Carol II of Romania

Early life and boyhood in the 1890s

Carol was born in October 1893 in Peleș Castle as the son of the German-born Crown Prince Ferdinand and the British-born Crown Princess Marie. He was the first male member of the royal family to be born in Romania. However, he spent most of his childhood under the thumb of his domineering great-uncle, King Carol I, who blocked the younger Carol's parents from any role in raising him. Romania in the early 20th century had a famously relaxed "Latin" sexual morality, and Marié had a long series of affairs with various Romanian men with whom she could obtain more emotional and sexual satisfaction than with Ferdinand, who fiercely resented being cuckolded. The stern Carol I felt that Marie was unqualified to raise Prince Carol because of her affairs and her young age, as she was only seventeen when Carol was born, while Marie regarded the King as a cold, overbearing tyrant who would crush the life out of her son.

The childless Carol I, who had always wanted a son, treated Prince Carol as his surrogate son and thoroughly spoiled him, indulging his every whim. Ferdinand was a rather shy and weak man who was easily overshadowed by the charismatic Marie, who became the most loved member of the Romanian royal family. Growing up, Carol felt ashamed of his father, whom both his grand-uncle and mother pushed around. Carol as a child was caught in an emotional tug-of-war between Carol I and Marie, who had very different ideas about how to raise him. The Romanian historian Marie Bucur described the battle between Carol I and Princess Marie as one between traditional 19th-century Prussian conservatism as personified by Carol I versus the 20th-century liberal, modernist, and sexually deviant values of the "New Woman" as personified by Princess Marie. Aspects of both Marie's and Carol I's personalities were present in Carol II. Largely because of the battle between the King and Marie, Carol ended up being both spoiled and deprived of love.

1900 - 1921: Early marriages and love affairs

During his teenage years in the first decade of the 1900s, Carol (Romanian for "Charles") acquired the "playboy" image that was to become his defining persona for the rest of his life. Carol expressed some concern at the direction that Prince Carol was taking, as the young Prince's only serious interest was stamp collecting and he spent an inordinate amount of time drinking, partying, and chasing after women. Young Carol fathered at least two illegitimate children by the teenage schoolgirl Maria Martini by the time that he was 19 (in 1912). Carol rapidly became a favorite of gossip columnists around the world owing to the frequent photographs that appeared in the newspapers showing him at various parties with him holding a drink in one hand and a woman in the other.

To teach the prince the value of Prussian virtues, the King had the prince commissioned as an officer in 1913. His time with the 1st Prussian Guards regiment did not achieve the desired results, and Carol remained the "playboy prince". Romania in the early 20th century was an intensely Francophile nation, indeed perhaps the most Francophile nation in the entire world as the Romanian elite obsessively went about embracing all things French as the model for perfection in everything. To a certain extent, Carol was influenced by the prevailing Francophilia, but at the same time, he inherited from Carol I, in the words of the American historian Margaret Sankey, a "profound love of German militarism" and the idea that all democratic governments were weak governments.

Sometime before the First World War, the Romanian and Russian royal families held talks about the marriage of Carol, at that time the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Romania, to the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia, the eldest daughter of the Russian emperor at the time, Tsar Nicholas II: Sergey Sazonov, the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire between 1910 and 1916, wanted Olga to marry Carol to ensure Romania's position as an ally of Russia in the eventuality of a war, as Romania was an ally of Germany at the time. Both royal families, including the Tsar and his wife Alexandra, gave their support for the idea, and there were high expectations that the marriage would take place. However, neither Carol or Olga demonstrated an interest for the other: Carol wasn't fond of Olga's appearance, and Olga expressed her wish to remain in Russia (should the marriage have taken place, Olga would have become the Crown Princess, and later the Queen of Romania). This was best seen during the visit of the Romanian royal family to Russia in March 1914, and during a visit of Nicholas and his family to Romania a few months later.

Controversies surrounding Magda Lupescu (1920s)

In the early 1920s, the nascent marriage soon collapsed in the wake of Carol's affair with Elena (Magda) Lupescu (1895–1977), the Roman Catholic daughter of Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity. Magda Lupescu had formerly been the wife of Army officer Ion Tâmpeanu. The National Liberal Party, which dominated Romania's politics, made much of Carol's relationship with Lupescu to argue that he was unqualified to be king. One of the leading figures of the National Liberals was Prince Barbu Știrbey – who was also Queen Marie's lover, and Carol had a strong dislike of Știrbey, who had humiliated his father via his indiscreetly disguised relationship with Marie, and hence of the National Liberals. Knowing that Carol was ill-disposed towards them, the National Liberals waged a sustained campaign to keep him from the throne. The campaign waged by the National Liberals had less to do with disgust with Carol's relationship with Madame Lupescu than with an effort to remove a potential "loose cannon", as Carol made it clear when he succeeded to the throne that he would not be content to let the National Liberals dominate politics in the way that the previous Hohenzollern kings had.

