appointed by prefects whom he named. In stages between August and October 1941, he instituted civilian administration of Transnistria under Governor Gheorghe Alexianu, whose status he made equivalent to that of a cabinet minister. Similar measures were taken in Bukovina and Bessarabia (under Governors Corneliu Calotescu and Gheorghe Voiculescu, respectively). Antonescu strictly relied on the chain of command, and his direct orders to the Army overrode civilian hierarchies. This system allowed room for endemic political corruption and administrative confusion. The Romanian leader also tolerated a gradual loss of authority over the German communities in Romania, in particular the Transylvanian Saxon and Banat Swabian groups, in agreement with Hitler's views on the Volksdeutsche. This trend was initiated by Saxon Nazi activist Andreas Schmidt in cooperation with the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, resulting in de facto self-governance under a Nazi system which was also replicated among the 130,000 Black Sea Germans of Transnistria. Many young German Romanian men opted to join the Schutzstaffel as early as 1940 and, in 1943, an accord between Antonescu and Hitler automatically sent ethnic Germans of recruitable age into the Wehrmacht. The regime was characterized by the leader's attempts to regulate even remote aspects of public life, including relations between the sexes. He imposed drastic penalties for misdemeanors, and the legal use of capital punishment was extended to an unprecedented level. He personally set standards for nightclub programs, for the length of skirts and for women's use of bicycles, while forcing all men to wear coats in public. His wife Maria was a patron of state-approved charitable organizations, initially designed to compete with successful Iron Guardist ventures such as Ajutorul Legionar. According to Romanian-born gender studies academic Maria Bucur, although the regime allowed women "to participate in the war effort on the front in a more regularized, if still marginal, fashion", the general tone was sexist. The administrative apparatus included official press and propaganda sectors, which moved rapidly from constructing Carol's personality cult to doing the same for the new military leader: journals Universul and Timpul, as well as Camil Petrescu's România magazine, were particularly active in this process. Some other such venues were Porunca Vremii, Nichifor Crainic's Sfarmă-Piatră, as well as all the seemingly independent newspapers and some ten new periodicals the government founded for this purpose. Among the individual journalists involved in propaganda were Crainic, Petrescu, Stelian Popescu,Final Report, p. 97 and Curentul editor Pamfil Șeicaru (the