title: Carol II of Romania

text: Following the start of World War II, Carol II reaffirmed the Polish–Romanian alliance; the military assistance was, however, declined by Poland, which wished to follow the Romanian Bridgehead plan that required a neutral Romania. Following the fall of Poland and the involvement of the USSR, Carol II maintained a neutrality policy. After the fall of France, Carol II's policy changed towards re-alignment with Nazi Germany in hopes of gaining a German guarantee. He was, however, not aware of the secret clauses of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Germany and the Soviet Union that would see Romania lose significant parts of its territory. The year 1940 marked the fragmentation of Greater Romania by the seceding of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the USSR, Northern Transylvania to Hungary and Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria. Although a German guarantee was finally achieved, the situation had a disastrous effect on the reputation of Carol II. The reorientation of Romania's foreign policy towards Nazi Germany, however, would not prevent his regime from collapsing and he would be forced to abdicate by General Ion Antonescu, the newly appointed and Nazi-backed prime minister, who was succeeded by his son Michael. After his abdication, Carol was permitted to leave the country with a special train loaded with his personal fortunes, which he had acquired during his time as king, and an attempt on his life was made by the Iron Guard, who had fired on the train in hope of killing the former king. After World War II, Carol II wanted to return to the helm of the country and dethrone his son again but was stopped by the Western Allies. For the rest of his life, he traveled the world, finally marrying Elena Lupescu while living in Brazil in 1947. After settling in the Portuguese Riviera, Carol II at the age of 59, died peacefully in exile and his son Michael I, refused to attend his funeral out of disgust for the treatment of his mother, Princess Helen by his father.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Additionally, the childless Carol I, who had always wanted a son, treated Prince Carol as his surrogate son and thoroughly spoiled him, indulging his every whim. Ferdinand was a rather shy and weak man who was easily overshadowed by the charismatic Marie, who became the most loved member of the Romanian royal family. Growing up, Carol felt ashamed of his father, whom both his grand-uncle and mother pushed around. Carol's childhood was spent being caught up in an emotional tug-of-war between Carol I and Marie, who had very different ideas about how to raise him. The Romanian historian Marie Bucur described the battle between Carol I and Princess Marie as one between traditional 19th-century Prussian conservatism as personified by Carol I versus the 20th-century liberal, modernist, and sexually deviant values of the "New Woman" as personified by Princess Marie. Aspects of both Marie's and Carol I's personalities were present in Carol II. Largely because of the battle between the King and Marie, Carol ended up being both spoiled and deprived of love.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Sometime before the First World War, the Romanian and Russian royal families held talks about the marriage of Carol, at that time the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Romania, to the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia, the eldest daughter of the Russian emperor at the time, Tsar Nicholas II: Sergey Sazonov, the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire between 1910 and 1916, wanted Olga to marry Carol to ensure Romania's position as an ally of Russia in the eventuality of a war, as Romania was an ally of Germany at the time. Both royal families, including the Tsar and his wife Alexandra, gave their support for the idea, and there were high expectations that the marriage would take place. However, neither Carol or Olga demonstrated an interest for the other: Carol wasn't fond of Olga's appearance, and Olga expressed her wish to remain in Russia (should the marriage have taken place, Olga would have become the Crown Princess, and later the Queen of Romania). This was best seen during the visit of the Romanian royal family to Russia in March, 1914, and during a visit of Nicholas and his family to Romania a few months later.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Carol next married Princess Helen of Greece and Denmark, who was known in Romania as Crown Princess Elena, on 10 March, 1921, in Athens, Greece. They were second cousins, both of them great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria, as well as third cousins in descent from Nicholas I of Russia. Helen had known of Carol's dissolute behavior and previous marriage, but her love for him was undeterred. The intent behind this arranged marriage was to help organize a dynastic alliance between Greece and Romania. Bulgaria had territorial disputes with Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia, and all three of the latter states tended to be close during the interwar period owing to their shared fears of the Bulgarians. Helen and Carol's only child, Michael, was born seven months after their marriage, sparking rumors that Michael was conceived out of wedlock. Apparently close at first, Carol and Helen drifted apart. Carol's marriage with Princess Helen was an unhappy one, and he frequently engaged in extramarital affairs. The elegant wallflower Helen found the bohemian Carol, with his love of heavy drinking and constant partying, rather too wild for her tastes. For his part, Carol disliked royal and aristocratic women, whom he found too stiff and formal, and had an extremely marked preference for commoners, much to the chagrin of his parents. Carol found low-born women to have the qualities that he sought in a woman, such as informality, spontaneity, humor, and passion.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: The marriage soon collapsed in the wake of Carol's affair with Elena (Magda) Lupescu , the Roman Catholic daughter of Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity. Magda Lupescu had formerly been the wife of Army officer Ion Tâmpeanu. The National Liberal Party, which dominated Romania's politics, made much of Carol's relationship with Lupescu argue that he was unqualified to be king. One of the leading figures of the National Liberals was Prince Barbu Știrbey – who was also Queen Marie's lover, and Carol had a strong dislike of Știrbey, who had humiliated his father via his indiscreetly disguised relationship with Marie, and hence of the National Liberals. Knowing that Carol was ill-disposed towards them, the National Liberals waged a sustained campaign to keep him from the throne. The campaign waged by the National Liberals had less to do with disgust with Carol's relationship with Madame Lupescu than with an effort to remove a potential "loose cannon", as Carol made it clear when he succeeded to the throne that he would not be content to let the National Liberals dominate politics in the way that the previous Hohenzollern kings had.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: As a result of the scandal, Carol renounced his right to the throne on 28 December 28, 1925, in favor of his son by Crown Princess Helen, Michael I (Mihai), who became king in July 1927 upon the death of his paternal grandfather, King Ferdinand I. Helen divorced Carol in 1928. After renouncing his right to the throne, Carol moved to Paris, where he lived openly in a common-law relationship with Madame Lupescu. The National Liberal Party was largely a vehicle for the powerful Brătianu family to exercise power and, after the National Liberal prime minister Ion I. C. Brătianu died in 1927, the Brătianu's were unable to agree upon a successor, causing the fortunes of the National Liberals to go into decline. In the 1928 elections, the National Peasant Party under Iuliu Maniu won a resounding victory, taking 78% of the vote. As Prince Nicolae, the chief of the Regency Council that governed for King Michael, was known to be friendly with the National Liberals, the new prime minister was determined to dispose of the regency council by bringing back Carol.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Returning to the country on 7 June, 1930, in a coup d'état engineered by National Peasant Prime Minister Iuliu Maniu, Carol was recognized by the Parliament as king of Romania the following day. For the next decade, he sought to influence the course of Romanian political life, first through manipulation of the rival Peasant and Liberal parties and anti-Semitic factions, and subsequently through a ministry of his own choosing. Carol also sought to build up his own personality cult against the growing influence of the Iron Guard, for instance, by setting up a paramilitary youth organization known as Straja Țării in 1935. The American historian Stanley G. Payne described Carol as "the most cynical, corrupt and power-hungry monarch who ever disgraced a throne anywhere in twentieth-century Europe". A colorful character, Carol was in the words of the British historian Richard Cavendish: "Dashing, willful and reckless, a lover of women, champagne and speed, Carol drove racing cars and piloted planes, and on state occasions, occasions appeared in operetta uniforms with enough ribbons, chains, and orders to sink a small destroyer."