Even without betraying his vows to Helen, Carol could not marry Lupescu and become king, as the constitution barred the crown prince from marrying a Romanian citizen. As a result of the scandal, Carol renounced his right to the throne on 28 December 1925, in favor of his son by Crown Princess Helen, Michael I (Mihai), who became king in July 1927 upon the death of his paternal grandfather, King Ferdinand I. Helen divorced Carol in 1928. After renouncing his right to the throne, Carol moved to Paris, where he lived openly in a common-law relationship with Madame Lupescu. The National Liberal Party was largely a vehicle for the powerful Brătianu family to exercise power and, after the National Liberal prime minister Ion I. C. Brătianu died in 1927, the Brătianu's were unable to agree upon a successor, causing the fortunes of the National Liberals to go into decline. In the 1928 elections, the National Peasant Party under Iuliu Maniu won a resounding victory, taking 78% of the vote. As Prince Nicolae, the chief of the Regency Council that governed for King Michael, was known to be friendly with the National Liberals, the new prime minister was determined to dispose of the regency council by bringing back Carol.

Carol II, the King of Romania from 1930 to 1940 (usurpation of the throne)

Returning to the country on 7 June 1930, in a coup d'état engineered by National Peasant Prime Minister Iuliu Maniu, Carol deposed his son Michael (who was still under a regency due to his minority) and was recognized by the Parliament as king of Romania the following day. For the next decade, he sought to influence the course of Romanian political life, first through manipulation of the rival Peasant and Liberal parties and antisemitic factions, and subsequently (January 1938) through a ministry of his own choosing. Carol also sought to build up his own personality cult against the growing influence of the Iron Guard, for instance, by setting up a paramilitary youth organization known as Straja Țării in 1935. The American historian Stanley G. Payne described Carol as "the most cynical, corrupt and power-hungry monarch who ever disgraced a throne anywhere in twentieth-century Europe". A colorful character, Carol was in the words of the British historian Richard Cavendish: "Dashing, willful and reckless, a lover of women, champagne and speed, Carol drove racing cars and piloted planes, and on state occasions appeared in operetta uniforms with enough ribbons, chains, and orders to sink a small destroyer."

The Romanian historian Maria Bucur wrote about Carol:

Of course, he loved luxury; being born to privilege he expected nothing less than the grand lifestyle he saw in the other courts of Europe. Yet his style was not outlandish or grotesque like Nicolae Ceaușescu's unique brand of kitsch. He liked things large but relatively simple – his royal palace testifies to that trait. Carol's true passions were Lupescu, hunting, and cars and he spared no expense on them.

Carol liked to present an impressive and populist persona to the public, wearing garish military uniforms adorned with medals, and being the benefactor of every philanthropic endeavor in the country. He loved parades and grandiose festivals and watched them closely, but he was not taken in by these events as more than shows of his power. He did not take them as a show of sincere popularity as Ceaușescu did during his later years.

Carol had sworn in his coronation an oath to uphold the constitution of 1923, a promise he had no intention of keeping, and right from the start of his reign, the king meddled in politics to increase his own power. Carol was an opportunist with no real principles or values other than the belief that he was the right man to rule Romania and that what his kingdom needed was a modernizing dictatorship. Carol ruled via an informal body known as the camarilla, comprising courtiers together with senior diplomats, army officers, politicians, and industrialists, who were all in some way dependent upon royal favor to advance their careers. The most important member of the camarilla was Carol's mistress, Madame Lupescu, whose political advice Carol greatly valued. Maniu had brought Carol to the throne out of the fear that the regency for Michael I was dominated by National Liberals, who would ensure that their party would always win the elections. Madame Lupescu was deeply unpopular with the Romanian people, and Maniu had demanded that Carol return to his wife, Princess Helen of Greece, as part of the price for being given the throne. When Carol broke his own word and continued to live with Madame Lupescu, Maniu resigned in protest in October 1930 and was to emerge as one of Carol's leading enemies. At the same time, Carol's return had prompted a break in the National Liberals with Gheorghe I. Brătianu breaking away to found a new party, the National Liberal Party-Brătianu that was willing to work with the new king. Despite his dislike of the National Liberals, Maniu's enmity towards Carol left the king with no choice, but to enlist as his allies the break-away factions of the National Liberals against the National Peasants, who demanded that Carol banish Lupescu and return to his wife.

