Organizer of a mass partisan war against occupation
In Domnista in 1942, he led a small mountain guerrilla band and proclaimed the emergence of ELAS.
Born Athanasios Klaras, Aris Velouchiotis was a Greek communist activist who became the key organizer linking the National Liberation Front, EAM, with its military arm, ELAS, during the occupation. In 1942 he formed a small guerrilla force in the mountains of Roumeli and built its early base by combining strict discipline with mass politics. Joint actions such as the destruction of the Gorgopotamos viaduct demonstrated the potential of armed resistance, while EAM-ELAS’s growing dominance also sharpened conflict with rival resistance groups and Britain. After the Varkiza Agreement he rejected demobilization, broke with the party leadership, and died isolated in 1945; the communist movement later restored his standing.
Career timeline
1920sJoined left-wing and anti-militarist activity and the Communist Party of Greece
early 1930sWorked on the editorial staff of the communist newspaper Rizospastis
1936–1941Imprisoned under the Metaxas dictatorship and forced to sign a renunciation
1942.01Sent by the KKE to prepare guerrilla warfare in Roumeli
1942.06Announced ELAS and began mountain guerrilla operations at Domnista
1942.11Participated in the Gorgopotamos viaduct sabotage
1944.10Commanded ELAS operations in central Greece and the Peloponnese after liberation
1945Continued armed struggle after Varkiza and died in the mountains
Palestinian activist linking anti-colonialism and anti-fascism
In Spain in 1936 he addressed Moroccan soldiers serving Franco, confronting the tension between anti-fascist solidarity and colonial rule in North Africa.
Palestinian communist activist, writer, and translator. Raised in Jerusalem and educated in Moscow, he went to Spain in 1936 to support the Republic. His propaganda work among Moroccan soldiers serving Franco linked anti-fascism in Spain with Arab liberation. He later worked in journalism and literary translation. His memoirs provide an Arab participant’s perspective on the Spanish Civil War.
Career timeline
1924Worked in the British Mandate Department of Posts and Telegraphs in Jerusalem, where Jewish workers introduced him to communism, and he joined the Palestine Communist Party.
1925–1928Sent by the Palestine Communist Party leadership to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) in Moscow, where he married a Ukrainian communist.
1930Elected a member of the Palestine Communist Party Central Committee at its Seventh Congress in Jerusalem and helped edit its clandestine newspaper, ilal-amam.
1931–1933Arrested by the British authorities and sentenced to two years, served in the Jerusalem, Jaffa and Acre prisons; kept under police surveillance for six months after his release.
1933–1936Sent by the Comintern to Paris to edit the Arabic monthly al-Sharq al-Arabi, which the French authorities shut down in early summer 1936.
1935–1936Studied the Soviet experience of the national question in Tashkent, then was sent by the Comintern to Spain in August 1936 to conduct propaganda among Moroccan troops fighting for Franco.
1937–1939Moved to Syria and Lebanon, active in communist circles in Damascus and Beirut and writing for the party press; expelled from the Syro-Lebanese Communist Party for criticising the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939.
1939–1948Returned to Jerusalem to work for the British-run Near East Broadcasting Service and turned to literature, publishing Pushkin (1945) and Chekov (1947) in Cairo.
1948–1976Moved with the radio station to Limassol, Cyprus, after the 1948 Nakba, living there until 1950, then continued in Beirut as a journalist, translator and literary critic.
1976–1979Moved to Athens, where one of his daughters lived; he died there in 1979 and was buried in the city.
A Resistance organizer who moved from Vichy sympathies to opposition
“I believed in Marshal Pétain, in the double game, and even in a humane and social National Revolution.”
Henri Frenay was a French army officer who turned military discipline and patriotism into an organizing force for clandestine resistance after the defeat of 1940. He initially hoped that Pétain and the National Revolution might save France, but changed course as Vichy’s collaboration and repression became clear. With Berty Albrecht, he founded the Mouvement de Libération Nationale and expanded an underground press into Combat, one of the principal resistance movements, before overseeing the return of prisoners, deportees and refugees after the war.
