Dead Romania Dictator Becomes Hero -- Antonescu, A Pro-Nazi Killer Of Jews, Being Rehabilitated By Nationalists

SLOBOZIA, Romania - Little has ever distinguished this dusty county seat in southern Romania, but when the locals built a monument to Marshal Ion Antonescu, even Washington sat up and took notice.

Antonescu led Romania into World War II as an ally of Nazi Germany. Most of the world recalls him as a brutal, pro-Hitler dictator whose regime killed or deported up to 400,000 Jews during the war.

Fifteen U.S. congressmen signed a protest letter to President Ion Iliescu after the bronze bust was dedicated last fall. The State Department urged Romania to "condemn political groups that attempt to resuscitate extreme-nationalist and anti-Semitic currents."

They had little effect. The bust atop a stone tower outside Slobozia's police headquarters was just one early sign of an Antonescu rehabilitation drive that is gathering steam.

Like others emerging from decades of stifling communism across Eastern Europe, Romanians yearn for historical heroes. They appear to have settled on military strongman Antonescu.

Shocked at rehabilitation

"Personally, I am shocked to find that democratization of the country should start with the rehabilitation of a fascist dictator," said Andrei Pippidi, one of the few Romanian historians bucking the revisionist trend.

A spate of recent books, a television documentary and a movie portray Antonescu as a misjudged, martyred patriot who had no choice but to join Germany to win back Romanian lands usurped by the Soviets.

In today's troubled Romania, Antonescu was seen as having solid credentials for a comeback. He was strong, nationalistic and fervently anti-communist. The Communists executed him in 1949.

The rehabilitation helps ultranationalists argue that only an authoritarian regime can solve Romania's daunting problems. Few consider them serious contenders for national power, but the allure of a strongman could grow if the country's economic crisis deepens.

Why Slobozia was chosen for Romania's first postwar monument to Antonescu remains a mystery. It was billed as a local initiative, but keynote speakers at the unveiling included Corneliu Vadim Tudor, head of the ultranationalist Greater Romania Party.

Col. Amza Tudor, the local police director and no relation to the party leader, insists a historical connection does exist. He said Communist guards transporting Antonescu after his arrest in 1944 stopped in Slobozia to feast in a restaurant while Antonescu "waited like a dog" outside.

"There is a false impression that he was a torturer, a man without any morals, that he was a dictator," the police director said.

He said that he reviewed records suppressed by the Communists and that the "real history" is different.

A `contradictory character'

"Antonescu was a contradictory character," said Ion Cristoiu, populist editor of a widely read Romanian daily, Evenimentul Zilei.

"He has been . . . rehabilitated by public opinion not as anti-Semitic, but as anti-Russian; not as a dictator, but as an anti-communist."

Cristoiu, whose newspaper has criticized the rehabilitation effort, said the only danger is if "nationalist-communist forces" can parlay it into a power base before Romanians become bored with the whole notion.

Scholars like Pippidi fear more distortions of history will keep Romanians from learning hard lessons of the past.

"In the last years of the 1930s and during the war, because of our leaders, Romania had an ugly face," he said. "Historians like me try to tell Romanians that history must be accepted with its bitter truths."