Participarea României la Al Doilea Război Mondial
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Acest articole este parte dinseriile Istoria României. |
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| Principatele medievale române |
| Renaşterea naţională a României |
| Regatul României |
România în Al Doilea Război Mondial |
Comunismul în România |
România începând cu 1989 |
După o scurtă perioadă de neutralitate, România s-a alăturat Puterilor Centrale în iunie 1941, în timpul guvernării lui Ion Antonescu. O lovitură de stat din 1944 condusă de Regele Mihai a oprit dictatura lui Antonescu şi a adus România de partea Aliaţilor. În ciuda acestei asocieri cu partea învingătoare, România Mare nu a supravieţuit în urma războiului, pierzând teritorii atât către Bulgaria cât şi către URSS.
Anii dinaintea războiului
Odată cu venirea Anilor 1930, democraţia instabilă din România se deteriora încetul cu încetul în favoarea dictaturii fasciste. Până în 1938, forma de guvernământ română şi-a păstrat forma, dacă nu şi substanţa, de monarhie constituţională liberală. Constituţia din 1923 i-a dat regelui mână liberă de a-şi deizolva parlamentul şi a organiza alegeri anticipate; în final, România a experimentat mai mult de 25 de guverne într-o decadă.
În creştere, aceste guverne erau dominate de câteva mişcări anti-Semitice, ultra-naţionaliste, şi mai mult fasciste. Partdiul Naţional Liberal a devenit în timp scurt naţionalist, în loc de liberal, şi-a pierdut dominanţa pe care o avea asupra politicii României în perioada de după Primul Război Mondial. Era umbrit din ce în ce mai mult de Partidul Naţional Ţărănist (o grupare moderată), dar şi de radicalul Front Român, de Liga Apărării Naţional-Creştine (LANC) - care a fuzionat în 1935 cu Partidul Naţional Agrar pentru a forma Partidul Naţional Creştin (PNC) - şi mai ales de gruparea aproape fascistă Garda de Fier, o grupare desprinsă din LANC ce promova naţionalismul, frica de comunism, şi resentimentul pentru aleşii străini şi dominaţia ebraică asupra economiei.
În tot acest timp, partidele naţionaliste aveau o relaţiei dezastroasă cu Regele Carol al II-lea. După moartea fratelui său Ferdinand în 1927, Carol a fost prevenit de iubita sa, Magda Lupescu, în privinţa preluării tronului. După ce a servit 3 ani ca şi regent pentru tânărul său fiu Mihai, a renunţat în mod public la iubita sa şi a luat tronul în propriile sale mâini; s-a aflat repede că renunţarea sa a fost o ipocrizie.
Nonetheless, in December 1937, the king appointed LANC leader (and poet) Octavian Goga as prime minister. Around this time, Carol met with Adolf Hitler, who expressed his wish to see a Romanian government headed by the Iron Guard. Instead, on February 10, 1938 King Carol II used the occasion of a public insult by Goga to toward Lupescu as a reason to dismiss the government and institute a short-lived royal dictatorship, sanctioned seventeen days later by a new constitution under which the king named not only the prime minister but all ministers.
Over the next two years, under several short-lived governments, the already violent conflict between the Iron Guard and other political groupings approached the level of a civil war. Already, the Iron Guard had embraced the politics of assassination and various governments had reacted more or less in king. On December 10, 1933, Liberal prime minister Ion Duca "dissolved" the Iron Guard, arresting thousands; 19 days later he is assassinated by Iron Guard legionnaires.
Nonetheless, the stakes on both sides were raised at the time of the royal dictatorship. In April 1938, Carol had Iron Guard leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu arrested and imprisoned; on the night of November 29-30, 1938, presumably in retaliation for a series of assassinations by Iron Guard commandos, Codreanu and several other legionnaires were killed while purportedly attempting to escape from prison. It is generally agreed that there was no such escape attempt.
The royal dictatorship was brief. On March 7, 1939 a new government was formed with Armand Călinescu as prime minister; on September 21, 1939, three weeks after the start of World War II, Călinescu, in turn, was assassinated by legionnaires avenging Codreanu.
Începe războiul
On August 23, 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which stipulated, among other things, the Soviet "interest" in Bessarabia. Eight days later, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Romania officially remained neutral, but leaned heavily toward the Axis Powers, allowing the Nazi German troops to pass through on their way into Poland.
Ion Gigurtu’s government, formed July 4, 1940 was the first to include an Iron Guardist minister: Horia Sima, a particularly virulent anti-Semite who had become the nominal leader of the movement after Codreanu's death, was one of the few prominent legionnaires to survive the carnage of the preceding years.
In 1940, Romania lost territory in both east and west: In June 1940 the Soviet Union took Bessarabia and Bukovina; two thirds of Bessarabia were collated to a small part of USSR to form the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. The rest was apportioned to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Shortly thereafter, on August 30, 1940, under the [Diktat of Vienna]], the Axis powers forced Romania to "give back," half of Transylvania to Hungary; this arguably historically Hungarian area was henceforward known as "Northern Transylvania," as against "Southern Transylvania," which remained Romanian. On September 7, 1940, under the Treaty of Craiova, the Kadrilater or "Quadrilateral" (the southern part of Dobrudja) was ceded to Bulgaria.