Personality cult

To compensate for his rather negative and well-deserved "playboy king" image, Carol created a lavish personality cult around himself that grew more extreme as his reign went on, which portrayed the king as a Christ-like being "chosen" by God to create a "new Romania". In the 1934 book The Three Kings by Cezar Petrescu, which was intended for a less educated audience, Carol was constantly described as being almost god-like, the "father of the villagers and workers of the land" and the "king of culture" who was the greatest of all the Hohenzollern kings and whose return from exile from France via airplane in June 1930 was a "descent from the heavens". Petrescu depicted Carol's return as the beginning of his God-appointed task of becoming "the maker of eternal Romania", the start of a glorious golden age as Petrescu asserted that rule by monarchs was what God wanted for Romanians.

Carol had little understanding of or interest in economics, but his most influential economic advisor was Mihail Manoilescu who favored a statist model of economic development with the state intervening in the economy to encourage growth. Carol was very active in the cultural realm, being a generous patron of the arts and actively supporting the work of the Royal Foundation, an organization with a broad mandate to promote and study Romanian culture in all fields. In particular, Carol supported the work of the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti of the Social Service of the Royal Foundation, who in the early 1930s started to bring social scientists from various disciplines like sociology, anthropology, ethnography, geography, musicology, medicine, and biology together in a "science of the nation". Gusti took teams of professors from various disciplines to the countryside to study an entire community from all vantage points every summer, who then produce a lengthy report about the community.

Political influence

For most of the interwar period, Romania was in the French sphere of influence, and in June 1926, a defensive alliance was signed with France. The alliance with France, together with an alliance with Poland signed in 1921, and the "Little Entente," which united Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, were the cornerstones of Romanian foreign policy. Starting in 1919, the French sought to create the Cordon sanitaire that would keep both Germany and the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe. Carol did not seek to replace the foreign policy he had inherited in 1930 at first, as he regarded the continuation of the cordon sanitaire as the best guarantee of Romania's independence and territorial integrity, and as such, his foreign policy was essentially pro-French. At the time that Romania signed the alliance with France, the Rhineland region of Germany was demilitarized, and the thinking in Bucharest had always been that if Germany should commit any act of aggression anywhere in Eastern Europe, the French would begin an offensive into the Reich. Starting in 1930, when the French began to build the Maginot Line along their border with Germany, some doubts started to be expressed in Bucharest about whether the French might actually come to Romania's aid in the event of a German aggression. In 1933, Carol had Nicolae Titulescu, an outspoken champion of collective security under the banner of the League of Nations, appointed foreign minister with instructions to use principles of collective security as the building blocks for creating some sort of security structure intended to keep both Germany and the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe. Carol and Titulescu personally disliked one another, but Carol wanted Titulescu as a foreign minister as he believed he was the best man for strengthening ties with France and for bringing Great Britain into the affairs of Eastern Europe under the guise of the collective security commitments contained the League Covenant.

The process of Gleichschaltung (coordination) in National Socialist Germany did not extend only to the Reich but was rather thought of by the National Socialist leadership as a worldwide process in which the NSDAP would take control over all of the ethnic German communities around the entire world. The Foreign Policy Department of the NSDAP, headed by Alfred Rosenberg, had attempted to take over the Volk Deutsch (ethnic German) community in Romania starting in 1934, a policy that greatly offended Carol, who regarded this as outrageous German interference in Romania's internal affairs. As Romania had half a million Volk Deutsch citizens in the 1930s, the Nazi campaign to take over the German community in Romania was a real concern for Carol, who feared that the German minority might become a fifth column. In addition, Rosenberg's agents had established contracts with the Romanian extreme right, most notably with the National Christian Party headed by Octavian Goga and less substantial links with the Iron Guard headed by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, which further annoyed Carol. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote about Carol's foreign policy views: "He admired and feared Germany, but feared and disliked the Soviet Union.". The fact that the first leader to visit Nazi Germany (albeit not in an official capacity) was the Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, who during his visit to Berlin in October 1933 signed an economic treaty that placed Hungary within the German economic sphere of influence – was a source of much alarm to Carol. For the entire interwar period, Budapest refused to recognize the frontiers imposed by the Treaty of Trianon and laid claim to Transylvania region of Romania. Carol, like the rest of the Romanian elite, was worried by the prospect of an alliance of the revisionist states that rejected the legitimacy of the international order created by the Allies in 1918–20, indicating that Germany would support Hungary's claims to Transylvania. Hungary had territorial disputes with Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, all of which happened to be allies of France. Accordingly, Franco–Hungarian relations were extremely bad during the interwar period, and so – it seemed natural that Hungary would ally itself with France's archenemy, Germany.

