1. Shortly after the start of World War II, Gigurtu was affiliated with King Carol's National Renaissance Front, serving as Public Works and Communications Minister and Foreign Minister under Premier Gheorghe Tatarescu, before the territorial losses incurred by Romania in front of the Soviet Union propelled him as Tatarescu's replacement.
Ion Gigurtu retreated from public life for the rest of the war, and, following the pro-Allied coup of August 1944, was arrested, investigated and released several times.
Ion Gigurtu then went to the German Empire, pursuing secondary studies at the Bergakademie in Freiberg and the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg and becoming a mining engineer.
Ion Gigurtu was a founding member of the Romanian Society of Industry and Commerce in October 1919, and was head of the Mica Society from its founding in the spring of 1921 until October 1944.
Ion Gigurtu was president of the Nitrogen Society and of the Discount Bank.
Ion Gigurtu, as a "pro-Nazi industrialist", was a friend of Hermann Goring.
Ion Gigurtu then made him Public Works and Communications Minister, Foreign Minister and state secretary with ministerial rank in successive cabinets led by Gheorghe Tatarescu.
Ion Gigurtu thus upheld a decree-law revising the citizenship status of Jews, around a claim that many of them had illegally settled in Romania after 1919.
Ion Gigurtu stayed in Romania for the remainder of World War II.
Ion Gigurtu was held under a special law allowing for the arrest of those who "had conducted pro-German policies and who ceded Transylvania"; following Northern Transylvania's retrocession to Romania in March 1945, the investigation stopped, his file was closed and Gigurtu was freed in June 1946.
Ion Gigurtu had been held without trial at Sighet for nearly six years, but was finally judged in a public show trial and sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment.
Ion Gigurtu's appeal was rejected, and three years later, gravely ill and in serious pain, he died in the penitentiary at Ramnicu Sarat.
Ion Gigurtu was rehabilitated by the Romanian Supreme Court in 1999.