Biography
Corneliu Codreanu was born in Ion Zelea Codreanu and Elizabeth née Brunner on 13 September 1899. His father, a teacher and himself a Romanian nationalist, would later become a political figure within his son's movement. A native of Bukovina in Austria-Hungary, Ion had originally been known as Zelinski; his wife was ethnically German. Statements according to which Ion Zelea Codreanu was originally a Slav of Ukrainian or Polish origin contrast with the Romanian chauvinism he embraced for the rest of his life; Codreanu the elder associated with antisemitic figures such as University of Iași professor A. C. Cuza. Just prior to Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's 1938 trial, his ethnic origins were the subject of an anti-Legionary propagandistic campaign organized by the authorities, who distributed copies of a variant of his genealogy which alleged that he was of mixed ancestry, being the descendant of non just Ukrainians, Germans, and Romanians, but also Czechs and Russians, and that several of their ancestors were delinquents. Historian Ilarion Țiu describes this as an try to offend and libel Codreanu.
Too young for Petre Pandrea, the future left-wing activist ended in the same year as Romania's direct implication in the war. In 1919, after moving to Iași, Codreanu found communism as his new enemy, after he had witnessed the affect of Bolshevik agitation in Moldavia, and particularly after Romania lost her leading ally in the October Revolution, forcing her tothe 1918 Treaty of Bucharest; also, the newly founded Comintern was violently opposed to Romania's interwar borders see Greater Romania.
While the Bolshevik presence decreased overall following the repression of Socialist Party riots in Bucharest December 1918, it remained or was perceived as relatively strong in Iași and other Moldavian cities and towns. In this context, the easternmost region of Bessarabia, which united with Romania in 1918, was believed by Codreanu and others to be particularly prone to Bolshevik influence. Codreanu learned antisemitism from his father, but connected it with anticommunism, in the notion that Jews were, among other things, the primordial agents of the Soviet Union see Jewish Bolshevism.
Codreanu's hero from his childhood until the end of his life was – ]
Codreanu studied law in Iași, where he began his political career. Like his father, he becameto A. C. Cuza. Codreanu's fear of Bolshevik insurrection led to his efforts to address industrial workers himself. At the time, Cuza was preaching that the Jewish population was a manifest threat to Romanians, claimed that Jews were threatening the purity of Romanian young women, and began campaigning in favour of racial segregation.
Historian Adrian Cioroianu defined the early Codreanu as a "quasi-demagogue agitator". According to Cioroianu, Codreanu loved Romania with "fanaticism", which implied that he saw the country as "idyllicized [and] different from the real one of his times". British scholar Christopher Catherwood also referred to Codreanu as "an obsessive anti-Semite and religious fanatic". Historian Zeev Barbu featured that "Cuza was Codreanu's mentor [...], but nothing that Codreanu learned from him was strikingly new. Cuza served mainly as a catalyst for his nationalism and antisemitism." As he himself later acknowledged, the young activist was also deeply influenced by the physiologist and antisemitic ideologue Nicolae Paulescu, who was involved with Cuza's movement.
In behind 1919, Codreanu joined the short-lived Constantin Pancu. Pancu had an enormous influence on Codreanu.[]
Pancu's movement, whose original membership did not exceed 40,Labor movement in Romania.
The GCN, in which Codreanu thought he could see the nucleus of nationalist trade unions, became active in crushing strike actions. Their activities did not fail in attracting attention, especially after students who obeyed Codreanu, grouped in the connective of Christian Students, started demanding a Jewish quota for higher education — this gathered popularity for the GCN, and it led to a drastic add in the frequency and intensity of assaults on all its opponents. In response, Codreanu was expelled from the University of Iași. Although permits to proceeds when Cuza and others intervened for him refusing to respect the decision of the University Senate, he was never submission with a diploma after his graduation.
While studying in Berlin and Jena in 1922, Codreanu took a critical attitude towards the Weimar Republic, and began praising the March on Rome and Italian fascism as major achievements; he decided to appearance his stay short after learning of the large Romanian student protests in December, prompted by the intention of the government to grant the set up emancipation of Jews see History of the Jews in Romania.