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Carol had sworn in his coronation an oath to uphold the constitution of 1923, a promise he had no intention of keeping, and right from the start of his reign, the king meddled in politics to increase his own power. Carol was an opportunist with no real principles or values other than the belief that he was the right man to rule Romania and that what his kingdom needed was a modernizing dictatorship. Carol ruled via an informal body known as the camarilla, comprising courtiers together with senior diplomats, army officers, politicians, and industrialists, who were all in some way dependent upon royal favor to advance their careers. The most important member of the camarilla was Carol's mistress, Madame Lupescu, whose political advice Carol greatly valued. Maniu had brought Carol to the throne out of the fear that the regency for Michael I was dominated by National Liberals, who would ensure that their party would always win the elections. Madame Lupescu was deeply unpopular with the Romanian people, and Maniu had demanded that Carol return to his wife, Princess Helen of Greece, as part of the price for being given the throne. When Carol broke his own word and continued to live with Madame Lupescu, Maniu resigned in protest in October 1930 and was to emerge as one of Carol's leading enemies. At the same time, Carol's return had prompted a break in the National Liberals with Gheorghe I. Brătianu breaking away to found a new party, the National Liberal Party-Brătianu that was willing to work with the new king. Despite his dislike of the National Liberals, Maniu's enmity towards Carol left the king with no choice, but to enlist as his allies the break-away factions of the National Liberals against the National Peasants, who demanded that Carol banish Lupescu and return to his wife.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: The "Red Queen," as Lupescu was known to the Romanian people on account of the color of her hair, was the most hated woman in 1930s Romania. She was a woman whom ordinary Romanians saw as "the embodiment of evil," in the words of the British historian Rebecca Haynes. Princess Helen was widely viewed as the wronged woman, while Lupescu was seen as the femme fatale who had stolen Carol away from the loving arms of Helen. Lupescu was Roman Catholic, but because of her parents' background, she was widely viewed as Jewish. Lupescu's personality did not win her many friends, as she was arrogant, pushy, manipulative, and extremely greedy, with an insatiable taste for buying the most expensive French clothes, cosmetics, and jewelry. At a time when many Romanians were suffering from the Great Depression in Romania, Carol's habit of indulging Lupescu's expensive tastes caused much resentment, with many of Carol's subjects grumbling that the money would have been better spent on alleviating poverty in the kingdom. Further adding to Lupescu's immense unpopularity, she was a businesswoman who used her connections to the Crown to engage in dubious transactions that usually involved large sums of public money – going into her pocket. However, the contemporary viewpoint that Carol was a mere puppet of Lupescu is incorrect, and Lupescu's influence on political decision-making was much exaggerated at the time. Lupescu was primarily interested in enriching herself to support her extravagant lifestyle and had no real interest in politics, beyond protecting her ability to engage in corruption. Unlike Carol, Lupescu had utterly no interest in social policy or foreign affairs and was such a self-absorbed narcissist that she was unaware of just how unpopular she was with ordinary people. Carol by contrast was interested in the affairs of the state, and though he never sought to deny his relationship with Lupescu, he was careful not to display her too much in public, as he knew that this would bring him unpopularity.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Carol sought to play the National Liberals, the National Peasant Party, and the Iron Guard off against each other with the ultimate aim of making himself master of Romanian politics and disposing of all the parties in Romania. With regards to the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Carol had no intention of ever letting the Iron Guard come to power, but insofar as the Legion was a disruptive force that weakened both the National Liberals and the National Peasants, Carol welcomed the rise of the Iron Guard in the early 1930s, and he sought to use the Legion for his own ends. On 30, 1933, the Iron Guard assassinated the National Liberal prime minister, Ion G. Duca, which led to the first of several bans placed on the Legion. The assassination of Ion Duca, which was Romania's first political murder since 1862, shocked Carol, who saw the willingness of Codreanu to order the assassination of the Prime Minister as a clear sign that the egomaniacal Codreanu was getting out of control and that Codreanu would not play the role assigned by the king as a disruptive force threatening the National Liberals and National Peasants alike. In 1934, when Codreanu was brought to trial for ordering Duca's assassination, he used as his defense the argument that the entire Francophile elite was completely corrupt and not properly Romanian, and as such, Duca was just another corrupt National Liberal politician who deserved to die. The jury acquitted Codreanu, an act that worried Carol as it showed that Codreanu's revolutionary message that the entire elite needed to be destroyed was winning popular approval. In the spring of 1934, after Codreanu was acquitted, Carol, together with Bucharest police prefect Gavrilă Marinescu and Madame Lupescu, were involved in a half-hearted plot to kill Codreanu by poisoning his coffee, an effort that was abandoned before being attempted. Until 1935, Carol was a leading contributor to the "Friends of the Legion", the group that collected contributions to the Legion. Carol only stopped contributing to the Legion after Codreanu started calling Lupescu a "Jewish whore". Carol's image was always that of "the playboy king", a hedonistic monarch more interested in womanizing, drinking, gambling, and partying, than in affairs of state, and to the extent that he cared about politics, Carol was viewed as a scheming, dishonest man only interested in wrecking the democratic system to seize power for himself.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: For most of the interwar period, Romania was in the French sphere of influence, and in June 1926, a defensive alliance was signed with France. The alliance with France, together with an alliance with Poland signed in 1921, and the "Little Entente," which united Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, were the cornerstones of Romanian foreign policy. Starting in 1919, the French sought to create the Cordon sanitaire that would keep both Germany and the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe. Carol did not seek to replace the foreign policy he had inherited in 1930 at first, as he regarded the continuation of the cordon sanitaire as the best guarantee of Romania's independence and territorial integrity, and as such, his foreign policy was essentially pro-French. At the time that Romania signed the alliance with France, the Rhineland region of Germany was demilitarized, and the thinking in Bucharest had always been that if Germany should commit any act of aggression anywhere in Eastern Europe, the French would begin an offensive into the Reich. Starting in 1930, when the French began to build the Maginot Line along their border with Germany, some doubts started to be expressed in Bucharest about whether the French might actually come to Romania's aid in the event of a German aggression. In 1933, Carol had Nicolae Titulescu, an outspoken champion of collective security under the banner of the League of Nations, appointed foreign minister with instructions to use principles of collective security as the building blocks for creating some sort of security structure intended to keep both Germany and the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe. Carol and Titulescu personally disliked one another, but Carol wanted Titulescu as a foreign minister as he believed he was the best man for strengthening ties with France and for bringing Great Britain into the affairs of Eastern Europe under the guise of the collective security commitments contained the League Covenant.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: The process of Gleichschaltung (coordination) in National Socialist Germany did not extend only to the Reich but was rather thought of by the National Socialist leadership as a worldwide process in which the NSDAP would take control over all of the ethnic German communities around the entire world. The Foreign Policy Department of the NSDAP, headed by Alfred Rosenberg, had attempted to take over the Volk Deutsch (ethnic German) community in Romania starting in 1934, a policy that greatly offended Carol, who regarded this as outrageous German interference in Romania's internal affairs. As Romania had half a million Volk Deutsch citizens in the 1930s, the Nazi campaign to take over the German community in Romania was a real concern for Carol, who feared that the German minority might become a fifth column. In addition, Rosenberg's agents had established contracts with the Romanian extreme right, most notably with the National Christian Party headed by Octavian Goga and less substantial links with the Iron Guard headed by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, which further annoyed Carol. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote about Carol's foreign policy views: "He admired and feared Germany, but feared and disliked the Soviet Union.". The fact that the first leader to visit Nazi Germany (albeit not in an official capacity) was the Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, who during his visit to Berlin in October 1933 signed an economic treaty that placed Hungary within the German economic sphere of influence – was a source of much alarm to Carol. For the entire interwar period, Budapest refused to recognize the frontiers imposed by the Treaty of Trianon and laid claim to Transylvania region of Romania. Carol, like the rest of the Romanian elite, was worried by the prospect of an alliance of the revisionist states that rejected the legitimacy of the international order created by the Allies in 1918–20, indicating that Germany would support Hungary's claims to Transylvania. Hungary had territorial disputes with Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, all of which happened to be allies of France. Accordingly, Franco–Hungarian relations were extremely bad during the interwar period, and so – it seemed natural that Hungary would ally itself with France's archenemy, Germany.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: In 1934, Titulescu played a leading role in creating the Balkan Entente which brought together Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey in an alliance intended to counter Bulgarian revanchism. The Balkan Entente was intended to be the beginning of an alliance that would bring together all of the anti-revisionist states of Eastern Europe. Like France, Romania was allied to both Czechoslovakia and Poland, but because of the Teschen dispute in Silesia, Warsaw and Prague were bitter enemies. Like the diplomats of the Quai d'Orsay, Carol was exasperated by the bitter Polish-Czechoslovak dispute, arguing that it was absurd for anti-revisionist Eastern European states to be feuding with one another in the face of the rise of German and Soviet powers. Several times, Carol attempted to mediate the Teschen dispute and thus end the Polish-Czechoslovak feud without much success. Reflecting his initially pro-French orientation, in June 1934, when the French foreign minister Louis Barthou visited Bucharest to meet with the foreign ministers of "the Little Entente" of Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, Carol organized lavish celebrations to welcome Barthou that were made to symbolize the enduring Franco-Romanian friendship between the two "Latin sisters.". The German minister to Romania, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg complained with disgust in a report to Berlin that everyone in the Romanian elite was an incurable Francophile who told him that Romania would never betray its "Latin sister" France.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: At the same time, Carol also considered the possibility that if Romanian-German relations were improved, then perhaps Berlin could be persuaded not to support Budapest in its campaign to regain Transylvania. Further pressing Carol towards Germany was the desperate state of the Romanian economy: even before the worldwide Great Depression, Romania had been a poor country, and the Great Depression hit Romania hard, with Romanians being unable to export much owing to the global trade war set off by the American Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which in turn led to a decline in the value of the Leu as Romania's reserves of foreign exchange were being used up. In June 1934, Romanian finance minister Victor Slăvescu visited Paris to ask the French to inject millions of francs into the Romanian treasury and to lower their tariffs on Romanian goods. When the French refused both requests, an annoyed Carol wrote in his diary that the "Latin sister" France was behaving in a less than sisterly way towards Romania. In April 1936, when Wilhelm Fabricius was appointed German minister in Bucharest, the Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath in his instructions to the new minister, described Romania as an unfriendly, pro-French state but suggested that the prospect of more trade with the Reich might bring the Romanians out of the French orbit. Neurath further instructed Fabricius that while Romania was not a major power in a military sense, it was a state of crucial importance to Germany because of its oil.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: The doubts about the French willingness to undertake an offensive against Germany were further reinforced by the Remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, which had the effect of allowing the Germans to start building the Siegfried line along the border with France, something that considerably lessened the prospect of a French offensive into western Germany if the Reich should invade any of the states of the cordon sanitaire. A British Foreign Office memo from March 1936 stated that the only nations in the world that would apply sanctions on Germany for remilitarizing the Rhineland if the League of Nations should vote for such a step were Britain, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Romania. In the aftermath of the remilitarization of the Rhineland, and once it was clear that no sanctions were going to be applied against Germany, Carol started to voice his fears that the days of French influence in Eastern Europe were numbered and Romania might have to seek some understanding with Germany to preserve its independence. After continuing the alliance with France, Carol also began a policy of attempting to improve relations with Germany.