Damasanu had the capability to seal city access points, occupy key communication and transport nodes, and neutralize German units scattered in the capital before they could organize.

Without him, the coup was impossible.

He was also the man who had asked for 5 days to be ready when the king presented the plan on August 20th.

The front collapse did not leave that time.

Another pillar of the conspiracy circle was General Constantine Sanatescu, head of the king’s military household since 1943.

Antonescu had placed him in that position precisely to keep Mihi the first informed about military affairs, but politically isolated, not realizing he was delivering to the monarch an officer with access to classified information and contacts throughout the high command.

Sanatescu put the king in contact with retired General Guyja Mi, former chief of the general staff and retired General Orel Alia.

Both had been removed from active service by Antonescu due to their ties to the circle of King Carol II and their distance from the regime.

The original coup plan was elegantly simple and depended on concentrating the Romanian response within a few hours.

Antonescu and his deputy prime minister would be invited to an audience with the king.

If the conjucator rejected the armistice demand, he would be arrested.

The king would appoint a new government that would immediately announce the cessation of hostilities against the USSR and demand the withdrawal of German forces from Romanian territory.

Simultaneously, Romanian representatives in Cairo, where a diplomatic channel with the Western Allies already existed, would sign the armistice.

The king would send a personal telegram to General Henry Maitelland Wilson, Supreme Allied Commander of the Mediterranean Theater, requesting air attacks on German targets around Bucharest and the interdiction of railway lines through which German reinforcements could arrive from Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.

Technical details of the telegram to Wilson occupied several members of the conspiratorial circle during the night of August 21st to 22nd.

The cipher service of the foreign ministry working in offices relocated to Snugoff to escape American bombing spent hours encoding the message with precise map references of the air targets the king requested to be attacked.

It was meticulous, high pressure work carried out in absolute secrecy in an office where any employee could be an informant of the regime’s security apparatus.

On August 22nd, when Antonescu announced he would return to the front the next day before briefly coming back to Bucharest, the conspirators accelerated the timetable, Damasanu was informed that he would have hours, not days.

The colonel replied that he would do what he could.

The contingency plan originally designed for 5 days had to be executed with the forces available at that moment.

At 3 p.

m.

on August 23rd, 1944, in the suffocating heat of the royal palace halls, Marshall Eon Antonescu arrived slightly late, as was his habit, at the royal residence, Kasanua.

Deputy Prime Minister Mihi Antonescu was already present together with General Sanatescu in the waiting salon.

Two officers loyal to the monarch took position at the foot of the stairs.

Three non-commissioned officers waited in an adjacent corridor.

The king asked the conjucator for a report on the front situation.

Antonescu admitted that the Soviets had broken through the lines in Mulavia and Bessabia, but insisted that the army was to blame because it had not fought with sufficient hardness and that the political opposition had undermined troop morale through defeatist propaganda.

It was the same argument he had used after Stalingrad.

The same logic refusing to recognize that the problem was not willingness to fight but the balance of forces.

Michael I of Romania asked him directly whether he did not believe the time had come to conclude an armistice.

Antonescu listed his conditions.

He needed to notify Hitler before any action.

Obtain allied guarantees that German troops would withdraw without harassment.

ensure that Romanian civil administration would continue without interruption, that there would be no territorial changes until a peace conference and that the Romanian government would have an inviable district as its seat.

Sanites replied that Romania had hours, not days or weeks, to decide.

Deputy Prime Minister Mihi Antonescu, more pragmatic than the Marshall, asked for at least a couple of days to receive responses from Romanian diplomatic contacts in Turkey.

Sanescu repeated that there was no such time.

The king asked Antonescu to relinquish power to someone willing to sign the armistice without prior conditions.

The marshall rejected this vehemently.

He declared that he would defend the Foxani pass with all available reserves and that if that failed, he would organize a final resistance in the mountain massives of southern Transylvania.

It was the position of a man who still believed or pretended to believe that catastrophe could be reversed by willpower.

If that is the situation, there is nothing more to be done, said Michael Watnard.

It was the agreed phrase.

The captain stationed outside the room entered with three soldiers, saluted the conjucator, and then requested that he accompany them, taking him by the arm.

Antonescu froze.

What does this mean? There was a second of general paralysis.

Then the king’s aid from the doorway shouted to the soldiers, “Carry out your orders.

” The marshall was taken upstairs together with the deputy prime minister.

Both were locked inside the enormous safe embedded in the wall where King Carol II had kept his postage stamp collection.

It was a piece of banking engineering with steel walls several centime thick, well ventilated, with enough space for two men, but absolutely inescapable from the inside.

The escort of the conjucator parked in front of the building less than 100 m from the German Gustapo headquarters in Bucharest was invited into the palace under the pretext of escaping the heat.

Once inside, it was disarmed and detained.

The efficiency of this maneuver was critical.

If the escorts had been able to raise the alarm immediately, the Germans would have had two or three additional hours to organize their response.

In the following hours, the conspirators systematically dismantled the regime’s apparatus.

Interior Minister Dumitru Popescu was summoned by a fake call in Antonu’s name and arrested upon arrival.

