Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940-1944 by Dennis Deletant (review)

Abstract

reviews 569 Kang-Bohr's book is thoroughly researched and provides a great number of valuable statistics and references to her sources. However, there is a tendency towards description instead of analysis and, in a few instances, one gets the impression that the author considers the written word in the sources too easily at face value. Involuntarily, for example, she seems to shift respon sibilityaway from the top,when shewrites that Stalin wished to integrate the party rank-and-file and strengthen their self-confidence by encouraging them to criticize their superiors (p. 121), or that the centre stopped mass repres sion because itbecame aware that ithad lost control (p. 256). Nonetheless, this regional study ofVoronezh provides a great variety of new and useful data, a set of cogent questions and an internally coherent argumentation. It is therefore an important contribution to a topic so heatedly debated in historiography. Universityof Jena Franziska Schedewie Deletant, Dennis. Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu andHis Regime,Romania ig40-ig44. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2006. x 4 379 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?55.00. In the last ten years a spate of new books has appeared chronicling theNazi occupation of various European countries, great and small, bringing to light the extent towhich many of these lands played theirpart in the brutality and tragedy of the Holocaust. However, there is no work to date that addresses Romania's complex relationship with Hitler's Germany. Dennis Deletant's book, Hitler's Forgotten Ally, ably succeeds in filling this gap. In itDeletant deftly chronicles Ion Antonescu's complex reign from 1940 to 1944, including his ambiguous role in the Final Solution. But as he argues, this is not simply a case of writing another monograph on yet another small 'rogue state' under Hitler's control, since Romania was unique in many important respects. For one thing, the country was one of the few to maintain its sovereignty through out the Second World War, in largemeasure because of the Fuhrer's respect for Antonescu as well as the compatibility of the Romanian leader's revanchist war aims with his own. Romania's unusual independence was also due to the fact that itboasted the third largestAxis army in Europe, bringing to bear some 585,000 national troops in the assault on the USSR in June-October 1941.That Romania also contributed to theNazi war effortby delivering oil and other raw materials to Berlin assured Antonescu more license and latitude to conduct Romanian affairs as he saw fit. Given Romania's strategic importance and key role in the Second World War, why has there not been more literature on Antonescu's reign? This is by no means because he was (or is) a forgotten figure. On the contrary, itwas precisely the Cold War remaking of Antonescu ? firstby the Soviets as a socialist traitor, then by the more populist romanticization of him as a nation alist hero who fought Stalin and theCommunists ? that has made scholar ship on Antonescu so partial and polemic. That he often has been seen in the West as simply a war criminal, responsible for the death of between 250,000 and 290,000 Jews and 10,000 20,000 Romas, has only added to the sound 570 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 and fury associated with his name and rule. Herein lies the great value ofDeletant's finebook, which judiciously siftsthrough the accumulated lay ers of legend and mythmaking to provide us with a clear-eyed and balanced assessment of Antonescu's Romania. What emerges fromDeletant's account is a fascinating, highly contradic tory leader. Antonescu inherited his country's Axis alignment, having come to power in 1940, but did little to alter it.This was no commonplace fascist rise to power, though. After all, the Iron Guard was the only radical right movement to come to power without the aid of theThird Reich or Fascist Italy, and was the only one toppled during Nazi Germany's domination of continental Europe. Nor isAntonescu's role in theHolocaust straightforward. No doubt he was aware of the implications ofFinal Solution forJews inNazi Occupied Europe, having had a long and well-chronicled meeting with Hitler at Castle...