Ion Mihalache - World War II and After

World War II and After

During World War II, he opposed the National Legionary State created by the Iron Guard, and complained to the Guard's rival partner, Conducător Ion Antonescu, that Horia Sima and his grouping had assumed control of his cooperative organization in Muscel County. Antonescu refused to mediate; Sima replied to Mihalache that the measure had been partly taken as compensation for the Legionaries' "suffering at the hands of Mihalache ", but offered to allow some of the Muscel cooperative's former administrators structure to regain their positions. Attacks and threats towards Mihalache in the Guard's press became widespread, and Mille Lefter singled him out as a former persecutor of the movement in a conference aired on Romanian Radio.

Following Antonescu's defeat of the Guard during the Legionary Rebellion of 1941, Mihalache forwarded a congratulatory message to the former. In time, he also objected to Antonescu's Nazi Germany-allied dictatorship of (although pressured by the latter to join a War Cabinet). He did, however, support the recovery of Bessarabia from the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa, and offered his services as a volunteer in the Romanian Army (June 1941) — he served for only a few days, and was discharged on orders from Antonescu himself.

He eventually joined a semi-clandestine opposition, and then supported the PNŢ's entry into the underground liberation movement, as well as King Michael's pro-Allied August 1944 coup.

The appearance of the Iron Curtain and Joseph Stalin's plans for Romania singled out the PNŢ, the main supporter of cooperation with the Western Allies, as an adversary of growing Soviet influence over the country (see Soviet occupation of Romania). Consequently, he and Maniu were branded "fascists" by the Romanian Communist Party press, and Mihalache was especially attacked for his supposedly good relations with Antonescu; the 1941 episode was used against him during the rigged 1946 elections, when Communists prevented him from running for office based on a law forbidding candidatures of former Eastern Front volunteers. It is possible, however, that just before the elections, the PNŢ had attempted to resist and profit from a foreseen insurrection against the Petru Groza government, by forming Cercul Militar Professional (the "Professional Military Circle") — grouping generals and other officers, it was led by Mihalache himself.

The Communist regime which was installed in late 1947 outlawed the PNŢ altogether, alleging that Mihalache and Maniu had been trying to flee the country from the airfield in Tămădău, and had planned to give Romania a capitalist government-in-exile. Their capture (see Tămădău Affair) and trial by a kangaroo court led to sentences of life imprisonment with requirements of penal labour, effectively death sentences; Mihalache, after having passed through Sighet prison, died in custody at Râmnicu Sărat.