The 1937 election and the Goga government

In September 1937, Carol paid an extended visit to Paris, during which he indicated to the French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos that Romanian democracy would soon end. In a campaign speech for the general elections due that December, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, "Captain" of the Archangel Michael Legion, called for an end to the alliance with France and stated: "I am for a Romanian foreign policy with Rome and Berlin. I am with the states of the National Revolution against Bolshevism. Within forty-eight hours of a Legionary movement victory, Romania will have an alliance with Rome and Berlin". Without realizing it, Codreanu had sealed his doom with that speech. Carol had always insisted that control of foreign policy was his own exclusive royal prerogative, which no one else was allowed to interfere with. Despite the constitution, which stated that the foreign minister was responsible to the prime minister, in practice, the foreign ministers had always reported to the king. By challenging Carol's right to control foreign policy, Codreanu had crossed the Rubicon in the king's eyes and from that time on, Carol was committed to the destruction of the arrogant upstart Codreanu and his movement who had dared to challenge the king's prerogative. In the December 1937 elections, the National Liberal government of Prime Minister Gheorghe Tătărescu won the largest number of seats, but less than the 40% required to form a majority government in parliament. After assassinating Prime Minister Duca in 1933, the Iron Guard had been banned from participating in elections, and to get around the ban Codreanu founded the All for Fatherland! party as a front for the Legion. The All for Fatherland! the party won 16% of the vote in the 1937 election, marking the high point of the Iron Guard's electoral success.

On 28 December 1937, Carol swore in the radical anti-Semitic poet Octavian Goga of the National Christian Party, which only won 9% of the vote, as prime minister. Carol's reasons for appointing Goga Prime Minister were partly because he hoped that anti-Semitic policies Goga would bring in would win him support from the All for Fatherland! voters and thus weaken the Legion and partly because he hoped that Goga would prove so incompetent as prime minister as to provoke such a crisis that would allow him to seize power for himself. Carol wrote in his diary that the markedly stupid Goga could not possibly last long as prime minister and that Goga's failure would allow him to "be free to take stronger measures which will free me and the country from the tyranny of party interests". Carol agreed to Goga's request to dissolve parliament for new elections on 18, 1938. As leader of the fourth party in parliament, Goga's government was certain to be defeated on a vote of no-confidence when parliament convened as the National Liberals, National Peasants and All for the Fatherland Party had all come out against Goga, albeit for very different reasons. The election got off to a violent start with a brawl in Bucharest between Goga's Lăncieri paramilitary group and the Iron Guard that left two dead, 52 hospitalized and 450 people arrested. The 1938 election was one of the most violent elections in Romanian history, as the Iron Guard and Lăncieri battled one another for control of the streets while seeking to establish their anti-Semitic creditations by assaulting Jews. As Parliament never met during the Goga government, Goga had to pass laws via emergency decree, which all had to be countersigned by the king.

The Royal Dictatorship

Coming to realize belatedly that he was being used by Carol, Goga had a meeting with Codreanu on 8 February 1938, at the house of Ion Gigurtu to arrange for a deal under which the Iron Guard would withdraw its candidates from the election to ensure that the radical anti-Semitic right would have a majority. Carol quickly learned of the Goga-Codreanu pact and used it as the justification for the self-coup he had been planning since late 1937. On 10 February 1938, Carol suspended the Constitution and seized emergency powers. Carol proclaimed martial law and suspended all civil liberties under the grounds that the violent election campaign was at the risk of plunging the nation into civil war.

Having outlived his usefulness, Goga was sacked as prime minister and Carol appointed Patriarch Elie Cristea, the head of the Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church, as his successor. Carol knew he would command wide respect in a country where the majority of the population was Orthodox. On 11, 1938, Carol drafted a new constitution. Although it was superficially similar to its 1923 predecessor, it was actually a severely authoritarian and corporatist document. The new constitution effectively codified the emergency powers Carol had seized in February, turning his government into a de facto legal dictatorship. It concentrated virtually all governing power in his hands, almost to the point of absolute monarchy. The new constitution was approved in a plebiscite held under far-from-secret conditions; voters were required to appear before an election bureau and verbally state whether they approved the constitution; silence was deemed as a "yes" vote. Under these conditions, an implausible 99.87 percent were reported as having approved the new charter, against fewer than 5,500 votes against it.

At the time of his coup in February 1938, Carol informed the German minister Wilhelm Fabricius of his wish for closer ties between his country and Germany. Thierry told Carol in a meeting after the coup that his new government was "well received" in Paris and that the French would not allow the end of democracy to affect their relations with Romania. The new government of Patriarch Cristea did not introduce new anti-Semitic laws but did not repeal the laws passed by Goga either, though Cristea was less extreme about enforcing these laws. When asked by a Jewish friend if his citizenship would be restored now that Goga was gone, Interior Minister Armand Călinescu, who detested the Iron Guard and antisemitism, replied that the Cristea government had no interest in restoring citizenship back to the Jews.

