1. Ion Antonescu was a military attache to France and later Chief of the General Staff, briefly serving as Defence Minister in the National Christian cabinet of Octavian Goga as well as the subsequent First Cristea cabinet, in which he served as Air and Marine Minister.
An atypical figure among Holocaust perpetrators, Ion Antonescu enforced policies independently responsible for the deaths of as many as 400,000 people, most of them Bessarabian, Ukrainian and Romanian Jews, as well as Romanian Romani.
On 23 August 1944, King Michael I led a coup d'etat against Ion Antonescu, who was arrested; after the war he was convicted of war crimes, and executed in June 1946.
Ion Antonescu was especially close to his mother, Lita Baranga, who survived his death.
Ion Antonescu spent the following two years attending courses at the Special Cavalry Section in Targoviste.
Reportedly, Antonescu was a zealous and goal-setting student, upset by the slow pace of promotions, and compensated for his diminutive stature through toughness.
Opinions on his role in the events diverge: while some historians believe Antonescu was a particularly violent participant in quelling the revolt, others equate his participation with that of regular officers or view it as outstandingly tactful.
Ion Antonescu's handling of the situation earned him praise from King Carol I, who sent Crown Prince Ferdinand to congratulate him in front of the whole garrison.
In 1913, during the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria, Antonescu served as a staff officer in the First Cavalry Division in Dobruja.
When enemy troops crossed the mountains from Transylvania into Wallachia, Ion Antonescu was ordered to design a defence plan for Bucharest.
Lieutenant Colonel Ion Antonescu retained his visibility in the public eye during the interwar period.
Ion Antonescu participated in the political campaign to earn recognition at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 for Romania's gains in Transylvania.
Ion Antonescu was known for his frequent and erratic changes of mood, going from being extremely angry to being calm to angry again to being calm again within minutes, behaviour that often disoriented those who had to work with him.
Ion Antonescu negotiated a credit worth 100 million French francs to purchase French weaponry.
Ion Antonescu worked together with Romanian diplomat Nicolae Titulescu; the two became personal friends.
Ion Antonescu was in contact with the Romanian-born conservative aristocrat and writer Marthe Bibesco, who introduced Antonescu to the ideas of Gustave Le Bon, a researcher of crowd psychology who had an influence on Fascism.
In 1923, he made the acquaintance of lawyer Mihai Ion Antonescu, who was to become his close friend, legal representative and political associate.
Ion Antonescu married Maria Niculescu, for long a resident of France, who had been married twice before: first to a Romanian Police officer, with whom she had a son, Gheorghe, and then to a Frenchman of Jewish origin.
On Carol's orders, Ion Antonescu was placed under surveillance by the Siguranta Statului intelligence service, and closely monitored by the Interior Ministry Undersecretary Armand Calinescu.
Ion Antonescu was engaged in discussions with the rising far right, antisemitic and fascist movements; although in competition with each other, both the National Christian Party of Octavian Goga and the Iron Guard sought to attract Antonescu to their side.
Ion Antonescu's mandate coincided with a troubled period, and saw Romania having to choose between its traditional alliance with France, Britain, the crumbling Little Entente and the League of Nations or moving closer to Nazi Germany and its Anti-Comintern Pact.
At the time, Ion Antonescu viewed Romania's alliance with the Entente as insurance against Hungarian and Soviet revanchism, but, as an anti-communist, he was suspicious of the Franco-Soviet rapprochement.
However, his major contribution in office was in relation to an internal crisis: as a response to violent clashes between the Iron Guard and the PNC's own fascist militia, the Lancieri, Antonescu extended the already imposed martial law.
The deposed Premier died in 1938, while Ion Antonescu remained a close friend of his widow, Veturia Goga.
Ion Antonescu was a celebrity defence witness at the latter's first and second trials.
Ion Antonescu himself had come to value a pro-Axis alternative after the 1938 Munich Agreement, when Germany imposed demands on Czechoslovakia with the acquiescence of France and the United Kingdom, leaving locals to fear that, unless reoriented, Romania would follow.
