Kingdom of Romania
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Kingdom of Romania Regatul României 1881–1947 |
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| Constitution |
Constitution of the United Principalities 1881–1923 Constitution of March 29, 1923 1923–1938 Constitution of February 27, 1938 1938–1947 |
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| Official language | Romanian | ||||
| Capital | Bucharest | ||||
| Form of government | kingdom | ||||
| Form of government |
Constitutional monarchy, royal dictatorship 1938–1940, military dictatorship 1940–1944 |
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| Head of state |
King Charles I (1881–1914) King Ferdinand I (1914–1927) King Michael I (1927–1930 / 1940–1944 / 1947) State leader Ion Antonescu (1940–1944) King Charles II (1930–1940) |
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| Head of government |
Prime Minister State Leader (1940–1944) |
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| Founding of the state |
March 26, 1881 (Proclamation of the Kingdom of Romania) |
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| resolution |
December 30, 1947 (proclamation of the People's Republic of Romania) |
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| National anthem | Trăiască rule | ||||
| currency | Romanian leu | ||||
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The Kingdom of Romania ( Romanian : Regatul României ) was a state in south-eastern Europe that existed from its independence in 1881 to the proclamation of the People's Republic of Romania in 1947. The kingdom was the successor state to the Principality of Romania .
After the First World War , the areas of Bessarabia , Bukovina and Transylvania became part of the kingdom, hence the name Greater Romania . Romania took on the part of the Axis powers on World War II in part and in 1944 by the Red Army occupied.
history
Beginnings
The election of Alexandru Ioan Cuza as prince of both Moldova and Wallachia under the nominal suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire in 1859 united an identifiable Romanian nation under a common ruler. On December 8, 1861, Alexandru Ioan Cuza proclaimed the formation of the Principality of Romania from the Danube Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. In 1862 the two principalities were also formally united and formed Romania with Bucharest as the capital.
Under pressure from the so-called “monstrous coalition” of conservative and radical liberals, Cuza had to abdicate on February 23, 1866. The German Prince Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was appointed Prince of Romania with the ulterior motive of ensuring Prussian support for unity and future independence. His descendants would rule as kings of Romania until the fall by the communists in 1947.
After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877/78, in which Romania fought alongside Russia against Turkish rule, Romania was recognized as independent by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 (→ Berlin Congress ). The Dobrudscha was added to it as territory, but at the same time it had to cede the three districts of Cahul, Bolgrad and Ismail in southern Bessarabia in the area of the Danube estuary to Russia (this corresponded to about a quarter of the Moldavia, to which the area belonged until then). The principality proclaimed itself the Kingdom of Romania on March 26, 1881, and Charles became the first King of Romania as Carol I. The new state, wedged between the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary and Russia with Slavic neighbors on three sides, looked to the west for cultural and administrative models, especially France. Today this state is also called Altreich .
Germany and Austria-Hungary, which had formed the Triple Alliance with Italy in 1882 , tried to bind Romania to them in order to prevent Romania from taking the Russian side in the event of a conflict; Romania joined the Triple Alliance in 1883. In the First Balkan War in 1912/13 Romania remained neutral, in the Second Balkan War the country took part in the coalition against Bulgaria, which emerged as a loser from the war and had to cede southern Dobruja to Romania. During the First World War , too , they remained neutral for the time being; since Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, there was no alliance commitment.
First World War
In the course of the war, however, the constellations changed. Italy declared war on the Central Powers and Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. Prime Minister Ion IC Brătianu tried in vain to get neutrality compensated for in Romanian-speaking areas in Transylvania and Bukovina .
On August 17, 1916, Romania signed an alliance treaty with the Entente . In it, Romania was assured almost all of Bukovina (south of the Prut ), Transylvania and the Temesvár Banat.
On August 27, 1916 Romania entered the war on the side of the Entente. Romania's war targets were the regions of Austria-Hungary, which were mostly inhabited by Romanians. The Romanian army was militarily extremely unhappy, and within a few months all of Wallachia was occupied by German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian troops. Only with Russian help could the Romanian army stop the enemy advance in the summer of 1917. Due to the October Revolution in Russia, Romania finally had to seek an armistice , and on March 5, 1918, following a German ultimatum, the preliminary peace of Buftea was reached, followed by the peace of Bucharest on May 7 . On November 10, 1918, one day before the armistice on the Western Front , Romania declared war again on the Central Powers and took part in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference as one of the victorious powers .