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: On the domestic front, in the summer of 1936, Codreanu and Maniu formed an alliance to oppose the growing power of the Crown and the National Liberal government. In August 1936, Carol had Titulescu fired as foreign minister, and in November 1936, Carol sent the renegade National Liberal politician Gheorghe I. Brătianu to Germany to meet with Adolf Hitler, the Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath and Hermann Göring to tell them of Romania's desire for a rapprochement with the Reich. Carol was much relieved when Brătianu reported that Hitler, Neurath, and Göring had all reassured him that the Reich had no interest in supporting Hungarian revanchism and was neutral on the Transylvania dispute. The decoupling of Berlin's campaign to overthrow the international system created by the Treaty of Versailles from Budapest's campaign to overthrow the system created by the Treaty of Trianon was welcome news to Carol, creating the possibility that a greater Germany would not mean a greater Hungary. Göring, the newly appointed chief of the Four Year Plan organization designed to have Germany ready to wage a total war by 1940, was especially interested in Romania's oil and talked much to Brătianu about a new era of German-Romanian economic relations. Germany had almost no oil of its own, and throughout the Third Reich, control of Romania's oil was a key foreign policy goal. Reflecting the changed emphasis, Carol vetoed in February 1937 a plan promoted by France and Czechoslovakia for a new alliance that would formally unite France with the Little Entente and envisioned much closer military ties between the French and their allies in Eastern Europe. Because of its oil, the French were keen to keep the alliance with Romania strong, and because Romania's manpower was a way of compensating the French for their lower population vs. Germany's (the French had 40 million people while Germany had 70 million people). Additionally, it was assumed in Paris that if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia Hungary would also attack Czechoslovakia to regain Slovakia and Ruthenia. French military planners envisioned the role of Romania and Yugoslavia in such a war as invading Hungary to relieve the pressure on Czechoslovakia.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Up until 1940, Carol's foreign policy teetered uneasily between the traditional alliance with France and an alignment with the newly ascending power of Germany. In the summer of 1937, Carol told French diplomats that if Germany attacked Czechoslovakia, he would not allow the Red Army transit rights across Romania but was willing to ignore the Soviets if they crossed Romanian airspace on their way to Czechoslovakia. On December 9, 1937, a German-Romanian economic treaty was signed that placed Romania within the German economic sphere of influence but left the Germans unsatisfied as the Reich's enormous demand for oil to power its increasingly large war machine, was not yet fulfilled by the 1937 treaty. Germany had a tremendous need for oil and no sooner had the 1937 agreement been signed than the Germans asked for a new economic treaty in 1938. At the same time that the German-Romanian treaty was signed in December 1937, Carol was receiving the French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos to show that the alliance with France was not yet dead.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: In September 1937, Carol paid an extended visit to Paris, during which he indicated to the French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos that Romanian democracy would soon end. In a campaign speech for the general elections due that December, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, "Captain" of the Archangel Michael Legion, called for an end to the alliance with France and stated: "I am for a Romanian foreign policy with Rome and Berlin. I am with the states of the National Revolution against Bolshevism. Within forty-eight hours of a Legionary movement victory, Romania will have an alliance with Rome and Berlin". Without realizing it, Codreanu had sealed his doom with that speech. Carol had always insisted that control of foreign policy was his own exclusive royal prerogative, which no one else was allowed to interfere with. Despite the constitution, which stated that the foreign minister was responsible to the prime minister, in practice, the foreign ministers had always reported to the king. By challenging Carol's right to control foreign policy, Codreanu had crossed the Rubicon in the king's eyes and from that time on, Carol was committed to the destruction of the arrogant upstart Codreanu and his movement who had dared to challenge the king's prerogative. In the December 1937 elections, the National Liberal government of Prime Minister Gheorghe Tătărescu won the largest number of seats, but less than the 40% required to form a majority government in parliament. After assassinating Prime Minister Duca in 1933, the Iron Guard had been banned from participating in elections, and to get around the ban Codreanu founded the All for Fatherland! party as a front for the Legion. The All for Fatherland! the party won 16% of the vote in the 1937 election, marking the high point of the Iron Guard's electoral success.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: On 28, 1937, Carol swore in the radical anti-Semitic poet Octavian Goga of the National Christian Party, which only won 9% of the vote, as prime minister. Carol's reasons for appointing Goga Prime Minister were partly because he hoped that anti-Semitic policies Goga would bring in would win him support from the All for Fatherland! voters and thus weaken the Legion and partly because he hoped that Goga would prove so incompetent as prime minister as to provoke such a crisis that would allow him to seize power for himself. Carol wrote in his diary that the markedly stupid Goga could not possibly last long as prime minister and that Goga's failure would allow him to "be free to take stronger measures which will free me and the country from the tyranny of party interests". Carol agreed to Goga's request to dissolve parliament for new elections on 18, 1938. As leader of the fourth party in parliament, Goga's government was certain to be defeated on a vote of no-confidence when parliament convened as the National Liberals, National Peasants and All for the Fatherland Party had all come out against Goga, albeit for very different reasons. The election got off to a violent start with a brawl in Bucharest between Goga's Lăncieri paramilitary group and the Iron Guard that left two dead, 52 hospitalized and 450 people arrested. The 1938 election was one of the most violent elections in Romanian history, as the Iron Guard and Lăncieri battled one another for control of the streets while seeking to establish their anti-Semitic creditations by assaulting Jews. As Parliament never met during the Goga government, Goga had to pass laws via emergency decree, which all had to be countersigned by the king.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: The harsh anti-Semitic policies of the Goga government impoverished the Jewish minority and led to immediate complaints from the British, French and American governments that Goga's policies were going to lead to a Jewish exodus out of Romania. Neither Britain, France, nor the United States had any wish to take in the Jewish refugees that Goga was creating by imposing increasingly oppressive anti-Semitic laws, and all three governments pressed for Carol to dismiss Goga as a way of nipping the developing humanitarian crisis caused by Goga in the bud. The British minister Sir Reginald Hoare and French minister Adrien Thierry both submitted notes of protest against the Goga government's anti-Semitism, while President Roosevelt of the United States wrote a letter to Carol complaining about the anti-Semitic policies he was tolerating. On 12, 1938, Goga stripped all Romanian Jews of their Romanian citizenship, a preparatory move towards Goga's ultimate goal of the expulsion of all Romanian Jews. Carol was personally not an anti-Semite, but in the words of his biographer, Paul D. Quinlan, the king was "simply indifferent" to the sufferings of his Jewish subjects caused by Goga's oppressive anti-Semitic laws. The opportunistic Carol did not believe in antisemitism anymore than he believed in anything else other than power, but if raison d'état meant tolerating an anti-Semitic government as the price of gaining power, Carol was quite prepared to sacrifice the rights of his Jewish subjects. At the same time, Goga proved himself a better poet than politician, and there was a crisis atmosphere in early 1938 as the Goga government, which obsessed with solving the "Jewish Question", to the exclusion of everything else, was clearly floundering. Weinberg wrote about Goga, saying that he was "Unprepared for office and untouched by any leadership ability..." and whose clownish antics left diplomats stationed in Bucharest "half-amused, half-appalled". As Carol had expected, Goga proved to be such an inept leader as to discredit democracy while his anti-Semitic policies ensured that none of the democratic great powers would object to Carol proclaiming a dictatorship.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Having outlived his usefulness, Goga was sacked as prime minister and Carol appointed Patriarch Elie Cristea, the head of the Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church, as his successor. Carol knew he would command wide respect in a country where the majority of the population was Orthodox. On 11, 1938, Carol drafted a new constitution. Although it was superficially similar to its 1923 predecessor, it was actually a severely authoritarian and corporatist document. The new constitution effectively codified the emergency powers Carol had seized in February, turning his government into a de facto legal dictatorship. It concentrated virtually all governing power in his hands, almost to the point of absolute monarchy. The new constitution was approved in a plebiscite held under far-from-secret conditions; voters were required to appear before an election bureau and verbally state whether they approved the constitution; silence was deemed as a "yes" vote. Under these conditions, an implausible 99.87 percent were reported as having approved the new charter, against fewer than 5,500 votes against it.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Carol, together with the rest of the Romanian elite, was deeply shocked by the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, which he saw as allowing all of Eastern Europe to fall within the German sphere of influence. Romania had long been one of the most Francophile nations in the world, which meant that the effects of Munich were felt especially strongly there. Weinberg wrote about the effect of Munich on Franco-Romanian relations: "In view of the traditional ties going back to the beginnings of Romanian independence and manifested in the way in which the Romanian elite looked to France as the model for everything from fashion to government, the revelation of France's abdication was particularly shocking." In October 1938, the Iron Guard had begun a terrorist campaign of assassinating police officers and bureaucrats and staging bombings of government offices as part of an effort to overthrow Carol. Carol struck back hard, ordering the police to arrest Iron Guardsmen without warrant and to summarily execute those found with weapons.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: In view of Germany's desperate need for oil and the repeated German requests for a new economic agreement that would allow for more Romanian oil to be shipped to the Reich, Carol met Fabricius to tell him that he wanted such an agreement to create a lasting understanding between Germany and Romania. At the same time, in October–November 1938, Carol was playing a double game and appealed to Britain for help, offering to place Romania within the British economic sphere of influence, and visited London between November 15 and 20 to hold unsuccessful talks on that subject. On November 24, 1938, Carol visited Germany to meet with Hitler in order to improve German-Romanian relations. During the talks for the new German-Romanian economic agreement, which was signed on December 10, 1938, Weinberg wrote that "Carol made the needed concessions, but he demonstrated his concern for his country's independence by driving a very hard bargain.". The British historian D.C. Watt wrote that Carol had a "trump card" in his control of the oil Germany needed so badly and that the Germans were willing to pay a very high price for Romanian oil, without which their military could not function. During his summit with Hitler, Carol was much offended when Hitler demanded that Carol free Codreanu and appoint him prime minister. Carol believed that as long as Codreanu lived, there was a possible alternative leadership in Romania for Hitler to back, and that if this possibility was eliminated then Hitler would have no choice other than to deal with him.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Carol had initially planned to keep Codreanu in prison, but after the terrorist campaign began in October 1938, Carol agreed to Călinescu's plan drawn up in the spring to murder all of the Iron Guard leaders in custody. On the night of November 30, 1938, Carol had Codreanu and 13 other Iron Guard leaders murdered, with the official story being that they were "shot while trying to escape.". The killings on the night of November 30, 1938, which saw much of the Iron Guard's leadership wiped out, have gone down in Romanian history as "the night of the vampires.". The Germans were much offended by the murder of Codreanu and for a period in late 1938 waged a violent propaganda campaign against Carol, with German newspapers regularly running stories casting doubt about the official version of events that Codreanu had been "shot while trying to escape" while calling Codreanu's murder "a victory for the Jews," but ultimately economic concerns, especially the German need for Romanian oil caused the Nazis to get over their outrage over the killings of the Iron Guard leaders by early 1939, and relations with Carol soon went back to normal.