Michael I

Mihai I

1921–2017 ↓ Forced to abdicate; exiled; died in Switzerland in 2017

The last King of Romania, who arrested Antonescu on 23 August 1944 to bring the country over to the Allies and abdicated at gunpoint in 1947

On the morning of 30 December 1947, in a palace surrounded by troops, Groza and Gheorghiu-Dej put the abdication before him. Michael testified in exile that he was told refusal would mean bloodshed and the shooting of a thousand students held in custody. That afternoon parliament proclaimed the People's Republic.

Born to Crown Prince Carol of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and Helen of Greece, he became king at six in 1927 under a regency because his father had renounced the succession, and was demoted to crown prince when Carol II returned to take the throne in 1930. When Antonescu deposed Carol II in September 1940 he was crowned again at eighteen, but power lay with Antonescu's dictatorship and the Axis alliance. On 23 August 1944, with the Red Army across the border, he arrested Antonescu in a palace coup, concluded an armistice with the Allies and turned Romania against Germany, becoming one of the very few foreigners awarded the Soviet Order of Victory. Yet in March 1945 he had to appoint the Groza government under Vyshinsky's pressure, and his "royal strike" of refusing to sign decrees from August that year could not stop the rigged election of 1946 or the Maniu trial of 1947. On 30 December 1947 he signed the abdication forced on him by Groza and Gheorghiu-Dej, and the People's Republic was proclaimed the same day. Stripped of citizenship in 1948, he lived in Britain and Switzerland as a test pilot and a broker; a million people gathered in Bucharest on his first return at Easter 1992. His citizenship was restored in 1997, and he died in Switzerland in 2017, buried with a state funeral in the royal necropolis at Curtea de Argeș.