The Romanians of Transylvania spoke on December 1, 1918 in the “Karlsburger Decisions” ( Alba Iulia ) for unification with Romania. The Germans of Transylvania supported this decision on December 15, 1918 in Mediaş , while the Hungarians spoke out against it on December 22, 1918 in Cluj- Napoca. The new Romanian state, however, implemented only part of the commitments made to the minorities in the Karlsburger decisions .
Interwar period
After the fighting with the Central Powers is over, Romanian troops occupy Transylvanian territories. In April 1919 the Hungarian-Romanian War broke out over predominantly Romanian populated areas, which ended in August 1919 with the occupation of Budapest and the end of the Hungarian Soviet Republic under Béla Kun . With this military position, Romania benefited from a favorable military-political boom at the Paris Peace Conference : Because the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires had disappeared, Romania was able to make extensive territorial demands in the peace negotiations, namely those areas where there was an absolute Romanian Majority of the population gave. However, Romania was also granted areas that were mostly inhabited by Hungarians, such as the Szeklerland and numerous border towns in the north and north-west. Government bodies formed in Transylvania , Bessarabia and Bukovina opted for union with Romania, which was confirmed in the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.
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In the new " Greater Romania " only three quarters of the population were ethnic Romanians. Numerous minorities lived in Transylvania, the Banat, Bukovina, Bessarabia and Dobruja. The most important minorities were Hungarians (7.9%), Romanian Germans (4.1%), Jews (4%) and Ukrainians / Russians (3.2%); there were also Russians (2.3%), Bulgarians (2%), Roma / Gypsies (1.5%), Turks (0.9%), Gagauz (0.6%) etc. But also the number of Romanians who lived in the neighboring states along the borders of Greater Romania was not insignificant: 250,000 in the Soviet Union (including 172,419 in the Autonomous Republic of Moldova ), 230,000 in Yugoslavia in the Serbian part of the Banat and in central Serbia , 60,000 in Bulgaria (including 42,414 in the Around Vidin ) and 24,000 in Hungary.
Most of the governments in the interwar years retained the form but not the substance of a liberal constitutional monarchy. The 1923 constitution gave the king the power to dissolve parliament and call elections at will; As a result, there were over 25 different governments between 1930 and 1940. The national liberal party, which dominated in the years immediately after the First World War, became increasingly nationalist and was replaced in power by the national peasant party in 1927.
During this time the relationship between the nationalist parties and King Carol II was marked by mutual distrust. After the death of his father Ferdinand in 1927, Carol was prevented from acceding to the throne because of his famous Jewish mistress Magda Lupescu . After three years in exile, during which his brother Nicolae served as regent and his young son Mihai as king, Carol publicly gave up his mistress and ascended the throne herself; but it quickly became clear that his renunciation was a delusion.
In the 1930s a number of ultra-nationalist parties rose, in particular the quasi-mystical fascist movement of the Iron Guard (also: "Legion of the Archangel Michael"), which promoted nationalism , the fear of communism and resentment against the alleged foreign and Jewish Took advantage of dominance in the economy. On December 10, 1933, Liberal Prime Minister Ion Duca disbanded the Iron Guard and arrested thousands; 19 days later he was murdered by legionnaires of the Iron Guard on a platform at Sinaia train station .
On February 10, 1938, King Carol II dismissed the government and instituted a royal dictatorship to prevent the formation of a government that would have included ministers from the Iron Guard. This happened in direct confrontation with Adolf Hitler's express support for the Iron Guard.
Over the next two years, the already fierce conflict between the Iron Guard and other political groups under several short-lived governments turned into almost civil war. In April 1938, Carol had the Iron Guard leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, arrested. On the night of November 29th to 30th, 1938, presumably in revenge for a series of assassinations by Iron Guard commands, Codreanu and several other legionaries were killed, allegedly while attempting to escape. It is generally believed that such an attempt to escape did not take place.
The king's dictatorship was short-lived. On March 7, 1939, a new government was formed with Armand Călinescu as Prime Minister; on September 21, 1939, three weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War , Călinescu was again murdered by legionnaires in revenge for the death of Codreanu.
Second World War
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At the beginning of the Second World War, Romania initially tried to remain neutral. On April 13, 1939, France and Britain had committed themselves to securing Romania's independence, but negotiations for a similar guarantee by the Soviet Union were broken off after Romania refused to allow the Red Army to be present on its territory. On August 23, the Foreign Ministers of the Soviet Union and the German Empire, Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed the German-Soviet non-aggression pact , in the secret additional protocol of which Bessarabia was added to the Soviet sphere of influence. Eight days later , Germany invaded Poland , and Romania gave refuge to members of the Polish government (see Polish government in exile ).