World War II (Carol's struggle over Romanian neutrality)

When World War II began with German-Soviet Invasion of Poland in September 1939, Carol proclaimed neutrality. In doing so, Carol technically violated the letter of the treaty of alliance with Poland signed in 1921 and the spirit of treaty of alliance signed with France in 1926. Carol justified his policy under the grounds that, with Germany and the Soviet Union allied in the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact of August 1939 and France holding its forces behind the Maginot line, unwilling to start an offensive into Germany, that neutrality was his only hope of preserving his kingdom's independence. For its part, the Polish government was more interested in weapon deliveries from its Western allies through Romanian ports, but this became insignificant following Poland's defeat on the battlefield. As usual with Carol, he sought to play a careful balancing act between the Allies and the Axis, on one hand signing a new economic treaty with Germany while on the other hand allowing for a considerable period of time for the Polish troops to cross into Romania while declining to intern them as international law required. Instead, the Poles were allowed to travel to Constanța to board ships to take them to Marseille to continue the fight against Germany from France. The Romanian Bridgehead remained a key escape route for thousands of Poles in the desperate days of September 1939. It was only after receiving a number of furious complaints from Fabricius about the passage of Polish soldiers across Romania that Carol finally started to intern the fleeing Poles.

Fall 1939: Călinescu assassinated and Romania maintains neutrality

On 21 September 1939, Prime Minister Călinescu was assassinated by the Iron Guard in a plot organized out of Berlin, thus silencing the strongest pro-Allied voice amongst Carol's camarilla. The next day, the nine assassins of Călinescu were publicly shot without the benefit of a trial and on the week of 22–28 September 1939, 242 members of the Iron Guard were the victims of extrajudicial executions. Because of its oil, Romania was highly important by both sides, and during the Phoney War of 1939–40 there occurred what Weinberg called a "silent struggle over Romania's oil," with the German government doing everything within its power to have as much Romanian oil as possible while the British and French governments equally doing everything possible to deny it. The British launched an unsuccessful campaign to sabotage Romanian oil fields and the transportation network that took Romanian oil to Germany. In January 1940, Carol broadcast a speech to proclaim that it was his brilliant handling of foreign policy that kept Romania neutral and safe from danger. He also announced that he was going to be building a gigantic defense line around the kingdom, and as such, taxes would have to rise to pay for it. Romanians called the proposed line the Imaginet Line, as the line was considered to be a purely imaginary version of the Maginot line and many of Carol's subjects suspected that the money raised by higher taxes would go to the king's Swiss bank accounts.

May 1940: Romania sides with the Axis

Carol had hedged his bets about whether to choose between the Allies and the Axis. It was only in late May 1940, when France was clearly losing the war that Carol swung decisively over to the Axis side. During the later period of the Phoney War, after waging a campaign of bloody repression against the Iron Guard, which reached its peak after Călinescu's assassination, Carol began a policy of reaching out to the surviving Iron Guard leaders. Carol felt that a "tamed" Iron Guard could be used as a source of popular support. In April 1940, Carol had reached an agreement with Vasile Noveanu, the leader of the underground Iron Guard in Romania, but it was not until early May 1940 that Horia Sima, the leader of the Iron Guards in exile in Germany, could be persuaded to support the government. On 26 May 1940, Sima returned to Romania from Germany to begin talks with General Mihail Moruzov of the secret service about the Iron Guard joining the government. On 28 May 1940, after learning of the surrender of Belgium, Carol told the Crown Council that Germany was going to win the war, and Romania accordingly needed to realign its foreign and domestic policies with the victors. On 13 June 1940, an agreement was reached whereas the Iron Guard would be allowed to join the National Renaissance Front in exchange for more and harsher anti-Semitic laws. The National Renaissance Front was reorganized as the Party of the Nation, which was described as "a single and totalitarian party under the supreme leadership of His Majesty, King Carol II." On 21 June 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany. Romania's elite had been so obsessively Francophile for so long that France's defeat had the effect of discrediting that elite in the eyes of public opinion and led to an upswing of popular support for the pro-German Iron Guard.

Summer 1940: Soviets commandeer Bessarabia

In the midst of the turn towards the Iron Guard and Germany came a bombshell from abroad. On 26 June 1940, the Soviet Union submitted an ultimatum demanding that Romania hand over the Bessarabia region (which had been Russian until 1918) and the northern part of Bukovina (which had never been Russian) to the Soviet Union and threatened war within the next two days if the ultimatum was rejected. Carol had at one moment considered following the example of Finland in 1939 when faced with a similar Soviet ultimatum, but the outcome of the Winter War was scarcely an inspiring example. Carol at first considered rejecting the ultimatum, but upon being informed that the Romanian Army would be no match for the Red Army, agreed to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union. Carol appealed to Berlin for support against the Soviet ultimatum, only to be told to comply with Stalin's demands. The loss of the regions without any fighting to the Soviet Union was felt to be a national humiliation by the Romanian people and was a huge blow to Carol's prestige. Carol's personality cult had by 1940 reached such extreme heights that the withdrawal without any resistance from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina revealed that Carol was a mere man after all, and so badly dented his prestige more than would have been the case if Carol had maintained a more modest image.

