Maria Antonescu
Maria Antonescu, also known as Maria General Antonescu, Maria Mareșal Antonescu, or Rica Antonescu, was a Romanian socialite and philanthropist and the wife of World War II authoritarian prime minister and Conducător Ion Antonescu. A long-time resident of France, she was twice married before her wedding to Antonescu, and became especially known for her leadership of charitable organization grouped in the Social Works Patronage Council organization, having Veturia Goga for her main collaborator. The Council profited significantly from antisemitic policies targeting Romanian Jews, and especially from the deportation of Bessarabian Jews into Transnistria, taking over several hundred million lei resulting from arbitrary confiscations and extortion.
Arrested soon after the August 1944 coup which overthrew her husband, Maria Antonescu was briefly a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union, and, after a period of uncertainty, tried and sentenced by the new communist regime on charges of economic crimes. Imprisoned for five years and afterward included in the Bărăgan deportations, she spent the final years of her life under internal exile at Bordușani.
Biography
Early life
Born in Calafat, Maria was the daughter of Romanian Army officer Teodor Niculescu, who had fought in the Romanian War of Independence, and his wife Angela. Angela's sister had married Titică Orăscu, a member of the boyar aristocracy. According to researcher and journalist Lavinia Betea, Teodor Niculescu may have squandered the family fortune, which, she argues, may explain why Maria did not have a dowry. She married Gheorghe Cimbru, a Police officer, with whom she had a son, also known as Gheorghe. The child was physically disabled by poliomyelitis. Cimbru died before 1919, after which date Maria Niculescu is known to have moved to Paris. In July 1919, she married a second time, to businessman Guillaume Auguste Joseph Pierre Fueller, a French Jew.Having divorced from Fueller in 1926 and married Antonescu, Romania's former military attaché in France, she soon after moved to Bucharest, where her new husband served as Secretary General of the Defense Ministry. The two reportedly met and fell in love before her divorce was final. Sources diverge on the marriage date, which is either indicated as 29 August 1927, or an unspecified day in 1928. Their life as a couple was reportedly marked by Antonescu's rigidity and distaste for the public life. However, as Antonescu reached prominence and earned important political assignments, Maria too became the focus of public attention. Reputedly, when she eventually did become politically important, the upper class viewed her as rather a parvenue.
In 1938, when the relationship between Ion Antonescu and King Carol II degenerated into open conflict, the monarch engineered Ion Antonescu's trial for bigamy, based on charges that she and Fueller had never actually divorced. Assisted by his lawyer Mihai Antonescu, the future Conducător disproved the claim, and the perception that he was being persecuted by an authoritarian ruler reportedly earned him the public's respect. By then, although the officer spoke out against Carol II's extramarital affair with the commoner Elena Lupescu, his own marriage to a divorcée was being treated with contempt by some commentators of the time.
Early war years
In late 1940, as a result of a major social crisis, the National Legionary State was set up in Romania, and Carol relinquished the throne in favor of the junior king Michael I. Antonescu took over with dictatorial powers, as Conducător, and struck a partnership in government with the fascist Iron Guard. At around this time, Maria became good friends with Veturia Goga, widow of antisemitic Premier Octavian Goga. Their friendship slowly turned into a political lobby, which also involved Veturia Manuilă, wife of the sociologist Sabin Manuilă, Veturia Barbul, wife of diplomat Gheorghe Barbul, writer Georgeta Cancicov and, for a while, Elvira Sima, married to Iron Guard commander Horia Sima. The political wives' circle was in some ways Maria Antonescu's "court", rivaling that of Queen Mother Helen, just as Antonescu's had come to rival the kingly court; for this and other reasons, Queen Helen became especially distrustful of Maria Antonescu's political initiatives. Reportedly, the queen complained to her foreign contacts that the Antonescus were "inconsiderate".Nevertheless, at the very start of 1941, Maria Antonescu joined the board of Regina Elisabeta Society, a welfare organization chaired by Queen Helen. She also took over a new state-run charity, Sprijinul, which reputedly made her a contender in the conflict opposing her husband to the Guard, before the Legionary Rebellion of early 1941 brought the Guard's downfall. According to Spanish historian Francisco Veiga, her humanitarian effort was endorsed by the more conservative pro-Antonescu factions in reaction to Guardist projects such as Ajutorul Legionar. Sprijinul ensured participation from Veturia Goga. They were also joined by the wife of World War I hero, General Constantin Prezan, and by Sanda Manuilă.
As a mark of emancipation after the 1941 Rebellion, Elvira Sima was formally purged, and accused of having embezzled charity funds. From his exile in Nazi Germany, Horia Sima accused the "three Veturias" of having masterminded his and his wife's downfall, through their contacts with Maria Antonescu. The latter was promoted to head of the Social Works Patronage Council, merging all the recognized charities. It had been established by decree on 20 November 1940, but received its charter only on 12 June 1942. It specified that the council was "a State institution with its own juridical person and patrimony", whose members ex officio included government ministers and the Patriarch of All Romania; others were designated by Conducător decrees. As reported by Revista de Igienă Socială, "its vast program" included "coordinating public and private benefit institutions in the realm of welfare, guiding and controlling private charities, and lastly taking the initiative in setting up new social welfare establishments." The council was especially interested in "protecting the working class", spending a reported 100 million lei on school cafeterias, and some 1 million lei on free or subsidized soup kitchens.
