Nicolae Dabija

Major Nicolae Dabija (born April 13 or 18, 1907; died October 28, 1949), knight of Order of Michael the Brave, was an officer of the Romanian Royal Army and a member of the anticommunist armed resistance in Romania. He was the leader of the "National Defense Front–The Haiduc Corps" resistance group in the Apuseni Mountains.

Early life Nicolae Dabija was born in April 1907 in Galați, in the historical region of Moldavia, eastern Romania. (Some sources claim he was a cousin of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.) His father, a carpenter, died when he was 9 years old, and he was raised in poverty. After starting his studies at Vasile Alecsandri High School, he dropped out at age 15 and became employed at a local bank. In 1926 he voluntarily enlisted into the Romanian Army, at the 13th Dorobanți Regiment in Iași. Encouraged by his superiors, he enrolled in the local Military High School for a year, after which he went to the Military School for Infantry Officers in Sibiu, graduating in 1929. Soon after, on June 22, Romania joined Operation Barbarossa in order to reclaim the lost territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which had been annexed by the Soviet Union in June 1940. Dabija served as an officer in the Romanian Land Forces, participating in the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. The goal was to occupy government institutions, armament and ammunition depots, as well as strategic points, such as the defiles of the rivers Mureș, Someș, Olt, Prahova, and Dorna. Dabija's group created and spread anticommunist fliers and set up an information network in Bucharest. On December 22, 1948, resistants from this group, armed with a rifle and handguns, robbed the Tax Office in Teiuș of some 300,000 leis, from which they later procured more arms and a typewriter.

Arrest and execution The Romanian authorities learned about the location of Dabija after arresting a partisan fighter, Traian Ihuț, who revealed the location of his group on Muntele Mare and their strength. Immediately after, on March 4, 1949, a detachment of 80 Securitate troops from Cluj led by Colonel Mihai Patriciu charged the peak where the fighters were located, with a gunfight and later hand-to-hand combat occurring. Eleven anticommunist fighters were killed, but Dabija and two others managed to escape; the Securitate forces suffered three deaths and three others wounded. His wife, Flavia, was reportedly killed during the firefight.

Dabija was arrested on March 22, 1949 in Gârde, after a local villager, whose barn he was sleeping in, notified the communist authorities of his presence. All partisans and their aides were captured. They were subject to interrogation in Turda, Bucharest, and Sibiu. Later they were tried and convicted through sentence no. 816 of October 4, 1949 of the Military Tribunal of Sibiu. The execution was supervised by the director of the Sibiu branch of the Securitate, lieutenant colonel ; he sent a report the next day to colonel Mișu Dulgheru, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs's penal investigation unit.

In 2004, the remains of Dabija and the 6 other executed partisans were identified and properly re-buried at the Sibiu Municipal Cemetery, and a monument dedicated to the "Anti-communist fighters – Major Nicolae Dabija group" was erected on the spot.