Career timeline
1924–1926Cadet, École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr
1935–1938École supérieure de guerre; German studies
1939–1940Staff officer, 43rd Fortress Army Corps on the Maginot Line
1940Escaped captivity and began organizing the MLN
1941–1943Founder and leader of Combat; organized its underground press
1943–1945Commissioner and minister for prisoners, deportees and refugees
1948–1954President, Union of European Federalists
1976Published The Night Will End: Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Spanish anarchist who served in the Republican government
In November 1936 she accepted a cabinet post. Her dispute with Emma Goldman over government participation exposed strategic differences among anarchists supporting the same revolution.
Spanish anarchist and writer associated with the CNT. She served as minister of Health and Public Assistance from November 1936 to May 1937. Her participation in the Republican government raised a difficult question for an anti-statist movement: could taking state office defend the revolution without compromising its principles? Her exchanges with Emma Goldman reveal disagreements over the relationship between anti-fascist war and social revolution.
Career timeline
1921Publishes her first short novel, Horas trágicas, beginning her writing career at fifteen
1927Joins the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI)
1931Joins the anarcho-syndicalist union CNT and gains prominence as a speaker
1936After the July coup, serves on the FAI peninsular committee and the CNT national committee
1936Appointed minister of Health and Social Assistance in the Republican government in November
1937Leaves office in May when the anarchist ministers resign after the Barcelona May Days
1939Flees into exile in France; based in Toulouse, works to rebuild the CNT in exile and edits anarchist papers
Communist who was the first editor of the underground Szabad Nép and died in custody after his arrest in 1942
Born in Budapest, he studied civil engineering in Karlsruhe and Dresden, where he led the socialist students’ association and wrote warnings against the Nazis. Back in Hungary in 1931, he was drawn by his brother Richárd into the underground Communist movement and in 1935 joined the leadership of the Communist Youth League. From 1938 he built Communist cells inside the Social Democratic Party and the trade unions, and after June 1941 he went underground as a leader of the “independence movement”. Editor-in-chief of Szabad Nép from February 1942, he was arrested on 1 June and died two weeks later in unclear circumstances.
Career timeline
1920sStudied in Karlsruhe and Dresden; led the socialist students’ association
1932Joined the Hungarian Communist Party
1935Leadership of the Communist Youth League
1938–1941Built Communist cells in the Social Democratic Party and unions
1942Editor of Szabad Nép; died in custody after arrest
Zionist lawyer who negotiated with Eichmann to send 1,684 Jews to Switzerland on what became known as the Kasztner train
Born into the Jewish community of Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca), he became a Zionist at fifteen and worked as a journalist for the Jewish paper Új Kelet and as a lawyer. Moving to Budapest in 1941, he became a leader of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, which smuggled Jewish refugees into Hungary. In the summer of 1944 he negotiated with Eichmann to let 1,684 Jews leave for Switzerland instead of Auschwitz on what became known as the Kasztner train, in exchange for money, gold and diamonds. Diverted to Bergen-Belsen, the passengers reached Switzerland in two groups in August and December 1944. After the war he moved to Israel and became a government spokesman, but a 1955 ruling in a trial over charges that he had collaborated with the Nazis said he had “sold his soul to the devil”; he was shot in March 1957 and died of his wounds. In 1958 the Supreme Court overturned two of the charges.
Career timeline
1921Joined a Zionist youth group
1930sJournalist for Új Kelet; lawyer
1941Moved to Budapest
1944Negotiations with Eichmann; the Kasztner train
1952Spokesman, Israeli Ministry of Trade and Industry
SS officer who ran the deportation of Europe’s Jews to the death camps and in 1944 oversaw that of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz
Born to a Calvinist family in Solingen, Germany, he grew up in Austria, where the family moved in 1914, and joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932. In 1938 he was posted to Vienna to organise Jewish emigration from Austria. Head of RSHA Sub-Department IV B4 from December 1939, he attended the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and prepared its minutes, after which he and his staff were responsible for deporting Jews to the extermination camps. After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944 he oversaw the deportation of Hungary’s Jews; by the time the transports stopped in July, 437,000 of its 725,000 Jews had been deported. Captured by US forces after the war, he escaped from a detention camp and reached Argentina in 1950, but in 1960 Israel’s Mossad abducted him; tried in Jerusalem, he was hanged in 1962.
