Ion Antonescu Research Articles

Ion Antonescu and the Church

This study refers to the attitude of Ion Antonescu towards the Romanian Orthodox Church. The documentary sources used for this study which, as far as I am aware, is the first of its kind, are drawn from the transcripts of the governmental meetings, held mostly during September 1940 – April 1941, i.e. from the moment Ion Antonescu took over the supreme leadership of the and until he decided to focus primarily on military preparations. This study shows that Ion Antonescu considered that the Orthodox Church should play the role of a kind of special ministry of the state, in charge of facilitating control over the population; in Antonescu`s vision, the state was to be the main beneficiary of such an arrangement, but it was willing to share those benefits with the church. For Ion Antonescu, this „philosophy” had two main theses–consequences. The first was that the Romanian state needed the Orthodox Church and, therefore, had to support its existence by both political and material means, and the second was that the priesthood, in its activity, had to meet minimum „ethical–moral standards” that would allow it to fulfill its role as an instrument of ideological control over the population.

Șerban Cioculescu la Facultatea de Litere și Filosofie a Universității din Iași (25 mai 1946–31 august 1947)

We publish and also comment three documents about the presence of literary critic Șerban Cioculescu as Professor in the Department of Modern Romanian Literature. He was summoned by a commission led by G. Călinescu, whose report was published initially in „Monitorul Oficial” [„Official Gazette”] on the 8th of July 1946. Șerban Cioculescu, in a book entitled Amintiri [Memories, 1981], recalled this episode. But, apart of this, there is a series of episodes which complete the picture. We refer to the juridical and political context. The laws of higher education were adopted during Ion Antonescu’s regime and were elaborated by a group supervised by the Minister of Culture and Cults, Ion Petrovici (1942). Those decision continued to function after the 23rd of August 1944, after Ion Antonescu had been arrested. But, between this date and the 30th of December 1947, when King Mihai I abdicated, the Communist Party expanded its authority and persecuted those who refused to accept the political compromise. Although Șerban Cioculescu would have been nominated as Professor from October the 1st 1946, he lectured in Iassy at the end of winter or in the very first days of sprit 1947. In the summer of 1947, a Govern commission decided that Șerban Cioculescu, among others, would be excluded from the universities on the 1st of September 1947.

Administrarea românească a Bucovinei și a Basarabiei în perioada dictaturii lui ion Antonescu

The problem of Romanian administration in Bukovina and partly Bessarabia is analyzed in the study. This period is one of the least studied in Ukrainian historiography. The real situation in the region in the sphere of Romanian internal and foreign policy, the conditions of Ion Antonescu’s coming to power, and also the peculiarities of the formation and organization of activities of Romanian authorities on the territory of contemporary Chernivtsi oblast’ during the Second World war are researched on the base of archive materials, published documents and previous investigations of Ukrainian, Romanian and world scientists. The author pays special attention to the forms of administrative-territorial organization of Bukovina, Bessarabia and Hertsa, peculiarities of Romanian management of the region, main functions of Romanian authorities and ways of administrative management problems solving by the region during the war.

Pianos and Paintings from Transnistria: The Plunder of ‘Cultural Trophies’ During the Romanian Occupation (1941-1944)

ABSTRACT This article is the first attempt to piece together the sporadic traces of cultural plunder in wartime southwestern Ukraine under Romania’s occupation in 1941-1944. In Transnistria, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered, the violent and organized redistribution of wealth and heritage via acts of cultural looting occurred in tandem with the economic exploitation and extermination of Jews in the region. Motivated by prospects of high profits, regional and local public officials set up hidden networks and organized group schemes that transgressed the boundaries of state hierarchies and extended beyond the region. While deliberately extracting ‘cultural trophies’ from local museums, theaters, and art galleries based on Ion Antonescu’s verbal orders, they simultaneously plundered the valuables and belongings, including objects of cultural value, of the Jews.

Staging Genocide: Theatrical Remembering of the Romani Holocaust

This article explores performance-centred efforts to remediate the erasure of Romanies from public Holocaust narratives. First, the French play Samudaripen uses aesthetic strategies that emphasize themes of violence and rupture in order to evoke the brutality of Romani persecution under Nazi and Vichy regimes. With its performative elisions between Romani experiences in internment camps in France and concentration camps abroad, Samudaripen connects both historically-specific and fictionalized instances of Romani trauma to broader patterns of anti-Romani persecution past and present. Second, the Romanian-Romani language theatre piece Kali Traš (‘Black Fear’) relays the story of the Romani deportations to camps in Romania in the region of Transnistria under the rule of Romanian fascist dictator Ion Antonescu. Kali Traš pushes back against the silencing of the Romani genocide by reinvigorating the counter-history of the Romani Holocaust in both informative and affectively compelling ways. Each play proclaims Romani agency in commemorative contexts through its narrative and aesthetic strategies. This article shows how Romani artists have engaged in public-facing projects that criticize mainstream Holocaust historiographies and anti-Romani racism more broadly, assessing the extent to which such works constitute valuable additions to Romani struggles for recognition and reparations.

