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Iron Guard

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Iron Guard

 

(in Rumanian, Garda de fier), a fascist organization created in 1931 by reactionary Rumanian bourgeois-landlord circles. The Iron Guard served as an agent of Hitler in Rumania. After its assassination of the Rumanian prime minister I. G. Duca in 1934, the organization was formally dissolved. It continued to operate under the name of “Everything for the Fatherland.”

After the establishment of the fascist monarchical dictator-ship in February 1938, King Carol II, recognizing the Iron Guard as a rival in the struggle for political power in the country, banned the organization and killed its leader, C. Codreanu, “in an attempt to escape.” In 1940 the leaders of the illegal Iron Guard, including Horia Sima, took part in the formation of General I. Antonescu’s fascist government; however, in January 1941, they came into conflict with Antonescu. After the liberation of Rumania from fascism in 1944, the Iron Guard was dissolved and banned.

REFERENCE

Lebedev, N. I. “Zheleznaia gvardiia.” Kami’ II i Gitler. Moscow, 1968.

E. D. KARPESHCHENKO

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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An important aspect of the registration, closely followed by the authorities, was that of the requests received from the members of the formers political parties, and especially those coming from the National Peasants' Party, the National Liberal Party and the Iron Guard. Immediately after the establishment of the first single political party, different representatives of the political spectrum--from left to right--hurried to show their adherence to the National Renaissance Front.
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There was a curved cast iron guard over those knives to keep small boys' fingers out of the rotating knives.
The second factor that disrupted DHM activity was the tension between the Antonescu government and Romania's contribution to fascism, the Iron Guard. By January 1941, Antonescu decided that cooperation between his government and the leader of the Iron Guard, Horia Sima, was no longer possible and that the Iron Guard would have to be dealt with decisively.
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But I faced a new surprise the following week, when, on the same TV program, the hostess was rather passive towards her guest, a militant journalist turned mercenary journalist, as he confessed his admiration for Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the "Captain" of the Iron Guard, the far-right Orthodox terrorist organization of the pre-war years.
However desperate the Jews were before the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, they were even more panic-stricken afterwards, as more than 600,000 Jews were summarily massacred in the next few months in Lithuania, eastern Poland, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, while the Iron Guard commenced, literally, butchering Jews in Bucharest.
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