Glass, Hildrun Deutschland und die Verfolgung der Juden im rumnischen Machtbereich 1940–1944 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 780 Western world. One hopes that misprints like ‘the 70th birthday of Stalin in 1950’ (as it appears on p. 148) instead of 1949 or Tarangog (p. 139) instead of Taganrog will be corrected in the paperback edition. Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main Alexey Tikhomirov Glass, Hildrun. Deutschland und die Verfolgung der Juden im rumänischen Machtbereich 1940–1944. R. Sudosteuropäische Arbeiten, 152. Oldenbourg, Munich, 2014. 303 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. €44.95. The name of Hildrun Glass is synonymous with the forensic analysis of the fate of the Jews in Romania in the three decades following the end of the First World War. Her study on the Jewish experience between 1944 and 1949 (Minderheit zwischen zwei Diktaturen, Munich 2002) established itself as the essential work of reference on this topic and it is no surprise that this new study should be based on the same rigorous dedication to research. ThethemeofthisbookistheinteractionbetweenNaziGermanyandRomania in the development and implementation of the ‘solution to the Jewish question’ in the respective countries and in the areas which the German and Romanian regimes controlled. Dr Glass identifies three stages in this interaction in the period 1940–44: congruence, 1940–41; divergence, 1942; and disagreement 1943/1944. The Holocaust in Romania was unlike that in other parts of Europe and the Soviet Union. In the first place, the mass murder of Jews by shooting in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in 1941, was carried out by the Romanian authoritiesunderIonAntonescu’smilitarydictatorship,atatimewhenRomania was a sovereign German ally. A congruence of German and Romanian policies can be identified in General Ion Antonescu’s policy of ‘ethnic purification’. Yet Antonescu acted upon his own initiative in resolving the ‘Jewish question’ (the term employed in official Romanian discourse of the time) and did not act under pressure from Berlin. Expulsion of the Jews from Romania was the tool for policy implementation; Mihai Antonescu — the vice-premier but no relation to the General — made this clear at a cabinet meeting over which he presided on 17 June 1941, only a few days before the German-Romanian attack on the Soviet Union. Second, the deaths of Jews at the hands of the Romanians were the result not only of systematic killing, but also of deportation in 1941 and its consequences. Third, Romania’s ‘Jewish policy’ was independent of Germany in the sense that Antonescu acted of his own volition regarding the Jews, but in a context established by Nazi domination of continental Europe. Thus, in the summer of 1942 Antonescu changed his mind about acceding to German requests that REVIEWS 781 the remaining Jewish population of Romania — from the Banat, southern Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia — be deported to the death camps in Poland. Here we have Dr Glass’s ‘divergence’ stage. Antonescu’s about-turn on deportation may be seen as opportunism but it was an opportunism that saved the remaining Jews of Romania from death camps in Poland. Had the Iron Guard still been in power in Romania, there is no doubt that it would have acceded to the German request to implement the Final Solution. One can only speculate on whether events on the battlefield in November 1942 led Marshal Antonescu to modify his position on deportation. He was astute enough to realize that a short war against the Soviet Union offered the best chance of a victory. After the crushing defeat of the Axis armies at Stalingrad — where two German armies and two Romanian armies were decimated before the German Sixth Army was encircled — Antonescu became concerned that he would have to answer to the Allies for his actions. In mid December 1942, with an eye to ingratiating himself with the Western powers, Antonescu decided that the solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ in Romania was emigration rather than deportation — the stage of ‘disagreement’. On 12 December, Manfred von Killinger, the German ambassador to Romania, informed the German Foreign Ministry that Radu Lecca, the Romanian official responsible for Jewish affairs, had received instructions from Antonescu to organize ‘the emigration of 75,000 to 80,000 Jews to Palestine and Syria’. The only condition for emigration was payment by each emigrant of 200,000 lei. Despite...