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: In February 1939, Göring dispatched his deputy Helmuth Wohlthat of the Four Year Plan organization to Bucharest with instructions to sign yet another German-Romanian economic treaty that would allow Germany total economic dominance over Romania, especially its oil industry. That Wohlthat, the number two man in the Four-Year Plan organization, was sent to Bucharest indicated the importance of the German-Romanian talks. Carol had resisted German demands for more oil in the December 1938 agreement and instead had succeeded by early 1939 in placing Romania to a certain extent within the British economic sphere of influence. To counterbalance the increasingly powerful German influence in the Balkans, Carol wanted closer ties with Britain. At the same time, the Four-Year Plan was running into major difficulties by early 1939, and in particular, Göring's plans to have synthetic oil plants that would make oil from coal were well behind schedule. The new technology of making synthetic oil from lignite coal had run into major technical problems and cost overruns, and Göring had been informed in early 1939 that the synthetic oil plants whose construction had started in 1936 would not be operative by 1940 as planned. It was not until the summer of 1942 that Germany's first synthetic oil plants finally started operating. It was painfully obvious to Göring in the first months of 1939 that the German economy would not be ready to support a total war by 1940 as the Four-Year Plan of 1936 had envisioned while at the same time his economic experts were telling him the Reich needed to import 400,000 tons of oil per month while Germany had in fact imported only 61,000 tons of oil per month in the last four months of 1938.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Hence Wohlthat demanded during his talks with Romanian Foreign Minister Grigore Gafencu that Romania nationalize their entire oil industry, which was henceforth controlled by a new corporation owned jointly by the German and Romanian governments, while demanding Romania "respect German export interests" by only selling their oil to Germany. In addition, Wohlthat demanded a host of other measures that, to all practical purposes, would have converted Romania into a German economic colony. As Carol had no intention of giving in to these demands, the talks in Bucharest went very badly. It was at this point that Carol began what became known as the "Tilea affair" when, on March 17, 1939, Virgil Tilea, the Romanian minister in London, burst unexpectedly into the office of the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax in an agitated state to announce that his country was faced with an imminent German invasion and asked Halifax for British support. At the same time, Carol mobilized five infantry corps on the Hungarian border to guard the supposed invasion. The British "economic offensive" in the Balkans was causing Germany very real economic pain as the British bought up Romanian oil that the Germans badly needed, hence their demands for control of the Romanian oil industry that so offended Carol. As the British believed in Tilea's claims, the "Tilea affair" had an immense impact on British foreign policy and led to the Chamberlain government changing from appeasement of Germany to a policy of "containing" the Reich. Carol denied, unconvincingly, knowing anything about what Tilea was up to in London, but the British warnings to Germany against invading Romania in March 1939 led the Germans to relax their demands, and the latest German-Romanian economic treaty signed on March 23, 1939, was, in the words of Watt 'very vague". Despite the "Tilea affair", Carol had decided that he would refuse to become involved in any diplomacy that would force him to decisively choose between Germany and Britain, and he would never accept any support from the Soviet Union to deter Germany.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: As part of their new policy of seeking to "contain" Germany starting in March 1939, the British sought the construction of the "peace front," which was to comprise at a minimum Britain, France, Poland, the Soviet Union, Turkey, Romania, Greece and Yugoslavia. For his part, Carol was obsessed with fears in the first half of 1939 that Hungary, with German support, would soon attack his kingdom. On April 6, 1939, a cabinet meeting decided that Romania would not join the "peace front" but would seek Anglo-French support for its independence. The same meeting decided that Romania would work to strengthen ties with other Balkan nations but would seek to prevent the Anglo-French efforts to link the security of the Balkans to the security of Poland. On April 13, 1939, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain speaking in the House of Commons and the French Premier Édouard Daladier speaking in the Chamber of Deputies, announced a joint Anglo-French "guarantee" of the independence of Romania and Greece. Carol promptly accepted the "guarantee.". On May 5, 1939, the French Marshal Maxime Weygand visited Bucharest to meet with Carol and his prime minister, Armand Călinescu to discuss Romania's possible participation in the "peace front.". Both Carol and Călinescu were supportive but evasive, saying that they would welcome having the Soviet Union fight against Germany, but would never allow the Red Army to enter Romania even if Germany should invade. Carol told Weygand: "I do not wish to let my country be engaged in a war which would result, in a few weeks, in the destruction of its army and the occupation of its territory...We do not wish to be the lighting conductor for the coming storm". Carol went on to complain that he had enough equipment for only two-thirds of his army, which also lacked tanks, anti-aircraft guns, heavy artillery and anti-tank guns while his air force had only about 400 antiquated aircraft of French manufacture that were no match for latest German aircraft. Weygand reported to Paris that Carol wanted Anglo–French support, but would not fight for the Allies if war came.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: On May 11, 1939, an Anglo-Romanian agreement was signed under which Britain committed itself to grant Romania a credit of £5 million pound sterling and promised to buy 200,000 tons of Romanian wheat at above-market prices. When Yugoslavia reacted negatively to the Anglo-Turkish Declaration of May 12, 1939, promising to "ensure the establishment of security in the Balkans" and threatening to pull out of the Balkan Pact, Gafencu had a summit with Yugoslav Foreign Minister Aleksandar Cincar-Marković on May 21, 1939, at the Iron Gates to ask the Yugoslavs to stay in the Balkan Pact. However, Cincar-Marković's talk of leaving the Balkan Pact turned out to be a ploy by the Yugoslav Regent, Prince Paul, who was backing a plan mooted by the Turkish Foreign Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu to have Bulgaria join the Balkan Pact in exchange for Romania ceding part of the Dobruja region. In a letter to Carol, Paul stated that he wanted the Bulgarians "off my back" as he was afraid of the Italians building up their forces in their new colony of Albania and asked his friend to make this concession for him. Carol stated in response that it was out of the question for him to cede any territory to Bulgarians, partly because he was against giving any of his realm on principle and partly because to cede the Dobrudja would only encourage the Hungarians to renew their claims on Transylvania.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: In July 1939, the king had a major clash with Fritz Fabritius, the leader of the Nazified German National Party, which was the largest of the Volk Deutsch parties and which joined the National Renaissance Front in January 1939. Fabritius had taken to calling himself the Führer, had formed two para-military groups, the National Workers Front and the German Youth, and was holding ceremonies in which members of Romania's 800,000 strong German minority had to swear personal oaths of loyalty to him. In early July, Fabritius, during a visit to Munich, gave a speech in which he stated that the Romanian Volk Deutsch were loyal to Germany, not Romania, and spoke of his wish to see a "Greater German Reich," which would be secured by armed peasant settlements along the Carpathians, Ural, and Caucasus mountains. In this Grossraum (an untranslatable German word meaning roughly "greater space"), only Germans would be allowed to live, and those not willing to be Germanized would have to leave. In response to this speech, when Fabritius returned to Romania, he was summoned to a meeting with Călinescu on July 13, who told him that the king had enough and was going to take action against him. Fabritius promised to behave, but was expelled from Romania shortly afterwards when one of his staffers accidentally left on a train a briefcase full of documents showing Fabritius's supporters were arming themselves and that Führer Fabritius was being financed by Germany.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: In July 1939, when Carol heard rumors that Hungary, supported by Germany, was planning on invading Romania following a new crisis in Romanian-Hungarian relations caused by complaints from Budapest that the Romanians were mistreating the Magyar minority in Transylvania (which were supported by Berlin), the king ordered general mobilization of his military while taking off in the royal yacht to Istanbul. During his unexpected trip to Istanbul, Carol held talks with the Turkish President İsmet İnönü and the Turkish Foreign Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu during which the Turks promised him that Turkey would immediately mobilize its military in the event of an Axis attack on Romania. The Turks, in their turn, pressed Carol to sign an alliance with the Soviet Union, something that Carol said very reluctantly he might do if the Turks were to serve as the middlemen and if the Soviets were to promise to recognize the border with Romania. The show of Romanian resolve, supported by Turkey had the effect of causing the Hungarians to back off on their demands against Romania.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: The news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in August 1939 was received with horror by Carol, who had sought to play off both sides against each other. Carol allowed Călinescu to tell Thierry that the Romanians would destroy their oil fields if the Axis invaded, while at the same time Gafencu told the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop of his firm friendship with Germany, his opposition to the "peace front," and his desire to sell more oil to the Germans. After the signing of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, Călinescu advised Carol: "Germany is the real danger. An alliance with it is tantamount to a protectorate. Only Germany's defeat by France and Britain can ward off the danger.". On August 27, 1939, Gafencu told Fabricius that Romania would declare neutrality if Germany invaded Poland and that he wanted to sell to Germany some 450,000 tons of oil per month in exchange for 1 million and a half Reichsmark plus a number of modern German aircraft for free. Carol met with the German air force attaché on 28 August 28, 1939, to congratulate the Germans on the great diplomatic success they had gained with the pact with the Soviet Union. Unknown to Carol, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had in its infamous "secret protocols" assigned the Romanian region of Bessarabia to the Soviet Union. In the short run, the German–Soviet pact was a blessing for Carol since Germany now had access to Soviet oil, which reduced the pressure on Romania.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: When World War II began with German-Soviet Invasion of Poland in September 1939, Carol proclaimed neutrality. In doing so, Carol technically violated the letter of the treaty of alliance with Poland signed in 1921 and the spirit of treaty of alliance signed with France in 1926. Carol justified his policy under the grounds that, with Germany and the Soviet Union allied in the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact of August 1939 and France holding its forces behind the Maginot line, unwilling to start an offensive into Germany, that neutrality was his only hope of preserving his kingdom's independence. For its part, the Polish government was more interested in weapon deliveries from its Western allies through Romanian ports, but this became insignificant following Poland's defeat on the battlefield. As usual with Carol, he sought to play a careful balancing act between the Allies and the Axis, on one hand signing a new economic treaty with Germany while on the other hand allowing for a considerable period of time for the Polish troops to cross into Romania while declining to intern them as international law required. Instead, the Poles were allowed to travel to Constanța to board ships to take them to Marseille to continue the fight against Germany from France. The Romanian Bridgehead remained a key escape route for thousands of Poles in the desperate days of September 1939. It was only after receiving a number of furious complaints from Fabricius about the passage of Polish soldiers across Romania that Carol finally started to intern the fleeing Poles.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: On 21 September, 1939, Prime Minister Călinescu was assassinated by the Iron Guard in a plot organized out of Berlin, thus silencing the strongest pro-Allied voice amongst Carol's camarilla. The next day, the nine assassins of Călinescu were publicity shot without the benefit of a trial and on the week of 22–28 September 22–28, 1939, 242 Iron Guards were the victims of extrajudicial executions. Because of its oil, Romania was highly important by both sides, and during the Phoney War of 1939–40 there occurred what Weinberg called a "silent struggle over Romania's oil," with the German government doing everything within its power to have as much Romanian oil as possible while the British and French governments equally doing everything possible to deny it. The British launched an unsuccessful campaign to sabotage Romanian oil fields and the transportation network that took Romanian oil to Germany. In January 1940, Carol broadcast a speech to proclaim that it was his brilliant handling of foreign policy that kept Romania neutral and safe from danger. He also announced that he was going to be building a gigantic defense line around the kingdom, and as such, taxes would have to rise to pay for it. Romanians called the proposed line the Imaginet Line, as the line was considered to be a purely imaginary version of the Maginot line and many of Carol's subjects suspected that the money raised by higher taxes would go to the king's Swiss bank accounts.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Carol had hedged his bets about whether to choose between the Allies and the Axis. It was only in late May 1940, when France was clearly losing the war that Carol swung decisively over to the Axis side. During the later period of the Phoney War, after waging a campaign of bloody repression against the Iron Guard, which reached its peak after Călinescu's assassination, Carol began a policy of reaching out to the surviving Iron Guard leaders. Carol felt that a "tamed" Iron Guard could be used as a source of popular support. In April 1940, Carol had reached an agreement with Vasile Noveanu, the leader of the underground Iron Guard in Romania, but it was not until early May 1940 that Horia Sima, the leader of the Iron Guards in exile in Germany, could be persuaded to support the government. On May 26, 1940, Sima returned to Romania from Germany to begin talks with General Mihail Moruzov of the secret service about the Iron Guard joining the government. On May 28, 1940, after learning of the surrender of Belgium, Carol told the Crown Council that Germany was going to win the war, and Romania accordingly needed to realign its foreign and domestic policies with the victors. On June 13, 1940, an agreement was reached whereas the Iron Guard would be allowed to join the National Renaissance Front in exchange for more and harsher anti-Semitic laws. The National Renaissance Front was reorganized as the Party of the Nation, which was described as "a single and totalitarian party under the supreme leadership of His Majesty, King Carol II." On 21 June 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany. Romania's elite had been so obsessively Francophile for so long that France's defeat had the effect of discrediting that elite in the eyes of public opinion and led to an upswing of popular support for the pro-German Iron Guard.