Pop's reasons for advising Carol to appoint Antonescu as Prime Minister were partly because Antonescu, who was known to be friendly with the Iron Guard and who had been imprisoned under Carol, was believed to have enough of an oppositional background to Carol's regime to appease the public and partly because Pop knew that Antonescu, for all his Legionary sympathies, was a member of the elite and believed he would never turn against it.
Carol and Ion Antonescu accepted the proposal, Ion Antonescu being ordered to approach political party leaders Maniu of the PNT and Dinu Bratianu of the PNL.
Ion Antonescu partly complied with the request but asked Carol to bestow upon him the reserve powers for Romanian heads of state.
Shortly afterward, Ion Antonescu heard rumours that two of Carol's loyalist generals, Gheorghe Mihail and Paul Teodorescu, were planning to have him killed.
Horia Sima's subsequent cooperation with Antonescu was endorsed by high-ranking Nazi German officials, many of whom feared the Iron Guard was too weak to rule on its own.
Ion Antonescu continued as Premier and Conducator, and was named as the Guard's honorary commander.
Ion Antonescu subsequently ordered the Guardists imprisoned by Carol to be set free.
Ion Antonescu drew much hostility from his partners by extending some protection to former dignitaries whom the Iron Guard had arrested.
German officials acting on Hitler's orders, including the new Ambassador Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, helped Ion Antonescu eliminate the Iron Guardists, but several of their lower-level colleagues actively aided Sima's subordinates.
Hitler only knew German, while the only foreign language Ion Antonescu knew was French, in which he was completely fluent.
The Asians Antonescu referred were the various Asian peoples of the Soviet Union, such as the Kazakhs, Kalmyks, Mongols, Uzbeks, Buryats, etc.
Ion Antonescu had been made aware of the plan by German envoys, and supported it enthusiastically even before Hitler extended Romania an offer to participate.
On 18 June 1941, Ion Antonescu gave orders to his generals about "cleansing the ground" of Jews when Romanian forces entered Bessarabia and Bukovina.
The propaganda of the Ion Antonescu regime demonized everything Jewish as Ion Antonescu believed that Communism was invented by the Jews, and all of the Soviet leaders were really Jews.
Ion Antonescu believed that the liberal humanist-democratic-capitalist values of the West and Communism were both invented by the Jews to destroy Romania.
Since the Jewish women were going to exterminated anyway, Ion Antonescu felt there was nothing wrong about letting his soldiers and gendarmes have "some fun" before shooting them.
In September 1941, Ion Antonescu ordered Romanian forces to take Odessa, a prize he badly wanted for reasons of prestige.
Ion Antonescu's anti-Semitism was sharpened by the Odessa fighting as he was convinced that the only reason why the Red Army had fought so fiercely around Odessa was that the average Russian soldier had been terrorized by bloodthirsty Jewish commissars into fighting hard.
Ion Antonescu ended his letter with the claim that Russian Jewish commissars had savagely tortured Romanian POWs and that the entire Jewish community of Romania, Filderman included were morally responsible for all of the losses and sufferings of the Romanians around Odessa.
Since Romania had almost no arms industry of its own and was almost entirely dependent upon weapons from Germany to fight the war, Ion Antonescu had little choice, but to comply with Killinger's request.
One of the earliest major obstacles Ion Antonescu encountered on the Eastern Front was the resistance of Odessa, a Soviet port on the Black Sea.
Antonescu's planned that once the war against the Soviet Union was won to invade Hungary to take back Transylvania and Bulgaria to take back the Dobruja with Antonescu being especially keen on the former.
Ion Antonescu planned on attacking Hungary to recover Transylvania at the first opportunity and regarded Romanian involvement on the Eastern Front in part as a way of proving to Hitler that Romania was a better German ally than Hungary, and thus deserving of German support when the planned Romanian-Hungarian war began.
Ion Antonescu is known to have been suffering from digestive problems, treating himself with food prepared by Marlene von Exner, an Austrian-born dietitian who moved into Hitler's service after 1943.
In early 1943, Ion Antonescu authorized his diplomats to contact British and American diplomats in Portugal and Switzerland to see if were possible for Romania to sign an armistice with the Western powers.