Defense Minister General Constantine Pantazi was detained in the same way.

The Bucharest prefect and the commander of the Jearm also fell into the trap.

The head of the Romanian secret intelligence service, Siguranta, Yugen Christescu, was the only one who suspected in time.

When they asked him to speak directly with Antonescu by phone and the conjucator did not appear on the line, Christescu refused to attend the meeting and went directly to alert the German legation.

The legation was operating with reduced personnel that afternoon.

The ambassador Baron Manfred Fonkillinger, a veteran of the German Fryore period of political assassinations in the 1920s, appointed ambassador to Bucharest in 1941, was out of town.

The acting counselor gathered the three heads of the German military missions of the army, Luftwafa and Navy.

They decided to call vonilinger, inform Berlin, and wait for instructions.

They took no immediate initiative, which gave the Romanian conspirators several additional hours of advantage.

Meanwhile, in the royal palace, General Sanatescu received the official appointment as prime minister of the new national unity government.

Leaders of the political opposition, Manu of the National Peasants Party, Gioja Bratanu of the National Liberal Party, Titel Petrescu of Social Democracy, and Lucitio Patrascanu had been summoned to the audience and were to provide the king with an agreed list of ministers.

None of them showed up.

Manu was not locatable.

Bratanu had panicked at the possibility that the coup might fail and decided to stay away until the result was known.

Patrascanu did attend and was the only party leader present during the critical hours.

Sanatescu had to improvise a government of generals to which Michael I insisted on adding the four opposition leaders as ministers without portfolio even without their prior consent.

At 10:25 p.

m.

the voice of King Michael I was heard on Romanian radio across the country and in frontline positions wherever a receiver existed.

He announced the end of the alliance with the Axis powers, the immediate sessation of hostilities against Soviet, American, and British forces, and the formation of a national unity government under General Sanatescu.

He repeatedly mentioned the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States together at the same level to soften the psychological impact of making peace with the enemy Romanian soldiers had been fighting for more than 3 years.

The BBC monitoring service captured the speech and distributed it as top news.

Half an hour later in Allied headquarters in Naples, Alers and Moscow, teleprinters began transmitting the Romanian speech text.

The news took Moscow completely by surprise.

Stafka had no prior information about the coup, and generals Rodon Malinowski and Fodor Tolbukin received instructions to continue the offensive as if nothing had changed until new orders arrived.

During the following 48 hours, Romanian soldiers who surrendered or tried to switch sides at the front were treated as prisoners of war in most sectors.

The reaction at the front was chaotic and contradictory.

Many Romanian soldiers had no access to a radio receiver.

Those who heard the king’s speech faced an unprecedented decision.

Their official orders coming from a chain of command that no longer existed said one thing.

The monarch’s voice on the radio told them another.

A Romanian battalion that had broken a Soviet encirclement on the Yasi front found itself at dawn encountering a German battalion that was also retreating.

They exchanged information about the coup.

The second left tenant who left the testimony of that encounter recalled that we stood stunned.

I could not understand why my superiors had abandoned us.

His unit decided to follow its own path and was captured shortly after by Soviet patrols.

Transylvania and the price of the armistice September to December 1944.

On September 5th, 1944, the Hungarian Second Army launched a counteroffensive from northern Transylvania toward the south, attempting to seize the key Carpathian mountain passes before Soviet forces arrived.

The Hungarian Second Corps advanced from Kluj toward the southeast.

The Hungarian Second Armored Division attacked through the center and the eighth SS Cavalry Division pushed from Taru Mures toward the southwest.

The objective was to seize the Vulcan and Tou Rosu passes, the natural access routes from the south into the Transian Plateau.

Romanian border guards withdrew, seeding up to 40 km of territory.

The training divisions forming the Romanian Sixth Territorial Corps and Sixth Army Corps, composed mostly of young recruits with minimal training, began arriving and digging defensive positions along the Mir’s River.

But the critical element was the Romanian mechanized corps, the last strategic reserve the general staff had managed to assemble.

the eighth motorized cavalry division, the first cavalry division, and the ninth infantry division, plus the improvised armored detachment from Pyestee equipped with French and Czechoslovak origin tanks.

On September 6th, the Hungarian second armored division broke through the front at Ludus in the center of the Romanian line, forcing the Romanian Sixth Corps to retreat to the town of Amika River.

The eighth SS cavalry division advanced on the right flank, but the Romanian mechanized corps launched an immediate counterattack.

By September 7th, the line had stabilized.

On September 8th, the Romanians went on the offensive along the entire front and within 4 days pushed the Hungarian second army back across the Mure River.

Soviet forces began flowing into southern Transylvania from the south while continuing penetration into northern Transylvania from the east.

The Soviet Romanian armistice was signed in Moscow on September 12th, 1944 when Romania was already completely occupied by Soviet forces.

The document was harsh.

20 articles obliging Romania to provide 12 divisions to fight against Nazi Germany, to seed northern Bukavina and Bess Arabia to the USSR, to repatriate Soviet prisoners of war, to pay occupation costs, to pay reparations worth $300 million, to prosecute Romanian war criminals, to allow Soviet censorship, and to dissolve fascist type groups.