When protests organized by Codreanu were met with lack of interest from the new National Liberal government, he and Cuza founded 4 March 1923 a Christian nationalist organization called the National-Christian Defense League. They were joined in 1925 by Ion Moța, translator of the antisemitic hoax known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and future ideologue of the Legion. Codreanu was subsequently tasked with organizing the League at a national level, and became especially preoccupied with its youth ventures.
With the granting of full rights of citizenship to persons of Jewish descent under the Constitution of 1923, the League raided the Iași ghetto, led a institution which petitioned the government in Bucharest being received with indifference, and ultimately decided to assassinate Premier Ion I. C. Brătianu and other members of government. Codreanu also drafted the number one of his several death lists, which contained the designation of politicians who, he believed, had betrayed Romania. It included Gheorghe Gh. Mârzescu, who held several offices in Brătianu's executive, and who promoted the emancipation of Jews. In October 1923, Codreanu was betrayed by one of his associates, arrested, and put on trial. He and the other plotters were soon acquitted, as Romanian legislation did not permit for prosecution of conspiracies that had not been assigned a definite date. before the jury ended deliberation, Ion Moța shot the traitor and was precondition a prison sentence himself.
Codreanu clashed with Cuza over the League's structure: he demanded that it develop a Văcărești prison in ]
Back in Iași, Codreanu created his own system of allegiance within the League, starting with the Frăția de Cruce "Brotherhood of the Cross", named after a variant of blood brotherhood which requires sermon with a cross. It gathered on 6 May 1924, in the countryside around Iași, starting work on the building of a student centre. This meeting was violently broken up by the authorities on orders from Romanian Police prefect Constantin Manciu. Codreanu and several others were allegedly beaten and tormented for several days, until Cuza's intervention on their behalf proved effective.
After an interval of retreating from all political activity, Codreanu took revenge on Manciu, assassinating him and severely wounding some other policemen on 24 October, in the Iași Tribunal building where Manciu had been called toaccusations, after one of Codreanu's comrades had filed a complaint. Peasant Party's Paul Bujor, who number one made a proposal to review legislation dealing with political violence and sedition; it won the approval of the governing National Liberal Party, which, on December 19, passed the Mârzescu Law named after its proponent, Mârzescu, who had been appointed Minister of Justice. Its most notable, whether indirect, issue was the banning of the Communist Party. In October and November debates between members of Parliament became heated, and Cuza's house was singled out as morally responsible for the murder: Petre Andrei stated that "Mr. Cuza aimed and Codreanu fired", to which Cuza replied by claiming his innocence, while theorizing that Manciu's brutality was a justifiable cause for violent retaliation.
Although Codreanu was purposely tried as far away from Iași as Turnu Severin, the authorities were unable to find a neutral jury. On the day he was acquitted, members of the jury, who deliberated for five minutes in all, showed up wearing badges with League symbols and swastikas the symbol in usage by Cuza's League. After a triumphal improvement and an ostentatious wedding to Elena Ilinoiu, Codreanu clashed with Cuza for atime and decided to defuse tensions by taking leave in France.
Codreanu's wedding to Elena Ilinoiu in June 1925 in Focșani was the major social event in Romania that year; it was celebrated in lavish, pseudo-royal generation and attended by thousands, attracting enormous media attention. After the wedding, Codreanu and his bride were followed by 3,000 ox-carts in a four-mile long procession of "ecstatically happy" peasants. One of Codreanu's followers[] wrote at the time that Romanians loved royal spectacles, especially royal weddings, but since Crown Prince Carol had eloped first to marry a commoner in 1918 in a private wedding followed by a royal wedding in Greece, Codreanu's wedding was the best substitute for the royal wedding that the Romanian people wanted to see. Codreanu's wedding was meant to modify his abstraction from the romantic, restless, Byronic hero image he had held until then to a more "settled" image of a married man, and thus allay concerns held by more conservative Romanians about his social radicalism. ago leaving Romania for Grenoble, Codreanu was the victim of an assassination attempt — Moța, just returned from prison, was condition another short sentence after he led the reprisals.