On June 26, 1940, one day after the Compiègne armistice came into force , the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to Romania asking it to withdraw its troops and administration from Bessarabia, northern Bukovina and the Herza area , otherwise the USSR would join the military invasion begin. This move was made possible by the secret additional protocol of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact. Both Germany and Italy had already been informed of the ultimatum on June 24, but had neither informed Romania of this nor were they prepared to provide assistance. Romania agreed to the terms to avoid an armed conflict. The Soviet occupation began on June 28th and was completed with the proclamation of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic on August 2nd.
On August 30, Romania was forced by Germany and Italy through the Second Vienna Arbitration to return the northern half of Transylvania ( Northern Transylvania ) to Hungary (Southern Transylvania remained Romanian). On September 7, under the Treaty of Craiova, the southern part of the Dobruja ( called Cadrilater in Romanian ) had to be returned to Bulgaria. These territorial losses shook the very foundations of Carol's power.
The government formed by Ion Gigurtu on July 4, 1940 was the first to include an Iron Guard minister , namely the anti-Semite Horia Sima , who had become the nominal leader of the movement after Codreanu's death. He was one of the few prominent legionaries who had survived the carnage of the past few years.
Antonescu era
In the immediate aftermath of the loss of Northern Transylvania, the Iron Guard, led by Simas and General (later Marshal) Ion Antonescu , formed the government of a "national legionary state" on September 4, 1940, 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 previously enforced territorial cessions, was drawing close to the Axis powers .
In power, the Iron Guard tightened the already tough anti-Semitic laws and took revenge on their enemies. More than 60 former dignitaries and officials were executed in Jilava Prison on November 27, 1940 while awaiting trial. The historian and former Prime Minister Nicolae Iorga and the economist Virgil Madgearu, also ministers in a previous government, were murdered without arrest. The relationship between the Iron Guard and Antonescu was considered tense. On January 20, 1941, the Iron Guard attempted a coup, combined with a pogrom against the Bucharest Jews, but the coup was crushed by Antonescu within four days and the Iron Guard was expelled from the government. Sima and many other legionaries took refuge in Germany, others were imprisoned.
On November 23, Romania joined the Tripartite Pact and allowed Germany to station troops on its territory. Units of the Wehrmacht crossed the Romanian border on October 8, 1940 and began training the Romanian army. In April 1941 a German army corps took part in the Balkan campaign from Romanian territory .
On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa began the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In the southern area of Bukovina and Bessarabia, the attack did not begin until July 2, 1941. The German 11th Army (100,000 men) and the 3rd and 4th Romanian Army (200,000 men in 14 divisions) were involved. Hitler convinced Antonescu to advance further than the 1940 border. On July 27, the troops reached the Dniester River and advanced into what would later become Transnistria , the conquest of which was completed as far as the Bug River in August 1941. The battle for Odessa lasted until October 1941. On August 30, 1941, the Romanian and German military came to the agreement of Tighina , according to which the economic exploitation of Transnistria was to be incumbent on Romania.
General Petre Dumitrescu led the 3rd Army into the battle of the Sea of Azov . By October 10, the units had moved more than 1,700 kilometers from Romania, fought four major battles and fought 42 minor skirmishes.
For the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942/43, the High Command of the Army (OKH) ordered large parts of Dumitrescu's troops to the front north and south of the city, which either fell there in a row or were taken prisoner by the Soviets. In total, the Romanian army lost over 150,000 men in the battle, most of its expeditionary force.
The Romanian troops affiliated with the German 17th Army fought in the Kuban bridgehead in 1943 and in the Crimea in 1943/44 . More Romanian troops were deployed on the lower Dnieper, from where they had to retreat to the Dniester in the spring of 1944.
Under the Antonescu government, Romania made a significant contribution to supplying Germany and the armies of the Axis powers with supplies of oil, grain and industrial products, but mostly without financial compensation, which resulted in high inflation. The oil fields of Ploieşti were one of the most important sources of raw materials for the Wehrmacht. Allied air strikes on Ploiești were intended to prevent or at least impair the production of essential war goods such as fuel. On August 1, 1943, American planes bombed the conveyors and refineries in Operation Tidal Wave .
