Born to a Jewish family in Tiraspol, on the eastern bank of the Dniester river (part of Imperial Russia at the time), he was the son of Alexandru Grünberg, a miller.
[15] Georgescu and Nicolschi agreed to the deal, and allowed Iron Guard's affiliates (the Legionaries) to emerge from the underground, awarding them identity papers and employment on the condition that they disarmed themselves.
[15] Georgescu was persuaded by Nicolschi to let Petrașcu go free;[16] the minister later confessed that this was done on suspicion that the Iron Guard would otherwise provide support for the National Peasantist leaders: "The PNȚ's attempts, successful up to a certain extent, of attracting Legionaries into their party, [thus] giving them a legal possibility to act against the regime".
[17] According to Georgescu, as a direct result of the understanding, as much as 800 Iron Guard affiliates applied for recognition, including a number of people who had "returned from Germany after August 23, 1944, having diversion as their [original] purpose".
[18] In autumn 1945, the two Communist representatives intervened to have sizable groups of Iron Guard members set free from various labor camps,[19] while Petrașcu was awarded a degree of liberty in resuming political contacts.
[22] Nicolschi was later assigned General Inspector of the traditional secret police, Siguranța Statului, where he and Serghei Nicolau led the will-to-be communist security force "Mobile Brigade", entrusted with silencing political opposition.
[25] During May, Nicolschi, together with Marin Jianu, engineered a series of trials for sabotage, which notably implicated the industrialists Radu Xenopol and Anton Dumitru, who were accused of having destroyed their own enterprises as a means to resist nationalization.
[32] As historian Vladimir Tismăneanu argues, this was made possible by the Soviet agents and their relations with the group around emerging Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej: "if one does not grasp the role of political thugs such as the Soviet spies Pintilie Bodnarenko (Pantiușa) and Alexandru Nikolski in the exercise of terror in Romania during the most horrible Stalinist period, and their personal connections with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and members of his entourage, it is difficult to understand the origins and the role of the Securitate".
[38] In the inquiry preceding the show trial for sabotage at the Danube-Black Sea Canal, he led a squad of torturers that was entrusted with obtaining forced confessions from Gheorghe Crăciun and other employees.
[43] Pauker was officially accused, among other things, of having welcomed the Iron Guard into the Party, although her degree of involvement in the deal remains disputed[44] (while Nicolschi is credited with having initiated it, it was also proposed that his Soviet superiors had played a part in the decision).
[47] In 1961, after Gheorghiu-Dej began adopting anti-Soviet themes in his discourse, Nicolschi, promoted to Lieutenant General, was sidelined and forced into retirement,[48] without being denied the luxuries reserved for the nomenklatura.
[7] This happened on the very same day he was presented with a subpoena from the Prosecutor General, who had received a formal notification from the victims' families and the Association of Former Political Prisoners (Nicolschi was scheduled for hearings on April 17, 1992).
[51] Alongside Pintilie and Mazuru, Nicolschi features prominently in theories that the early Securitate was controlled by ethnic minorities (as notably voiced by the press of the ultra-nationalist Greater Romania Party).