The Romanian anti-communist resistance movement was active from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, with isolated individual fighters remaining at large until the early 1960s. Armed resistance was the first and most structured form of resistance against the communist regime, which in turn regarded the fighters as "bandits". It was not until the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu in late 1989 that details about what was called "anti-communist armed resistance" were made public. It was only then that the public learned about the several small armed groups, which sometimes termed themselves "haiducs", that had taken refuge in the Carpathian Mountains, where some hid for ten years from authorities. The last fighter was eliminated in the mountains of Banat in 1962. The Romanian resistance was one of the longest lasting armed movements in the former Eastern Bloc. Some academics argue that the extent and influence of the movement is often exaggerated in the post-Communist Romanian media, memoirs of the survivors, and even historiography, while the authoritarian, anti-Semitic and/or xenophobic ideology of part of the groups are generally overlooked or minimized. Others, generally civic associations and former dissidents, argue that had external circumstances been different, and had the Western powers not permitted the Soviet Union to incorporate Romania and other countries from Eastern Europe into its sphere of domination, the anti-communist armed resistance could have led a successful war of national liberation. Still others, mainly former officials, former members of the Securitate secret police, as well as sympathizers of the communist regime, label these clandestine groups as fascist, criminal, or anti-national elements subordinate to foreign Western interests seeking to destabilize the country. Some former resistance fighters (such as Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu, Gavrilă Vatamaniuc, and Lucreția Jurj) acknowledged after 1989 that they never posed a real threat to the Communist regime, and that their role was rather limited in maintaining an anti-communist climate in their local communities in the event of an American intervention. Preliminaries Early resistance In March 1944, the Red Army set foot in Bukovina, advancing into Romania, at the time an ally of Nazi Germany. Hundreds of people went into the forests forming anti-Soviet guerrilla groups of 15–20 people. A battalion was created and trained by the Wehrmacht to fight the NKVD; consisting exclusively of local volunteers, this unit, which reached up to 1,378 fighters, could not stem the tide. By August 1944, most were captured by the NKVD, who considered