RUMANIA: God Help Your Majesty

Dictators have bulletproof railway cars and last week Carol Hohenzollern, royal dictator of Rumania for the last two and a half years, barely escaped alive from his country as lead spat against the armored sides of his speeding private train. The loyalty to this Hohenzollern of a simple Rumanian stationmaster at Timisoara was all that saved Carol II from the wrath of his bitter people.

As the royal special careened from Bucharest toward the frontier of Yugoslavia, armed members of the Iron Guard (Ku Klux Rumanian organization) roughly asked the stationmaster whether the train would stop at Timisoara. “Yes, I swear it,” he replied, but slyly managed to dot-dash from his station a warning to Carol II that his only chance was to run the gantlet of the Iron Guard.

During the ten-year reign of Carol Hohenzollern two premiers were shot out from under him. The proud, nervous, chain-smoking King, who committed the supreme political folly of trying to give Rumania a regime of royal totalitarianism with no base among the masses, knew he faced death. If the train failed to stop it might be dynamited or derailed. Taking this chance, Carol ordered his engineer to stop for nothing. He roared through Timisoara station amid a hail of bullets which smashed many of the windows, missed occupants of the train who flung themselves on the floor, deeply scarred the armored sides of the royal private car, wounded the fireman in the locomotive.

Enraged, Iron Guardsmen swarmed aboard another locomotive in the Timisoara railway yards, forced the engineer at pistol point to chase the Hohenzollern special. Like Keystone cops, other Guardsmen piled cursing into Timisoara taxis, bounced off full speed in a wild chase to head off the train at Jimbola on the frontier.

A troop of Rumanian soldiers held Jimbola, and Army discipline was decisive. The soldiers stopped the taxi gunmen and the pursuing locomotive. Scared Carol got over the border into Yugoslavia with some 30 of his palace clique. He took with him in freight cars attached to the royal train three handsome motor cars and 30 truckloads of valuables.

It was officially denied in Bucharest that the train had been fired on. Officially the Iron Guard announced that it had wanted to kill, not Carol II, but only his “Jewish Pompadour,” Mme. Magda Lupescu. But in the Balkans nobody was fooled. An unsuccessful dictator had been driven from his country.

Premier Mussolini sent a pilot train full of Italian police to lead the Hohenzollern Special across Italy from Yugoslavia to Switzerland, and at Lugano station Carol was cheered by Swiss as he alighted smiling and took Magda to a swank hotel overlooking the lake. They dined sumptuously with the Rumanian Minister to Switzerland, sitting at table until after 10 p.m., applied to Vichy by telegraph for permission to settle on the French Riviera. The Vichy Government hemmed & hawed. The Axis might not like it.

In Bucharest the whole front page of the anti-semitic Universul was devoted to an article in which Minister of Interior David Popescu certified with details that the ex-King is an “immoral, epileptic, degenerate exploiter and usurper.” M. Popescu summed up: “Future generations of Rumanians will remember Carol as the greatest misfortune his people ever suffered. Today ended part of the purgatory which our people have endured for ten years.”

“SoldOut.” The people of Rumania have been bled white with taxes in the past few years to build up an Army, an Air Force and the nearest thing in the Balkans to a Maginot Line — the Carol Line. These fortifications were to bulwark Rumania against an expected attack from Hungary. When in Vienna last fortnight Germany and Italy forced Rumania to give up one-half of Transylvania and the Carol Line to Hungary (TIME, Sept. 9), the instinctive reaction of many Rumanians was that the Government had let them be robbed. It took no great efforts of the Nazi Iron Guard to set them shouting: “Down with the traitors! We should have fought! We have been sold out!”

The statesman who capitulated at Vienna on orders from Carol II, Foreign Minister Mihail Manoilescu, last week suffered a nervous breakdown on the train back to Bucharest. But more than nerves were breaking. Rumanian editors, who for years had supported the regime, suddenly turned around and told the people of graft and corruption in building the Carol Line, denounced rampant rottenness in State and Court.

In Rumania corruption has always been more or less chronic, but King Carol in the past ten years has put up a show of developing from a Royal Scapegrace, first class, into a dictator, second class. But last week many of his subjects saw him as an archtraitor, or as an arch-fool who relied upon the guarantee of Great Britain to save Rumania.