On 28 June 1940, Sima entered the cabinet as Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Education. On 1 July 1940, Carol, in a radio speech, renounced both the 1926 alliance with France and the 1939 Anglo-French "guarantee" of Romania, saying that henceforth Romania would seek its place in the German-dominated "New Order" in Europe. The next day, Carol invited a German military mission to train the Romanian Army. On 4 July 1940, Carol was sworn into a new government headed by Ion Gigurtu with Sima as Minister of Arts and Culture. Gigurtu had been a leading figure in the anti-Semitic National Christian Party in the 1930s, was a millionaire businessman with many connections to Germany, and was a well-known Germanophile. For all these reasons, Carol hoped that having Gigurtu as prime minister would win him Hitler's goodwill and thus prevent any further loss of territory. Along the same lines, Carol signed a new economic treaty with Germany on 8 August 1940, that finally gave the Germans the economic dominance of Romania and its oil that they had been seeking all through the 1930s.

Summer 1940: Bulgarians and Hungarians seek territory from Romania

Immediately afterwards, inspired by the Soviet example of gaining Romanian territory, the Bulgarians demanded the return of Dobruja, lost in the Second Balkan War of 1913, while the Hungarians demanded the return of Transylvania, lost to Romania after World War I. Romania and Bulgaria opened talks that led to the Treaty of Craiova, which saw the southern Dobruja ceded to Bulgaria. In particular, Carol proved unwilling to cede Transylvania, and had it not been for the diplomatic intervention of Germany and Italy, Romania and Hungary would have gone to war with each other in the summer of 1940. In the meantime, Carol imprisoned General Ion Antonescu after the latter had criticized the king, charging that it was the corruption of the royal government that was responsible for the military backwardness of Romania and hence the loss of Bessarabia. Both Fabricius and Hermann Neubacher, the man in charge of the Four Year Plan's operations in the Balkans, intervened with Carol, saying that Antonescu's "accidental death" or being "shot while trying to escape" would "make a very bad impression on the German headquarters," as Antonescu was known to be a leading advocate of an alliance with Germany. On 11 July 1940, Carol had Antonescu freed, but kept under house arrest at the Bistrița monastery.

Hitler offers Romania a guarantee against further territorial losses

Hitler was alarmed about the possibility of a Hungarian-Romanian war, which he feared might result in the destruction of Romania's oil fields and/or might lead to the Soviets intervening to seize all of Romania. At this time, Hitler was already seriously considering invading the Soviet Union in 1941, and if he were to take such a step, he would need Romanian oil to power his military. At the Second Vienna Award of 30 August 1940, the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano ruled that northern Transylvania was to go to Hungary while southern Transylvania would stay with Romania, a compromise that left both Budapest and Bucharest deeply unhappy with the Vienna award. For economic reasons, Romania was far more important to Hitler than was Hungary, but Romania had been allied to France since 1926 and had flirted with joining the British-inspired "peace front" in 1939, so Hitler who personally disliked and mistrusted Carol – felt that Romania deserved to be punished for waiting so long to align with the Axis. After the fall of Paris in June 1940, the Germans had captured the archives of the Quai d'Orsay and were thus well-informed about the double-line that Carol had pursued until the spring of 1940. Hitler was annoyed with Carol's efforts to forge closer ties with France at the same time proclaiming his friendship towards Germany. At the same time, Hitler offered Carol a "guarantee" of the rest of Romania against further territorial losses, which Carol promptly accepted.

September 1940: The road to abdication

The acceptance of the Second Vienna Award completely discredited Carol with his people, and in early September 1940 enormous demonstrations broke out all over Romania demanding that Carol abdicate. On 1 September 1940, Sima (who had resigned from the government) gave a speech calling upon Carol to abdicate, and the Iron Guard began to organize demonstrations all over Romania to press for his abdication.

On 2 September 1940, Valer Pop, a courtier and an important member of the camarilla first advised Carol to appoint General Ion Antonescu as prime minister as the solution to the crisis. Pop's reasons for advising Carol to have Antonescu as prime minister was partly because Antonescu – who was known to be friendly with the Iron Guard and had been imprisoned under Carol – was believed to have enough of an oppositional background to appease the public and partly because Pop knew that Antonescu for all his Legionary sympathies was a member of the elite and would never turn against it. As the increasingly large crowds started to assemble outside of the royal palace demanding the king's abdication, Carol considered Pop's advice, but was reluctant to have Antonescu as prime minister. As more and more people started to join the protests, Pop feared that Romania was on the verge of a revolution that might not only sweep away the king's regime, but also the elite who had dominated the country since the 19th century. To apply further pressure on Carol, Pop met with Fabricius on the night of 4 September 1940 to ask him to tell Carol that the Reich wanted Antonescu as prime minister, which led to Fabricius promptly calling Carol to tell him to appoint the general as the prime minister. Additionally, the very ambitious General Antonescu who long coveted the premiership now suddenly started to downplay his long-standing antipathy to Carol, and he suggested that he was prepared to forgive past slights and disputes.