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: In the midst of the turn towards the Iron Guard and Germany came a bombshell from abroad. On June 26, 1940, the Soviet Union submitted an ultimatum demanding that Romania hand over the Bessarabia region and the northern part of Bukovina (which had never been Russian) to the Soviet Union and threatened war within the next two days if the ultimatum was rejected. Carol had at one moment considered following the example of Finland in 1939 when faced with a similar Soviet ultimatum, but the outcome of the Winter War was scarcely an inspiring example. Carol at first considered rejecting the ultimatum, but upon being informed that the Romanian Army would be no match for the Red Army, agreed to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union. Carol appealed to Berlin for support against the Soviet ultimatum, only to be told to comply with Stalin's demands. The loss of the regions without any fighting to the Soviet Union was felt to be a national humiliation by the Romanian people and was a huge blow to Carol's prestige. Carol's personality cult had by 1940 reached such extreme heights that the withdrawal without any resistance from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina revealed that Carol was a mere man after all, and so badly dented his prestige more than would have been the case if Carol had maintained a more modest image.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: On June 28, 1940, Sima entered the cabinet as Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Education. On July 1, 1940, Carol, in a radio speech, renounced both the 1926 alliance with France and the 1939 Anglo-French "guarantee" of Romania, saying that henceforth Romania would seek its place in the German-dominated "New Order" in Europe. The next day, Carol invited a German military mission to train the Romanian Army. On July 4, 1940, Carol was sworn into a new government headed by Ion Gigurtu with Sima as Minister of Arts and Culture. Gigurtu had been a leading figure in the anti-Semitic National Christian Party in the 1930s, was a millionaire businessman with many connections to Germany, and was a well-known Germanophile. For all these reasons, Carol hoped that having Gigurtu as prime minister would win him Hitler's goodwill and thus prevent any further loss of territory. Along the same lines, Carol signed a new economic treaty with Germany on August 8, 1940, that finally gave the Germans the economic dominance of Romania and its oil that they had been seeking all through the 1930s.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Immediately afterwards, inspired by the Soviet example of gaining Romanian territory, the Bulgarians demanded the return of Dobruja, lost in the Second Balkan War of 1913, while the Hungarians demanded the return of Transylvania, lost to Romania after World War I. Romania and Bulgaria opened talks that led to the Treaty of Craiova, which saw the southern Dobruja ceded to Bulgaria. In particular, Carol proved unwilling to cede Transylvania, and had it not been for the diplomatic intervention of Germany and Italy, Romania and Hungary would have gone to war with each other in the summer of 1940. In the meantime, Carol imprisoned General Ion Antonescu after the latter had criticized the king, charging that it was the corruption of the royal government that was responsible for the military backwardness of Romania and hence the loss of Bessarabia. Both Fabricius and Hermann Neubacher, the man in charge of the Four Year Plan's operations in the Balkans, intervened with Carol, saying that Antonescu's "accidental death" or being "shot while trying to escape" would "make a very bad impression on the German headquarters," as Antonescu was known to be a leading advocate of an alliance with Germany. On July 11, 1940, Carol had Antonescu freed, but kept under house arrest at the Bistrița monastery.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Hitler was alarmed about the possibility of a Hungarian-Romanian war, which he feared might result in the destruction of Romania's oil fields and/or might lead to the Soviets intervening to seize all of Romania. At this time, Hitler was already seriously considering invading the Soviet Union in 1941, and if he were to take such a step, he would need Romanian oil to power his military. At the Second Vienna Award of 30, 1940, the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano ruled that northern Transylvania was to go to Hungary while southern Transylvania would stay with Romania, a compromise that left both Budapest and Bucharest deeply unhappy with the Vienna award. For economic reasons, Romania was far more important to Hitler than was Hungary, but Romania had been allied to France since 1926 and had flirted with joining the British-inspired "peace front" in 1939, so Hitler who personally disliked and mistrusted Carol – felt that Romania deserved to be punished for waiting so long to align with the Axis. After the fall of Paris in June 1940, the Germans had captured the archives of the Quai d'Orsay and were thus well-informed about the double-line that Carol had pursued until the spring of 1940. Hitler was annoyed with Carol's efforts to forge closer ties with France at the same time proclaiming his friendship towards Germany. At the same time, Hitler offered Carol a "guarantee" of the rest of Romania against further territorial losses, which Carol promptly accepted.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: The acceptance of the Second Vienna Award completely discredited Carol with his people, and in early September 1940 enormous demonstrations broke out all over Romania demanding that Carol abdicate. On 1 September 1940, Sima who had resigned from the government gave a speech calling upon Carol to abdicate, and the Iron Guard began to organize demonstrations all over Romania to press for king's abdication. On 2 September 1940, Valer Pop, a courtier and an important member of the camarilla first advised Carol to appoint General Ion Antonescu as prime minister as the solution to the crisis. Pop's reasons for advising Carol to have Antonescu as prime minister was partly because Antonescu – who was known to be friendly with the Iron Guard and had been imprisoned under Carol – was believed to have enough of an oppositional background to appease the public and partly because Pop knew that Antonescu for all his Legionary sympathies was a member of the elite and would never turn against it. As the increasingly large crowds started to assemble outside of the royal palace demanding the king's abdication, Carol considered Pop's advice, but was reluctant to have Antonescu as prime minister. As more and more people started to join the protests, Pop feared that Romania was on the verge of a revolution that might not only sweep away the king's regime, but also the elite who had dominated the country since the 19th century. To apply further pressure on Carol, Pop met with Fabricius on the night of 4 September 1940 to ask him to tell Carol that the Reich wanted Antonescu as prime minister, which led to Fabricius promptly calling Carol to tell him to appoint the general as the prime minister. Additionally, the very ambitious General Antonescu who long coveted the premiership now suddenly started to downplay his long-standing antipathy to Carol, and he suggested that he was prepared to forgive past slights and disputes.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: On 5 September 1940, Antonescu became prime minister, and Carol transferred most of his dictatorial powers to him. As prime minister, Antonescu was a man acceptable to both the Iron Guard and the traditional elite. Carol planned to stay as king after appointing Antonescu and initially Antonescu did not support the popular demand for Carol's abdication. Antonescu had become prime minister, but he had a weak political base. As an Army officer, Antonescu was a loner, an arrogant and aloft man with an extremely bad temper who as a consequence was very unpopular with his fellow officers. Antonescu's relations with the politicians were no better, and as such Antonescu was initially unwilling to move against the king until he had some political allies. Carol ordered Antonescu and General Dumitru Coroamă who commanded the troops in Bucharest to shoot down demonstrators in front of the royal palace, an order that both refused to obey. It was only on 6 September 1940, when Antonescu learned of a plot to murder him headed by another member of the camarilla General Paul Teodorescu that Antonescu joined the chorus demanding Carol's abdication. With public opinion solidly against him and with the Army refusing to obey his orders, Carol was forced to abdicate.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: claim that Romania's de facto alliance with Germany under Antonescu was the work of Carol, who began laying its foundations for it as early as 1938, is wide off the mark. Carol's concessions to Germany were made half–heartedly and delayed as much as possible in the hope that the western powers would regain the initiative on the political-diplomatic front and, from September 1939, the military one. He finally did change his country's external economic and political orientation, but only in the spring of 1940, when German hegemony on the Continent seemed imminent. In addition, there is more than a subtle distinction between Carol's request in the last weeks of his rule for the dispatch of a German military mission to train the ill–prepared Romanian Army and Antonescu's decision almost immediately after assuming power to fight on Germany's side until the very end. In fact, in his desire to regain the province of Bessarabia, Antonescu was keener than the Germans' in Romania's participation in an anti-Soviet war.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Forced under Soviet and subsequently Hungarian, Bulgarian, and German pressure to surrender parts of his kingdom to foreign rule, he was finally outmaneuvered by the pro-German administration of Marshal Ion Antonescu, and abdicated in favour of Michael in September 1940. He went into exile, first in Mexico, then in Portugal. While in Portugal, he stayed in Estoril, at Casa do Mar e Sol. Carol and Lupescu finally settled in Mexico City, where he purchased a house in one of Mexico City's most expensive districts. During World War II, Carol tried to set up a Free Romania movement based in Mexico to overthrow General Antonescu. Carol had hopes that his Free Romania movement would be recognized as a government-in-exile and would ultimately lead to him being restored. The closest Carol ever got to having his Free Romania movement recognized came in 1942 when President Manuel Ávila Camacho allowed Carol to stand beside him while reviewing his troops. Carol would have liked to operate out of the United States, but the American government refused him permission to enter. However, Carol was in contact with two Eastern Orthodox priests living in Chicago, Father Glicherie Moraru and Father Alexandru Opreanu, who organized an unsuccessful campaign in the Romanian-American community to pressure the American government to recognize the "Free Romania" committee as the legitimate government of Romania.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: To advance his cause, Carol published a magazine in America called The Free Romanian and published several books in both Romanian and English. A major problem for Carol's efforts to mobilize the Romanian American community was the Immigration Control Act of 1924, which drastically limited immigration from Eastern Europe into the United States. As such, the majority of Romanian Americans in the 1940s were either persons who immigrated prior to 1924 or their children; in either case, Carol did not mean much to them. Furthermore, many Romanian Americans were Jews who had neither forgiven nor forgotten that it was Carol who had appointed the anti-Semitic fanatic Goga as prime minister in 1937. To improve his image amongst Jews, Carol persuaded Leon Fischer, the former vice-president of the United Romanian Jews of America, to write articles on his behalf in American Jewish magazines that portrayed the former king as the friend and protector of the Jews and an enemy of anti-Semitism. The reaction to Fischer's articles was overwhelmingly negative with a flood of letters to the editor who complained bitterly that it was Carol who signed in all of Goga's laws that took away Romanian citizenship from Jews and made it illegal for Romanian Jews to own land and shares in public companies and work as lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc. Furthermore, the writers of the letters noted that Carol allowed these laws to remain on the statute books after dismissing Goga and sarcastically commented that if Carol was the best friend of the Jews in Romania, then Romanian Jews certainly did not need enemies.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Carol's offers to have his Free Romania committee recognized as a government-in-exile was hindered by his unpopularity in his own homeland with many British and American diplomats arguing that supporting the former king was likely to increase public support for General Antonescu. Beyond that, there was a rival Free Romania committee headed by Viorel Tilea based in London that wanted to have nothing to do with Carol's committee in Mexico City. Virgil Tilea had as a university student in the 1930s supported the Iron Guard. Unusually for a Romanian in this period, Tilea was an Anglophile rather a Francophile, and had attended Cambridge University as an exchange student. Tilea's time in Britain changed his political views as he later stated that seeing many different types of people living in harmony in Britain made him realize that it was not necessary for one ethnic group to dominate all the others as Codreanu had proclaimed, leading him to break with Iron Guard. When General Antonescu was sworn in as prime minister as the new "National Legionary State", Tilea resigned as Romanian minister in London in protest at the appointment. Later in 1940, Tilea formed his Free Romania committee in London that attracted support from a number of Romanians who fled the Antonescu regime into exile.