In reaction, Antonescu attempted to stabilize the front on a line between Focsani, Namoloasa and Braila, deep inside Romanian territory.
On that day, the sovereign asked Ion Antonescu to meet him in the Royal Palace, where he presented him with a request to take Romania out of its Axis alliance.
Ion Antonescu was afterward handed to the Soviet occupation forces, who transported him to Moscow, together with his deputy Mihai Antonescu, Governor of Transnistria Gheorghe Alexianu, defence minister Constantin Pantazi, Gendarmerie commander Constantin Vasiliu and Bucharest Police chief Mircea Elefterescu.
At some point during this period, Ion Antonescu attempted suicide in his quarters.
Ion Antonescu was returned to Bucharest in spring 1946 and held in Jilava Prison.
Ion Antonescu was interrogated by prosecutor Avram Bunaciu, to whom he complained about the conditions of his detainment, contrasting them with those in Moscow, while explaining that he was a vegetarian and demanding a special diet.
In May 1946, Ion Antonescu was prosecuted at the first in a series of People's Tribunals, on charges of war crimes, crimes against the peace and treason.
Ion Antonescu was represented by Constantin Paraschivescu-Balaceanu and Titus Stoica, two public defenders whom he had first consulted with a day before the procedures were initiated.
Ion Antonescu supporters circulated false rumours that regular soldiers had refused to fire at their commander, and that the squad was mostly composed of Jewish policemen.
Ion Antonescu's final written statement was a letter to his wife, urging her to withdraw into a convent, while stating the belief that posterity would reconsider his deeds and accusing Romanians of being "ungrateful".
Conducator Antonescu thought Hitler willing to revise his stance on Northern Transylvania, and claimed to have obtained the German leader's agreement, using it to justify participation on the Eastern Front after the recovery of Bessarabia.
Several nationalists sympathetic to Antonescu acclaimed the extension of Romanian rule into Transnistria, which they understood as permanent.
Historian Ioan Scurtu believes that, during the Legionary Rebellion, Antonescu deliberately waited before stepping in, in order for the Guard to be "profoundly discredited" and for himself to be perceived as a "saviour".
However, various other researchers assess that, by aligning himself with Hitler before and during Operation Barbarossa, Antonescu implicitly agreed with his thoughts on the "Jewish Question", choosing racial over religious antisemitism.
However, as early as February 1941, Antonescu was contemplating the ghettoization of all Jewish Romanians, as an early step toward their expulsion.
Ion Antonescu's antiziganism manifested itself as the claim that some or all Romani people, specifically nomadic ones, were given to criminal behaviour.
In doing so, Antonescu offered some credit to a marginal and pseudoscientific trend in Romanian sociology, which, basing itself on eugenic theories, recommended the marginalization, deportation or compulsory sterilization of the Romani people, whose numeric presence it usually exaggerated.
References to the fascist traits of Ion Antonescu's dictatorship are made by other researchers.
The synthetic aspect of Ion Antonescu's rule is discussed in detail by various authors.
The "providential" and "saviour" themes are emphasized by historian Adrian Majuru, who notes that Ion Antonescu both adopted such ideals and criticized Carol for failing to live up to them.
Accordingly, Antonescu formally outlawed all political forces in February 1941, codifying penal labour as punishment for most public forms of political expression.
Ion Antonescu strictly relied on the chain of command, and his direct orders to the Army overrode civilian hierarchies.
Ion Antonescu imposed drastic penalties for misdemeanors, and the legal use of capital punishment was extended to an unprecedented level.
Ion Antonescu personally set standards for nightclub programs, for the length of skirts and for women's use of bicycles, while forcing all men to wear coats in public.
Ion Antonescu's wife Maria was a patron of state-approved charitable organizations, initially designed to compete with successful Iron Guardist ventures such as Ajutorul Legionar.
Much of the propaganda produced during the Ion Antonescu era supported the antisemitic theses put forth by the Conducator.
Romania's other enemies were generally treated differently: Antonescu himself issued objections to the anti-British propaganda of explicitly pro-Nazi papers such as Porunca Vremii.
