Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944 (review)

Abstract

Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940-1944, by Dennis Deletant. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 379 pp. $74.95. The politics of memory have remained a prominent feature of Romania's political life since 1989. Perhaps no other historical issue has energized Romanian public discourse more than image of its wartime dictator. Marshal Ion Antonescu. Following a more than forty-year absence from indigenous historiography, Antonescu reemerged in 1990s, promoted by Romanian nationalists as a veritable national hero whose leadership in World War II was informed less by his sympathy for fascism than by his patriotic determination to defend Romanian nation against perils of Bolshevist encroachment. Such apologists have consistently ignored responsibility Romania's dictator bears for fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews who perished as a result of policies Antonescu either officially decreed or directly inspired. Dennis Deletant has ably deconstructed Antonescu's record to establish paradoxical nature of his regime, to clarify motivations behind Marshal's wartime conduct and also to challenge many of assumptions prevalent in both Romanian and Western historiographies. The author observes that until end of communist rule in 1989, three strategies were prevalent in Romanian historiography to explain country's experience in Second World War. The first of these is 'justification, offering that Romanian regime in occupied Transnistria was decidedly more benign than German rule in its Soviet occupied territories. The second approach he describes as evasion, which emphasizes Romania's role as an ally of Soviet Union in defeat of Germany after royal coup of August 1944. The final strategy is victimization, which argues that Romania simply fell victim to predatory designs of German political and military ambition and ascribes equal blame to territorial designs of Soviet Union, Hungary, and Bulgaria, who capitalized on Romania's political isolation to bring their revisionist claims to fruition (p. 262). None of these approaches even acknowledges Antonescu, much less engages debate over his wartime leadership. Deletant establishes convincingly that while Antonescu may have had little choice other than to remain at Germany's side after recovering lands awarded to Soviet Union in 1940, Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, his decision to cross Dniester was informed at least as much by his messianic determination to defeat Bolshevism, which he declared to be the great enemy of civilization (p. 85), as by his loyalty to Hitler. The Marshal's expedient elision of Jewish-Communists allowed him to rationalize deportation and destruction of Jews residing in Bessarabia and Bukovina not only as a security threat lying behind Romanian army lines, but also as part of his broader, racially driven determination to purify Romanian nation. However, Antonescu paradoxically distinguished between what he regarded as dispensable and indispensable Jews. Those Jews residing inside Romania's January 1941 borders not only were never deported, but continued to occupy critical positions in national economy. Deletant persuasively describes sheer arbitrariness in application of official policies in this respect, a reality that enabled many Jews to evade Romanianization laws by purchasing dispensations from local authorities. These Jews were neither confined to ghettos nor were they required to wear Star of David. …