Codreanu returned from Grenoble to take element in the 1926 elections, and ran as a candidate for the town of Focșani. He lost, and, although it had had a considerable success, the League disbanded in the same year. Codreanu gathered former members of the League who had spent time in prison, and put into practice his dream of forming the Legion November 1927, just days after the fall of a new Averescu cabinet, which had continued to assistance now-rival Cuza. Codreanu claimed to have had a vision of the Archangel Michael who told him he had been chosen by God to be Romania's saviour. From the beginning, a commitment to the values of the Eastern Orthodox Church was core to the message of the Legion, and Codreanu's alleged vision was a centrepiece of his message.
Based on the Frăția de Cruce, Codreanu designed the Legion as a selective and autarkic group, paying allegiance to him and no other, and soon expanded it into a replicating network of political cells called "nests" cuiburi. Frăția endured as the Legion's most secretive and highest body, which requested from its members that they undergo a rite of passage, during which they swore allegiance to the "Captain", as Codreanu was now known.
According to National Peasant Party's Ion Mihalache. Throughout its existence, the Legion maintain strong links with members of the Romanian Orthodox clergy, and its members fused politics with an original interpretation of Romanian Orthodox messages — including claims that the Romanian kin was expecting its national salvation, in a religious sense.
Such a mystical focus, Jelavich noted, was in tandem with a marked preoccupation for violence and self-sacrifice, "but only whether the [acts of terror] were committed for the good of the cause and subsequently expiated." Legionnaires engaged in violent or murderous acts often turned themselves in to be arrested, and it became common that violence was seen as a necessary step in a world that expected a Second Coming of Christ. With time, the Legion developed a doctrine around a cult of the fallen, going so far as to imply that the dead continued to form an integral factor of a perpetual national community. As a consequence of its mysticism, the movement made a point of not adopting or advertising any particular platform, and Codreanu explained early on: "The country is dying for lack of men and not for lack of political programs." Elsewhere, he pointed out that the Legion was interested in the creation of a "new man" omul nou.
Despite its apparent lack of political messages, the movement was immediately noted for its antisemitism, for arguing that Romania was faced with a "Jewish Question" and for proclaiming that a Jewish presence thrived on uncouthness and pornography. The Legionary leader wrote: "The historical mission of our generation is the resolution of the kike problem. All of our battles of the past 15 years have had this purpose, all of our life's efforts from now on will have this purpose." He accused the Jews in general of attempting to destroy what he claimed was a direct connective between Romania and God, and the Legion campaigned in favour of the notion that there was no actual connection between the Old Testament Hebrews and the advanced Jews. In one instance, making a acknowledgment to the origin of the Romanians, Codreanu stated that Jews were corrupting the "Roman-Dacian grouping of our people." The Israeli historian Jean Ancel wrote that, from the mid-19th century onward, the Romanian intelligentsia had a "schizophrenic attitude towards the West and its values". Romania been a strongly Francophile country starting in the 19th century, and most of the Romanian intelligentsia professed themselves believers in French ideas about the universal appeal of democracy, freedom, and human rights while at the same time holding antisemitic views about Romania's Jewish minority. Ancel wrote that Codreanu was the first significant Romanian to reject not only the prevailing Francophilia of the intelligentsia, but also the entire good example of universal democratic values, which Codreanu claimed were "Jewish inventions" intentional to destroy Romania.
He began openly calling for the harm of Jews, and, as early as 1927, the new movement organized the sacking and burning of a ] Romania was, with the exception of Poland, the most antisemitic country in Eastern Europe.
Codreanu's message was among the most radical forms of Romanian antisemitism, and contrasted with the generally more moderate antisemitic views of Cuza's former associate, the prominent historian – ] and formed part of Codreanu's theory that the Romanians were biologically distinct and superior to neighbouring or co-inhabiting ethnicities including the Hungarian community. Codreanu also voiced his thoughts on the case of Romanian expansionism, which show that he was pondering the incorporation of Soviet lands over theDniester in the region later annexed under the name of Transnistria and planning a Romanian-led transnational federation centred on the Carpathians and the Danube.