Ion Antonescu Research Articles

When the West is far away: Romanian attempts to withdraw from World War II (1943-1944), Finnish views

This article approaches the Romanian foreign policy stakes in the aftermath of the Stalingrad Battle as seen from the perspective of a comrade-in-arms country, Finland, which shared with Romania many of the assumptions, fears and anxieties with regard to the outcome of the war. The article is shaped in Stephen M. Walt’s understanding of balancing and bandwagoning, Romania and Finland choosing Germany over the Soviet Union mainly for the reason that the latter was perceived as the biggest security threat and the former as the only possible deterrent and support. The material focuses on the analysis of Eduard Hjalmar Palin’s diplomatic dispatches from Bucharest. On one hand, they were the main source of information for the Finnish decision-makers with regard to the Romanian international situation and its foreign and domestic policies. On other hand, Palin was an experienced diplomat, with excellent connections in the Romanian society and enjoyed access to confidential information in the governmental circles due to a Romanian-Finnish agreement of summer of 1941. We can see, for instances, cases when Ion and Mihai Antonescu confided to the Finnish envoy Führer Adolf Hitler’s statements which could affect the situation in Finland or help its leaders to take decisions. The article shows how divided Romanian governmental and opposition circles were, not only between but also among themselves. By reading these diplomatic reports, we could also acknowledge the widening split between the views of the two most prominent Romanian governmental leaders, Ion and Mihai Antonescu, thus complementing other sources of information already published. We can also learn about some peace plans of Romanian opposition groups, some of whom are little known from other documentary sources.

Holocaust commemoration in Romania: Roma and the contested politics of memory and memorialization

In 2009, the Romanian government unveiled a $7.4 million Holocaust memorial to commemorate over 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma who died as victims of the Ion Antonescu regime. Located in central Bucharest, the monument is part of a national agenda, outlined by an international commission, to study the crimes of the Holocaust in Romania and to help the country come to terms with historical atrocities. Under communism and in the early post-communist period, the Romanian state denied its role in the Holocaust. In this article, we explore the representation of the Holocaust and, in particular, Roma victims in the dominant historical narrative and the Holocaust memorial. We delve into discourses around this monument, which feed into a larger dialogue of victim recognition and contested national narratives about the Holocaust. We highlight the construction and contestation of the Holocaust memorial, considering in particular the paradox of Roma victims and suggesting that Roma are simultaneously represented, unrepresented and misrepresented in the historical story and memorial of the Holocaust in Romania.

Heinen, Armin and Schmitt, Oliver Jens (eds). Inszenierte Gegenmacht von rechts. Die ‘Legion Erzengel Michael in Rumnien 1918–1938 (review)

