prominent legionnaires to survive the carnage of the preceding years.
On September 4, 1940, the Legion formed a tense alliance with General (later Marshal) Ion Antonescu to form a "National Legionary State" government, which forced the abdication of Carol II in favour of his son Mihai, and leaned even more strongly toward the Axis. (Romania would formally join the Axis in June 1941.) Horia Sima became vice-president of the Council of Ministers.
Once in power, from September 14 1940 until January 21 1941 the Legion ratcheted up the level of already harsh anti-Semitic legislation and pursued, with impunity, a campaign of pogroms and of political assassinations, not to mention showing their own skill at clientelism and at outright extortion and blackmail of the commercial and financial sectors. More than 60 former dignitaries or officials were executed in Jilava prison while awaiting trial; historian and former prime minister Nicolae Iorga and economist Virgil Madgearu, also a former government minister, were assassinated without even the pretense of an arrest.
The Iron Guard have become infamous for their participation in the Holocaust. In The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg writes, "There were... instances when the Germans actually had to step in to restrain and slow down the pace of the Romanian measures." The annihilation of the Jews of eastern Romania (including Bessarabia, Bukovina, Transnistria, and the city of Iasi) had more the character of a pogrom than of the well-organized transports and camps of the Germans.
The Legion overplayed their hand, however. On January 24, 1941 Antonescu successfully suppressed a Legion-inspired military coup, resulting in the Legion being forced out of a governing role and losing its government protection. During the three-day civil war, eventually won by Antonescu with support from the German army, members of the Iron Guard instigated a deadly pogrom in Bucharest, the capital city. Particularly gruesome was the murder of dozens of Jewish civilians in the Bucharest slaughterhouse. After the victims were killed, the perpetrators hung the bodies from meat hooks and mutilated them in a vicious parody of kosher slaughtering practices. Horia Sima and many other legionnaires took refuge in Germany; others were imprisoned.
See also Romania during World War II, The Legionnaires Rebellion and the Bucharest Pogrom.
Legacy
The name "Garda de Fier" is also used by a small, Romanian fascist group, active in the post-communist era.
There is also another contemporary far-right organization in Romania, Noua Dreapta (The New Right). Considering itself the heir apparent to the Iron Guard, Noua Dreapta embraces legionnairism and has a personality cult for Corneliu Codreanu.
Since the 1970s Mircea Eliade, a prominent historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher, has been criticized for having supported the Iron Guard in the 1930s.
Other uses of the term
There was a Peronist faction in early 1970s Argentina known as the Guardia de Hierro (Spanish for Iron Guard) which had no connection to Romanian fascism.
See also
External links
- Influential Sicilian Traditionalist rightist Julius Evola's analysis of the Iron Guard:
- An excellent , produced as a class project at Claremont College. Essays on that site provide a detailed picture of the growth of the Iron Guard and the legionary movement, the cultural aspects of the movement, and the involvement of the Iron Guard in the Holocaust, as well as a year-by-year chronology of the Iron Guard, its antecedent groups and rival fascist and proto-fascist movements, beginning in 1910.
- . Information on the Holocaust in Romania, including the role of the Iron Guard, from a report commissioned and accepted by the Romanian government.
- . An aborted 1945 mission of the Aromanian Iron Guardists in Greece.
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