Career timeline
1932Joined the Austrian Nazi Party and the SS
1933–1938Jewish affairs, SS Security Service
1938–1939Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, Vienna
1939–1945Head of RSHA Sub-Department IV B4
1944Oversaw the deportation of Hungary’s Jews
1950–1960In hiding in Argentina
1960–1962Abducted by Mossad, tried in Jerusalem, executed
Of the militia commanders, one contemporary report noted: 'The only one who knows how to read a map is the one they call Modesto.'
Juan Modesto rose from organizing Communist militias to become one of the Republic’s principal commanders. Leading the Fifth Regiment and later the Fifth Army Corps, he embodied the wartime effort to turn fragmented militias into a regular army. As commander of the Army of the Ebro in 1938, he directed the Republic’s last major offensive, but a prolonged battle could not overcome its material and manpower disadvantage. After defeat, he lived in exile in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia and recorded his wartime experience.
Career timeline
1930Joined the Communist Party of Spain
1933–1936Organized the Antifascist Worker and Peasant Militias in Madrid
1936Organizer and early commander of the Fifth Regiment
1936–1937Commander of the 4th Division; promoted lieutenant colonel
1937–1938Commander of the Fifth Army Corps in Brunete, Belchite and Teruel
1938.04–11Commander of the Army of the Ebro during the Ebro Offensive
1939General and commander of the Central Army; went into exile in March
1944–1969Lived as an exile, serving in the Soviet Union and Bulgaria before settling in Prague
A British engineer officer drawn into Greek resistance politics
On 25 November 1942, Myers's party blew up a span of the Gorgopotamos railway viaduct with support from about 150 Greek partisans.
Edmund Myers was a Royal Engineers officer who led the Special Operations Executive's British military mission to occupied Greece during the Second World War. He planned and commanded the November 1942 operation that destroyed the Gorgopotamos railway viaduct, coordinating cooperation between the rival ELAS and EDES resistance groups. His military assignment became entangled with British intervention in Greece's postwar political order, and he later recorded the experience in his memoir Greek Entanglement.
Career timeline
1926Commissioned into the Royal Engineers
1942–1944Head of the SOE British Military Mission to occupied Greece
1942Commanded the Gorgopotamos viaduct operation
1943Took part in the destruction of the Asopos railway bridge
1944Commander Royal Engineers, 1st Airborne Division, at Arnhem
In August 1948, his wartime career ended at the border as he tried to reach Romania.
Arso Jovanović was a highly educated officer of the Royal Yugoslav Army who became chief of staff of the Partisan Supreme Headquarters and exercised major operational authority during the Second World War. He became the first Chief of the General Staff of the postwar Yugoslav Army, but sided with the Soviet position in the 1948 Tito–Stalin split and was politically isolated. He died while attempting to cross into Romania, although the official border account and later testimony have left the circumstances contested.
Career timeline
1925–1928Cadet, Royal Military Academy lower school, Belgrade
1932–1934Student, Royal Military Academy higher school
1939Published Tactics of the Infantry Battalion; instructor and commander at the Infantry School
1941Commander, Provisional Supreme Command of the Montenegrin uprising
1942–1945Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters of the Yugoslav Partisan forces
1945First Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army
1946–1948Studied at the Voroshilov Higher Military Academy in Moscow
1948Supported the Informbiro Resolution; killed while attempting to escape to Romania
Standing before Mussolini at Gran Sasso, Skorzeny became the face of a victory whose command credit belonged elsewhere.
Born in Vienna, Skorzeny became a Waffen-SS officer who directed sabotage and commando operations for Nazi Germany. In the 1943 Gran Sasso raid, he helped locate Benito Mussolini and led an SS detachment at the landing site, but the operation as a whole was planned and commanded by the airborne officers Harald Mors and Kurt Student. Nazi propaganda presented him as Mussolini's liberator, while he also took part in the overthrow of Hungary's government and the Ardennes deception operation. Acquitted at a postwar war-crimes trial, he later lived in Spain amid far-right networks.
Career timeline
1932Joined the Austrian Nazi organisation
1938Served with the SS during the Anschluss
1943Led the RSHA sabotage and commando section
1943Led an SS detachment in the Gran Sasso raid
1944Took part in Operation Panzerfaust in Hungary
1944Commanded Operation Greif in the Ardennes
1947Acquitted at the Dachau military trial
1953Military adviser to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser
Communist Resistance leader who directed the Paris uprising
On 21 August 1944, he ordered posters put up across Paris calling for barricades.