REVIEWS 779 his judgment is sound, even if not everyone will agree with his contention that British policy sought to engineer a Russo-Japanese rapprochement after 1907 in an effort to contain Germany. This book is a considerable scholarly achievement. What a shame, however, that Professor Berton and his readers have not been better served by his publishers. The price is exorbitant, and will ensure a limited readership; and the production of the book — forty-five lines squeezed in small font onto each page — leaves much to be desired. Author and readers deserve better. University of East Anglia T. G. Otte Heinen, Armin and Schmitt, Oliver Jens (eds). Inszenierte Gegenmacht von rechts. Die ‘Legion Erzengel Michael’ in Rumänien 1918–1938. Sudosteuropäische Arbeiten, 150. R. Oldenbourg, Munich, 2013. 400 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. €54.95. The ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael’, also known as the Iron Guard, was the only radical movement of the right in Europe to come to power without the assistance of Germany or Italy, and the only one to be toppled during Nazi Germany’s domination of continental Europe. During the Legion’s period of rule in Romania (1940–41), through its reach for total power, the excesses of the Legionary police, the utter mismanagement of the state administration and the economy by inexperienced youthful militants, it antagonized most middle-class Romanians and challenged General Ion Antonescu’s own political authority. Faced with the prospect of a breakdown in order in the country should the Guard seize complete control of the state, the officer corps stood firmly behind Antonescu and gave him its full support in his show-down with the Guard in January 1941. As the title of this penetrating volume of essays on the formative years of the Legion indicates, we are presented here with analyses of the political, social and cultural practice of the movement, one which the editors judiciously term ‘a counter-force of the Right’. Armin Heinen’s name is associated with his outstanding study of the Iron Guard in Romania which appeared in 1986 at a time when access to the relevant archives in Romania was virtually closed to non-Romanian scholars. The contributions to this volume, from scholars of the Legion such as the two editors (Heinen on the Legion’s electoral performance, Schmitt on its labour force) Constantin Iordachi (‘Fascism, Charisma and Politics’), Rebecca Haynes (‘The Ritualization of the “New Man”’) Radu Harald Dinu (‘Antisemitism as Social Practice’) and Roland Clark (‘The Women in the Legion’) — there are others, too, no less worthy of mention — lead us to the SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 780 conclusion that if we define some of the characteristic features of fascism as a crisis of identity stemming from the traditional, often ethnic features of the community, and an authoritarian, para-military type of organization, then the most significant movement in Romania to which this definition could be applied was the Legion. But such a judgement, although accurate, requires qualification, as the editors imply in their perceptive introduction. The impact of modernity and the widespread rebellions against its influence on culture and religion provided the dynamics of the Legion’s antisemitism. That antisemitism was in part an attempt to heal the profound malaise resulting from a constellation of factors which prevented interwar Romanians from enjoying a clear sense of identity, collective national purpose, and place in ‘the modern world’. To these we can add a hatred of Marxism. As Henry Roberts pointed out, ‘fascism is not generally anti-industrial […]. But in the case of Rumania, with its particular position vis-à-vis industrial society, the fascist response in its most characteristic form involved this negation and an exaltation of the peasant’ (Rumania: Political Problems of an Agrarian State, New Haven, CT, 1951). Another unique aspect of the Legion was its missionary role, addressed by Iordachi in his contribution. In his autobiography Corneliu Codreanu, the Legion’s founder, described how he received a vision of the archangel Michael in the chapel of the Văcăreşti prison in Bucharest in November 1923 and the archangel urged him to dedicate his life to God. After his release from jail in...

Romanian Military Attachés in London and their Diplomatic Value (1919-1939)

The article emphasises the fact that the military represented an important component of the connections between Romania and England in the interwar period. An important role in maintain military connections between the two countries was played by military attaches: Nicolae Arion, Matila Costiescu Ghika, Radu R. Rosetti, Ion Antonescu, Nicolae Radescu, Constantin Sanatescu, Gheorghe Niculescu, Gheorghe Dumitrescu, Ermil Gheorghiu. In their diplomatic activity they supported the following: Romania being recognised in England in actual fact; providing good reports for English businessmen; developing Great Britain’s economic interests in Romania; acquainting Romania with the organisation and fighting technique of the British army; achieving a closer cooperation between the two armies (British and Romanian); building common military objectives (such as the Tașaul military port), and others.

TURKEY'S ROLE IN ROMANIAN'S DIPLOMATIC STRUGGLE

The present study aimed to to focus on the intense diplomatic activity developed by Romania in efforts to negotiate an armistice with the Allies especially between September 1943 and August 1944. Starting the spring of 1943, the Romanian diplomacy, including here Ion Antonescu Marshal, the King and the opposition parties, engaging in consistent separate peace negotiations with the United Kingdom using the mediation of Turkey. The paper is based on unpublished documents found in the Romanian diplomatic and national archives.

Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania (review)

Reviewed by: Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania Paul E. Michelson Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania, by Vladimir Solonari. Washington DC/Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 451 pp. $65.00. This thoroughly researched and well executed study contends that Romanian ethnic purification efforts during World War II were not only the product of a preoccupation with such matters at the highest levels of the Romanian wartime regime—that is, Ion Antonescu and his (mostly military) henchmen—but [End Page 155] were also the result of three developments in pre-war Romanian culture: the emergence in the 1930s of a radical racialist consensus in Romanian nationalist circles (Chapter 1), abetted by the success of the Romanian eugenics movement (Chapter 4), and implemented by the statist, social engineering proclivities of Romanian social scientists, particularly sociologists and demographers (Chapter 5). Both eugenics and social engineering, ironically, reflected mainstream trends in modernity, modern "science," and management. At the same time, Solonari is careful to relate these developments, policies, and actors to international, regional, and internal contexts, showing how this affected the apparent tergiversations of Romanian policy makers. The book combines both intentionalist and functionalist approaches; in the end, however, the author gives full weight to individual behaviors and motivations, explaining but not excusing the actions and/or inaction of people at all levels of society in the face of crimes against humanity such as ethnic cleansing. In 1918, Transylvania, Bucovina, and Basarabia had been unified with the pre-war Romanian kingdom, fulfilling the dream of nineteenth-century nationalists. However, achievement of the national ideal had created a myriad of problems, especially in a supposedly national unitary state that was only 72 percent ethnic Romanian by 1930. The story starts with the Romanian attempt to assimilate their newly-acquired territories by reversing the Magyarization, Germanization and Ruthenization, and Russification carried out prior to 1918. The state was seen as the principal agency in this process, as it was in most other aspects of Romanian life. This was based on the nearly universal Romanian acceptance of the equation "nation=the ethnos=the state." The reality was that "[d]efending the superior interests of the Romanian nation" trumped everything else and explains the ease with which Romanian policy makers could "adjust" to whatever the circumstances were. Thus, "[i]n a world dominated by democracies, tolerance was in order . . . in a world under Nazi domination, discipline, ruthlessness, and narrow-minded nationalism were signs of 'vitality' and commanded respect" (p. 336). The Romanian eugenics movement and the advocates of social engineering were bureaucracy-based and were able to gain traction with proposals for "solving" what had come to be seen as a vexing national problem, despite the oddity of a Romanian racism without an actual Romanian race. They shaped an environment that made extremist policies viable in the 1940s, and many leading eugenicists and population planners were on the whole enthusiastic contributors to a regime that carried out crimes against humanity in the name of national affirmation and defense. They were also partly responsible for the indifference to the victims of these crimes shown by both the general Romanian [End Page 156] population and the Romanian elite (there were honorable exceptions), even when they were not adherents of racialist views. In 1940, Romanian policy was reoriented to an alliance with Nazi Germany (which of course further radicalized Romanian racialist views and modeled even more extreme "solutions"). Until 1942, Ion Antonescu and his collaborators believed that Romania had arrived at a "historic moment" in which scores could be settled and ethnic purification could be achieved vis-à-vis Jews, Gypsies, and other minorities. However, this new dream "was dashed by the realities of the changing international situation, military developments, and the imperatives of the national economy." When the war appeared lost, the policies were moderated or suspended, but as the author shows by detailing monstrous population exchange and resettlement schemes put forth in 1942- 1944, the eugenicist/social engineering convictions of Romania's leaders and elite remained constant. The "vision itself was never discarded and its basic premises never questioned" (pp. 333-334...