Three weeks after gaining power and inaugurating the National Legionary regime, Antonescu declared to Italian interviewers at La Stampa that solving the "Jewish Question" was his pressing concern, and that he considered himself "haunted" by the large Jewish presence in Moldavian towns.
In late August 1941, in Tighina, Antonescu called a secret conference attended by himself, the governors of Bessarabia and Bukovina and the governor-designate of Transnistria to discuss his plans regarding the Jews in those regions.
On 11 November 1941, Ion Antonescu sent Filderman a second letter stating no Jews would be allowed to live in the "liberated territories" and as for the Jews of the Regat:.
Also in the summer of 1942, Antonescu became a perpetrator of the Porajmos, or Holocaust-related crimes against the Romani people, when he ordered the Transnistrian deportation of Romanian Romani from the Old Kingdom, transited through camps and resettled in inhumane conditions near the Southern Bug.
Ion Antonescu is quoted saying that the Romanian Army's criminal acts were "reprisals, not massacres".
The policies applied in respect to the Romani population were ambivalent: while ordering the deportation of those he considered criminals, Ion Antonescu was taking some interest in improving the lives of Romani labourers of the Baragan Plain.
When confronted with German decisions to push back Jews he had expelled before the occupation of Transnistria, Antonescu protested, arguing that he had conformed with Hitler's decisions regarding "eastern Jews".
Antonescu saw the deportation of the Jews of the Regat as the pro quid quo for the return of Transylvania and unable to obtain satisfactory promises from the German Ambassador Baron Manfred von Killinger that Romania would be rewarded with the return of Transylvania in exchange for handing over its Jews, Antonescu cancelled the deportation until the Germans would make him a better offer.
Ion Antonescu was doing the same for certain Northern Transylvanian Romani communities who had escaped southwards.
The Antonescu regime allowed the extermination of the Romanian Jewish diaspora in other parts of Europe, formally opposing their deportation in some cases where it appeared Germany was impinging upon Romania's sovereignty.
The Germans objected to such ambiguities, and Hitler once advised Antonescu to have Maniu killed, an option which the Conducator rejected because of the PNT leader's popularity with the peasants.
Steflea issued similar calls, and Ion Antonescu's eventually agreed to preserve a home army just before the Battle of Stalingrad.
Dinu Bratianu condemned antisemitic measures, prompting Ion Antonescu to accuse him of being an ally of "the Yid in London".
At the other end of the political spectrum, after the Legionary Rebellion and the Iron Guard's decapitation, many Legionaries who opposed the regime, and whom Antonescu himself believed were "communists in [Legionary] green shirts", were killed or imprisoned.
Measures enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime had contradictory effects on the Romanian cultural scene.
Ion Antonescu himself recounted having contemplated using the death penalty against "sects" who would not allow military service, and ultimately deciding in favour of deporting "recalcitrant" ones.
Vladimir Tismaneanu has said Antonescu has a "pseudo-sacred aura" and many Romanians consider the attempts to diminsh this to be an affront to their national dignity: "In post-Communist societies, fantasies of persecution offer immense gratification to large strata of frustrated individuals".
Romanians' image of Antonescu shifted several times after the 1989 Revolution toppled communism.
Various researchers argue that the overall tendency to exculpate Antonescu was endorsed by the ruling National Salvation Front and its successor group, later known as Social Democratic Party, who complemented an emerging pro-authoritarian lobby while depicting their common opponent King Michael and his supporters as traitors.
In 2003, after a period in which his own equivocal stance on the matter had drawn controversy, Constantinescu's successor Ion Antonescu Iliescu established the Wiesel Commission, an international group of expert historians whose mission was the study of the Holocaust in Romania, later succeeded by the Elie Wiesel National Institute.
The vote's knockout phase included televised profiles of the ten most popular figures, and saw historian Adrian Cioroianu using the portion dedicated to Antonescu to expose and condemn him, giving voters reasons not to see the dictator as a great Romanian.
Ion Antonescu had sporadic contacts with the artistic and literary environment, including an interview he awarded to his supporter, writer Ioan Alexandru Bratescu-Voinesti.
Ion Antonescu was the first Romanian to receive the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, being awarded it by Hitler himself.