Henri Rol-Tanguy was a French communist metalworker and veteran of the International Brigades whose military experience shaped his work in the anti-Nazi Resistance. As commander of the Paris-area French Forces of the Interior in August 1944, he organized and directed the uprising before the Allied entry. His importance lies in combining labour-movement organization with armed resistance to drive the capital’s liberation from within. After the war he remained active in the army and the French Communist Party, publicly defending the Resistance’s independent role.
Career timeline
1925Metalworker at Talbot; joined the Young Communists
1936Secretary of the Paris-region metalworkers’ CGT
1937–1938Political commissar in the International Brigades’ XIV Brigade; fought at the Ebro
1941–1942Organizer of armed groups in Paris; part of the FTP’s founding leadership
1943Reorganized the Paris FTP and joined the regional FFI staff
1944Commander of the Paris-area FFI; directed the Paris uprising
1945–1962Lieutenant-colonel in the French Army; held postwar military assignments
1962–1987Member of the French Communist Party Central Committee
Ukrainian nationalist politician and leader of the OUN-B.
Bandera led Ukrainian nationalist underground activity in eastern Galicia, then part of Poland. A leader in the OUN, he was sentenced to death for organizing the 1934 assassination of Polish interior minister Bronisław Pieracki; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. After the OUN split in 1940, he led its radical OUN-B faction, which proclaimed a Ukrainian state in Lviv shortly after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and pledged cooperation with Nazi Germany. German authorities detained him and sent him to Sachsenhausen concentration camp; after the war he led the OUN-B émigré organization in West Germany.
Career timeline
1929Joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
1931Became head of propaganda for the OUN.
1933Became head of the OUN's home executive in Poland.
1934Was sentenced to death for organizing the assassination of the Polish interior minister; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
1940Led the OUN-B faction after the OUN split.
1941–1944Arrested by German authorities and imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
1945Became leader of the OUN's foreign organization.
1959Assassinated in Munich by KGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky.
Vichy police chief who negotiated with the occupier
On 2 July 1942, he agreed to place the French police at the occupier’s disposal for the arrest of Jews.
René Bousquet was a senior French civil servant who pursued Vichy police collaboration while presenting it as a defense of French administrative sovereignty. He negotiated with German security officials for room to operate a French police force, while supplying that force to the persecution and deportation of Jews. His decisions helped make the July 1942 Vélodrome d'Hiver roundup possible, after which he escaped the main force of the post-Liberation purge and returned to influential business and political circles.
Career timeline
1930Gained national recognition for rescue work during the floods and received the Légion d’honneur
1931Chief of staff to Pierre Cathala at the Interior Ministry
1933Sub-prefect
1939–1942Prefect of the Marne and regional prefect
1942–1943Secretary-general of the Vichy police
1950s–1993Businessman and political influence broker in finance and the press
Latvian former policeman whose Arajs Kommando, under the SS Security Service, murdered about half of Latvia’s Jews
Born in Baldone to a Latvian blacksmith and a mother from a wealthy Baltic German family, he served in the Latvian Army, studied law at the University of Latvia and was a policeman until 1938. When the Germans entered Riga in July 1941 he was introduced to Stahlecker and recruited a unit from his student fraternity and the Pērkonkrusts, which took part in burning Riga’s synagogues on 4 July. The Arajs Kommando murdered some 26,000 people in Latvia and then Belarus, and he was made an SS-Sturmbannführer in 1943. Interned in a British camp until 1949, he lived under a false name and worked at a printing company in Frankfurt. In 1979 the Hamburg State Court sentenced him to life imprisonment for leading the Jews of the Riga ghetto to their deaths on 8 December 1941; he died in prison in Kassel in 1988.
Swedish diplomat who sheltered Budapest Jews with protective passports and safe houses, then vanished in Soviet custody
Born near Stockholm, he studied architecture in the United States and from 1941 travelled often to Budapest for a trading company. Chosen in June 1944 to lead the rescue mission of the US War Refugee Board, he reached the Swedish legation in Budapest on 9 July issued “protective passports” identifying the bearers as Swedish subjects, and sheltered almost 10,000 people in 32 buildings he declared extraterritorial. Historians regard the claim that he saved 100,000 Jews as an exaggeration; Yad Vashem puts the number granted protective paperwork at about 4,500. Detained by SMERSH on suspicion of espionage during the siege on 17 January 1945, he disappeared; in 1957 the Soviet authorities said he had died of a heart attack in the Lubyanka in 1947, but the cause and date of his death have been disputed ever since. In 2016 the Swedish Tax Agency declared him dead.