New models, new questions: historiographical approaches to the Romanian Holocaust

This essay surveys the historiography on the Romanian Holocaust, focusing in particular on four monographs published by Western historians within the past five years. Earlier research was limited both empirically and theoretically, and these works suggest new research paradigms and raise new questions about the genocide in Romania during the Second World War. Dennis Deletant assesses the rule of General Ion Antonescu in light of his responsibility for the Holocaust and attempts to explain why the General began and ended the Holocaust when he did. Vladimir Solonari argues that the Holocaust should be read in the context of plans for ethnic homogenisation which were implemented when the opportunity presented itself in 1941. Jean Ancel examines the expropriation of Jewish property and shows that, among other things, the Romanian perpetrators were motivated by a desire to enrich themselves at the expense of the Jews. Finally, Armin Heinen reads the Holocaust by looking at how different groups of perpetrators used violence and attempts to recreate the logic that shaped their actions. In addition, the essay discusses Holocaust denial, survivor memoirs and the state of primary-source collections on the Romanian Holocaust.

Ion Antonescu and the Holocaust in Romania

Ion Antonescu’s obsession with what he saw as the Bolshevik menace drove his policy towards the Jews. The vast majority of those living in the provinces bordering on, and occupied by, the Soviet Union between 1940 and 1941—Bessarabia and Bukovina—were deported to Transnistria, where more than seventy percent of them were murdered or died of disease and starvation. Ukrainian militias and ethnic German Selbstschutz played a major role in the massacres, the former under the direction of Romanian gendarmes in Bogdanovka camp in the winter of 1941/1942, and the latter, independently, in southeastern Transnistria. This paper, based on the author’s research in the archives and library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and upon primary sources in Romania, seeks to bring into sharper focus Antonescu’s anti-Semitic actions, thereby highlighting the distinctive nature of the Holocaust in Romania and Antonescu’s part in it.

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

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. …

Alexandre Safran. Une vie de combat, un faisceau de lumière by Carol Iancu (review)