Despite the alliances between Hungary and Romania and Germany, the Antonescu regime remained hostile to Hungary on the diplomatic level on the Transylvania question. Before the Soviet counter-offensive in Stalingrad, the Romanian government saw an armed conflict with Hungary on this issue as inevitable for the time after the expected victory over the Soviet Union.
Romania and the Holocaust
Shortly after taking office in 1940, Antonescu declared the Jews of Romania to be stateless unless they had become citizens before the peace treaty was signed. That affected just about all Jews, about 590,000. When Romania entered the war in February 1941, the Iron Guard's massacre of Jews began. In Odessa , for example, over 60,000 Jews were killed within a very short time . Even after the fall of the Iron Guard, the Antonescu regime, allied with the Nazi state , continued a policy of repression and massacres of Jews and Roma , albeit mainly in the eastern areas. Pogroms and deportations were the order of the day in Moldova , Bukovina and Bessarabia . The number of victims is controversial, but the lowest serious estimates range between 100,000, 250,000 and at least 280,000 Jews and 20,000 to 25,000 Roma in these eastern regions, while 120,000 of Transylvania's 150,000 Jews died under the attack of the Hungarians. Without German pressure, at the time of Romania's surrender in August 1944, more than half of the country's Jews had been murdered, and only the new political situation prevented complete extermination . Between September 1941 and October 1942 between 150,000 and 180,000 Jews from all over Romania were deported to Transnistria , tens of thousands of whom died of starvation, disease and exhaustion.
Royal coup and change of sides
By 1944, the Romanian economy was on the brink of war spending and Allied bombing, and resistance to skimming by Germany developed even among those in favor of war.
When the front reached Romanian territory in 1944 (see Operation Jassy-Kishinew = major attack on August 20, 1944), King Mihai, until then mainly a figurehead, led on August 23, 1944 with the support of opposition politicians from the center-left spectrum and the Army successfully carried out a coup , which ended Antonescu's dictatorship, partially reinstated the 1923 constitution and brought Romania to the side of the Allies. The new Romanian bourgeois government was led by Prime Minister Nicolae Rădescu . In the battle against Germany, Romania suffered further heavy losses in Transylvania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Although Romanian units were now fighting under Soviet command, the Soviets viewed Romania as occupied territory and stationed troops across the country. The Allied Western Powers recognized this status in the Yalta Conference . The 1946 Paris Peace Conference denied Romania the rank of fellow ally. The territory of Romania shrank significantly compared to its size before the Second World War. Although the Vienna arbitration award was revised and northern Transylvania was placed under Romanian administration again, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina had to be returned to the Soviet Union.
In January 1945, Romania fulfilled Soviet reparations claims for war damage before the change of sides by the deportation of able-bodied Romanian Germans to Soviet labor camps, forced by the Russian occupiers .
Rise of the communists and dissolution
In 1945 Petru Groza was appointed Prime Minister by the Frontul Plugarilor, which is close to the communists . Although his government consisted of representatives from most of the major pre-war parties, the key ministries were occupied by the communists.
King Mihai, dissatisfied with the course taken by the government, refused to sign new laws in an attempt to force Groza's resignation. Groza decided to let the laws go into effect without Mihai's consent. On November 8, 1945, an anti-communist demonstration in front of the Royal Palace in Bucharest was violently broken up, with numerous arrests, injuries and an indefinite number of deaths.
The first government under Groza decided on land reform in March 1945 with extensive expropriations of fields, houses, cattle, agricultural machinery and equipment . Women were also given the right to vote. At the same time, however, it also marked the beginning of Soviet and Communist domination in Romania.
On June 1, 1946, Ion Antonescu, the Army Chief of Staff and dictatorial Prime Minister of Romania, was executed in Jilava prison near Bucharest. In the elections according to the unified list of November 9, 1946 (cf. Romanian Communist Party ), the communists received 80% of the votes, but this resulted in widespread and sometimes violent election manipulation.
In the spring of 1947, the Groza government crushed the remnants of the opposition with mass arrests and the ban on the two large traditional political groups, the Partidul Național Țărănesc Creștin Democrat ( National Peasant Party ) and the Partidul Național Liberal ( National Liberal Party ). Farmer leader Iuliu Maniu , then 74 years old, was sentenced to life imprisonment on November 11, 1947 and died eight years later. Liberal leader Ion C. Brătianu suffered the same fate . In 1946 and 1947 tens of thousands of members of the regime formerly on the side of the Axis powers were executed as war criminals. King Mihai abdicated under pressure on December 30, 1947 and went into exile. The Romanian People's Republic was proclaimed and established by a constitution on April 13, 1948 .
