Further assassinations of Fascist leaders are expected to arise from the murder of Michael Stelescu–shot dead in a Bucharest hospital by an “execution squad” of the anti-Semitic Iron Guard on July 16.
Stelescu, a former leader of the Iron Guard, who resigned after an internal fight to form another Fascist group, had declared in a number of signed articles that the Guard had sentenced him to death and warned that if he were murdered, Codreanu, his chief enemy, would be killed.
Among the members of Stelescu’s Crusaders of Rumania, a non-anti-Semitic Fascist group, are well-known terrorists, bound by oath to take revenge for acts of terrorism against them. This situation is expected to lead to a vendetta among the opposing Fascist leaders.
The decision to kill Stelescu was taken at a students’ conference at Targu Muresch, it was ascertained. He was one of several political personalities sentenced to death. Special “execution squads” were named for each person.
One of the founders of the Iron Guard and elected by it to Parliament in 1929, Stelescu broke with Codreanu in 1933, accusing him of being linked to the camarilla surrounding the King.
He attacked Codreanu in his new weekly, Rumanian Crusader, and exposed that protagonist of Rumanian racialism as a Pole by publishing his birth certificate. Codreanu’s mother, he claimed, was of German origin.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