Career timeline
1935Architecture degree, University of Michigan
1936–1944Central European Trading Company; joint owner
1944Joined the Swedish legation in Budapest; issued protective passports
A wartime commander who confronted the limits of long-range air supply
Before the 1944 Warsaw airlift, he warned that the mission offered little military prospect and would incur heavy losses, but it went ahead.
James Thom Durrant was a South African Air Force officer and pilot who commanded reconnaissance and bomber formations in Africa and the Mediterranean during the Second World War. In 1944 he led No. 205 Group RAF from Italy during the Warsaw Uprising airlift, exposing the tension between military feasibility and political obligation in a mission constrained by extreme distance, night flying and enemy defences. After the war he became Director-General of the South African Air Force, but resigned amid conflict with the National Party government’s de-Anglicisation policy and the defence minister.
Career timeline
1933–1934Completed the South African Air Force Permanent Force Cadet Course and qualified as a pilot
1940–1941Commanding officer, No. 40 Squadron SAAF, East Africa
1941–1942Commanding officer, No. 24 Squadron SAAF, Western Desert campaign
1942–1944Commanding officer, No. 3 Bomber Wing SAAF, North Africa, Sicily and Italy
1944–1945Commander, No. 205 Group RAF, directing the Warsaw airlift from bases in Italy
1945–1946Air officer commanding, No. 231 Heavy Bomber Group RAF, Far East
1946–1952Director-General of the South African Air Force
The Nazi Gestapo chief who made Lyon a center of terror
At his 1987 Lyon trial, he denied the Izieu roundup and said: “I fought the Resistance. It was war.”
Klaus Barbie was an SS and Sicherheitsdienst officer who commanded the Gestapo in occupied Lyon, organizing systematic persecution of the French Resistance and Jews. He arrested and tortured Jean Moulin at Caluire and was responsible for deporting 44 Jewish children and their teachers from Izieu to Auschwitz. After the war, U.S. intelligence used him in anti-communist operations and helped him escape to Bolivia, where he avoided justice for decades before his 1987 Lyon trial and life sentence for crimes against humanity. His case exposes both the continuity of Nazi criminal networks and the impunity produced by Cold War anti-communism.
Career timeline
1935Joined the SS and began service in the Sicherheitsdienst
1940–1941SD service in Amsterdam, targeting Jews and communists
1942Assigned to Dijon for security work in occupied France
1942–1944Head of the Lyon Gestapo, repressing the Resistance and deporting Jews
1947–1951Agent of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps
1951–1983Lived in Bolivia as Klaus Altmann
1987Lyon trial, convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life
A Partisan commander who helped turn insurgent formations into a regular army
On 20 October 1944, Yugoslav and Soviet forces under Dapčević's command entered Belgrade.
Peko Dapčević was a Montenegrin-Yugoslav communist commander shaped by service in the Spanish Civil War and the Yugoslav People's Liberation War. Rising from the Montenegrin uprising, he commanded divisions and corps before leading the First Army Group alongside Soviet forces in the liberation of Belgrade in 1944. As commander of the First Army in 1945, he directed the breakthrough of the Syrmian Front and the transition from wartime formations to a regular postwar army, later serving as Chief of the General Staff. His career shows both the military capacity of the revolutionary movement and the political tensions of turning it into a state institution.
Career timeline
1937–1939Volunteer and company commander, International Brigades of the Spanish Republican Army
The double agent who made fiction a strategic weapon
On 9 June 1944, he told German commanders that the Normandy landings were only a diversion.
Juan Pujol García was a Spanish double agent who penetrated German intelligence while remaining loyal to Britain during the Second World War. From Lisbon, he built a fictitious network in Britain from public sources and won the confidence of his German handlers. After joining British intelligence, he combined invented agents with carefully timed real information to shape German decisions. In Operation Fortitude, his reports reinforced the story that Normandy was a diversion and that the main assault would come at Pas-de-Calais.
