Marginalii la „cazul Avramescu”
A Few Sidenotes on the “Avramescu Case”

Summary/Abstract: A prominent figure in the Romanian army, General Gheorghe Avramescu entwined his name with the liberation of Northern Bukovina, in early July 1941, and of north-western Transylvania, on October 25, 1944, later leading the Romanian 4th Army in the battles for the liberation of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. On March 2, 1945, while he was on the front in Czechoslovakia leading the Romanian 4th Army in the Operation “Zvolen – Banska Bystrica”, he was summoned to the headquarters of the 40th Army (which included the Romanian 4th Army) led by General Zhmachenko, where he was arrested by the Soviets. The reasons for his arrest are not clear to this day, the most common supposition referring to his involvement in an anti-Soviet military action, which aimed – in collusion with the Romanian legionaries that sought shelter in Germany, under the command of Horia Sima – to turn the weapons against Soviet troops with German help and thus to avoid Romania’s fall under Soviet occupation. According to the information provided by the Soviets 18 years later, in 1963, the General lost his life on March 3, 1945, in an air-raid by the German aviation. In the first half of the 1960s, the Romanian authorities opened an inquiry meant to finally shed some light of the “Avramescu case”. This article presents a report prepared by the head of the Department of Military Counterintelligence, in which the minister of the Romanian Armed Forces was informed on the conclusions of the inquiry: General Avramescu did not intend to turn weapons against Soviet troops, despite some pressure to do so, and the “information provided by the Red Cross of the USSR that Avramescu Gheorghe died on March 3, 1945, in an German air raid, is unsubstantiated”, the general being seen alive on March 14, 1945.

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