R. Chris Davis. Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945.

R. Chris Davis. <i>Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945</i>.

Churches, Memory and Justice in Post-Communism

Churches, Memory and Justice in Post-Communism

POLITICAL ELITE AND PROPAGANDA IN A ROMANIA OF THE LEGIONARY NATIONAL STATE. SEQUENCES

The study examines aspects of the mechanism of official propaganda during the period of the Legionary National State, noting (among other things) that the topic of nationalism was intertwined with that of anti-communism, with elements of antisemitic discourse (in turn) not absent from this background either. The Legionary Movement, in a period of reconstruction and undifferentiated growth in its numbers, had lost much of the relative attractiveness it had known during Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s lifetime, with the new leadership (of which Horia Sima in particular had emerged) representing only a pale copy of its predecessors. The Legionnaries were also disadvantaged by the tense, complicated, unpredictable relationship they had during this time with Ion Antonescu, as well as by the lack of experienced elements in the act of government. Propaganda and dynamism tried to compensate for these major shortcomings, but without success. In the end, events turned out to be totally unfavourable to the Legionnaires, seriously compromising their image. The series of abuses, violence and murders provided extremely strong arguments for the Legion’s opponents.

Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944 by Dallas Michelbacher

Reviewed by: Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944 by Dallas Michelbacher Paul A. Shapiro Dallas Michelbacher. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 174 pp. The Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, issued in 2004, made it clear that the Romanian state, recognized as Nazi Germany's most significant military ally on the Eastern Front, was also a major perpetrator of Holocaust-era crimes. The Final Report provided a platform for what since has become a significant outpouring of new scholarship on the Holocaust in Romania, most of which has concentrated on topics that were the focus of the Final Report. These fell into five broad categories: Romanian antisemitism; anti-Jewish legislation and crimes committed by the fascist Iron Guard during the "National-Legionary State" (September 1940–January 1941); the effort of Ion Antonescu's wartime regime to rob and rid the country entirely of its Jewish population; Jewish response; and postwar obfuscation and denial. Barely five pages of the four-hundred-page Final Report were dedicated to forced labor,1 and the topic languished largely unaddressed for years. Dallas Michelbacher provides the first monograph in English on Jewish forced labor in Romania.2 He makes ample use of the major document collection published in Romanian by Bucharest's Elie Wiesel Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania3 as well as other published documents. To this he adds in-depth research in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives and in major oral history collections. The result is a much more granular study of Romanian forced labor than previously available. The book provides a review of the orders and guidelines issued by the multiple civil and military authorities which administered the forced labor regime. But to this Michelbacher adds a nuanced picture of the corruption that permeated the administration of forced labor, with officials at every level encouraging and accepting payments against labor exemption certificates, preferential retention at one's traditional job, assignment to a particular locality, etc. He describes the varying degrees of risk of verbal [End Page 216] or physical abuse faced by forced laborers according to the personality and motivations of the civilian and military officials overseeing laborers performing tasks that ranged from heavy rail, road, and defense construction work in so-called "external" labor detachments, to humiliating snow shoveling duty assigned to Jews able to remain in their home towns. He captures the antagonistic attitude of local non-Jews toward Jewish laborers and the resentment that the need to keep some 75,000 Jews in technical, managerial, and administrative jobs in order to keep the national economy running created in both official and civil society circles. He provides a glimpse of the impact that removing able-bodied men for labor, under threat of deportation to Transnistria, had on Jewish community organizations and Jewish families left vulnerable to intimidation and blackmail, often lacking in basic necessities, and uncertain as to what would come next. A picture of forced labor at the ground level emerges most vividly in Michelbacher's chapters 4 and 5, which trace developments leading up to Romania's planned mass deportation of Jews to the Nazi death camp at Belzec, and then following Antonescu's decision to abandon the deportation plan. In these chapters the author moves beyond reliance on published sources and draws heavily on previously untapped archival and testimonial source material. He introduces survivor voices, largely absent from earlier studies, and provides graphic detail regarding several well-documented and painfully remembered labor sites—railroad track repair, a canal, defense works, a quarry, etc. Given the power of this new material, it is unfortunate that the book's footnotes provide only partial information, clarifying where a document can be found, but not the precise nature of the cited document. There is an aspect of Michelbacher's approach that leads the author to some problematic conclusions. The difficulty stems from the geographic limitation of the study, for the most part, to forced labor inside the borders of the Old Kingdom (Regat) and Southern Transylvania, isolated from the broader context of what was taking place in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. It...

