Disintegration

Correspondents in Switzerland, who get most of their news from tipsters and the radio, last week cabled reports that Premier Ion Antonescu had arrested 4,000 members of the fascist Iron Guard and executed 80 for a plot to overthrow his Government. The facts were:

> In Rumania there was a wave of demonstrations and sabotage. Rumanians were protesting openly against their appalling losses in Russia (which London sources estimated between 600,000 and 900,000).

> Rumanians' bitterness at these losses was heightened by the fact that Bulgaria, one of the two nations to which Rumania was forced by the Axis to cede territory, was not fighting Russia at all, and that the other, Hungary, has sent fewer than 150,000 troops to fight Russia.

> Antonescu's arrests and executions were not to crush an Iron Guard Putsch. Rumania's uprising was spontaneous and was spreading through all classes. It was led by agitators belonging particularly to the Communist and Peasant parties. Perhaps many disillusioned Iron Guardists joined.

> One of those arrested was democratic, anti-Axis Juliu Maniu, leader of an increasingly powerful peasants' movement in Rumania. Probably most of the others jailed by Antonescu were not Iron Guardists, but antiFascists.

Rumania's claim to be a state capable of keeping law & order, even totalitarian law & order, clearly hung by fewer threads than ever. Only five Rumanian divisions and a German force of less than a division remained to prevent anarchy. That was not all Antonescu had to worry about last week. German Ambassador Baron Manfred von Killinger was reported to have told him: "A situation might arise when Rumania will have to face the menace of a Russian invasion."

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