Career timeline
1931Compulsory service in a Spanish cavalry and artillery unit
1936–1939Served on both the Republican and Nationalist sides in the Spanish Civil War
1941–1942Operated from Lisbon as a self-created Abwehr agent
1942Recruited as a British double agent under the codename Garbo
1943–1944Ran the fictitious network with Tomás Harris
1944Spread the Pas-de-Calais main-attack deception in Operation Fortitude
1944Appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire
Anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter on Mt. Paektu, posthumously revered as one of the 'Three Generals'
One day while the unit marched, five or six enemies rose from the reeds and aimed at the General. Comrade Kim Jong-suk shielded him with her own body and shot down an enemy with her revolver.
Kim Jong-suk was a women's guerrilla commander in the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army who fought in the anti-Japanese armed struggle under Kim Il Sung, but she is remembered less for her wartime deeds than for her posthumous veneration as the 'Woman General of Mt. Paektu,' the maternal anchor of the 'Three Generals' Paektu bloodline mythology. As Kim Il Sung's wife and Kim Jong Il's mother, she helped found the Korean Democratic Women's Union after liberation and died in childbirth in 1949.
Career timeline
1935Joined the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army
1936Personal guard to Kim Il Sung; women's unit commander, Singalpa unit
1937Fought in the Battle of Pochonbo; joined the Chinese Communist Party
1937–1938Expanded revolutionary organizations in Sinpa, Pungsan, and Tanchon areas
1940Married Kim Il Sung; relocated to the Soviet Union
1945Returned to Pyongyang after liberation
1946–1949Co-founded the Korean Democratic Women's Union; women's movement work
A Greece expert at the boundary of resistance and empire
After the 1942 Gorgopotamos operation, he stayed in Greece rather than evacuating, building the mission that linked the resistance to Cairo.
Christopher Montague Woodhouse was a British army officer, SOE and MI6 operative, and historian of Greek politics. In occupied Greece he helped establish and later led the British Military Mission, maintaining contact with ELAS and EDES while linking the resistance to Allied strategy. His work also reveals the tension between military cooperation with a broad resistance and Britain's effort to restore the monarchy and preserve its influence after liberation. He later served as an MP and wrote extensively on modern Greece.
Career timeline
1939Enlisted in the Royal Artillery
1941Served on an SOE mission to organize resistance in Crete
1942Second-in-command of the Harling Force in Operation Harling
1942–1943Maintained liaison with ELAS and EDES through the British Military Mission
1943–1945Commanded the Allied Military Mission in Greece
1945–1946Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Athens
1959–1974MP for Oxford and ministerial office in Conservative governments
A communist pioneer of armed resistance to the Occupation
“We’ve avenged Titi!”
Pierre Georges was a French communist and Resistance fighter whose early anti-fascist experience included service with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. On 21 August 1941 he shot the German naval officer Alfons Moser at Paris’s Barbès metro station, an action that made the French Communist Party’s armed resistance visible while intensifying the occupiers’ hostage executions and repression. Under the names Frédo and later Colonel Fabien, he organised clandestine fighters and maquis units, then led the Colonne Fabien toward the eastern front after the Liberation of Paris. He was killed by a mine explosion in 1944, leaving a legacy that joins the decision to fight the Occupation to the severe reprisals that followed.
Career timeline
1936–1939International Brigades fighter in the Spanish Civil War
1939–1940Cadre of the French Communist youth movement
1940–1941Underground communist organiser in occupied France
1941–1942Military commissioner of the Organisation spéciale
1942–1943FTP maquis organiser in the Doubs
1943–1944FTP maquis commander across eastern and central France
1944FTP and FFI commander during and after the Liberation of Paris
1944Commander of the Colonne Fabien, killed on the eastern front
1941.08.21Shot German naval officer Alfons Moser at Barbès metro station
1944.12.27Killed by a mine explosion at Habsheim, Alsace
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.
Career timeline
1927–1930First reign under a regency
1930–1940Crown prince
1940Crowned again after Antonescu deposed Carol II
1944Palace coup of 23 August; Antonescu arrested, Romania joins the Allies
1945Awarded the Soviet Order of Victory; forced to appoint the Groza government