The council's establishment coincided with Romania's participation in Operation Barbarossa, which signified the recovery of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and the occupation of Transnistria. Awarded its own badge, the Council then became a direct competitor to Queen Helen's earlier work in welfare and relief, as well as a would-be replacement for the Romanian Red Cross. Its activities were promptly covered and advertised by the regime's official propaganda. Beyond simply directing the work of private welfare institutions, the council was suspected of wanting to subvert them and take over their investment. It openly confiscated the patrimony of older welfare organizations, such as Umanitatea, owner of the girls' colony in Slănic.
During the early months of 1941, the Iron Guard having been successfully repressed, Maria Antonescu and Veturia Goga coaxed support for the regime from the old establishment parties. Official newspapers publicized their visit to Topoloveni, a former fief of the National Peasants' Party, where they met with PNȚ leader Ion Mihalache. The event was organized by Admiral Dan Zaharia, who was simultaneously a PNȚ cadre and a friend of her husband's. Although she refrained from overt political statements, Maria Antonescu gave praise to Mihalache as a community and civil society leader. The pro-Allied PNȚ leader, Iuliu Maniu, saw in this an attempt by Antonescu to co-opt Mihalache as a minister. His immediate response was to dissuade Mihalache from "compromising himself" with such affiliations. For her part, Maria Antonescu alternated such displays of traditionalism with the public endorsement for fascist causes. In July 1941, she was an official guest at the Anti-Masonry Exhibit in Bucharest.
Antisemitic plunder and spoils of war
With the continuation of war on the Eastern Front, the Social Works Patronage Council took it upon itself to look after the needs of first-line soldiers and their families, as well as to protect a special category of vulnerable individuals: the IOVR. By December 1941, it had raised and spent some 25 million lei for the needs of men under arms and 138 million for the wounded; 9.7 million for families of active duty soldiers, and 17 million for invalids, widows or orphans.Romania's participation in the war came with the generalization of antisemitic measures and the massive deportations of the Jews to occupied Transnistria, a process initiated by her husband, and marked by events in which she herself was implicated. In October 1941, Wilhelm Filderman, head of the Jewish Communities' Federation, sent her and her husband letters of protest, stressing that the deportations were tantamount to death—messages which went unanswered. In November, after the ghetto in Chișinău was sacked and its population deported to Transnistria, the authorities set aside confiscated property for the Patronage Council, for the Red Cross, for Romanian hospitals and the Romanian Army.
Such arbitrary confiscations inaugurated a chain of supply for the Patronage Council. In August 1942, the Jewish entrepreneurs Max Auschnitt and Franz von Neumann donated 50 million Swiss francs to the same charity, a precautionary measure which may have played a part in the decision to indefinitely postpone transports from Romania to Nazi extermination camps. This event was notably recounted in a testimony by Ioan Mocsony-Stârcea, a member of King Michael's entourage. The same month, Jewish Affairs Commissioner Radu Lecca, whose office implied regular extortion of the Jewish community, collected 1.2 billion lei from the ghettos through the government-controlled Central Jewish Office, of which 400 million were redirected toward Maria Antonescu's charities. The total sum passed by the Central Jewish Office toward the patronage Council exceeded 780 million lei.
This type of abuse also touched other communities. Thus, among the special provisions ordered by Governor Gheorghe Alexianu and affecting Ukrainian peasants in Transnistria, one set produce quotas for Maria Antonescu's project, as hospital meals for wounded soldiers. Having herself reserved a special Blue Cross tax from cinema revenues nationally, Maria Antonescu also looked into financing a fleet of traveling cinemas. It was furnished with spoils of war from Odessa Film Studio.
Lecca himself later stated: "The need for extra-budgetary money was continuously rising", arguing that, in addition to pressures from the part of Mihai Antonescu and German Ambassador Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, "Mrs. Antonescu asked for money for her patronage". Occasionally, however, Maria Antonescu intervened with her husband to alleviate some antisemitic measures. She is thus believed to have persuaded the Conducător not to create a special ghetto in Iași, in exchange for which local Jews provided the Patronage Council with 5 million lei. Reputedly, she and Veturia Goga also mediated between the Conducător and Petru Groza, left-wing activist and leader of the clandestine Ploughmen's Front, whose stance against the regime later made him the Antonescu regime's political prisoner.
It was also as a result of her intercession that Romania's Chief Rabbi, Alexandru Șafran, obtained the reversal of an order to nationalize and desecrate Bucharest's Sevastopol Jewish Cemetery. However, Șafran also left an account of her unwillingness to provide water and milk for children and infants confined in Cernăuți en route to Transnistria. Maria Antonescu is believed to have eventually heeded other calls, and to have pressured Ion Antonescu into allowing Jewish deportees from Dorohoi to return home. She is also credited with having collected medicine, food, clothing and window panes to be sent into Transnistria, and to have accepted Patronage Council donations in exchange for allowing other Jews to escape.