Monarchs
Charles I
(1881-1914)
Ferdinand I.
(1914-1927)
Michael I.
(1927–1930 and 1940–1947)
Charles II
(1930–1940)
population
According to the Romanian census in 1930, Romania had 18,057,028 inhabitants, of which Romanians made up the largest part of the population with 71.9%. Ethnic minorities made up 28.1% of the population.
| nationality | number | % |
|---|---|---|
| Romanians | 12,981,324 | 71.9 |
| Magyars | 1,425,507 | 7.9 |
| German | 745.421 | 4.1 |
| Jews | 728.115 | 4.0 |
| Ukrainians | 582.115 | 3.2 |
| Russians | 409.150 | 2.3 |
| Bulgarians | 366.384 | 2.0 |
| Roma | 262.501 | 1.5 |
| Turks | 154,772 | 0.9 |
| Gagauz | 105,750 | 0.6 |
| Czechs and Slovaks | 51,842 | 0.3 |
| Serbs , Croats and Slovenes | 51,062 | 0.3 |
| Poland | 48,310 | 0.3 |
| Greeks | 26,495 | 0.1 |
| Tatars | 22,141 | 0.1 |
| Armenians | 15,544 | 0.0 |
| Hutsuls | 12,456 | 0.0 |
| Albanians | 4,670 | 0.0 |
| Other | 56,355 | 0.3 |
| no information | 7.114 | 0.0 |
| total | 18,057,028 | 100.0 |
Administrative structure
After independence, the Romanian Reich was divided into 33 districts. After the First World War, as a result of the unification and with the administrative law of 1925, the kingdom was divided into 71 counties, 489 districts (plăși) and 8879 municipalities. In 1938, Charles II of Romania proclaimed a new constitution, which changed the administrative structure of the kingdom to ten ținuturi (countries) again by 1947 .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ German translation (PDF; 57 kB)
- ^ Glenn E. Torrey: Rumania and the Belligerents 1914-1916 . In: The Journal of Contemporary History . 1, No 3 (1966), pp. 171-191, p. 183.
- ↑ Friedrich Stieve (ed.): Iswolski in the world wars. Isvolski's diplomatic correspondence from 1914-1917. New documents from the secret files of the Russian state archives. On behalf of the German Foreign Office . Berlin 1925, pp. 206f. (Text)
- ^ Preliminary peace from Buftea (PDF; 11 kB), requested on March 5, 2010
- ↑ The Karlsburger Resolutions ( Memento of the original from June 2, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Raoul V. Bossy, George H. Bossy, Michel-André Bossy: Recollections of a Romanian diplomat, 1918–1969: diaries and memoirs of Raoul V. Bossy, Volume 2 . Hoover Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8179-2951-7 , pp. 534 .
- ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller: The Unknown Eastern Front: The Wehrmacht and Hitler's Foreign Soldiers. Tauris, 2014, ISBN 978-1-78076-890-8 , p. 54.
- ↑ a b sueddeutsche.de , Süddeutsche Zeitung , Oliver Das Gupta: Romanian Prime Minister makes Holocaust denier minister - CDU calls for resignation of Ponta's confidante , August 11, 2012, accessed on August 12, 2012.
- ↑ Friedrich Battenberg: The European Age of the Jews. To the development of a minority in the non-Jewish environment of Europe. Vol. II, Darmstadt 1990, ISBN 3-534-11382-9 , p. 307.
- ↑ a b c jura.uni-hamburg.de ( Memento of the original from December 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 3.0 MB), Otto Luchterhandt : Ostrecht I, Historical and Geographical Foundations , p. 31.
- ^ Weber / Weber-Schlenther / Nassehi / Sill / Kneer, "Deportation of Transylvanian Saxons to the Soviet Union 1945-1949", 3 volumes, Böhlau Verlag, Cologne
- ↑ Land Reform Act No. 187 of March 23, 1945
- ^ A b Siegfried Kogelfranz: As far as the armies come ... , in: Der Spiegel , No. 37/1984 of September 10, 1984.
- ↑ Populaţia pe Neamuri ( Romanian ). Institutul Central de Statistică, p. XXIV (accessed October 27, 2011).
Web links
- Ruler of Romania (English)