Romania’s former King Michael I, a onetime boy monarch who later engineered the ouster of pro-Nazi strongman Gen. Ion Antonescu during World War II, only to be forced at gunpoint to abdicate by a communist-led postwar government, died Dec. 5 at his home in Aubonne, Switzerland. He was 96. The cause of death was not immediately announced in a statement from the royal house, but the former monarch had been treated for leukemia and another type of cancer for at least the past year, the family had earlier announced. King Michael, a member of the House of Hohenzollern and a distant cousin of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, was one of the last surviving links to Europe’s royal heads of state before and during World War II. He lived a life defined by political intrigue and buffeted by nearly every major upheaval on the continent in the past century. Banished by the communists in early 1948, he spent decades in exile before returning to his homeland amid the c...