Editing Carol II of Romania (section)

==Road to abdication==
The acceptance of the Second Vienna Award completely discredited Carol with his people, and in early September 1940 enormous demonstrations broke out all over Romania demanding that Carol abdicate. On 1 September 1940, Sima who had resigned from the government gave a speech calling upon Carol to abdicate, and the Iron Guard began to organize demonstrations all over Romania to press for king's abdication.{{sfn|Haynes|1999|p=710}} On 2 September 1940, Valer Pop, a courtier and an important member of the ''camarilla'' first advised Carol to appoint General Ion Antonescu as prime minister as the solution to the crisis.{{sfn|Haynes|1999|p=711}} Pop's reasons for advising Carol to have Antonescu as prime minister was partly because Antonescu – who was known to be friendly with the Iron Guard and had been imprisoned under Carol – was believed to have enough of an oppositional background to appease the public and partly because Pop knew that Antonescu for all his Legionary sympathies was a member of the elite and would never turn against it. As the increasingly large crowds started to assemble outside of the royal palace demanding the king's abdication, Carol considered Pop's advice, but was reluctant to have Antonescu as prime minister.{{sfn|Haynes|1999|p=712}} As more and more people started to join the protests, Pop feared that Romania was on the verge of a revolution that might not only sweep away the king's regime, but also the elite who had dominated the country since the 19th century. To apply further pressure on Carol, Pop met with Fabricius on the night of 4 September 1940 to ask him to tell Carol that the ''Reich'' wanted Antonescu as prime minister, which led to Fabricius promptly calling Carol to tell him to appoint the general as the prime minister.{{sfn|Haynes|1999|p=712}} Additionally, the very ambitious General Antonescu who long coveted the premiership now suddenly started to downplay his long-standing antipathy to Carol, and he suggested that he was prepared to forgive past slights and disputes.

On 5 September 1940, Antonescu became prime minister, and Carol transferred most of his dictatorial powers to him.<ref name="r1">{{cite web|lang=ro |author=Radu, Delia |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/romanian/news/story/2008/08/080801_serial_antonescu_episod1.shtml |title=Serialul 'Ion Antonescu și asumarea istoriei' |website=BBC Romanian Edition |date=1 August 2008}}</ref><ref>''Final Report'', p. 320</ref> As prime minister, Antonescu was a man acceptable to both the Iron Guard and the traditional elite.{{sfn|Haynes|1999|p=713}} Carol planned to stay as king after appointing Antonescu and initially Antonescu did not support the popular demand for Carol's abdication.{{sfn|Haynes|1999|p=713}} Antonescu had become prime minister, but he had a weak political base. As an Army officer, Antonescu was a loner, an arrogant and aloft man with an extremely bad temper who as a consequence was very unpopular with his fellow officers. Antonescu's relations with the politicians were no better, and as such Antonescu was initially unwilling to move against the king until he had some political allies. Carol ordered Antonescu and General [[Dumitru Coroamă]] who commanded the troops in Bucharest to shoot down demonstrators in front of the royal palace, an order that both refused to obey.{{sfn|Haynes|1999|p=718}} It was only on 6 September 1940, when Antonescu learned of a plot to murder him headed by another member of the ''camarilla'' General Paul Teodorescu that Antonescu joined the chorus demanding Carol's abdication.{{sfn|Haynes|1999|p=714}} With public opinion solidly against him and with the Army refusing to obey his orders, Carol was forced to abdicate.

Concerning the claim of the American historian Larry Watts that it was Carol that allied Romania to Nazi Germany and that Marshal Ion Antonescu had unwillingly inherited an alliance with Germany in 1940, the Canadian historian Dov Lungu wrote:

<blockquote>[Watts's] claim that Romania's ''de facto'' alliance with Germany under Antonescu was the work of Carol, who began laying its foundations for it as early as 1938, is wide off the mark. Carol's concessions to Germany were made half–heartedly and delayed as much as possible in the hope that the western powers would regain the initiative on the political-diplomatic front and, from September 1939, the military one. He finally did change his country's external economic and political orientation, but only in the spring of 1940, when German hegemony on the Continent seemed imminent. In addition, there is more than a subtle distinction between Carol's request in the last weeks of his rule for the dispatch of a German military mission to train the ill–prepared Romanian Army and Antonescu's decision almost immediately after assuming power to fight on Germany's side until the very end. In fact, in his desire to regain the province of Bessarabia, Antonescu was keener than the Germans' in Romania's participation in an anti-Soviet war.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Lungu |first=Dov |title=Review of Romanian Cassandra: Ion Antonescu and the Struggle for Reform, 1916–1941 |pages=378–380 |journal=The International History Review |volume=16 |issue=2 |date=May 1994}}</ref></blockquote>