The Evening Star. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1939. ASSASSINATION.

Evening Star, Issue 23379, 23 September 1939, Page 12

The Evening Star. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1939. ASSASSINATION.

News of assassination comes with a shook even amid the horrors of war. It will be difficult for German Nazism to acquit itself of at least indirect responsibility for the murder by political extremists of the Prime Minister of Rumania, M. Calinescu. For the murderers were members of Rumania’s Iron Guard, and the Iron Guard, known also as the Green Shirts and the All For the Fatherland Party, were understood to draw their chief finances from Germany when they first came into prominence more than two years ago. They wore emblems made in Germany and their bands were organised on the Nazi model. Their leader was a half-crazed, youthful zealot named Codreanu, who rode on a white horse and signed himself by no other name than “ Captain.” They terrorised the countryside, being notorious for their anti-Jewish violence, and were a disturbing force in politics. An earlier Prime Minister, Duca, was assassinated by them. In May of last year Codreanu was tried for conspiring against the State and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. In November, while King Carol was absent from the

country, he was shot, with thirteen others, “ while attempting to escape.” The Iron Guard before that had been proscribed, but its members seem to have held themselves together, and all their Nazi sympathies were inflamed by the German invasion of Poland. Rumania herself had had cause to fear invasion, and the same pledge against aggression which was given to the Poles was given to her—and also to Greece—by the Allies. During recent weeks the Rumanian Government has been most concerned in protecting its people as much as possible by reiterated declarations of its neutrality, and that policy naturally would bo offensive to a proNazi minority. The assassination of the Prime Minister who stood for it was carried through with typical hardihood and callousness by the miscreants by whom it was planned His motor car was blocked by another in one of the principal streets of the capital andshots poured into it by which the Prime Minister and his aide were killed and the chauffeur wounded. The assassins then forced their way into the city’s wireless station and broadcast their own crime. Eight Iron Guards who were alleged to be implicated were at once placed before a firing squad, and repression has been thorough since. Peace and order, we are told, now prevail again in Rumania. Without assassinations to excite it that country could not fail to live dangerously, since Germany covets its oil wells and Russia considerable portions of its territory which were lost by the Bolshevists as an immediate sequel to the Great War. The Germans might be in possession now if the Russians who have entered into a treaty with Nazism had not reached the frontier first. Rumania has reasserted her neutrality, but it would seem that only a miracle will bo able to keep her long out of the war. For some time past she has been adding to her naval flotilla and building a new harbour at Tashaul, a few miles north of Constanza, to give it shelter. When, last March, she signed a trade treaty with Germany and gave Germany extraterritorial rights in her ports, it looked as if the country had supinely surrendered, but operation of the treaty, it has been said, convinced observers that Rumania had promised to give away everything for the next 2,000 years, nothing for the next few mouths. Since then there has been trouble with Hungary as well as fears of Germany. The additions, which she made to her territory as the result of the last Great War have not been an unmixed advantage to Rumania.