The only visible concession was the promise, not guaranteed, to return northern Transylvania or most of it to Romania.

Rodon Malinowski established the Soviet Allied Control Commission over Romania under Soviet command after being promoted to Marshall 2 days earlier together with Fodor Tolbukin in recognition of the success of the second Yasi Chisinau offensive.

Marshall Ionescu was transferred to Moscow under Soviet custody.

Baron Manfred von Killilinger chose not to fall into Soviet hands.

He shot his secretary and then committed suicide.

In the following months, the Romanian army, now under operational command of the second Ukrainian front, fought in Hungary and Czechoslovakia against the Vermachar.

It was one of the strangest turns of the entire war.

The same Romanian soldiers who in 1941 had advanced alongside the Germans now fought them on Hungarian and Czechoslovak territory.

The cost was high.

Only in operations from August 1944 until the end of the war did Romania lose tens of thousands of additional men.

Northern Transylvania was formally returned to Romania after the end of the war in partial fulfillment of the Soviet promise.

Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were not.

They remained within the borders of the USSR and would not return to Romanian state control until the independence of the Republic of Muldova in 1991.

what Romania sacrificed and what it never recovered.

The second ESC Chisinau offensive was, in the words of historian Grant T.

Harwood, an unqualified disaster for Nazi Germany.

Not only did the army group South Ukraine collapse under the blows of the second and third Ukrainian fronts, but Romania’s fall deprived the Reich of its most important eastern front ally and its principal fuel source.

German Panzer forces participating in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, the last major German attack in the West, depended partly on fuel reserves accumulated before the loss of the Romanian oil fields.

The Battle of the Bulge failed, among other reasons, because German tanks ran out of gasoline halfway through the advance.

The scale of Romanian sacrifice in the Second World War is difficult to grasp in a single figure.

At its peak in November 1942, the Romanian army had 464,000 soldiers on the Eastern Front.

Throughout the war, total losses, dead, wounded, and prisoners are estimated at more than 700,000 men.

No other Axis ally except Finland with 500,000 soldiers, but on a much more limited front and with more restricted objectives, contributed so many men.

But Romania’s legacy in the war cannot be separated from the Holocaust.

Approximately 300,000 Jews died in territories under Romanian control.

The International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, known as the Visel Commission in honor of Ali Visel, who chaired it, determined in its 2004 report that Romania was the only Axis country other than Germany itself that independently conducted large-scale Jewish massacre operations.

The Aasi Poggram, the Odessa massacre, and the Transnistria camps all were Romanian crimes, not German operations imposed on a reluctant population.

The coup of August 23rd, 1944 complicates this narrative further.

King Michael Ist of Romania probably saved tens of thousands of Romanian lives by preventing the country from becoming a battlefield where the Romanian army would have been completely destroyed.

Historian Harwood notes that although it is unlikely that the army group South Ukraine could have held the FNB line for long, had Antonescu remained, Romanian reserves would have been thrown into combat.

The Soviet advance would have been slower and the destruction of German retreating forces would have been more bloody.

But Michael I paid a devastating personal price.

The armistice did not provide the conditions he expected.

The Americans and British did not act as a counterweight to the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Allied Control Commission in Romania was controlled almost exclusively by the Soviets.

The Romanian Communist Party, a minor party without significant social base before 1944, rose to power, supported by Soviet occupation forces.

By late 1947, 3 years after the coup that saved Romania from greater destruction, King Michael I was forced to abdicate and sent into exile.

He would not return to his country until decades later when communism had already fallen.

The debate over August 23rd, 1944 remains intense in Romania.

Communists turned it into a national holiday, but rewrote history by attributing the merit to the Communist Party.

After the fall of Communism in 1989, the narrative changed again.

Some celebrate it as an act of courage that shortened the war.

Others denounce it as a betrayal that delivered the country to Stalin.

The reality is that both are true at the same time.

It was an act that saved lives and simultaneously could not prevent Romania from passing from a fascist dictatorship to a communist dictatorship.

On the northeastern battlefields of Romania in Mulavia, traces of trenches are still visible in forests where tractors never reached to plow the land.

In places such as the outskirts of Tarunamt, concrete bunkers from Axis defensive lines slowly crumble among vegetation.

In the military cemeteries of Mulavian villages lie Romanians, Soviets, and Germans in uneasy proximity.

Since the fall of communism, most local monuments bear Orthodox crosses with inscriptions that sometimes mention the struggle against atheistic communism without cleanly separating the dead of 1941 to 1944 from those of 1944 to 1945.

As if Romania’s history in that conflict were impossible to narrate in two separate times.

Perhaps because it is impossible.

The same soldier who fought the Soviets in 1942 fought the Germans in 1944.

The same army that participated in the Holocaust carried out the coup that allowed the Allies to advance toward Berlin.

This is the history that textbooks rarely tell.

That of an ally who believed in what it was doing, who sacrificed more men than any other on the German side, who participated in documented war crimes, and who at the end, in a desperate act of self-preservation, switched sides late enough for the world to remember it only as a victim of the Cold War and early enough for some to call it a hero.

 

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