Iron Guard

Some of his most controversial remarks concern two leaders of the Romanian Iron Guard, a fascist and mystically Christian movement in Romania between 1927 and 1944, whom he described as "heroes".

The cases Mr. Sher prosecuted or oversaw included those of John Demjanjuk, who was accused of having been a death camp guard and deported to Germany; Archbishop Valerian Trifa, who, as part of the antisemitic Iron Guard of Romania, was reported to have instigated a pogrom in 1941 against Jews in Bucharest; and Arthur Rudolph, who was accused of “working slave laborers to death” in the V-2 rocket factory in Germany before becoming the project manager of NASA’s Saturn 5 rocket program, which was critical to the Apollo spaceflights.

Iasi was also a center of Romanian anti-Semitism, birthplace of the Iron Guard, a precursor to the fascist Romanian government that allied itself with Nazi Germany in World War II. In June 1941, Romania joined its German ally in invading the Soviet Union.

The U.S. government alleged Trifa had been an ardent Nazi supporter who wrote inflammatory newspaper articles and made anti-Jewish speeches as a member of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist group.

Romania was in the grips of a Fascist regime, the Iron Guard, and that regime’s policies, politicians, ideologues, and ideas suffuse the film’s dialogue, with its advocates talking, freely but cheerfully and even satirically, about its authoritarian and anti-Semitic ideologies—and, for that matter, about the significance of Hitler and Germany’s Nazi regime.