From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ion Gheorghe Duca
(
Romanian pronunciation:
[i?on
?duka]
ⓘ
; 20 December 1879 ? 29 December 1933) was prime minister of
Romania
from 14 November to 29 December 1933, when he was
assassinated
for his efforts to suppress the
fascist
Iron Guard
movement.
Life and political career
Born in
Bucharest
, he entered Romania's
Chamber of Deputies
for the
National Liberal Party
in 1907 and served in the cabinet from 1914.
As part of a group of
professors
,
physicians
,
soldiers
, etc., he helped bring
Scouting
to Romania (
see also
Cerceta?ii Romaniei
).
Appointed
Minister of Foreign Affairs
in 1922, he was an avid supporter of the
Little Entente
, formed between Romania,
Yugoslavia
, and
Czechoslovakia
to fend off
Hungarian
irredentist claims
(Hungary claimed
Transylvania
, which Romania gained after
World War I
) and prevent the
Habsburg
dynasty from returning to power in
Central Europe
.
In November 1933, King
Carol II
asked Duca to head the government as
prime minister
in preparation for the December elections. In this capacity, Duca worked to keep the rising support for the
Iron Guard
, also known as The Legion of the Archangel Michael, a fascist movement led by
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
, in check, even outlawing the All for the Fatherland-party, which was their political arm. What followed was a time of violence when police on orders from Duca sometimes attacked Iron Guard-members
[1]
(which led to the deaths of some of the members)
[2]
and jailed thousands of them. Shortly after these events and the release of many of the Iron Guard-members from jail, Duca was shot to death, as a form of revenge,
[3]
on the platform of the
Sinaia train station
by Nicolae Constantinescu accompanied by two other persons. All three of them were sentenced to jail for the murder.
He was initiated into
Freemasonry
while he was studying in
France
.
[4]
Duca wrote extensive memoirs about his experiences as a cabinet minister during
World War I
. His son, George, edited Duca and George's memoirs while at the
Hoover Institution
at
Stanford University
in the 1970s and 1980s.
References
External links
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