title: Carol II of Romania

text: Tilea's Free Committee was not officially recognized by the British government, but was known to have the support of Britain and to be very close to the Polish government-in-exile, which was a major reason why the British spurned the Carol's rival Free Romania committee based in Mexico City, which tended to attract support only from those Romanians who been closely associated with the king's camarilla. Tilea's committee had an office in Istanbul which regularly sent couriers to a safe house in Bucharest, where messages were exchanged with one of Carol's former prime ministers Constantin Argetoianu who in turn acted as an emissary for those opposed to Antonescu. Argetoianu reported that King Michael was opposed to the Antonescu regime and wanted to stage a coup d'état to depose Antonescu, waiting only for the Allies to invade the Balkans. General Antonescu was the dictator, but Romanian army officers took their oath of loyalty to the king, so there was reason to believe in London that the Romanian Army would side with the king against the prime minister if the two came into conflict. From the British viewpoint, associating themselves with Carol's campaign to once again depose his own son would only complicate their dealings with King Michael.


title: iSteve

text: As a free release on the Internet, the movie went unseen by film critics, with most public reactions coming from tech and business bloggers. According to Forbes, early reviews are mixed. Wired reviewer Mat Honan stated that the movie was "profoundly unfunny" and that "If 'Funny or Die' is a promise, the crew should probably start coffin shopping." Honan claims that the film has several inaccuracies but also notes that the film is a parody, which somewhat offsets that. CNET reviewer Amanda Kooser also notes that the movie "cut a few corners as far as accuracy goes". Kooser notes that the film succeeded, in a sense, in beating Ashton Kutcher's Jobs to market as the first Steve Jobs biopic after his death . Kooser also notes that the movie had rampant anachronistic technology term usage. Variety reviewer AJ Marechal notes that the movie, which was written in three days and shot in five, "has its funny moments", but that it may be "too long", especially for the Funny or Die viewership. The New York Times critic Brooks Barnes described the movie as a "biopic poking fun at biopics" and said that writer Ryan Perez said "In true Internet fashion, it's not based on very thorough research — essentially a cursory look at the Steve Jobs Wikipedia page". Barnes also noted that the movie also bested a third Jobs movie in the works by Aaron Sorkin adapted from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson with input from Wozniak to the market. Fortune reviewer Philip Elmer-DeWitt describes the movie as " an over-long Saturday Night Live skit that never quite gets rolling", but noted it had a few things going for it.


title: Access to public information in Greece

text: The principle of transparency in all areas of public life, including media, is expected to be enhanced given that there is an Action Plan Promoting Open Government since 2014 . Technical and institutional changes have been adopted to enhance the principle of transparency and these should lead to the enhancement of the functionality of the DIAVGEIA project (Transparency Program Initiative), to the publication of public procurements and to the open, transparent and secure exchange of public documents. The DIAVGEIA project began on October 1, 2010. Under this Transparency Program Initiative, all government institutions are obliged to upload their acts and decisions on the Internet with special attention to issues of national security and sensitive personal data. Each document is digitally signed and assigned a unique Internet Uploading Number (IUN) certifying that the decision has been uploaded at the "Transparency Portal". Following the latest legislative initiative of the Ministry of Administrative Reform and e-Governance, administrative acts and decisions are not valid unless published online.