reviews 377 highlyintelligent, unusuallygiftedand moral,whichwould need no law' thoughBulgaria'sleadingbiologist contested ideas ofracialpurity, pointing out thathumanevolution'does not takeplace [.. .] withinthe boundsof limited and short historical periods'. Aboutone in twoGermandoctorsbecame Nazis, 25 per centjoined the SA and 10 per centgraduatedto the SS; but we are told moreprecisely howVienna'shealthcare system was Nazifiedand used to implement racial policies.The exclusion ofJewsand insistence oftheoathofloyalty to Hitler resulted inthelossofoverhalfVienna'sdoctors and medicalfaculty; a secret orderofAugust1939obligeddoctorsand midwives to report casesofhandicapped children;SS doctorsset up a 'heredity and racial care' system; a 'BloodProtection Law' cameintoforce in 1941, andtheViennaPublicHealth Officeimplementeda 'euthenasiaprogramme'.The killingof helpless undesirables could begin.Oppositionto Nazi racialhygiene had been rare. Braveopposition bythree scientists of Jewish origin isrecorded; a fewGerman gentiles also opposed it; and a Catholictheologian who advocatedpositive eugenics was thrown outofGraz forprotesting againstthe1938pogrom. OtherCentralEuropeancountries werelessenthusiastic. In Italy,where Mussolinirejectedthe idea of Nordic superiority, antisemitism was not widespread. In Hungaryitwas,but therewas a rangeofalternative scapegoats ,including Germansand liberalpoliticians. Hungarianambivalence precludeda home-grown holocaustbut theGermansenforced it,and racialist ideaswereto re-surface thereafter thecollapseofCommunism. Roger Griffiths providesa conclusion.Flauntinghis wide reading,he invokesBrock,Dürrenmatt and Mies van der Roh, among many other luminaries; introduces conceptssuch as 'palingenetic metaphysicality', and citesElissa Marder'suse of Baudelaireand Flaubert'as documents of the "temporaldisorders" of modernity, whosebitter fruit is decentered deracinated space, and a disjointedtime withouttranscendence'. Some sense emerges occasionally, butGriffiths's luxuriant verbiage usually overwhelms it. Pretentious and self-indulgent, theconclusion chimesneither withthecareful examination of ideas and processeswithwhichthisvaluable book begins, nor the informative case studieswhichformitscore. It shouldhave been excised. London PhilipLongworth Iancu, Carol. Alexandre Safran.Uneviedecombat, unfaisceaudelumière. Université PaulVal éry, Montpellier, 2007.318pp.Appendices. Bibliography. Index. €20.00. Alexandre Safran (191 0-2006) was, at thetimeofhis installation as chief rabbiofRomaniainMarch1940attheage oftwenty-nine, theyoungest chief rabbiintheworldand was calleduponto shoulder an enormous responsibility .Romania'sJews,subjecttopersecution undera raft ofantisemitic legislationintroduced in theyearsfollowing Romania's territorial expansionafter theFirst WorldWar,foundthemselves exposedtothestate-licensed brutality 378 SEER, 87, 2, APRIL 200g oftheextreme-right IronGuardmovement whichcametopowerinSeptember 1940,and then,shortly after Romania'sattackalongsideNazi Germany on the Soviet Union in June 1941,to deportation. Safranand Wilhelm Filderman, thehead oftheFederation oftheUnionofJewish Communities, intervened ceaselessly withRomania'spro-Nazidictator, Ion Antonescu, to alleviatethesufferings oftheirpeople and werebothinstrumental, amongst others, inpersuading theRomanianleadertohaltthedeportation ofJewsto Transnistria and to renouncehisintention to accede to Germanwishesthat he deportRomania'ssurviving Jewsto thedeath-camps in Poland. Carol Iancu,in thisbiography ofSafran- thefirst in a majorEuropean language - tracesSafran'sconflicts withtheRomanianauthorities from the timeof his inauguration as chiefrabbi,conflicts whichdid not cease with thetragedy of the Shoah, but extendedto theperiodof Communist rule. The creation bytheRomanianCommunist PartyoftheJewishDemocratic Committee (CDE) as an instrument ofitspolicies,and therefusal ofSafran - and Filderman - to serveon it,brought upon themthehostility ofthe regime. Denied accesstohisoffice, and unabletocarry outhisduties, Safran leftthe country in December 1947,just a fewdaysbeforeKing Michael's abdication.Duringthe six remaining decades of his life,Safrandedicated himself, after hiselectionas chiefrabbiofGeneva in 1948,to reconciliation betweenJews and Christians. He was also a prolificcontributor to the Kabbalah,a bodyofmystical teachings offering interpretations oftheHebrew Scriptures. Iancu'sadmiration forhissubject adornsmanyofthepagesofthisfascinatingbook .The emphasisis upon factualnarrative and thecomplexrelationship betweenSafran,Fildermanand othermembersof Romania'sJewish community duringthewar remainstantalizingly beyondthereader'sgrasp, yetthepagesdedicatedto Safran'saddresses on reconciliation (pp. 185-297) givethereadera senseoftherabbi'sprofoundly humanistic message. UCL SSEES DennisDeletant Stern,Ludmila. Western Intellectuals andthe Soviet Union, 1920-4.0:From RedSquare tothe Left Bank.BASEES /RoutledgeSerieson Russianand East European Studies, 31.Routledge, Londonand NewYork,2007.xii+ 269 pp. Notes.Bibliography. Index.£75.00. Ludmila Stern (not to be confusedwithLiudmilaShtern,the authorof monographs on IosifBrodskiiand SergeiDovlatov)has produceda very readableand clearly written accountofsomeoftheWestern (mainly, butnot exclusively, French)intellectuals who actively supported the 'Great Experiment 'conducted bytheSovietleaderson their subjects. As thetitlesuggests, insomecasesthissupport predated thecomingtopowerand appeasement of Hitler, andso itcannotalways be regarded as an evenslightly reluctant choice ofthelesserevil.In 1920,forinstance, themilitant pacifist HenriBarbusse wroteoftheleadersofSovietRussia:'Not onlyare theyright in their orthodoxy ,theyare also right to imposetheirauthoritarian means.The men in Moscowwereright, ifindeedtheydid so, to maintain byforce, forthepast ...

Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 1920-40: From Red Square to the Left Bank. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, 31 by Ludmila Stern (review)

378 SEER, 87, 2, APRIL 200g oftheextreme-right IronGuardmovement whichcametopowerinSeptember 1940,and then,shortly after Romania'sattackalongsideNazi Germany on the Soviet Union in June 1941,to deportation. Safranand Wilhelm Filderman, thehead oftheFederation oftheUnionofJewish Communities, intervened ceaselessly withRomania'spro-Nazidictator, Ion Antonescu, to alleviatethesufferings oftheirpeople and werebothinstrumental, amongst others, inpersuading theRomanianleadertohaltthedeportation ofJewsto Transnistria and to renouncehisintention to accede to Germanwishesthat he deportRomania'ssurviving Jewsto thedeath-camps in Poland. Carol Iancu,in thisbiography ofSafran- thefirst in a majorEuropean language - tracesSafran'sconflicts withtheRomanianauthorities from the timeof his inauguration as chiefrabbi,conflicts whichdid not cease with thetragedy of the Shoah, but extendedto theperiodof Communist rule. The creation bytheRomanianCommunist PartyoftheJewishDemocratic Committee (CDE) as an instrument ofitspolicies,and therefusal ofSafran - and Filderman - to serveon it,brought upon themthehostility ofthe regime. Denied accesstohisoffice, and unabletocarry outhisduties, Safran leftthe country in December 1947,just a fewdaysbeforeKing Michael's abdication.Duringthe six remaining decades of his life,Safrandedicated himself, after hiselectionas chiefrabbiofGeneva in 1948,to reconciliation betweenJews and Christians. He was also a prolificcontributor to the Kabbalah,a bodyofmystical teachings offering interpretations oftheHebrew Scriptures. Iancu'sadmiration forhissubject adornsmanyofthepagesofthisfascinatingbook .The emphasisis upon factualnarrative and thecomplexrelationship betweenSafran,Fildermanand othermembersof Romania'sJewish community duringthewar remainstantalizingly beyondthereader'sgrasp, yetthepagesdedicatedto Safran'saddresses on reconciliation (pp. 185-297) givethereadera senseoftherabbi'sprofoundly humanistic message. UCL SSEES DennisDeletant Stern,Ludmila. Western Intellectuals andthe Soviet Union, 1920-4.0:From RedSquare tothe Left Bank.BASEES /RoutledgeSerieson Russianand East European Studies, 31.Routledge, Londonand NewYork,2007.xii+ 269 pp. Notes.Bibliography. Index.£75.00. Ludmila Stern (not to be confusedwithLiudmilaShtern,the authorof monographs on IosifBrodskiiand SergeiDovlatov)has produceda very readableand clearly written accountofsomeoftheWestern (mainly, butnot exclusively, French)intellectuals who actively supported the 'Great Experiment 'conducted bytheSovietleaderson their subjects. As thetitlesuggests, insomecasesthissupport predated thecomingtopowerand appeasement of Hitler, andso itcannotalways be regarded as an evenslightly reluctant choice ofthelesserevil.In 1920,forinstance, themilitant pacifist HenriBarbusse wroteoftheleadersofSovietRussia:'Not onlyare theyright in their orthodoxy ,theyare also right to imposetheirauthoritarian means.The men in Moscowwereright, ifindeedtheydid so, to maintain byforce, forthepast reviews 379 threeyears,the dictatorship of Reason' (p. 13).What is disturbing is that dictatorship stillhas itsadmirers - and notonlyamongtheusual