On 5 September 1940, Antonescu became prime minister, and Carol transferred most of his dictatorial powers to him. As prime minister, Antonescu was a man acceptable to both the Iron Guard and the traditional elite. Carol planned to stay as king after appointing Antonescu and initially Antonescu did not support the popular demand for Carol's abdication. Antonescu had become prime minister, but he had a weak political base. As an Army officer, Antonescu was a loner, an arrogant and aloft man with an extremely bad temper who as a consequence was very unpopular with his fellow officers. Antonescu's relations with the politicians were no better, and as such Antonescu was initially unwilling to move against the king until he had some political allies. Carol ordered Antonescu and General Dumitru Coroamă who commanded the troops in Bucharest to shoot down demonstrators in front of the royal palace, an order that both refused to obey. It was only on 6 September 1940, when Antonescu learned of a plot to murder him headed by another member of the camarilla General Paul Teodorescu that Antonescu joined the chorus demanding Carol's abdication. With public opinion solidly against him and with the Army refusing to obey his orders, Carol was forced to abdicate.

1940 departure from Romania and Exile

Forced under Soviet and subsequently Hungarian, Bulgarian, and German pressure to surrender parts of his kingdom to foreign rule, he was finally outmaneuvered by the pro-German administration of Marshal Ion Antonescu, and abdicated in favour of Michael in September 1940. He escaped from Spain into Portugal (While in Portugal, he stayed in Estoril, at Casa do Mar e Sol.), and then announced on March 29, 1941 that they would make their home in Cuernavaca, Mexico (50 miles outside of Mexico City).

1941: Mexico-based "Free Romania" Campaign

With Cuernavaca as his home base, Carol tried to set up a Free Romania movement based in Mexico to overthrow General Antonescu. Carol had hopes that his Free Romania movement would be recognized as a government-in-exile and would ultimately lead to him being restored. The closest Carol ever got to having his Free Romania movement recognized came in 1942 when President Manuel Ávila Camacho allowed Carol to stand beside him while reviewing his troops. Carol would have liked to operate out of the United States, but the American government refused him permission to enter. However, Carol was in contact with two Eastern Orthodox priests living in Chicago, Father Glicherie Moraru and Father Alexandru Opreanu, who organized an unsuccessful campaign in the Romanian-American community to pressure the American government to recognize the "Free Romania" committee as the legitimate government of Romania.

Appeals to Romanians in the USA

To advance his cause, Carol published a magazine in America called The Free Romanian and published several books in both Romanian and English. A major problem for Carol's efforts to mobilize the Romanian American community was the Immigration Control Act of 1924, which drastically limited immigration from Eastern Europe into the United States. As such, the majority of Romanian Americans in the 1940s were either persons who immigrated prior to 1924 or their children; in either case, Carol did not mean much to them. Furthermore, many Romanian Americans were Jews who had neither forgiven nor forgotten that it was Carol who had appointed the anti-Semitic fanatic Goga as prime minister in 1937. To improve his image amongst Jews, Carol persuaded Leon Fischer, the former vice-president of the United Romanian Jews of America, to write articles on his behalf in American Jewish magazines that portrayed the former king as the friend and protector of the Jews and an enemy of anti-Semitism. The reaction to Fischer's articles was overwhelmingly negative with a flood of letters to the editor who complained bitterly that it was Carol who signed in all of Goga's laws that took away Romanian citizenship from Jews and made it illegal for Romanian Jews to own land and shares in public companies and work as lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc. Furthermore, the writers of the letters noted that Carol allowed these laws to remain on the statute books after dismissing Goga and sarcastically commented that if Carol was the best friend of the Jews in Romania, then Romanian Jews certainly did not need enemies.