title: Teleopsis dalmanni

text: Female T. dalmanni roost on root threads overhanging streams at dusk. Males compete to gain control of these root hairs. Upon gaining control of a root hair they form harems, and females decide which male's harem to join. Studies have shown that females prefer to roost with males with larger eye-spans. Mating occurs at dawn, and usually multiple mating events take place. Research shows that increased mating frequency correlates with a higher proportion of fertile eggs. This is supported by the idea that multiple matings do not reduce the receptivity of a female fly to copulation, regardless of the characteristics of the mating male. Studies showed that the number of copulation events rather than the number of mates led to an increase in hatching success. Additionally, a large number of copulations are unsuccessful, with a study finding that females that copulated once had a hatching success rate of only 10%. Copulation specifics are not entirely understood, but some copulation events are rapid and last less than 60 seconds.


title: Structural Analysis of Cultural Systems

text: S.A.C.S. is a follow-up to the EU-project CULTOS . After the recommendation of the European Commission to continue research activities, S.A.C.S. was registered at Technische Universität Berlin in 2004. Founders were Roland Posner, late professor emeritus of linguistics and head of the semiotics research centre at TU Berlin, and Monika Walter, professor of romance literatures at TU Berlin. After its foundation, S.A.C.S. shifted its emphasis towards issues of cultural psychology, cultural semiotics, indigenous peoples and UN related work. Furthermore, it integrated a team of psychologists to provide expert reports for family courts, notably in child custody cases with mixed cultural backgrounds. In 2011, S.A.C.S. was officially registered as a non-governmental organization at the United Nations. It remained at TU Berlin until the end of 2012 and then became independent. From 2013 to 2015, S.A.C.S. had an office at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 2014, S.A.C.S. was awarded Special Consultative Status by the UN Economic and Social Council. Social research scientist Arnold Groh, who also was in charge of the predecessor project CULTOS at TU Berlin, is president/director of S.A.C.S.


title: Zombi 3

text: In a covert biological weapons laboratory in the Philippines, scientists work on a serum called Death One, which reanimates the dead. When Dr. Alan Holder and his assistant Norma experiment on a deceased human test subject, the corpse reanimates and reacts violently, prompting Dr. Holder to resign from the project. As he prepares to surrender the serum to the military, a group of rival gunmen ambushes the facility, with the lone surviving criminal absconding with Death One. During the ensuing chase, gunfire breaches the container with the serum. Dr. Holder initially shows no concern about the virus escaping in such a manner due to its inability to survive more than half a minute in the presence of oxygen until he learns that the criminal accidentally touched the serum and became infected. General Morton and his soldiers arrive at the Sweet River Resort, where the criminal had fled, to find the criminal had infected a bellhop, killed a maid, and cut off his own hand in a failed attempt to stop the infection's spread before finally succumbing to the infection. Morton orders the patrons and staff to be killed and buried in a mass grave, and the criminal's remains are transported to the facility's incinerator. As Dr. Holder and Norma fear, the ashes disperse into the air, infecting an entire flock of nearby birds.


title: Evans Memorial Chapel

text: The former Grace Church property with the chapel was resold to the University of Denver, which had been looking to purchase the property since 1947, in 1958. The university intended to demolish both church buildings to construct parking for the university's law school, which had recently merged with another local law school.: 148 Martin Rist, then President of the Rocky Mountain Methodist Historical Society, was informed of the plans and asked the university's chancellor Chester M. Alter to save the chapel. Alter embraced the idea and penned an opinion piece in the Rocky Mountain News entitled "Let's Save the Chapel!" The move was funded by a donation from John Evans, the former president of the university's board of trustees and grandson of the governor John Evans who had sponsored the chapel's original construction, as well as other members of the Evans family. The site selected for the relocation was west of Mary Reed Library on an axis with Mount Blue Sky (formerly known as Mount Evans).: 150


title: Benedikt Paul Göcke

text: After studying philosophy, Catholic theology and religious studies at the University of Münster, Göcke received his doctorate in 2011 under Klaus Müller with a thesis on the panentheism of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause at the Catholic theological faculty. Göcke obtained a second doctorate in, this time in philosophy, in 2013 at the Munich School of Philosophy. The work was supervised by Godehard Brüntrup and was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014 under the title "A Theory of the Absolute". From 2008 to 2012 Göcke was also a research fellow in Religion and Politics under Klaus Müller and from 2010 to 2013 a Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Blackfriars, Oxford. From 2012 to 2015 Göcke was a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Catholic Theology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Since 2016 he has been the group leader of an Emmy Noether project on theology as a science. Following a junior professorship from 2017 to 2019, Göcke has been Professor for the Philosophy of Religion and Philosophy of Science since 2019. He has also been an Associate Member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford since 2017.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: Immediately following Britain's declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, it began to consider the future of Palestine. Within two months a memorandum was circulated to the War Cabinet by a Zionist member, Herbert Samuel, proposing the support of Zionist ambitions in order to enlist the support of Jews in the wider war. A committee was established in April 1915 by British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to determine their policy towards the Ottoman Empire including Palestine. Asquith, who had favoured post-war reform of the Ottoman Empire, resigned in December 1916; his replacement David Lloyd George favoured partition of the Empire. The first negotiations between the British and the Zionists took place at a conference on 7 February 1917 that included Sir Mark Sykes and the Zionist leadership. Subsequent discussions led to Balfour's request, on 19 June, that Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann submit a draft of a public declaration. Further drafts were discussed by the British Cabinet during September and October, with input from Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews but with no representation from the local population in Palestine.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: The opening words of the declaration represented the first public expression of support for Zionism by a major political power. The term "national home" had no precedent in international law, and was intentionally vague as to whether a Jewish state was contemplated. The intended boundaries of Palestine were not specified, and the British government later confirmed that the words "in Palestine" meant that the Jewish national home was not intended to cover all of Palestine. The second half of the declaration was added to satisfy opponents of the policy, who had claimed that it would otherwise prejudice the position of the local population of Palestine and encourage antisemitism worldwide by "stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands". The declaration called for safeguarding the civil and religious rights for the Palestinian Arabs, who composed the vast majority of the local population, and also the rights and political status of the Jewish communities in other countries outside of Palestine. The British government acknowledged in 1939 that the local population's wishes and interests should have been taken into account, and recognised in 2017 that the declaration should have called for the protection of the Palestinian Arabs' political rights.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: Early British political support for an increased Jewish presence in the region of Palestine was based upon geopolitical calculations. This support began in the early 1840s and was led by Lord Palmerston, following the occupation of Syria and Palestine by separatist Ottoman governor Muhammad Ali of Egypt. French influence had grown in Palestine and the wider Middle East, and its role as protector of the Catholic communities began to grow, just as Russian influence had grown as protector of the Eastern Orthodox in the same regions. This left Britain without a sphere of influence, and thus a need to find or create their own regional "protégés". These political considerations were supported by a sympathetic evangelical Christian sentiment towards the "restoration of the Jews" to Palestine among elements of the mid-19th-century British political elite – most notably Lord Shaftesbury. The British Foreign Office actively encouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine, exemplified by Charles Henry Churchill's 1841–1842 exhortations to Moses Montefiore, the leader of the British Jewish community.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, later President of the World Zionist Organisation and first President of Israel, moved from Switzerland to the UK in 1904 and met Arthur Balfour – who had just launched his 1905–1906 election campaign after resigning as Prime Minister – in a session arranged by Charles Dreyfus, his Jewish constituency representative. Earlier that year, Balfour had successfully driven the Aliens Act through Parliament with impassioned speeches regarding the need to restrict the wave of immigration into Britain from Jews fleeing the Russian Empire. During this meeting, he asked what Weizmann's objections had been to the 1903 Uganda Scheme that Herzl had supported to provide a portion of British East Africa to the Jewish people as a homeland. The scheme, which had been proposed to Herzl by Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary in Balfour's Cabinet, following his trip to East Africa earlier in the year, had been subsequently voted down following Herzl's death by the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905 after two years of heated debate in the Zionist Organization. Weizmann responded that he believed the English are to London as the Jews are to Jerusalem.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: In January 1914 Weizmann first met Baron Edmond de Rothschild, a member of the French branch of the Rothschild family and a leading proponent of the Zionist movement, in relation to a project to build a Hebrew university in Jerusalem. The Baron was not part of the World Zionist Organization, but had funded the Jewish agricultural colonies of the First Aliyah and transferred them to the Jewish Colonization Association in 1899. This connection was to bear fruit later that year when the Baron's son, James de Rothschild, requested a meeting with Weizmann on 25 November 1914, to enlist him in influencing those deemed to be receptive within the British government to their agenda of a "Jewish State" in Palestine. Through James's wife Dorothy, Weizmann was to meet Rózsika Rothschild, who introduced him to the English branch of the family – in particular her husband Charles and his older brother Walter, a zoologist and former Member of Parliament (MP). Their father, Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild, head of the English branch of the family, had a guarded attitude towards Zionism, but he died in March 1915 and his title was inherited by Walter.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: This Anglo-French treaty was negotiated in late 1915 and early 1916 between Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, with the primary arrangements being set out in draft form in a joint memorandum on 5 January 1916. Sykes was a British Conservative MP who had risen to a position of significant influence on Britain's Middle East policy, beginning with his seat on the 1915 De Bunsen Committee and his initiative to create the Arab Bureau. Picot was a French diplomat and former consul-general in Beirut. Their agreement defined the proposed spheres of influence and control in Western Asia should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I, dividing many Arab territories into British- and French-administered areas. In Palestine, internationalisation was proposed, with the form of administration to be confirmed after consultation with both Russia and Hussein; the January draft noted Christian and Muslim interests, and that "members of the Jewish community throughout the world have a conscientious and sentimental interest in the future of the country."


