Romania

Romania is the problem child of the Europa Bund. Like Spain, Italy and Portugal, Romania is a nominal monarchy that is effectively a one-party state, but while the three Mediterannean nations are often described as "post Hitlerist", Romania puts a question mark next to the "post" part of it. Many have described Romania as simply a Hitlerist, or neo-Hitlerist, state.

Romania's governing party is the Iron Guard, an organisation founded in the 1930s by Corneliu Codreanu, an admirer of Hitler. While the Iron Guard had some particular features of its own - it was more christian-oriented than Hitlerism - it shared many startling similarities with Hitler's party, and there were close ties between the two. Codreanu was executed by the Romanian royal government in 1938, but his successors managed to bludgeon their way to power. For a few years the Iron Guard existed in an uneasy condominium with more traditional monarchist-reactionary leaders, personified by General Antonescu, the last non-Iron Guard Prime Minister. This equilibrium broke in 1941, when the Iron Guard launched a coup that coincided with a vicious pogrom. Antonescu called on Germany for assistance. Chancellor Goerdler, no great lover of Jews, was nonetheless disgusted by the stories coming out of the German embassy in Romania, but there was little appetite for military intervention. Antonescu fled the country, taking up exile in France, and the Iron Guard rose to power. In the 1940s, when the Bund was founded, Romania joined under Iron Guard *conducator* and Prime Minister Horia Sima.

Sima is still in power in Romania - King Michael reigns in theory, but has no real power and is simply kept by the Iron Guard to be reeled out for diplomatic occasions. Romania is a small country, and not a particularly rich one, but it regards itself as the ideological vanguard of the Bund, and has a bad habit of periodically cracking down on its dwindling, terrified Jewish population, and sheltering extremists from other Bund countries. Speer considered intervening in Romania during a particularly disgusting mass pogrom in the 60s, but had to confine himself to giving asylum to a small number of exceptional Jewish-Romanian scientists, academics and cultural figures - and even this led a blistering rebuke from Sima. Unfortunately, Sima has realised that he has Berlin over a barrel. Romania is not rich but it is in a strategically vital area - the Black Sea - and it is Europe's largest oil producer, a commodity that Germany has an almost endless appetite for. As long as Sima writes off the occasional pogroms as "regrettable excesses" and does not interfere with the operations of German companies inside Romania, Romaniacan continue to enjoy all the benefits of being a member of the Bund, while governing itself internally as it sees fit. As if to demonstrate his independence, Sima makes occasional feints towards an independent foreign policy - he has warm relations with the USA and Japan, and has visited both countries, where he was given a very generous welcome.

Romania does not allow any foreign military units to be permanently based on its soil, although it does participate in Bund military exercises. Although Romania buys a lot of German military equipment, its military is not highly rated by the German General Staff - most of the professional military officers were purged in the 1950s for being insufficiently dedicated to the Iron Guard, and their replacements are chiefly political thugs and street fighters in uniform.