New Order

From Bulgaria last week CBS Correspondent Leigh White poured out a bagful of new horror stories, gathered from eyewitness accounts of Rumania's fortnight-old Iron Guard rebellion. He told of Green Shirt ruffians ranging through the ghetto of Bucharest, firing shops and synagogues, shooting Jews and Christians who refused to join the fun, beating some senseless and setting matches to their gasoline-soaked bodies. He told of one band of Jews herded into a slaughterhouse, forced to kneel at the chopping blocks where their throats were cut in a grisly parody of kosher butchering. From a Jew, who miraculously escaped death by playing possum, he heard of a mass assassination of 160 Jews at the prison of Jihlava.

But by last week Rumania had already passed from anarchy to firing-squad autarchy. Soldiers scoured Bucharest house by house, digging out the last die-hard rebels, confiscating some 5,000 rifles, revolvers and machine guns, cases of hand grenades and ammunition. Patrols were ordered to open fire on all civilians bearing arms and on any public meetings. In Bucharest alone 2,000 rebels were under arrest, awaiting summary sentence.

Though Iron Guard Leader Horia Sima was still unaccounted for, new whipping boys for the rebellion were turned up every day. One was Mihai Itsa-Marin, one-armed mayor of the Bucharest suburb of Serban-Voda. accused, with his wife, of 87 murders during the revolt, of concealing 70 truckloads of Iron Guard loot in his home -- cotton, wool, silk, furniture, canned goods, jewelry, silverware.

Biggest catch of all was a munitions maker named Nicolas Malaxa. Having parlayed a shoestring into a chain of arms factories and a partnership in Rumania's largest iron works, he found his way into the confidence of Magda Lupescu and King Carol. When the Nazis took over and Carol abdicated, Malaxa began putting his chips on the Iron Guard. Last week he found he had guessed wrong again, when Rumanian Army artillery blasted him out of his barricaded home and he was put on trial for supplying the rebels with arms.

At week's end, with the Iron Guardists expelled from the Government and replaced by an Army-dominated Cabinet (only two civilians held portfolios), Premier General Ion Antonescu declared the complete restoration of order was at hand, announced his design for the future: at home, a Nazi-Fascist State; abroad, closer ties with the Axis.

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