Let’s break down the relevant parts of the conversation:

Douglas Muir: “Eastern European leaders of the 20th century, people! What’ve you got?”

Me: “When it comes to wartime East European leaders, I note that all the examples listed by Douglas were from the side of the Axis.”

Doug Muir: “Salazar was Axis?”

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Well, Douglas, as an answer to that question, I can tell you that Salazar definitely wasn’t East European by any meaningful standard, geographic or cultural.

Yes, you mentioned Salazar, but as I said, all the examples of wartime _East European_ leaders listed in your original post were from the side of the Axis.

Read closely; you’ve had these gaps before. And while at it, you may wish to read and think also the last message to this thread.

Cheers,

J. J.

The Antonescu you write about never existed: he was made up during the ’80s by the very same Communist Party that sent him to be shot in 1946: novels were written about the stoic general that takes responsibility during uncertain times, history books appeared where the “Basarabia” issue was not silently ignored as it was between 1950 and 1980, old WWI military songs were taught again to children, history teachers were instructed (in official teaching methodology documents) about how to make comments about how the history text books ignored this and that etc.

Antonescu is popular because Ceausescu and his clique wanted him popular.

Antonescu was a damned fool.

In 1940 he got in charge because he was kinda close to the Iron Guard , the same Iron Guard was heavily financed by the Nazis, when Caron II was sent packing.

He was a dumb military commander (he is directly responsible for about half the losses suffered by the Rumanian army on the East front because: 1. he decided to attack straight in the center of Basarabia, which was protected by forests, hills and swamps, instead of flanking the SU troops there by the North and the South, which were more difficult to defend, and 2. during the siege of Odessa, being not pleased with the delay, he got in a car and went from battalion headquarter to battalion headquarter and ordered them to go forward … so the result was that the units went to attack sequentially and allowed the SU artillery squish each unit as it went out in the open, resulting in 60000 casualties in one single day).

He was as corrupt as any other politicos in Rumania at that time: except he used his wife to collect, so he could claim he had not benefited from anything. His drive to “cleanse” the corruption ended in the slaughter of the enemies of the Iron Guard, in nationalizations, in property being transferred from political opponents and minorities (religious or national) to his Iron Guard pals.

“He was the only Balkan leader who was completely unimpressed by Hitler”

He was the only Balkan leader whose troops held enough front-line kilometers to make the Germans depend on him instead of him depending on the Germans. That’s why the Germans were paying through their nose for oil and food. Had there been less Rumanian troops on the Eastern front, the Germans would have had no qualms about raping the country the way they did in 1916-1918, or in the occupied countries during WWII.

Fact is, that’s the only smart thing Antonescu did: giving troops for the Barbarossa thingie, he insured the immunity of the civilians behind. This was learned by him during WWI: if there is a fight coming, make sure you pick a side, otherwise you’ll get clobbered by everybody, the way it happened to Greece in WWI.

The only good thing (the smart thing I mentioned above was not really good) he did was letting himself be arrested by King Michael … and there was no “conspiracy of democrats”. It was the king who just called his adjutants, called Antonescu, asked Antonescu to switch sides and when the guy said “no”, the king had his bodyguards lock him in the room with the stamp collection, then let the Communists and the elite of the other parties know what he did. This is the reason the move was a success. Had there been a conspiracy, there Germans would have found out and took charge of the country, the way they did in Hungary.

“Romania was doing pretty well right up until the Red Army rolled over the border in late 1944.”

Yeah, the Antonescus probably did very well. Rumania did well only compared with Poland.

“Within a year — less — he realized that Germany couldn’t win the war. The rest of his rule was a series of increasingly grim and desperate attempts to (1) stem the tide of military disaster as much as possible.”

Yeah, exactly what the Communists ordered when they had Marin Preda write “Delirul”, the novel that started the Antonescuphilia. The damn fool was preparing to resist the Soviets in the South of Moldova and on the Carpathians, betting on the wonder-weapons of the Germans spread rumors about or on the Western powers joining Germany in the fight against the Soviets.

The Antonescu you write about is believed by the kids that grew up with Marin Preda and pushed by the same fellows that invented him in the first place. The veterans of the war or the common people that survived it simply don’t talk about that time: to have a veteran that had seen the front line talk about it you need to get him real drunk, and then get ready to see a grown up man crying and trying to find himself an excuse for surviving the war.

The more I see these executions the more I am totally against them. The executioners always seem far more inhuman than the ‘monsters’ they are meant to “eliminate.”

The video reminded me of non-other than Saddam, who looked more human and decent than the “mob” that executed him. That was a bad, bad move by the people “above.”

Hm, forgot to mention Metaxas.

Doug M.

The one common factor between the Polish, Estonian and Latvian coups was, obviously, that they were all pre-emptive in nature. At the risk of advertising myself, a quick summary of the history of the events leading up to the Estonian coup of 1934 can be read here:

http://tinyurl.com/33jzrp

The Baltic gold reserves; it’s a complicated story, but this would be the first time that I’ve heard of their use in the maintenance of the embassies and the governments-in-exile. Of course, it may have happened.

However, Estonia was not the only one of the unfortunate trio that managed to get its gold out. The fact is that _all three_ republics managed to ship out most of their gold reserves before the annexation. The Latvian bullion ended up in France, the United States and Switzerland. The Lithuanian gold reserves, same thing; some of it ended up also in the United Kingdom.

After 1940, the gold reserves were basically nobody’s property. The countries in question were no longer in existence; but on the other hand, there was no international recognition for the Soviet takeover, either.

… but there were some practical exceptions. The Bank of England, for example, actually sold its share of the Baltic gold reserves to the USSR back in the 1960s. After 1991, the Bank apologized for the action and reimbursed the newly-independent republics by returning the originally deposited amount of gold.

Most of the gold reserves of the Estonian Central Bank ended up in Sweden, triggering a very interesting political development. Basically, the Swedish government negotiated with the USSR a formal contract which allowed Sweden to keep the Estonian gold in compensation for the former Swedish property seized by the Soviets in Estonia.

The treaty entailed a _de jure_ Swedish recognition of the Soviet annexation of Estonia, and consequently, Sweden became the one and the only European state outside the Soviet bloc and the Third Reich to recognize the Soviet takeover of the small Baltic Republic.

When it comes to wartime East European leaders, I note that all the examples listed by Douglas were from the side of the Axis. The ones from the Allied side - such as Wladyslaw Sikorski - might add some colour to the list.

Better yet, there are the truly controversial ones who shuttled between the two coalitions and thus inhabited the “gray area” in between, such as Draza Mihailovic.

Cheers,

J.J.

by Douglas Muir….