Codreanu and 13 Aides Slain in Attempted Jail Break; Cabinet Holds Emergency Session

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, imprisoned leader of the out-lawed terrorist Iron Guard, and 13 of his chief lieutenants were killed by guards today while trying to escape during their transfer from one prison to another. Among those killed were the assassins of Premier Ion Duca, slain in 1933, and Michael Stelescu, a dissident Iron Guardist assassinated in 1936.

The attempted break climaxed a wave of terrorism that has been sweeping the country, directed at Jews and anti-Fascists. The Cabinet met shortly after noon in emergency session to study the grave situation. In the past few days the following acts of violence have occurred: A synagogue and several Jewish factories were dynamited and wrecked in the Czernowitz area; three persons attending a Jewish performance were killed and 11 others wounded when two hand grenades exploded in a theater at Temesvar, Transylvania; Dr. Florian Stefanescu-Goanga, anti-Fascist rector of Club University and a former Cabinet member who had invoked strenuous measures to suppress anti-Jewish disorders, was shot and critically wounded by two Iron Guardist students; a policeman who rushed to help him was shot and killed.

The attempted delivery came a few hours after the arrest of Nicolas Fagadanu, former Iron Guardist, who was found in possession of a satchel containing two hand grenades, a Quantity of powerful explosives and fuses. Fagadanu assertedly gave police important information on the Iron Guard terrorist movement.

An official announcement said the 38-year-old pro-Fascist leader and his followers were mortally wounded when they tried to escape while being transferred by automobile from Ramnicu-Sarat prison to Jilava fortress near here. The dramatic event, ending a stormy career which Codreanu himself had believed only momentarily interrupted when he was sentenced to 10 years in prison last May for conspiring against Rumania with a foreign power, shook the nation.

Significantly, it occurred only two days after King Carol’s return to this capital from a talk at Berchtesgaden with Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Germany’s Nazi party has never made any secret of its sympathies with the Iron Guard, whose leader considered himself the Rumanian prototype of the Reichsfuehrer.

Wide renascence of Iron Guard activities, only temporarily halted by recurrent Government suppression, was evidenced by a new wave of anti-Semitic violence in the provinces of Transylvania and Bukovina and by death threats received as recently as yesterday by numerous military and government leaders.

The decision to transfer Codreanu and his fellow prisoners to Jilava fortress was understood to be linked with these manifestations. Government authorities planned to grill the pro-Fascist chief on whether he was directing the terrorist campaign from his prison cell. The shift was further designed to thwart an asserted plot to deliver him from Ramnicu-Sarat penitentiary.

The official version of his death said that he and his 13 followers were being transported to Jilava in open automobiles when unidentified men fired on the caravan while it was speeding along the wooded Bucharest-Ployesti highway at 5 o’clock this morning. The assailants were routed, police said, but Codreanu and the 13 other prisoners, taking advantage of a thick fog and the confusion, leaped from the cars and made a dash for the woods. Authorities declared the gendarmes first shouted a warning to the fugitives to return and then opened fire, killing all 14.

Indicative of official fear regarding the effect the event might have on Iron Guard zealots, still numbered by the thousands among Rumania’s students and peasants, the bodies were buried before noon at the Jilava military garrison after an inquest by army and civil authorities on the scene of the killings.

Codreanu was sentenced to ten years at hard labor last May 26 After having been convicted by a military court of high treason. He had also been condemned to five years’ imprisonment for conspiring against Rumania with a foreign power and eight years for organizing armed groups with seditious intent, but these terms were to have been served concurrently. When released, the Iron Guard leader was to have been deprived of civil rights for six years.

The youthful terrorist chief had been termed Europe’s “most virulent anti-Semite.” He organized the Iron Guard in 1927 and in the ensuing decade was arrested and tried four times on charges of inciting to insurrection and murder of policemen, but each time was acquitted. His organization was first outlawed in December, 1933, the action being followed a few days later by the assassination of Premier Duca. About 1,500 of Codreanu’s followers were seized and three of them were sentenced to life imprisonment as Duca’s slayers. Codreanu himself, however, was acquitted of charges that he was an accomplice. His last arrest followed police discovery of a plan to march on Bucharest on May 1.