The Origins and Onset of the Romanian Holocaust

The Origins and Onset of the Romanian Holocaust

Henry Eaton

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DETROIT

© 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eaton, Henry L.

The origins and onset of the Romanian Holocaust / Henry Eaton.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3872-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8143-3856-8 (e-book)

1. Jews—Persecutions—Romania.   2. Jews—Romania—Iasi—History—20th century.   3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Romania.   4. Antisemitism—Romania—History—20th century.   5. Romania—Ethnic relations.   I. Title.

DS135.R7E23 2013

940.53'1809498—dc23

2012040558

All photographs are from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The views or opinions expressed in this book, and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, or imply approval or endorsement by, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

publication was made possible by

Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Iaşi

2. Unification and the Jewish Question

3. Romanian Jews

4. Fascism and Antisemitism in the 1930s

5. The Rumble of Violence

6. War and the Mass Execution at Stânca Rosnovanu

7. Duminica ceea (That Sunday)

8. Trenurile mortuare (The Death Trains)

9. Victims

10. Perpetrators

11. The German Connection

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

The Romanian Holocaust began in late June 1941. On the twenty-seventh of that month officers and soldiers of the Romanian 6th Cavalry Regiment executed 311 Jews (men, women, and children) at a place called Stânca Rosnovanu in northeastern Romania. Next evening, June 28, in the nearby city of Iaşi, the government’s intelligence service, simulating an attack on German and Romanian troops in the city, ignited a pogrom. In the chaos that followed, policemen and German and Romanian soldiers joined civilians in the murder of several hundred Jews. Of those who survived some 2,700 perished while being evacuated from the city in the freight cars of two trains. The focus of this short study is on these mass murders and their origins. This means looking at immediate circumstances (e.g., Romania’s ties with Nazi Germany) and looking back, especially at the growing presence and volatility of antisemitism in Romania from the mid-1800s and the transformation that occurred between the two world wars when anti-Jewish actions turned increasingly violent and finally genocidal.

For about fifty years following the publications of Marius Mircu’s Pogromul de la Iaşi (Bucureşti: Glob, 1945) and Matatias Carp’s Black Book (1946–48) there was nothing published in Romania that dealt with the Iaşi pogrom and related events objectively and in some full measure. One slender book, published in 1978, concerned itself directly with the subject: A. Karețki and M. Covaci, Zile Însîngerate la Iaşi (28–30 iunie 1941) (Bloody days in Iaşi [28–30 June 1941]) (Bucureşti: Politică, 1978). It differed from other texts by apologists and deniers in its attention to certain important details. But its message was the same: Germans were in charge of the massacre; they and some local scum were the killers. Real Romanians were blameless, and the number of Jewish victims was relatively small. Still, it was remarkable that a book on the pogrom, one of many subjects Romanians did not talk freely about during the Ceauşescu dictatorship, was published at all. Sometime in 1982–83, when I lived in Iaşi, a friend placed the book in my hands without comment.

