A satellite of Nazi Germany, successive Romanian governments curtailed Jewish
rights, robbed Jews of their property and deprived numerous
Jews of the Romanian citizenship. These policies, which were
implemented starting in late 1937 by the government established
by Octavian Goga (National Peasants Party) and Alexandru Cuza
(League of National Christian Defense), were continued by the
dictatorship founded by King Carol II in February 1938.
In late June 1940, the Soviet Union forced Romania to surrender Bessarabia and
Northern Bukovina and the retreating Romanian troops and
local villagers carried out widespread violence against the
Jews. Thus on June 30, 1940, 200 Jews were murdered in Dorohoi,
hundreds more were killed in villages on both sides of the
new border and approximately ten thousand Jews were murdered
in a large-scale pogrom in Iasi. On August 8, 1940 the Romanian
government passed the “Statute of the Jews” which cancelled
the citizenship of most Jews and prohibited mixed marriages.
On September 4, 1940, General Ion
Antonescu took over power and invited the fascist Iron Guard,
headed by Horia Sima, to join his government which launched
a campaign of terror and intimidation against the Jews in
an effort to exclude them from the country’s economic and
commercial life. Antonescu shortly thereafter expelled the
Iron Guard from his government, but their rebellion on January
21-23, 1941 was accompanied by anti-Jewish riots in which
127 Jews were brutally murdered. Following the expulsion
of the Legionnaires, Antonescu continued his anti-Jewish
policies which were legislated into law and which were applied
by, among others, a National Romanization Center, which implemented
all the anti-Jewish laws and supervised the expulsion overnight
of tens of thousands of Jews from their homes.
The outbreak of the war between Germany
and the Soviet Union led to an escalation of anti-Jewish
measures in Romania. The Antonescu regime regarded the war
as an opportunity to solve the Jewish question and began
by expelling 40,000 Jews from towns and villages and confiscating
their property. This was followed by the initiation of a
campaign to mass murder the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina.
In its first phase, Romanian and German army units assisted
by Einsatzgruppe D and local Ukrainians murdered 160,000
Jews, and on September 15, 1941 Antonescu ordered the expulsion
to Transnistria of the 150,000 survivors. In the course of
the expulsion, tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by
their Romanian escorts or died of hunger and disease. While
under Romanian control, the area of Transnistria became a
site for the mass murder of Jews, 90,000 of whom perished
during the years 1941-1944. The Romanian army and gendarmerie
also participated in the liquidation of tens of thousands
of Ukrainian Jews, which they justified by accusing the Jews of collaboration with the Soviet occupation in 1940-1941.
The Romanian government initially
had agreed to the deportation to death camps in Poland of
the remaining Jewish population, but as time went by, Antonescu
realized that that Germany might lose the war, and that it
had no intention of returning Northern Transylvania to Romania.
These two factors combined with increased German demands
for Romanian troops to fight on the Eastern front and for
oil and food supplies, ultimately convinced the Romanians
to refuse the Nazis’ demands to deport Romania’s Jews to
the Belzec death camp. (Efforts by the local Jewish community,
headed by Dr. Wilhelm Felderman, which enlisted the support
of some prominent Romanians, also played a significant role.)
As a result, the Jews living in the Regat and Southern Transylvania
were spared from mass annihilation.
After rejecting the Nazis’ demands
to implement the Final Solution, the Romanian government
became convinced that helping the Jews would enhance Romania’s
image in the eyes of the Allies and help the country obtain
a better postwar settlement. Yet despite this understanding,
the anti-Jewish discriminatory policies of the Antonescu
regime remained in force, and the pauperization and economic
exploitation of Romanian Jewry continued throughout the war
years.
In all, a total of 420,000 Jews who
were living in Romania in 1939 are estimated to have been
murdered during the Holocaust. This figure includes the Jews
killed in Bessarabia and Bukovina in the summer of 1941;
those who died during the expulsion to Transnistria or in
that area; those murdered in the pogroms in Iasi and other
locations; the Jews of northern Transylvania deported to
Auschwitz by the Hungarians.
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