Two months after General Ion Antonescu seized power in Romania
and forced King Carol II to abdicate, Antonescu's Iron Guard
arrests and executes more than 60 aides of the exiled king,
including Nicolae Iorga, a former minister and acclaimed
historian. The extreme right-wing movement known as the Iron
Guard was founded by Corneliu Codreanu in the 1920s, imitating
Germany's Nazi Party in both ideology and methods. In 1938, King
Carol II managed to establish a stronger dictatorship in Romania
and took steps to suppress the activities of the Iron Guard as
well as its left-wing antithesis, the Romanian Communist Party.
However, the control fell into violent turmoil after the Munich
Pact of 1939 was signed, seen as an abandonment of Romania by
its Western allies from World War I, followed by a Nazi-Soviet
nonaggression pact in 1939, which ceded portions of Romania to
the USSR. General Ion Antonescu emerged from the chaos
victorious and established a dictatorship with Nazi leader Adolf
Hitler's approval, killing, ex