Seeking recognition of Free Romania committee as a "government-in-exile" (Tilia vs Carol)

Carol's offers to have his Free Romania committee recognized as a government-in-exile was hindered by his unpopularity in his own homeland with many British and American diplomats arguing that supporting the former king was likely to increase public support for General Antonescu. Beyond that, there was a rival Free Romania committee headed by Viorel Tilea based in London that wanted to have nothing to do with Carol's committee in Mexico City. Virgil Tilea had as a university student in the 1930s supported the Iron Guard. Unusually for a Romanian in this period, Tilea was an Anglophile rather a Francophile, and had attended Cambridge University as an exchange student. Tilea's time in Britain changed his political views as he later stated that seeing many different types of people living in harmony in Britain made him realize that it was not necessary for one ethnic group to dominate all the others as Codreanu had proclaimed, leading him to break with Iron Guard. When General Antonescu was sworn in as prime minister as the new "National Legionary State", Tilea resigned as Romanian minister in London in protest at the appointment. Later in 1940, Tilea formed his Free Romania committee in London that attracted support from a number of Romanians who fled the Antonescu regime into exile.

British response to rival Free Committees

Tilea's Free Committee was not officially recognized by the British government, but was known to have the support of Britain and to be very close to the Polish government-in-exile, which was a major reason why the British spurned the Carol's rival Free Romania committee based in Mexico City, which tended to attract support only from those Romanians who been closely associated with the king's camarilla. Tilea's committee had an office in Istanbul which regularly sent couriers to a safe house in Bucharest, where messages were exchanged with one of Carol's former prime ministers Constantin Argetoianu who in turn acted as an emissary for those opposed to Antonescu. Argetoianu reported that King Michael was opposed to the Antonescu regime and wanted to stage a coup d'état to depose Antonescu, waiting only for the Allies to invade the Balkans. General Antonescu was the dictator, but Romanian army officers took their oath of loyalty to the king, so there was reason to believe in London that the Romanian Army would side with the king against the prime minister if the two came into conflict. From the British viewpoint, associating themselves with Carol's campaign to once again depose his own son would only complicate their dealings with King Michael.

Marriage in Brazil in 1947; exiled from Romania for the rest of his life

Carol and Magda Lupescu were married in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 3 June 1947, Magda calling herself Princess Elena von Hohenzollern. In 1947 after the Communist take-over of Romania, a Romanian National Committee was set up to oppose the Communist regime. Carol's efforts to join the Romanian National Committee were rebuffed as all the factions were opposed to him, and Romanian monarchists on the committee made it clear that they regarded King Michael, not his father as the legitimate king of Romania. Carol remained in exile for the rest of his life. He was never to see his son, King Michael, after his 1940 departure from Romania. Michael could see no point in meeting his father who had humiliated his mother so many times via his open affairs and did not attend his funeral.

1953 Death in Portugal

Carol died in Estoril, on the Portuguese Riviera in 1953. His coffin was placed inside the Pantheon of the House of Braganza in Lisbon.

Remains returned to Romania in the 2000s

His remains were finally returned to the Curtea de Argeș monastery in Romania in 2003, the traditional burial ground of Romanian royalty, at the request and expense of the government of Romania (led by Adrian Năstase). They initially lay outside the cathedral, the burial place of Romanian kings and queens, as Elena was not of royal blood. Neither of his sons participated in either ceremony. King Michael I was represented by his daughter, Crown Princess Margareta, her husband, Prince Radu and two grandchildren Nicolae de Roumanie-Medforth-Mills and Karina de Roumanie Medforth-Mills.

In January 2018, it was announced that the remains of King Carol II would be moved to the new Archdiocesan and Royal Cathedral, along with those of Princess Helen. In addition, the remains of Prince Mircea would also be moved to the new cathedral. His remains were at the time interred at the Bran Castle's Chapel. King Carol II of Romania was reburied at the New Episcopal and Royal Cathedral in Curtea de Argeș on 8 March 2019.

Carol Lambrino was forbidden (since 1940) from entering Romanian territory, but a Romanian court declared him a legitimate son in 2003. Carol visited Bucharest in November 2005, shortly before his death.

Archives

Young Prince Carol's letters to his grandfather, Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, are preserved in the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen family archive, which is in the State Archive of Sigmaringen (Staatsarchiv Sigmaringen) in the town of Sigmaringen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. There are also letters from young Carol (together with letters from his mother, Crown Princess Marie) to his great-grandmother, Josephine of Baden, preserved in the State Archive of Sigmaringen (Staatsarchiv Sigmaringen).

Carol II of Romania's letters to Zizi Lambrino as well as documents about their marriage are preserved in the "Jeanne Marie Valentine Lambrino Papers" collection in the Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford, California, US).

In popular culture

Carol appears as a character [as Prince Carol] in the final episode of the third season of Mr. Selfridge, where he is played in a cameo appearance by British actor Anton Blake.

Carol is also considered to be the inspiration for the character Prince Charles of Carpathia in the 1953 play The Sleeping Prince and the 1957 related film The Prince and the Showgirl. "Ex-King Carol Weds Lupescu" was front-page news next to an article announcing a downed flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico.

He makes an appearance in the 2019 film Marie, Queen of Romania as an antagonist along with his mistress.