Historians in Romania have often characterized their country as protecting its Jews during World War II and have described wartime dictator Ion Antonescu as a savior, pointing out that he rejected a German plan to deport Romanian Jews to the Belzec death camp. According to the Historical Dictionary of Romania, while Antonescu deported 150–170,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bucovina to Transnistria, he resisted German pressure to send Romanian Jews to Nazi death camps, as a result saving the lives of over 300,000 Jews.¹ What the authors of this dictionary and other apologists fail to point out is that when in October 1942 Antonescu canceled an earlier agreement with Germany to have Romanian Jews deported he was conducting his own genocidal operation, set in motion by his own dictatorial regime. That operation included mass killings by Romanian soldiers during the invasion of the Soviet Union, brutal deportations of survivors by Romanian gendarmerie, and death camps in Transnistria (between the Dniester and Bug rivers) administrated by a Romanian governor and his police officials. It was to these camps that nearly all the above-mentioned deported 150–170,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bucovina were sent. Apologists sometimes make a further claim that the Antonescu regime, unlike the Hungarian government, not only saved its own Jews from German death camps but also gave asylum to Jews escaping from Hungary and other nearby countries. These apologists depict an innocent nation and heroic leader squeezed between opposing powers, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Some even scoff at the idea that antisemitism was deeply rooted in Romania and so, having dismissed the fact of a Romanian Holocaust, also dismiss its primary cause.² Such views are likely to be with us for some time, but what has been a rather solid wall of denial has taken some hits. Most significant in this turnabout has been a wave of good scholarship and publication on the subject. Even the Romanian government has backed away from denial. On October 12, 2004, President Ion Iliescu, speaking publicly, admitted Romania’s participation in the mass extermination of Jews. Supporting the president’s report was a lengthy summary of (and excellent introduction to) the Romanian Holocaust, created for him by an international commission of top scholars in the field, headed by Elie Wiesel and supported by the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.³

Indispensable for understanding long-term causes of the Romanian Holocaust are Carol Iancu’s works, especially his history of Jews and antisemitism in Romania: Les Juifs en Roumanie (1866–1919): De l’exclusion à l’émancipation (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1978) and Les Juifs en Roumaine, 1919–1938: De l’émancipation à la marginalisation (Paris: Peeters, 1996). Iancu’s second volume is complemented by two excellent monographs: Leon Volovici’s Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, translated from Romanian by C. Kormos (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991) and Irina Livezeanu’s Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). The first full-length study is Radu Ioanid’s The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); Ioanid devotes some thirty pages to the Iaşi pogrom. Accounts of pogrom survivors may be found in the archives of Yad Vashem. Of published survivor accounts, one of the most interesting is Adrian Radu-Cernea, Pogromul de la Iaşi: Depoziție de martor (Bucureşti: Hasefer, 2002). Official reports by civil and military officials around the time of the killings may be found at Yad Vashem and in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (especially RG 25.004M), and in volume 2 of Matatias Carp’s The Black Book.

Carp’s three-volume Cartea Neagră: Suferințele evreilor din România în timpul dictaturii fasciste, 1940–1944 (Bucureşti: 1946–48), or The Black Book: The suffering of Romanian Jews during the fascist dictatorship, 1940–1944, is the cornerstone for scholarship on the Romanian Holocaust. As secretary of the Federal Union of Jewish Communities in Romania during the war, Carp (1904–1952) was well situated to draw on and assemble basic information. Volume 1 of The Black Book documents the depredations of the National-Legionnaire State (September 1940–January 1941) that ended in a mass murder of Jews in Bucharest. Volume 2 primarily concerns the Iaşi pogrom and death trains. Volume 3 bears on wartime mass killings in Bucovina and Bessarabia and in the labor-death camps of Transnistria. These volumes first appeared between 1946 and 1948 then generally vanished from public view, part of an effort, it seems, to keep the national honor unsullied. It took nearly half a century and collapse of the Ceauşescu dictatorship for Carp’s work to be reissued in Romania in 1996.⁴

Several volumes of documents on the history of Romanian Jews, including the 1930s and ’40s, have been published by the Center for the Study of the History of Romanian Jews (Centrul pentru studiul istoriei Evreilor din România), a branch of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania (Federația Comunităților Evereişti din România) in Bucharest.⁵

Jean Ancel (d. 2008) has been the most prolific author of scholarly articles, books, and published document collections on the Romanian Holocaust. His Preludiu la asasinat: Pogromul de la Iaşi, 29 iunie 1941 (Iaşi: Polirom, 2005) and volume 2 of Carp’s Cartea Neagră are the two most important works on the Iaşi pogrom. Some other very important contributions by Ancel to the study of the Romanian Holocaust are: Documents Concerning the Fate of Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1986), 12 vols.; Transnistria (Bucureşti: Atlas, 1998), 3 vols.; and Contribuții la istoria României: Problema evreiască (Bucureşti: Hasefer/Yad Vashem, 2001–3), 2 vols. Primary sources and the critical evaluation of official documents are constants in Ancel’s work.