Reconstitution of an Absence: The Jewish Community of Alba Iulia in the Context of Urban Development

The study addresses the issue of reconstituting the heritage of the Jewish community in Alba Iulia (Romania), starting from several documentary and topographical sources from the first part of the 20th century. The choice of this case study is justified by the importance of the city for the history of Jews in Romania, as the only city in Transylvania (historical province integrated into Romania in 1918) where Jews received the right to settle as early as the 17th century. The main documentary source used is a list of Jewish properties in Alba Iulia declared confiscated in 1941, in the context of the anti-Semitic policy promoted by the regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu (Leader of the Romanian state during 1940-1944). Correlating it with the cadastral plan of the city drafted in 1914 and applying the georeferencing method reconstitutes the position of the still existing buildings and those that disappeared as a result of the systematization policy during the communist regime, in the central area of the city. A more complex approach is also proposed, based on the use of the GIS methodology, whereby the topographic information can be associated with the documentary and epigraphic sources referring to the Jewish cemetery in the city. The issue of the relevance of the Jewish heritage for the current urban strategy is also discussed, starting from the city’s development documents in force.

The Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe: Historiography, Archival Resources and Remembrance

<i>The Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe: Historiography, Archival Resources and Remembrance</i>

Food Supply, Starvation, and Food As a Weapon in the Camps and Ghettos of Romanian-Occupied Bessarabia and Transnistria, 1941-44

The Romanian regime of wartime leader Ion Antonescu concentrated the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovyna in transit camps and ghettos, and then deported them to the Romanian-administered territory between the Dnister and Buh rivers, in southwestern Ukraine. Of approximately 160,000 Romanian Jews deported to “Transnistria,” only 50,000 survived the ordeal. The Romanians, with local Volksdeutsch and Ukrainian collaborators, also massacred and were otherwise responsible for the death of approximately 150,000 local Ukrainian Jews, including the large Jewish community of Odesa. While not comparable to the Jews in number, deported Romanian Roma and local Roma were also subjected to physical brutality, forced labour, and incarceration.&#x0D; Famine and starvation did not cause all Jewish and Roma deaths in Bessarabia and Transnistria. Mass executions exacted a huge toll. So did exposure to the elements, exhaustion, and typhus. Still, while there was no famine in the region, starvation was a permanent presence. Romanian authorities controlled the food supply and denied it to their targeted victims. This article describes the steps taken by Romanian occupation authorities to isolate Jews and Roma; to limit the flow of food supplies to them; to prevent them from accessing food in local markets; and to prevent help that might have been offered by those local civilians who took pity on the starving victims. Official documentation and testimonies of both officials and survivors provide a vivid picture of the consequences. Specific cases reveal factors that made the situation in one locality better or worse than that in another, or that caused a situation to improve or deteriorate. Variations notwithstanding, however, all sources lead to the conclusion that Romania’s goal was to eliminate the Jews and reduce the Roma population. This made starvation, the use of “food as a weapon,” an acceptable element of state policy.

From Propagandistic Exploitation to Post-Communist Sensationalism: Beethoven Reception in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Romania

This paper mainly investigates the way Beethoven’s image was turned, during the totalitarian political regimes of twentieth-century Romania, into a tool of propaganda. Two such ideological annexations are striking: one took place in the period when Romania, as Germany’s ally during World War II and led by Marshall Ion Antonescu, who was loyal to Adolf Hitler, to a certain extent copied the Nazi model (1940–1944); the other, much longer, began when Communists took power in 1947 and lasted until 1989, with some inevitable continuations. The beginnings of contemporary Romanian capitalism in the 1990s brought, in addition to an attempt to depoliticize Beethoven by means of professional, responsible musicological enquiries, no longer grounded in Fascist or Communist ideologies, another type of approach: sensationalist, related to the “identification” of some of Beethoven’s love interests who reportedly lived on the territory of present-day Romania.

