[From "To the Abattoir : Investigating the Legionary Rebellion of January 21-23, 1941"]
In 1994 I applied for and received a small grant to travel to Slovenia to collaborate with the NSK group (Neue Slowenische Kunst). This art group, which had coalesced around the band Laibach a decade earlier during a period when it was banned, had just upped the ante on their collectivism by declaring themselves a “transglobal borderless state-in-time.” They had begun issuing passports and opening temporary pop-up NSK embassies wherever IRWIN (the NSK visual artists) were invited to exhibit their paintings and graphics. I’d proposed to design a set of tableware for NSK state occasions and had flown from Seattle to Ljubljana to work on that idea there. During the course of my stay I met a fetching Slovenian woman who was teaching children’s pottery classes at the ceramics studio where I ended up. Her name was Mihaela and her name plus the serendipitous purchase of a cheesy paperback exposé of Nazis in America precipitated a mania for Romania that preoccupied me for some years to come and ultimately led to a meeting in Bucharest with Catalin Z. Codreanu, the 90-year-old youngest brother of Corneliu Z. Codreanu, the charismatic founder of the Iron Guard.
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Chapter 2 of Blum’s 1977 true-crime potboiler, entitled “The Bishop and the Dentist” is a mawkish account of a Jewish Romanian-American dentist’s twenty-year letter-writing campaign to paint Bishop Trifa with the “Nazi war criminal” tar brush. Dr. Charles Kremer’s obsessive letters to US immigration officials, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, senators and congressmen eventually resulted in a government case against Trifa and his denaturalization in 1982. But Blum’s account of the flimsy hearsay evidence against Trifa ends before his deportation and death in exile in 1987. Information in the publication that same year of Securitate defector Ion Pacepa’s Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, in which the author chronicles the Ceaucescu regime’s manufacturing of false evidence against Trifa to feed to American Jewish organizations in a successful bid to maintain Romania’s most-favored-nation trading status, was ignored by US Immigration and Naturalization Service investigators. Trifa could not be expelled just because he was a Legionary. He had to be made to look like a monster. Pacepa writes, “The framing of Trifa was a long process that followed to the letter the guidelines received from the KGB on how to go about such an operation.”
Two other books published after Trifa’s death shed additional light on the diplomatic and political ramifications of the “war criminal” persecutions and the goals they ultimately served. However, it was Gerald Bobango’s Religion and Politics: Bishop Valerian Trifa and His Times, written while he was still alive, that woke me up to Jewish exceptionalism in postwar Romanian historiography and ignited a desire to travel there. Gerald Bobango was one of Trifa’s lawyers. His book about this case is a seminal one in my life in that it ultimately led to my breaking ranks with the Gramscian slow march through the schools and institutions most Western artists have been in Leftist lockstep with since V-E Day.
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Central to my research into Legionary history are the events of January 21-23, 1941, usually referred to as “the Legionary revolt of 1941” or “the Bucharest pogrom.” During these three days, we are told, the Legionaries attempted take control of the Romanian Legionary State from Marshal Ion Antonescu, with whom they were sharing power. The rebellion was actually a coup d’état begun by Antonescu when he began relieving Legionary functionaries of their various posts in city governments across the country with no warning. Bucharest’s Legionary bureaucrats and police force refused to abandon their positions and street fighting broke out.
During the resulting clash with the army the Jewish section of the city was ransacked. We have been told marauding Legionaries butchered 200 Jews in the municipal abattoir and left their bodies hanging on meathooks. In other parts of the city Jews were rounded up, robbed, raped, and tortured to death in a frenzy of looting and rapine. There are photos of the aftermath of the “revolt” and newspaper clippings attesting to all manner of depravity, but accounts of the events aren’t trustworthy and the story of the Bucharest abattoir has done more to bring disgrace on Romania’s populist Legionary Movement than any other event in the twenty-year history of its struggles with local police prefectures, the monarchy, and the army.
Wildly varying versions of this legend are repeated in most histories of the Holocaust and Romania in WWII. Evidence presented in the case against Archbishop Trifa included the text of a speech he delivered in his capacity as a Christian student leader to a group of university students on January 19. Supposedly it was an incitement to the violence which erupted the following day.
From what little I’ve been able to learn about his life, Corneliu Z. Codreanu was never a Legionary, but he was jailed after the war as a political liability and languished in Communist prisons while his academically trained artist wife did what she could to feed the family. I asked him a number of questions, including his opinion on the story of the abattoir, but his answers were in Romanian and I’ve yet to get these translated. At the time my translator told me he didn’t believe it. Everyone who has bothered to look into it agrees it’s a slander, but I doubt Mr. Codreanu knew that an American foreign correspondent named Leigh White, working for the Jewish Telegraph Agency, was the first person to report the story. White wasn’t in Bucharest when the fighting broke out. He filed his eyewitness account of the unrest from Sofia, Bulgaria, and was back in Bucharest before it was over.
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After a meeting with Hitler on January 14, 1941, Marshal Antonescu returned and dissolved the short-lived National Legionary State, and Romania entered the war five months later. Jews died during the resulting coup d’état, but so did many Legionaries, soldiers, and other citizens. No one agrees on how many, but figures for the Jewish lives lost were determined by fiat in 2009, and laws were passed in Romania to discourage revisionists.