I appreciate the support given me by the University of North Texas to work in the library and archives of Yad Vashem, by the Fulbright Program to spend the 1990–91 academic year in Iaşi, and by the Russian and East European Center of the University of Illinois (Urbana) to work in the university library’s excellent East European collection. The staffs at Yad Vashem and Illinois were kind and helpful. Despite its relative newness the expanding collection of the library and archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was useful to me. I very much appreciate the help of Professor Ralph Fisher of the University of Illinois, who always encouraged me in my work and who read my manuscript and suggested improvements. Thanks to Andrei Cretu for correcting my faulty diacritical marking of Romanian words. No one has given more support to this book project than my wife Kate and my sons Stephen and Jonathan. I owe many thanks to members of the Jewish community of Iaşi, especially those who recounted for me their recollections of the pogrom, and to Professor Odette Caufman-Blumenfeld and her father Dr. Simion Caufman, late president of the community.

Introduction

This is a brief study of the origins of the Romanian Holocaust and the first mass killings of Jews by Romanian authorities. It addresses two questions. First, why did the Antonescu government set out to exterminate Jews, those who lived in Romania and those in areas annexed by Romania during the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II? The war, the invasion, and Romania’s alliance with Nazi Germany certainly accommodated a genocidal campaign, ethnic purification in the jargon of government leaders, but the war and Axis alignment were not compelling circumstances. Of the Third Reich’s allies, only Romania took that course; in Hungary and Italy the systematic destruction of Jews required the intervention of Himmler’s SS. So why did Romania set out to destroy the Jews in its territories? To answer this question one must look at Romania’s antisemitic history, the subject I take up in the first half of this study. The second question concerns the initial mass killings of Jews by Romanian government agencies—where did the killings take place and when? who were the victims and perpetrators? and who gave the orders? The later chapters of this work are concerned with answering these questions.

The first massacres occurred in late June and early July 1941. On Sunday afternoon, June 29, 1941, in the city of Iaşi, several hundred Jews were shot to death in the courtyard of the municipal police station (chestură). Policemen, soldiers, and civilians began rounding them up the night before: invading and ransacking homes, stealing valuables, extorting money, beating and murdering residents. Many survivors of this assault were marched to the police station, some women and children but men for the most part, arms raised, jeered at, spit on, beaten, and shot if they fell behind or dropped their arms. Those who got to the chestură were driven into its courtyard between rows of soldiers beating them with wooden clubs and iron bars, wounding many, killing some. Women and most children were freed around the noon hour. Then, about 2:00 p.m., at the sound of air-raid sirens, the gates were closed and the shooting commenced, lasting off and on for some four hours. That evening and early Monday morning, survivors of the massacre and others, held in the chestură building or elsewhere in the city or caught up in the continuing raids, were herded to the central train station. Here the prisoners, crazed by thirst, some savagely beaten or wounded by gunshots or bayonets, were jammed into the boxcars of two trains. In the intense summer heat each car became a suffocating prison, doors locked shut and air vents closed or boarded over. More than fifteen hundred died in the foul and oven-like wagons of the first train, which meandered south on a halting, weeklong journey to the town of Călăraşi, ordinarily a trip of no more than a day. Nearly twelve hundred dead were removed from the more crowded cars of the second train, which took some eight hours to reach the town of Podu Iloaiei, only 15 miles (25 kilometers) west of Iaşi. Approximately 2,713 perished in the trains, but the total number of those murdered is not known. Romania’s Intelligence Service reported one of the highest estimates, a figure of 13,266, including 40 women and 180 children.¹ Romanian Jews call the day of mass murder Duminica ceea (That Sunday) and the trains Trenurile mortuare (The Death Trains).