The Fascist Phenomenon. National Legionary State between laws, journals, memoirs, and the Jewish repression between 20-23 January 1941

The aim of the study is to show the evolution of the National Legionary State from its beginnings to its fi nal form of revolt (20-23rd January 1941). This type of state was created on 14th September 1940 by the royal wish of Michael I of Romania, who was infl uenced by General Ion Antonescu. The study has the purpose to show how anti-Semitism can transform itself from a philosophy concept, through the ideas of Nae Ionescu, to a state ideology. The main documents which I studied are based on archives, the constitution of the state, during the period mentioned in the title, and the journals of general Ion Antonescu, or main political fi gures, and the notes written by Filip Browner, known better as Filip Brunea Fox, in his City of massacre. Journal of Legionary, Rebellion and Crime. This study is important because it analyzes a totalitarian regime that was made possible by the intervention of political arrangements alongside the help of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, founded by the Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in 1927.

Ghost heroes: Forgetting and remembering in national narratives of the past

This article takes a sociological perspective on the phenomenon of national myth making in collective memory. It develops an original theoretical concept, the ghost hero. The ghost hero, we posit, is a reinvented historical actor who, despite being implicated in acts of moral or legal turpitude, is elevated and venerated within national communities. In building a theoretical frame, we use two historical cases: Latvian aviator and Nazi-era collaborator Herberts Cukurs, and Marshall Ion Antonescu, pro-fascist leader of Romania in World War II. Our concept draws on the microsociological theory of Erving Goffman to characterize a historical narrative as the presentation of a national “self” and the structural functionalist perspective to examine the sociological functions of the ghost hero for state and society. We suggest that the ghost hero concept could extend beyond these cases and regions to analyze the heroization of historical figures implicated in atrocities.

РУМУНІЯ В ДРУГІЙ СВІТОВІЙ ВІЙНІ 1939-1945: «БІЛІ ПЛЯМИ» І НОВІ ПОГЛЯДИ НА ПРОБЛЕМУ

The article is devoted to the analysis of different views in Romanian historiography on the participation of I. Antonescu, along with Germany, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Finland, in the war against the USSR, starting from June 22, 1941. It is known that the decision to join the anti-Soviet war was taken by I. Antonescu alone, without any consultation with any political group, or even with the king Mihai, who has learned from the BBC radio that Romania had entered the war with the USSR. First, the war was proclaimed as a “sacred war” against Bolshevism for the return of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, received full support from the king and from the leaders of the “historical parties”, as well as from a wide range of the population. However, in August 1941, at the request of Hitler, having already military rank of Marshal, Ion Antonescu decided to continue the war in the East, which has been completely unfounded (the territory to the East of the Dniester never belonged to Romania). The modern Romanian historiographers emphasize that the continuation of the anti-Soviet war on the other side of the Dniester, which led to large (and useless) human losses, has become one of Antonescu’s greatest mistakes. The article also raises the issue of the Holocaust in Romania during the Second World War (suppressed during the communist years), the decline in the scale of the tragedy in that period. It is noted that the arrest of I. Antonescu on August 23, 1944 was the merit of the young king, Mihai I, and his entourage, and not the Communist Party of Romania represented by Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu.

The Interruption of the British-Romanian Relations in 1941

The study analyses the withdrawals of the British Legation from Bucharest and of the Romanian Legation from London. The research was undertaken at the Central Historical National Archives of Romania in Bucharest where the author studied the microfiches of the Public Record Office of the Great Britain, Foreign Office, Political, 371/29992, 371/29993 and 371/29994.The United Kingdom declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. The British Legation could not gather military, political and economical information as the new regime in Romania had invited the troops of Nazi Germany in the country. As the British found themselves implied only in formal activities, they decided to withdraw the Legation on February 15, 1941 and the Romanian Government acted on reciprocal basis but few Romanians returned from the London staff. The study deals with the preparations needed to withdraw the two Legations and the modalities required for the British and Romanian staffs for departure.General Ion Antonescu, Romanian Prime-Minister and de facto ruler of the country, was more than pleased with the British proposal of the interruption of bilateral relations.

