Pictured: The 1940 celebration of the Kingdom of Romania’s entry into the Axis. At the crowd’s front are Wilhelm Fabricius (Fascist diplomat), Horia Sima (the Iron Guard’s leader), General Ion Antonescu (yimach shmo), and King Michael of Romania.

At first, the Kingdom of Romania’s turn to monarchofascism may look puzzling. Unlike the German Reich and Austro‐Hungary, which lost substantial portions of land, and the Kingdom of Italy, which technically won but received little in return (vittoria mutilata), the Kingdom of Romania gained a great deal of land for winning World War I. What happened? Quoting Grant T. Harward’s Romania’s Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust, chapter 1:

While Romania had nearly doubled in size after the First World War, for some Romanians it was not enough. Ultra‐nationalists advocated expanding Greater Romania’s borders. The most common refrain was “To the Tisa!” because ultra‐nationalists argued Romania’s “natural” border was on the Tisa River deeper in Hungary, not the border drawn by the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

A less common cry was “Across the Dniester!” by ultra‐nationalists who wanted to bring Soviet Moldavians, whom they dubbed transnistrieni, into the national fold. Moldavians in the USSR were the largest group of ethnic Romanians remaining outside Greater Romania. Indeed, in the early 1920s, Romania staked a claim to territory across the Dniester, including the important port of Odessa.³² The Bolsheviks’ victory in the Russian Civil War, and the moderating influence of the League of Nations, prompted Romania to mute these slogans.

Conversely, the USSR and Hungary never recognized Romania’s annexations as legitimate. Romanians saw both Hungarians and Russians as hereditary enemies, but Hungary wanted only Transylvania, while the USSR wanted not only Bessarabia for itself but also the total dismemberment of Greater Romania, as Moscow supported national self‐determination.³³ The USSR also threatened that supporting pillar of Romanian nationalism, the Romanian Orthodox Church.

In addition to this, the Kingdom of Romania was a hotbed of anticommunism. As well as directly waging war against the RSFSR, Romanian anticommunists also crushed a peasant rebellion in northern Bessarabia during January 1919, and petty bourgeois Romanians with military backgrounds became common. Chapter 2:

Middle‐class reserve officers left the army to pursue professions, and large landowners took positions in government or on company boards, leaving behind a “class of modest men,” as an article in România militară (Military Romania), the General Staff’s journal, reported in May 1924.¹⁶ The threat of conscription still induced many middle‐class youths to become reserve officers.

The soil for monarchofascism was fertile indeed. As lurkers may know, Fascist Italy and the Kingdom of Romania signed a ‘Pact of Friendship and Cordial Collaboration’, and they became good trading partners. All of this context in mind makes this monarchy’s Axis membership all the more unsurprising. Chapter 3:

General Antonescu believed [that the Third Reich] would soon defeat Britain and thus become the sole arbiter over Europe. The conducător asked the führer to send a [Fascist] military mission soon after implementing the Second Vienna Award. He trusted that the presence of [the Wehrmacht] would deter further Soviet demands. He also wanted [Fascist] advisers to train the Romanian Army for a future conflict.

(So much for the fabled “Nazi–Soviet alliance”.)

Teodor Halic was in Arad when the [Reich’s] 13th Motorized Infantry Division arrived after entering Romania on 12 October. Halic associated these Germans with local ethnic Germans—who[m] he believed were honest, clean, educated, and pragmatic—and his initial impression was “very good.”¹³² A British journalist attributed Romanians’ lack of animosity toward the Germans to apathy, as the former were “past feeling anything or caring about anything” following recent events.¹³³

Actually, Romanians were comforted by the presence of each [Axis] tank, gun, truck, and man. Another British observer in Bucharest noted that “Rumanians were certainly not too depressed about the arrival of the German armored might,” and Romanian army intelligence smugly reported that Soviet plans “were thwarted” and Soviet commanders “were no longer talking about crossing into Moldavia.”¹³⁴

On 10 November, after arriving in Bucharest, [the Wehrmacht] had a chance to earn Romanian goodwill by helping in rescue efforts after an earthquake struck the country. Of course, [the Third Reich’s] rôle in the loss of northern Transylvania prompted some averted gazes or thrown bottles, but few Romanians were ardent anti‐Nazis.¹³⁵ As a peasant in Transylvania explained, “We chose Germany because we hate and fear Bolshevism and want to continue to have our own plots of land to till.”¹³⁶ Consequently, on 23 November, [Bucharest] signed the Tripartite Pact.

Thus, 48% of the non‐Germanic forces invading the Soviet Union were Romanian, and the Kingdom of Romania proved loyal to the Reich:

The Romanian Army deeply implicated itself in Axis war crimes in Romanian territory and Romanian‐occupied Soviet territory (known as Transnistria). Therefore, even when it became clear the [Wehrmacht] was losing, Romanian soldiers continued fighting alongside German soldiers out of fear of what retribution the Red Army might inflict on them and their families. Propaganda stoked these fears, which were rooted in ideological hatred of Jews and communism.

As always, there is plenty more to say, but I don’t want to overwhelm you. I leave you now with a quote from Stephen G. Gross’s excellent Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945, page 301:

In grain exports too, 1940 proved to be a good year for Romanian deliveries to the Third Reich; a boon at a moment when food supplies within Germany were beginning to tighten. As with oil, [Fascist] leaders used a mixture of incentives and planning to extract what they needed. That fall [Reich] agricultural experts drafted a ten‐year plan for Romania that set crop production targets that would serve [Axis] needs.

To help realize these targets, they agreed to have German firms export a significant amount of agricultural equipment to Romania — the number of tractors in the country increasing from 3,296 in 1940 to 8,250 in 1943. And a variety of joint German–Romanian corporations — SOJA, Solagra, Sudostropa, and Semina — helped coordinate cultivation. As a result, Romanian wartime grain exports to [the Third Reich] peaked in 1940 at 800,000 tons, and German trade with Romania between January and November 1940 even surpassed its trade with the Soviet Union.²⁵

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

For another book on this topic, see Dennis Deletant’s Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania 1940–1944.