suspects - eventoday,whether itis thedictatorship ofReason,or oftheproletariat or,as now,ofthelaw,withtheensuingarbitrariness and lack ofrulesand regulations applicableto all. Of course,mostof the intellectuals - JeanRichardBloch ,TheodoreDreiser,GeorgesFriedmann, AndréMalraux,Paul Nizan,GeorgeBernardShaw,Paul Vaillant-Couturier and othersdiscussed inthisvolume- knewlittle aboutpre-revolutionary Russiaand werefartoo busyto learnRussianor any of theotherlanguagesspokenin theUSSR. Hence thecompletely seriousbut unintentionally ludicrousaccountsof the almostunbelievable progress supposedly beingmade,suchas this:'Imagine thephenomena we see,suchas a youngSamoyedwomanwho,tenyearsago, was a cannibaland nowis doctorofphilosophy at theLeningrad University. There is a Samoyed woman at the Central Committee.And theyalso translate SwiftintoMordovian,whichhas the mostbackwardpopulation amongst all theSovietrepublics' (p. 20).To judge from thisbook,thesewellintentioned visitors paid no attention at all to whattheRussianemigration was sayingand publishing and did not botherto read the easilyavailable French,Germanor English-language tamizdat ofthe1920sand 1930s.There isnothing surprising aboutthis, ofcourse,and Stern'sbookisofconsiderable relevancetoday.For example,ignoranceof Arabicand Arab and Islamic cultureis no barrier forsomeverycleverpeoplewhentheytakeimportant decisionsaffecting Westernfraternal aid to our brothers and sisters in the Greater MiddleEast.AtleastStalinwas neverinvited tostayinBuckingham Palace,unlikesomemorerecentcriminal politicians. This monographis distinguished from earlier books (e.g., by Paul Hollanderand David Caute)on thesamesubjectbyStern'sable use ofthree important Moscowarchives (GARF,RGALI and RGASPI). Thisenablesher toquotefrom theinternal correspondence ofofficials working inMORP (the International Association of Revolutionary Writers), VOKS (theAll-Union Societyfor CulturalRelationswith ForeignCountries)and the Foreign Commission oftheUnionofSovietWriters. Allvisits to theUSSR thatwere controlled bythesebodieswerecarefully prepared, and theinterpreters were obligedtowrite detaileddailyreports on howtheir foreign chargesreactedto thevariousplaces (often modern-day equivalents of Potemkin villages)and meetings towhichtheywereinvited. Thus we can nowreadaccountsofthe visits totheUSSR ofsuchpeopleas thepainter Albert Marquet(pp. 146-49), thepublisher VictorGollancz(pp.158-62)andthenovelist LionFeuchtwanger (pp.162-73). The factthatthelatter's interpreter apparently vanished intothin air fourdays beforehis audience withStalin seems not to have worried Feuchtwanger, althoughit is perhapsjust possiblethathis subsequentless sceptical (toputitmildly) viewoftheLand oftheSovietswaspartly intended tosaveherfrom harm.Certainly, thefactthatRomainRolland(pp. 194-95), LouisAragon(pp. 123-24)andJacquesLipchitz(pp. 128-29)had relatives in theUSSR mighthave affected theirpublishedcomments on thatcountry's political system. Stern, whosegrandparents wereamongthemostdecentand well-meaning Sovietfellow-travellers, frankly admitshernaivety whenshewasjust beginningherresearch :'I also discovered - and thiscame as a surprise - that 380 SEER, 87, 2, APRIL 200g many sympathisers tended to publicise only positiveinformation while overlooking or...