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România după Al Doilea Război Mondial. Teritoriile pierdute sunt marcate cu galben. |
Antonescu vine la putere
In the immediate wake of the loss of Northern Transylvania, on September 4, 1940, the Iron Guard (led by Sima) and General (later Marshall) Ion Antonescu united to form a "National Legionary State" government, which forced the abdication of Carol II in favor of his 19-year-old son Mihai. Carol (and Lupescu) went into exile and Romania (despite the recent betrayal over Transylvania) leaned even more strongly toward the Axis.
In power, the Iron Guard stiffened already harsh anti-Semitic legislation (as well as enacting legislation directed against Armenian and Greek businessmen) and wreaked vengeance upon its enemies. More than 60 former dignitaries or officials were executed in Jilava prison on November 27, 1940 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 cohabitation between the Iron Guard and Antonescu was never an easy one. On January 20, 1941 the Iron Guard attempted a coup, combined with a pogrom against the Jews of Bucharest. Within four days, Antonescu had successfully suppressed the coup. The Iron Guard was forced out of the government. Sima and many other legionnaires took refuge in Germany; others were imprisoned.
On June 22, 1941, Nazi German armies with Romanian support attacked the Soviet Union. After recovering Bessarabia and Bukovina, Romanian units fought side by side with the Nazi Germans onward to Odessa, Sevastopol, and Stalingrad. The Romanian contribution of troops was enormous, second only to Nazi Germany itself and exceeding that of all of Nazi Germany's other allies combined. Romania annexed Soviet lands immediately east of the Dnister, including the city of Odessa.
Throughout the Antonescu years, Romania supplied Nazi Germany and the Axis armies with oil, grain, and industrial products, mostly without monetary compensation. Consequently, by 1943 Romania became a target of Allied bombardment, notably the August 1, 1943 attack on the oil fields of Ploeşti.
Despite both Hungary and Romania being allied to Nazi Germany, Antonescu's regime continued a diplomatic hostility toward Hungary over the status of Transylvania.
România şi Holocaustul
Even after the fall of the Iron Guard, the Antonescu regime, allied with Nazi Germany, continued the policy of oppression and massacre of Jews (and, secondarily, Gypsies), albeit mainly in the eastern territories. Pogroms and transports were the order of the day in Moldavia, Bukovina, and Bessarabia. The number of deaths is in dispute, but even the lowest respectable estimates run to about 250,000 Jews (and 25,000 gypsies) in these eastern regions, while 120,000 of Transylvania's 150,000 Jews died at the hands of the Hungarians.
Nonetheless, in stark contrast to most of Eastern and Central Europe, the majority of Romanian Jews survived the war. Antonescu's government made plans for mass deportations from Wallachia, Southern Transylvania, and southern and western Moldova, but never carried them out. Historians disagree as to whether the continued pleas of Antonescu's Jewish former classmate Wilhelm Filderman had a major role in this, whether Antonescu calculated that western Romania was not sufficiently anti-Semitic to make deportation practical, whether he was unwilling to sacrifice the Jewish contribution to the Romanian economy, or whether he was simply hedging his bets. (It is also worth noting that, despite his overt anti-Semitism, Antonescu had a Jewish step-mother and a French-Jewish first wife.) Totusi Antonescu, dupa venirea la putere, si-a dat cuvantul evreilor din Romania ca nimic nu li se va intampla. Insa acest lucru nu a fost valabil si pentru evreii din Basarabia si Bucovina de Nord, care in marea lor majoritate erau comunisti si care s-au dedat la acte de vandalism fata de armata romana care se retragea in urma ultimatului sovietic din iunie 1940. Astfel, in 1941 cand armata romana a reintrat in Basarabia si Bucovina de Nord, soldatilor li s-a dat mana libera sa se razbune pe cei care-i batjocorisera cu un an inainte.
Lovitura de stat regală
In February 1943 with the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, the tide of the war had turned against the Axis Powers. By 1944, the Romanian economy was in tatters due to the expenses of the war, and resentment of the heavy hand of Nazi Germany was growing even among those who had once enthusiastically supported the war. King Mihai, who initially had been largely a figurehead, led a successful August 23, 1944 coup with support from opposition politicians and the army, deposed the Antonescu dictatorship and put Romania's battered armies on the side of the Allies. Romania incurred additional heavy casualties fighting the Nazi Germans in Transylvania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
După război
Under the 1947 Treaty of Paris, the Allies refused co-belligerent status to Romania. Northern Transylvania was, once again, recognised as an integral part of Romania, but the USSR was allowed to annex Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina; renamed the "Moldavian SSR", they became independent only in 1991, under the name of Moldova.
Soviet occupation following World War II led to the formation of a communist Peoples Republic in 1947 and the abdication of the king.