Ion Antonescu was the military dictator of Romania from 4 September 1940 to 23 August 1944. Under his command Romanian forces, on Romanian initiative and largely without German prompting, killed between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews. The Romanian operations against the Jewish populations of Bessarabia, Bukovina and the Romanian-controlled territory of Transnistria were the second-largest national contribution to the Holocaust after Germany itself. Antonescu was tried and shot at Jilava prison on 1 June 1946. The execution was filmed.
The Iași pogrom
The first major Antonescu-period killing was the Iași pogrom of 28 to 30 June 1941, conducted in the city of Iași in Moldavia just days after the Romanian and German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Romanian army, the Romanian gendarmerie, the Romanian police and Romanian civilians killed around 13,000 Jews in three days. The principal method was the so-called death trains: thousands of Jews packed into sealed freight wagons that were shunted slowly through the Moldavian countryside in summer heat for days, with no water and no ventilation, until most of those inside had died of suffocation and thirst. The operation was conducted on direct orders from Bucharest. Antonescu had personally authorised the operation by telegram on 27 June 1941, the day before it began. The telegram has survived.
The Bessarabian and Bukovinian operations
From July 1941 the Romanian Third and Fourth Armies, advancing into Bessarabia and Bukovina behind the German invasion, killed around 150,000 Jews in their territories of operation. The killings were conducted by Romanian troops and gendarmes, in many cases in the presence of and with the cooperation of the German Einsatzgruppe D, but on Romanian initiative and Romanian command. Survivors were forced into the ghettos at Chișinău and into transit camps from which they were marched, on foot through the autumn and winter of 1941 to 1942, into the Romanian-controlled territory of Transnistria across the Dniester River. Around 100,000 died on the marches.
Transnistria
Transnistria was the strip of southern Ukraine awarded to Romania by Germany in summer 1941. Antonescu used it as a Romanian-administered killing zone. Between October 1941 and March 1942 around 150,000 Jews were marched into the territory and concentrated in ghettos and labour camps at Bogdanovka, Domanovka, Akmechetka, Pechora, and other sites. The conditions were deliberately fatal. At Bogdanovka in December 1941 the Romanian gendarmerie and Ukrainian auxiliaries shot or burned alive around 48,000 Jews over the course of two weeks. The Bogdanovka killing was conducted by Romanian forces, on Romanian command, with no German participation. It is the largest single Romanian massacre of the war.
The German request and the Romanian refusal
The Antonescu record contains one striking inversion of the usual collaborator pattern. From summer 1942 the German government repeatedly pressed Antonescu to deport the Jews of the Romanian Old Kingdom, the territory of Romania within its 1939 borders, to the German killing camps in Poland. Antonescu agreed in principle in summer 1942 and then, in October 1942, reversed his position and refused. The Old Kingdom Jews, around 290,000 people, were not deported. Why he reversed has been debated. The most plausible explanations are a combination of: the worsening military situation, the protests of the Romanian Orthodox Church and of Queen Mother Elena, the lobbying of Romanian-Jewish leaders including Wilhelm Filderman, the diplomatic intervention of the papal nuncio Andrea Cassulo, and Antonescu’s calculation that the Allies would win and the killings would damage Romania’s position at the eventual peace settlement. The reversal saved a substantial Jewish population. It does not erase the Romanian killings of 1941 and 1942 in Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria, which by the time of the reversal had already killed at least a quarter of a million people.
The 23 August 1944 coup
Antonescu was overthrown on 23 August 1944 by a coup organised by the young King Michael, who switched Romania to the Allied side as the Red Army crossed the country’s eastern border. Antonescu was arrested at the royal palace and held in Soviet custody, then handed back to Romania for trial in 1946.
The trial and the execution
The People’s Court of Romania tried Antonescu in May 1946. The trial was conducted under the new Soviet-influenced regime and the procedural standards were uneven, but the documentary case on the killings was overwhelming. Survivors of the Iași death trains, of the Bessarabian deportations, of Bogdanovka, gave evidence. The Antonescu defence, that he had only authorised what was necessary in wartime, did not engage with the specifics of the killings. He was convicted of war crimes and crimes against peace and sentenced to death. He was shot at Jilava prison outside Bucharest on 1 June 1946. The first volley wounded him without killing him; the firing squad commander put a final round into him at close range. The execution was filmed by the new regime’s information service. The film survives.
The post-1989 rehabilitation
The Antonescu legacy was contested in post-communist Romania. From the 1990s a Romanian nationalist current attempted to rehabilitate him as a patriot who had defended Romania against Soviet communism. The Romanian government, after extensive international pressure including from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, commissioned the Wiesel Commission in 2003 to produce an authoritative report on the Romanian Holocaust. The commission, led by Elie Wiesel, reported in 2004 that Romania under Antonescu had been responsible for the murder of between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews and around 11,000 Roma. The report is now the official Romanian government position. Antonescu rehabilitation was made a criminal offence under Romanian law in 2002.
What he was
Antonescu was the case of the national autocrat who killed Jews on his own initiative, then stopped killing them on his own initiative when the strategic situation changed. The change of mind in 1942 saved many. The killing of 1941 had already destroyed the Jewish communities of half of Romania. The two facts are not in tension. They are simply both true. He was a war criminal who calculated, late, that the killings were no longer in his interest, and changed course. The change came too late for the dead.
See also
Sources
- Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, the Wiesel Commission, 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
- Antonescu trial transcripts, Romanian National Archives
- USHMM: Romania