title: Balfour Declaration

text: Shortly after returning from Petrograd, Sykes briefed Samuel, who then briefed a meeting of Gaster, Weizmann and Sokolow. Gaster recorded in his diary on 16 April 1916: "We are offered French-English condominium in Palest. Arab Prince to conciliate Arab sentiment and as part of the Constitution a Charter to Zionists for which England would stand guarantee and which would stand by us in every case of friction ... It practically comes to a complete realisation of our Zionist programme. However, we insisted on: national character of Charter, freedom of immigration and internal autonomy, and at the same time full rights of citizenship to and Jews in Palestine." In Sykes' mind, the agreement which bore his name was outdated even before it was signed – in March 1916, he wrote in a private letter: "to my mind the Zionists are now the key of the situation". In the event, neither the French nor the Russians were enthusiastic about the proposed formulation and eventually on 4 July, Wolf was informed that "the present moment is inopportune for making any announcement."


title: Balfour Declaration

text: The French position in regard to Palestine and the wider Syria region during the lead up to the Balfour Declaration was largely dictated by the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and was complicated from 23 November 1915 by increasing French awareness of the British discussions with the Sherif of Mecca. Prior to 1917, the British had led the fighting on the southern border of the Ottoman Empire alone, given their neighbouring Egyptian colony and the French preoccupation with the fighting on the Western Front that was taking place on their own soil. Italy's participation in the war, which began following the April 1915 Treaty of London, did not include involvement in the Middle Eastern sphere until the April 1917 Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne; at this conference, Lloyd George had raised the question of a British protectorate of Palestine and the idea "had been very coldly received" by the French and the Italians. In May and June 1917, the French and Italians sent detachments to support the British as they built their reinforcements in preparation for a renewed attack on Palestine.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: In early April, Sykes and Picot were appointed to act as the chief negotiators once more, this time on a month-long mission to the Middle East for further discussions with the Sherif of Mecca and other Arab leaders. On 3 April 1917, Sykes met with Lloyd George, Lord Curzon and Maurice Hankey to receive his instructions in this regard, namely to keep the French onside while "not prejudicing the Zionist movement and the possibility of its development under British auspices, enter into any political pledges to the Arabs, and particularly none in regard to Palestine". Before travelling to the Middle East, Picot, via Sykes, invited Nahum Sokolow to Paris to educate the French government on Zionism. Sykes, who had prepared the way in correspondence with Picot, arrived a few days after Sokolow; in the meantime, Sokolow had met Picot and other French officials, and convinced the French Foreign Office to accept for study a statement of Zionist aims "in regard to facilities of colonization, communal autonomy, rights of language and establishment of a Jewish chartered company." Sykes went on ahead to Italy and had meetings with the British ambassador and British Vatican representative to prepare the way for Sokolow once again.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: Sokolow was granted an audience with Pope Benedict XV on 6 May 1917. Sokolow's notes of the meeting – the only meeting records known to historians – stated that the Pope expressed general sympathy and support for the Zionist project. On 21 May 1917 Angelo Sereni, president of the Committee of the Jewish Communities, presented Sokolow to Sidney Sonnino, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was also received by Paolo Boselli, the Italian prime minister. Sonnino arranged for the secretary general of the ministry to send a letter to the effect that, although he could not express himself on the merits of a program which concerned all the allies, "generally speaking" he was not opposed to the legitimate claims of the Jews. On his return journey, Sokolow met with French leaders again and secured a letter dated 4 June 1917, giving assurances of sympathy towards the Zionist cause by Jules Cambon, head of the political section of the French foreign ministry. This letter was not published, but was deposited at the British Foreign Office.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: "This is a very carefully worded document and but for the somewhat vague phrase 'A National Home for the Jewish People' might be considered sufficiently unalarming ... But the vagueness of the phrase cited has been a cause of trouble from the commencement. Various persons in high positions have used language of the loosest kind calculated to convey a very different impression to the more moderate interpretation which can be put upon the words. President Wilson brushed away all doubts as to what was intended from his point of view when, in March 1919, he said to the Jewish leaders in America, 'I am moreover persuaded that the allied nations, with the fullest concurrence of our own Government and people are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth.' The late President Roosevelt declared that one of the Allies peace conditions should be that 'Palestine must be made a Jewish State.' Mr. Winston Churchill has spoken of a 'Jewish State' and Mr. Bonar Law has talked in Parliament of 'restoring Palestine to the Jews'."


title: Balfour Declaration

text: When the letter was tabled at the Shaw Commission in 1929, Rustam Haidar spoke to Faisal in Baghdad and cabled that Faisal had "no recollection that he wrote anything of the sort". In January 1930, Haidar wrote to a newspaper in Baghdad that Faisal: "finds it exceedingly strange that such a matter is attributed to him as he at no time would consider allowing any foreign nation to share in an Arab country". Awni Abd al-Hadi, Faisal's secretary, wrote in his memoirs that he was not aware that a meeting between Frankfurter and Faisal took place and that: "I believe that this letter, assuming that it is authentic, was written by Lawrence, and that Lawrence signed it in English on behalf of Faisal. I believe this letter is part of the false claims made by Chaim Weizmann and Lawrence to lead astray public opinion." According to Allawi, the most likely explanation for the Frankfurter letter is that a meeting took place, a letter was drafted in English by Lawrence, but that its "contents were not entirely made clear to Faisal. He then may or may not have been induced to sign it", since it ran counter to Faisal's other public and private statements at the time. A 1 March interview by Le Matin quoted Faisal as saying:


title: Balfour Declaration

text: Balfour stated in February 1919 that Palestine was considered an exceptional case in which, referring to the local population, "we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination," although he considered that the policy provided self-determination to Jews. Avi Shlaim considers this the declaration's "greatest contradiction". This principle of self-determination had been declared on numerous occasions subsequent to the declaration – President Wilson's January 1918 Fourteen Points, McMahon's Declaration to the Seven in June 1918, the November 1918 Anglo-French Declaration, and the June 1919 Covenant of the League of Nations that had established the mandate system. In an August 1919 memo Balfour acknowledged the inconsistency among these statements, and further explained that the British had no intention of consulting the existing population of Palestine. The results of the ongoing American King–Crane Commission of Enquiry consultation of the local population – from which the British had withdrawn – were suppressed for three years until the report was leaked in 1922. Subsequent British governments have acknowledged this deficiency, in particular the 1939 committee led by the Lord Chancellor, Frederic Maugham, which concluded that the government had not been "free to dispose of Palestine without regard for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants of Palestine", and the April 2017 statement by British Foreign Office minister of state Baroness Anelay that the government acknowledged that "the Declaration should have called for the protection of political rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine, particularly their right to self-determination."


title: Balfour Declaration

text: The text of the declaration was published in the press one week after it was signed, on 9 November 1917. Other related events took place within a short timeframe, the two most relevant being the almost immediate British military capture of Palestine and the leaking of the previously secret Sykes-Picot Agreement. On the military side, both Gaza and Jaffa fell within several days, and Jerusalem was surrendered to the British on 9 December. The publication of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, following the Russian Revolution, in the Bolshevik Izvestia and Pravda on 23 November 1917 and in the British Manchester Guardian on 26 November 1917, represented a dramatic moment for the Allies' Eastern campaign: "the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted." The Zionists had been aware of the outlines of the agreement since April and specifically the part relevant to Palestine, following a meeting between Weizmann and Cecil where Weizmann made very clear his objections to the proposed scheme.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: In 1919, King Hussein refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. After February 1920, the British ceased to pay subsidy to him. In August 1920, five days after the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, which formally recognized the Kingdom of Hejaz, Curzon asked Cairo to procure Hussein's signature to both treaties and agreed to make a payment of £30,000 conditional on signature. Hussein declined and in 1921, stated that he could not be expected to "affix his name to a document assigning Palestine to the Zionists and Syria to foreigners." Following the 1921 Cairo Conference, Lawrence was sent to try and obtain the King's signature to a treaty as well as to Versailles and Sèvres, a £60,000 annual subsidy being proposed; this attempt also failed. During 1923, the British made one further attempt to settle outstanding issues with Hussein and once again, the attempt foundered, Hussein continued in his refusal to recognize the Balfour Declaration or any of the Mandates that he perceived as being his domain. In March 1924, having briefly considered the possibility of removing the offending article from the treaty, the government suspended any further negotiations; within six months they withdrew their support in favour of their central Arabian ally Ibn Saud, who proceeded to conquer Hussein's kingdom.


title: Balfour Declaration

text: On 25 April 1920, the San Remo conference – an outgrowth of the Paris Peace Conference attended by the prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy, the Japanese Ambassador to France, and the United States Ambassador to Italy – established the basic terms for three League of Nations mandates: a French mandate for Syria, and British mandates for Mesopotamia and Palestine. With respect to Palestine, the resolution stated that the British were responsible for putting into effect the terms of the Balfour Declaration. The French and the Italians made clear their dislike of the "Zionist cast of the Palestinian mandate" and objected especially to language that did not safeguard the "political" rights of non-Jews, accepting Curzon's claim that "in the British language all ordinary rights were included in "civil rights"". At the request of France, it was agreed that an undertaking was to be inserted in the mandate's procès-verbal that this would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The Italian endorsement of the Declaration had included the condition "... on the understanding that there is no prejudice against the legal and political status of the already existing religious communities ..." The boundaries of Palestine were left unspecified, to "be determined by the Principal Allied Powers." Three months later, in July 1920, the French defeat of Faisal's Arab Kingdom of Syria precipitated the British need to know "what is the 'Syria' for which the French received a mandate at San Remo?" and "does it include Transjordania?" – it subsequently decided to pursue a policy of associating Transjordan with the mandated area of Palestine without adding it to the area of the Jewish National Home.