Another massacre of Jews occurred a few miles north of Iaşi two days before That Sunday. Soldiers of the Romanian 6th Cavalry Regiment, during a skirmish across the Prut River, had entered the Soviet border town of Sculeni. Before retreating they rounded up some of its residents and brought them back into Romanian territory. Jews were then separated from the rest, and on June 27 at a place called Stânca Rosnovanu two regimental officers and a few soldiers robbed them, forced the young Jewish men to dig burial trenches, and executed them—311 men, women, and children. When Colonel Matieş, the regiment’s commander, was later questioned about the killings he dismissed the victims as deserving no consideration and claimed he had commanded the execution in conformity with superior orders.²

On the one hand these mass murders at Stânca Rosnovanu and Iaşi and in the death trains are part of Romania’s long and often violent antisemitic past. What they signaled, however, was an extraordinary escalation of violence. They were the first of many such actions Romanian military and police units carried out during the invasion of the Soviet Union (1941–44). Whether acting alone or with German SS mobile killing commandos, the mission of these units was the ethnic cleansing of those conquered territories that were to come under Romanian rule: Northern Bucovina, Bessarabia, and Transnistria. Had the Axis powers defeated the Soviet Union and come to dominate the whole of the European continent, the Jews of Romania proper, the Regat or Old Kingdom, almost certainly would also have been exterminated.

Iaşi (pronounced yahsh), capital of the former principality of Moldavia, is in northeastern Romania, spread along the Bahlui River Valley and among the hills that flank its course. It lies some 10 miles (16 kilometers) west of the Prut River, Romania’s border with the Soviet Union in June 1941 and after the breakup of the USSR its border with the Republic of Moldova. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Iaşi and neighboring towns and cities such as Fălticeni, Dorohoi, Suceava, and Botoşani had large Jewish populations whose shops, homes, schools, and synagogues represented lively, if not wealthy, communities. That side of Romanian life is all but gone now due to the cataclysmic events leading up to and including World War II, the persistence of antisemitism that followed the war, and opportunities for Romanian Jews to go elsewhere. In the territory that comprised Romania after World War II (i.e., excluding Soviet annexed Northern Bucovina and Bessarabia), Romanian Jews were reduced in number from about 450,000 in 1930 to about 26,000 in 1977.³ In the late nineteenth century and up to World War II, Iaşi was a major center of Romanian Jewish culture with a community of 30,000 to 40,000 persons and more than a hundred synagogues. In the course of the war and its aftermath those numbers were reduced to a few hundred persons and one main temple.

Deniers and apologists have explained That Sunday and The Death Trains as the work of Germans. True Romanians, they say, did not take part in such a monstrous crime; instead, they risked their lives to help the victims.⁴ But the eyewitness accounts of victims and others show that, in the first place, while they did not act alone in the killings, Romanians, from the highest officials to the dregs, initiated, participated in, and advanced, each stage of the action. Secondly, there is a long history of ill will and violence by Romanian Christians against Jews, including mass murders. The Iaşi pogrom is part of this record, the fruit of centuries-old hatreds that, during the troubled years between the two world wars, nurtured the most extreme solutions to Romania’s so-called Jewish question.

Such solutions, supported by some of the country’s most influential political, intellectual, and religious leaders, gained wide acceptance in the 1920s and ’30s and were finally put into general practice, beginning with draconian anti-Jewish legislation in January 1938. Mass violence against Jews soon followed. In late June 1940, Romanian soldiers, forced by the Soviet Union to retreat from Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina, vented their anger and frustration as they withdrew by plundering and killing Jews. Hardest hit of several communities was the city of Dorohoi where more than fifty Jews were murdered. In November Iron Guardsmen murdered eleven Jews in the city of Ploieşti. A few months later more than a hundred Jews were massacred in Bucharest during the Iron Guard rebellion of January 21–23, 1941. Thus the first mass killings of the Romanian Holocaust in late June 1941, at Stânca Rosnovanu and Iaşi and in the death trains, was not so much a beginning as an escalation of deadly violence against Jews.

