Romania presents the most morally ambiguous national record in the Holocaust. Around 380,000 to 420,000 Jews were murdered by Romania or by Romanian forces during the war. The figure makes Romania the second largest national perpetrator after Germany. Yet around half of the country’s pre-war Jewish population, around 350,000 people, survived the war on Romanian-controlled territory because the Romanian dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, refused to deport native Romanian Jews to the German death camps from late 1942 onwards. Romania killed massively in 1941 and 1942 and then drew back. The reasons for the change of policy, and the moral shape of the record, have been argued ever since.
The community before the war
Romanian Jewry was the third largest in central Europe after Polish and Hungarian Jewry. Around 757,000 Jews lived in Greater Romania in 1939, including the Jewish populations of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (areas Romania controlled until June 1940), of southern Transylvania (Romanian throughout the war), and of the territories Romania occupied in Soviet Ukraine after July 1941 (Transnistria). The community was divided regionally. The Jews of Wallachia and Moldavia, around Bucharest and the Old Kingdom, were largely middle-class, urban and acculturated. The Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina were more traditionally observant and largely Yiddish-speaking. The Jews of Transylvania had been part of Hungary for most of their history and were Hungarian-speaking and culturally Hungarian.
The Antonescu regime
Romania entered the Second World War on the German side in June 1941, invading the Soviet Union alongside the Wehrmacht. Marshal Ion Antonescu, the Conducator (Leader), was a career soldier and an antisemitic nationalist. The regime had passed antisemitic legislation along Nuremberg lines in 1940. The killing began in 1941 with the Iași pogrom of late June, which is covered on its own page. Around 13,000 to 15,000 Jews were murdered in Iași by Romanian soldiers, police and civilians.
Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria
From July 1941 onwards, Romanian forces and Romanian gendarmerie carried out mass killings of Jews in the recovered territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and in the Romanian-occupied Soviet territory of Transnistria. The killings were on a scale comparable to the German Einsatzgruppen operations further north and were conducted at the same moment, in some cases in coordination with the German units. Around 150,000 to 200,000 Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jews were killed in 1941 and 1942, in shootings, in deportation marches in winter, and in the camps and ghettos the Romanian administration ran in Transnistria. The Transnistria camps, particularly at Bogdanovka and Domanevka, saw mass killings of Romanian-deported Jews in conditions that approximated those of the German camps further west. The Bogdanovka killings of December 1941 and January 1942 alone murdered around 48,000 Jews in a single operation.
Why Antonescu changed his policy
From late 1942 the Antonescu regime drew back. Plans to deport native Romanian Jews from the Old Kingdom to the German death camps, agreed in summer 1942, were not implemented. The protests came from inside Romania: from Queen Mother Helen, from the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church, from foreign Jewish organisations operating through Switzerland, and from Romanian opposition figures. The military situation also shifted: the Romanian army was destroyed at Stalingrad in early 1943, and the regime began to consider its position if Germany lost the war.
Antonescu calculated that handing the Jews of Bucharest and Wallachia to the Germans would compromise his post-war negotiating position with the Allies, while doing nothing to save the Jews already murdered in the east. He stopped the planned deportations. The native Romanian Jews of the Old Kingdom and southern Transylvania, around 350,000 people, lived under increasing restrictions and forced labour but were not deported. Most of them survived the war.
The Hungarian-occupied territories
Northern Transylvania had been transferred from Romania to Hungary in 1940 under German pressure. The Jewish community there, around 165,000 people, fell under Hungarian jurisdiction. They were deported to Auschwitz in May and June 1944 alongside the rest of Hungarian Jewry. About 90,000 of them were murdered. They are usually counted in the Hungarian Holocaust death toll rather than the Romanian figure.
The post-war record
Antonescu was overthrown in August 1944 when Romania switched sides. He was tried for war crimes and shot in 1946. The communist Romanian state under Nicolae Ceausescu, like the rest of communist Eastern Europe, treated the Holocaust in Romania as a German crime and minimised the Romanian role. After the fall of communism in 1989, the post-Ceausescu government continued for several years to play down Romanian responsibility. The Wiesel Commission report of 2004, established under President Iliescu and chaired by the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, was the formal Romanian state acknowledgement of Romanian responsibility. The commission established the death toll figures used here. The Romanian state has since established a national Holocaust day on 9 October, marking the start of the Bessarabian and Bukovinian deportations.
Why the Romanian record matters
Romania is the case that shows that the Holocaust was not solely a German project. Romanian forces, on Romanian initiative, killed around 400,000 Jews. The killing was carried out by Romanian gendarmerie, Romanian soldiers, and Romanian civilians, with German encouragement but only intermittent German participation. The Romanian killings of 1941 and 1942 are not a footnote to the German operations. They are a parallel killing programme that, on its own, would qualify as one of the major genocides of the twentieth century. The Romanian decision to stop the killings of native Romanian Jews from late 1942 onwards saved hundreds of thousands of lives but does not unmake the killings that had already happened. Both decisions were taken by the same regime.
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
- USHMM: Romania