Whose Iron? Adolf Hitler was putting the finishing touches to Mein Kampf in 1925 when the “Soldiers of Archangel Michael” (later the Iron Guard) was founded in Rumania. In recent years every effort by Carol to squelch the Guard — and over 2,000 youths of the Guard were executed last year by royal decree in a blood purge — has been quietly blocked by the Führer. Here was a ready-made fifth column and Hitler was not going to let it be wiped out. The Iron Guardists, nearly all fanatical Rumanian patriots of Sinn Fein recklessness, were not men to refuse German money or refuge in Germany when they had to skip Rumania.

One night last week the Iron Guard launched all over Rumania bloody but ineffective revolts. These were crushed by the Rumanian Army as easily as the German Army crushed the original Munich Beer-Hall Putsch. Last week the King might cower in his great creamy palace on Calea Victoriei while the mob screamed and the Iron Guard fired shots in the air, but the rioting never got beyond Army control. It was the Army’s redheaded General Ion (“Red Dog”) Antonescu who suddenly emerged on top of the pile at Bucharest.

Red Dog enjoys the confidence of his brother officers. He has been Chief of the General Staff and War Minister. But of late he was confined by order of King Carol at a monastery in Rumanian territory which was ceded last fortnight to Hungary. Last week he was released and summoned to Bucharest.

On reaching the Royal Palace General Antonescu began a series of showdown sessions with His Majesty which left both of them scarcely a wink of sleep for 48 hours. It is hard to pry an obstinate king in the prime of life off even a shaky throne, and Red Dog, between irate sessions with His Majesty, conferred with Rumanian leaders of all parties and groups —Peasant, Liberal and Iron Guard—as well as with the diplomatic representatives of Hitler and Mussolini. The German Minister conferred with the Russian Minister. Stress tugged at counter-stress, hypocrite smiled on hypocrite, the mob howled.

Red Dog coaxed the King to give up his powers as dictator and vest them in Red Dog. This was the decisive step. Next night Dictator General Antonescu wore down the worried monarch further, and at 3 a.m. demanded in writing his abdication in favor of Crown Prince Mihai, a nice-looking boy just right to be a puppet. His Majesty signed away his throne two hours later.

By breakfast time Rumania surged with a brief boundless relief. In the streets people of all classes, rich and poor, in uniforms, business suits and peasant costumes, fraternized, openly rejoicing. They felt as if something big had been accomplished. They rejoiced when Red Dog begged the new King’s mother, Princess Helen (divorced and in exile), to return from Dresden. Actually the situation in Rumania remained close to political and strategic chaos.

Before & After. During the whole agonizing abdication crisis Hungarian troops, led by Regent Horthy on a white charger, were slowly moving into Transylvania. Tens of thousands of Rumanian peasants were being shunted to new homes. They and their chickens and ducks overflowed Rumanian railway cars so tightly jammed that most of the human and animal freight got in & out of windows instead of doors. Small bands of Rumanian soldiers and petty officers announced they would resist the Hungarians by waging guerrilla warfare in the Carpathians, but none of these bands caused the occupying Hungarian forces much trouble.

In Bucharest there was a carnival of arresting “grafters.” Former premiers, former ministers, rich men and almost anyone who ever had anything to do with a Government contract were locked up. It was radiorated that $11,000,000 had been found in a secret Government fund. New York Timesman Eugen Kovacs discovered that Berlin by no means regards the Iron Guard as its trusty agent. “German circles are more inclined toward General Antonescu than [toward] the Iron Guard,” cabled Kovacs, declaring the Guard is badly split by personal rivalries within itself. Red Dog declined to form a new Cabinet of Iron Guard ministers, as the Guard had demanded, jogged along into this week with the same Cabinet which had served Carol.

To King Mihai it must have appeared as if the confused and scandalous state of affairs long chronic inside the Rumanian Royal Family had now spread to the kingdom at large in a more appalling form. When he was in his cradle his father was two-timing with the now forgotten Mme. Zizi Lambrino. When he was a lad of five Mihai was made King under a Regency, but three years later, in 1930, Scapegrace Carol flew back from exile and with Army backing took the throne from his son. Jesuitical historians last week could recall nobody else since the world began who was King before & after his father.

Mihai, today aged 18, is King in little more than courtesy. He came officially of age last year and was certified to have passed his final examinations taken orally in the presence of his father, but Mihai I is just a simple royal youth who likes to tinker with motorboats, cars and radio sets. Lulu Malaxa, daughter of Rumania’s richest industrialist, has long been Mihai’s playmate, but her father was jailed last week as a suspected grafter and the young King seemed to take no interest. Over the air waves Rumanians heard new Dictator Antonescu say significantly to new Puppet King Mihai: “Sire, a prayer to God to help Your Majesty and me!”