Victims of the Iaşi pogrom were still dying on the Călăraşi death train as Romanian and German forces, making up Army Group South, began their attack (Operation München, July 2, 1941) into Soviet territory. On the German side, killing Jews was the special task of Einsatzgruppe D, the mobile unit Himmler assigned to the southern military zone. On the Romanian side, extermination was primarily the work of soldiers, policemen, and agents of two government intelligence services: SSI (Serviciul Special de Informații) and Section II (military intelligence) of the Supreme General Staff. German exterminators occasionally reported on the actions of their Romanian partners, especially their sloppiness (leaving dead bodies strewn about), cruelty, and greed. Regarding an action of July 1941 in Bessarabia, Einsatzgruppe D reported that during the past days and nights, considerable excesses were carried out repeatedly against Jews by Rumanian soldiers.⁵ Jews were murdered or imprisoned, tortured, raped, and robbed; thousands were killed in Cernăuţi (Czernowitz) and Chişinău (Kishinev), the major cities of Bucovina and Bessarabia. Romanian commanders, at Ion Antonescu’s urging, carried out one of the largest single mass murders of Jews during the war in and around Odessa on October 22–24, 1941. Many survivors of this and other massacres died while being marched to labor-death camps in Romania-controlled Transnistria (between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers), and most of those who reached the camps died there, victims of execution squads, typhus or other diseases, starvation, exposure, or multiple afflictions. The fact that the same state agencies responsible for the killings of Jews at Stânca Rosnovanu and Iaşi continued the wholesale killing of Jews during the invasion of the Soviet Union shows these events to be part of the same cleansing operation.⁶

Who ordered the Iaşi pogrom and subsequent mass murders? There is one credible answer—those who had the power to make those decisions, dictator Ion Antonescu and his top civil and military officials. Most likely the order was given some days or weeks before the invasion of the Soviet Union. Around that time Ion and his distantly related second-in-command Mihai Antonescu described the upcoming struggle in their speeches as a war of machine guns and ethnic purification. The likely first action taken by the government to put its genocidal plan in motion was to send to Iaşi, on June 18, 1941, a special unit of SSI, the state’s intelligence service, the task of which was to spark a pogrom in the city by simulating an attack on German and Romanian troops stationed there. The staged attack could hardly fail, preceded as it was by two Soviet bombings of the city and allegations that Jews (already demonized as enemy aliens) had signaled the bombers to their targets. Perpetrators of the pogrom came from all social classes and included SSI agents who not only set it off but also, exceeding their orders, joined in the killings. Officers and men of Romanian and German military units in the city, local and district policemen, and civilians also participated. Greed was one of the chief motivators; at one end of the plundering frenzy Christians grabbed their Jewish partners’ share of land and business property, at the other end scavengers stripped cadavers of their clothing and shoes.

What lies behind the descent of Ion Antonescu’s government into genocide? Nazi Germany showed the way by its remarkable rise to power and relentless campaign against Jews. Romanian leaders generally admired the Führer’s regime. An obvious connection between the antisemitic policies of the two countries occurred in August 1940 when the government of King Carol II enacted legislation patterned after the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws of 1935. As for the German plan to invade the USSR, that offered Romania the opportunity to crush its Soviet enemy, recover territory that it claimed rightfully belonged to it, and at the same time mask the crime of genocide.

The path Antonescu’s government took had its origins in the age-old hatred of Jews, sharpened in the 1860s and 1870s when the country became unified and independent. Three things rather clearly mark this circumstance: first, an already deep-seated Christian antisemitism; second, the growing number and commercial prominence of Jews in Moldavia in the mid-1800s; and third, the question of Romanian citizenship for Jews.