The Odessa Massacre took place over five months in late 1941 and early 1942, in the port city of Odessa on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast. Around 100,000 Jews were murdered. The killing was carried out almost entirely by Romanian forces, with German encouragement but with limited German operational involvement. Odessa is the Romanian counterpart to the Soviet German-occupied territory killings of the same period: a city under Romanian control in which the Romanian state, on Romanian initiative, conducted a sustained mass killing programme that destroyed almost the entire local Jewish population.
The setting
Odessa was the largest city in the southern Soviet territory that Romania occupied as part of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The city had been Russian, then Soviet, since the late eighteenth century, with a Jewish community that had grown to around 200,000 by the 1920s. The Soviet authorities evacuated around half of the Jewish population east before the city fell. The Jewish population at the moment of the Romanian arrival in October 1941 was around 80,000 to 100,000, a mix of Soviet Odessa Jews and refugees who had fled west into the city as the Romanian forces advanced.
Odessa fell to the Romanians on 16 October 1941. Romanian forces, around 250,000 men, had taken the city after a two-month siege that had cost around 18,000 Romanian dead. The Romanian command was ready for retaliation, and the Jewish population of the city was the chosen target.
The bombing of the Romanian headquarters
The trigger for the killing was an explosion at the Romanian military headquarters in Odessa on 22 October 1941. The Soviet NKVD had set time-delayed mines in the building before the Romanian arrival. The explosion killed around 67 people, including the Romanian commander General Ion Glogojeanu and several Romanian officers. The Romanian leadership immediately blamed the local Jewish population, in line with the standard antisemitic conspiracy theory that any Soviet sabotage was the work of Jewish agents.
Marshal Antonescu in Bucharest gave the order: 200 Communist Jews would be executed for every Romanian or German officer killed in the explosion, and 100 for every soldier. The arithmetic was approximate; the killing was not.
The first killing wave
On 23 October 1941, Romanian forces and local Romanian police began rounding up Jews across the city. Around 5,000 were murdered the first day in random street killings and in mass shootings at improvised execution sites in the city centre. Around 19,000 more were taken to the harbour district, locked into warehouses, and burned alive when the warehouses were set on fire. Around 20,000 more were taken to the suburb of Dalnik and shot at the edge of an antitank ditch over the following two days.
By the end of October 1941, around 50,000 Odessa Jews had been killed. The Romanian forces had carried out the operation almost entirely on their own, with German military observers present in some cases but not directing the action.
The Slobodka ghetto and the Transnistria deportations
The remaining Odessa Jews, around 35,000 to 40,000 people, were concentrated in the Slobodka district of the city in November 1941. Conditions were lethal in the standard ghetto pattern: starvation rations, overcrowding, exposure, beatings. From January 1942 the Slobodka population was deported in stages to the Romanian-administered Transnistria region, an area between the Dniester and the Bug rivers in occupied Ukraine that the Romanian state had been given control of as part of the German alliance.
The Transnistria camps and ghettos, particularly at Bogdanovka, Domanevka and Akhmetchetka, were Romanian-run killing sites. The Bogdanovka killings of December 1941 and January 1942 alone murdered around 48,000 Jews in a single operation. The total death toll among the Odessa and other Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jews deported to Transnistria reached around 200,000 by the spring of 1942.
The post-war record
The Odessa massacre and the Transnistria killings were prosecuted by the post-war Romanian state in a limited way. Several Romanian officers were tried by the post-war communist Romanian government and sentenced. The wider responsibility was, in line with the post-war Eastern European pattern, attributed to the German occupation rather than to Romanian initiative.
The Romanian Wiesel Commission of 2003 to 2004 set out the Romanian responsibility in detail. The Odessa massacre and the Transnistria killings together account for around 280,000 to 380,000 of the total Romanian Holocaust death toll of around 380,000 to 420,000. They are the bulk of the Romanian killings, and they are entirely the work of Romanian forces under Romanian command.
Why Odessa matters
Odessa is the case in which Romanian state-organised antisemitic killing reached the scale of the German Einsatzgruppen operations. The killing was carried out without German operational involvement. The chain of command ran from Antonescu in Bucharest through the Romanian military command in Odessa to the Romanian forces and police on the ground. The Romanian state, prosecuting a war alongside Germany on a basis of territorial recovery and anti-Soviet ideology, used the war as the cover for a sustained mass killing of Jewish civilians that was Romanian in design, organisation and execution. The Holocaust was a German project; in Odessa, it was a Romanian one.
See also
Sources
- Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Polirom, 2004
- Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania, Ivan R. Dee, 2000
- Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania, University of Nebraska Press, 2011
- Dennis Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania 1940-1944, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
- USHMM: Odessa