Ionescu, Ştefan Cristian Jewish Resistance to ‘Romanianization, 1940–44 (review)

SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 184 influence on the decline and fall of the Soviet system. One does not have to buy into all of Rittersporn’s theorizing to appreciate the richness of the many examples he provides. For anyone interested in Stalinism or Soviet history generally, this is a valuable, eye-opening work. Department of History Richard B. Spence University of Idaho Ionescu, Ștefan Cristian. Jewish Resistance to ‘Romanianization’, 1940–44. Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2015. xv + 267 pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. Ion Antonescu’s treatment of the Jews under his wartime pro-Axis rule was ambivalent; for the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia, Antonescu was a cruel antisemite; for those of Moldavia, Wallachia and southern Transylvania, he was, as William Oldson has suggested, also an antisemite but ‘a providential’ one. Even Antonescu’s inhuman and shameful behaviour towards the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia, whom he considered ‘infected by the virus of Bolshevism’ admits a distinction to be drawn between Romanian and German actions. While German and Romanian forces joined in mass executions of Jews in Bessarabia and Bukovina in the summer of 1941, after that date Romanian treatment of the Jews broadly-speaking followed a separate course. If, as in the German case, discrimination was followed by deportation, deportation, in the Romanian case, did not lead to the gas-chamber. Tens of thousands of Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria were indeed shot in the period from winter 1941 until early spring 1942 on Romanian orders, but subsequently the plight of the Jews in Transnistria, the Romanian-administered area of Ukraine between the Dniester and the Bug, was characterized by degradation and callous neglect. Jews residing in Ukraine beyond Transnistria were likely to suffer a quick death by shooting at the hands of the Germans, but in Transnistria Jews often faced a slow death by typhus or starvation. The contrast between German and Romanian actions is illustrated by the fact that the largest proportion of Jews to survive Axis rule during the World War Two in the Soviet Union was in Transnistria. Ambivalent is also an adjective that comes to mind to describe Antonescu’s policy of ‘Romanianization’, as presented and analysed by Ștefan Ionescu in this unique and original contribution to the study of the persecution of the Jews and Roma under Antonescu. Romanianization formed the basis of Antonescu’s policy to exclude outsiders, principally Jews and Romas, from the economic life of Romania through property and business seizure, and denial REVIEWS 185 of employment. As Ionescu points out, Romanianization resembled in part the nationalization projects of the other Axis states, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia, but there were differences (p. 14). While the degree of assimilation of Jews and their share of the local economy was higher in Hungary, Romania expropriated Jewish real estate at a faster pace. Drawing upon a wealth of archival and secondary sources, both official and private, Ionescu dissects Romanianization and then analyses the responses to it. His focus falls upon Bucharest where Jews represented some 10 per cent of the capital’s population (they numbered 98,000 in a population of 992,536 according to the censuses of 1941–42). He explores two main questions: How was the process of Romanianization implemented, and with what results? How did gentiles and Jews respond to that policy? Chapter two examines the racial laws which followed in the footsteps of the accession of Antonescu and the Iron Guard to power and the proclamation of a National-Legionary state on 14 September 1940. On 5 October, a decree-law was passed providing for the appointment of commissars, who had to be Romanian, to enforce compliance by companies with the directives of the Ministry of National Economy. This decree ushered in what was known at the time as ‘the policy of Romanianization’. On 3 October, Jews had been barred from renting pharmacies — most pharmacies were either rented or owned by Jews — and on 5 October, rural real estate was expropriated from Jews, as were, on 12 November, forest land, mills, distilleries and cereal stocks, and shipping (4 December). The right of Jews to plead...

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

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...

Ideological Transfers and Bureaucratic Entanglements: Nazi ‘Experts’ on the ‘Jewish Question’ and the Romanian-German Relations, 1940–1944

This article focuses on the transfer of the Nazi legal and ideological model to East Central Europe and its subsequent adoption, modification and fusion with local legal-political practices. To illustrate this process, we explore the evolution of the anti-Semitic policy of the Antonescu regime in Romania (1940–1944) from an under-researched perspective: the activity of the Nazi ‘advisors on the Jewish Question’ dispatched to Bucharest. Based on a wide range of published and unpublished archival sources, we attempt to provide answers to the following questions: To what extent did the Third Reich shape Romania’s anti-Semitic polices during the Second World War? What was the role played by the Nazi advisors in this process? In answering these questions, special attention is devoted to the activity of the Hauptsturmführer ss Gustav Richter, who served as Berater für Juden und Arisierungsfragen [advisor to the Jewish and Aryanization questions] in the German Legation in Bucharest from 1st of April 1941 until 23 August 1944. We argue that, by evaluating the work of the Nazi experts in Bucharest, we can better grasp the immediate as well as the longer-term objectives followed by the Third Reich in Romania on the ‘Jewish Question,’ and the evolution of this issue within the context of the Romanian-German diplomatic relations and political interactions. By taking into account a variety of internal and external factors and by reconstructing the complicated web of political and bureaucratic interactions that led to the crystallization of General Ion Antonescu’s policy towards the Jews, we are able to provide a richer and more nuanced analysis of German-Romanian relations during the Second World War.