Review: Dennis Deletant, Hitler's Forgotten Ally. Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania 1940-1944, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2006; x + 379 pp.; 9781403993410, £.64.00 (hbk)

Review: Dennis Deletant, Hitler's Forgotten Ally. Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania 1940-1944, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2006; x + 379 pp.; 9781403993410, £.64.00 (hbk)

Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania 1940-1944

Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and his Regime, Romania 1940-1944

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

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...

Transnistria, 1941–1942: The Romanian Mass Murder Campaigns (review)

Reviewed by: Transnistria, 1941–1942: The Romanian Mass Murder Campaigns Robert Levy Keywords Robert Levy, Jean Ancel, Transnistria, 1941–1942: The Romanian Mass Murder Campaigns, Romania, Romanian Jews, Transnistria, 1940s Romania, Antonescu Regime, Genocide, the Holocaust Jean Ancel. Transnistria, 1941–1942: The Romanian Mass Murder Campaigns. Translated by Rachel Garfinkel and Karen Gold. Publications of Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center, volumes 157–159. Tel Aviv: Goldstein-Goren Research Center, Tel Aviv University, 2003. In this outstanding three-volume collection of documents and analysis of Romania’s treatment of Jews in Transnistria in 1941 and 1942, Jean Ancel offers ample proof ‘that will enable students, historians, and Romanian scholars to grasp the essential truth that the Antonescu regime committed genocide’ during World War II (p. 16). That truth, ironically enough, is still debated among Romanians, whose government acknowledged Romania’s involvement in the Holocaust for the first time only in October 2004.1 Until then, both Communist and post-Communist regimes largely ignored the overwhelming evidence of Romania’s extermination of Jews within the Soviet territories it had occupied during the war. Instead, they focused on the fate of Jews in northern Transylvania, deported by the Hungarians to Auschwitz in 1944—as opposed to those under Romanian control in southern Transylvania, who survived the war thanks to Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu’s rescinding his plans in the fall of 1942 to deport the Jews of the ‘Old Kingdom’ of Romania (Wallachia, Moldavia, and southern Transylvania) to Nazi death camps. Antonescu’s mixed and contradictory legacy has enabled Romanians to deny any complicity whatsoever in Hitler’s Holocaust. What Ancel provides is confirmation from Romania’s own archives (made available in 1994–95) of a reality long documented in other sources (Nazi documents, survivor testimonies, war crimes trial transcripts): that Romania not only participated in but independently implemented its own autonomous genocide of Jews in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Ukraine—the only Nazi ally to do so during the war. The first stage of this genocide took place when gendarmerie units attached to the Romanian army ‘carried out a secret order to ‘cleanse the ground’ (i.e., to kill all Jews in rural areas) in Bessarabia and Bukovina’ in the summer of 1941 (p. 39). Ancel [End Page 424] estimates the death toll from this massacre to have been ‘at least 100,000’ Jews (pp. 531–32). Henceforth, Romania’s mass murder campaign took place in Transnistria, a part of Ukraine that Hitler placed under Romania’s exclusive control as a reward for its considerable contribution to the Nazi war effort. (After Germany, Romania furnished the largest army for the blitzkrieg against the USSR.) Comprising land between the Dneister River on the west and the Bug River on the east, Transnistria had three million residents at the start of the war, of whom roughly 311,000 were Jews. Its largest city was Odessa, the cosmopolitan center of the Russian Haskalah, with Jews composing 30 percent of its population (pp. 17–19). It is not known exactly how many of them failed to evacuate with the Soviets: Raul Hilberg estimates more than half; Radu Ioanid suggests ‘perhaps a third.’2 The extermination of Jews in Transnistria was first carried out by the Nazis’ Einsatzgruppe D, with the collaboration of the Romanian army: ‘tens of thousands . . . perhaps even more than 100,000’ Transnistrian Jews were annihilated soon after the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. On August 30, the Germans removed Einsatzgruppe D from the region and allowed Romania sole responsibility for dealing with the Jews there (pp. 32, 49–50). Immediately afterward, Romania set in motion a plan to rid itself of Bessarabian, Bukovinian, and Transnistrian Jewry: on September 30, 1941, Antonescu ordered Transnistria’s Jews imprisoned in camps along the Bug River (p. 87); on October 6, he ordered 110,000 Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jews deported to two forests in the same area (p. 518). The Romanians’ intent was to drive these Jews eastward across the Bug into the waiting hands of the Nazis (pp. 56, 88). What commenced, then, was the shocking spectacle of hordes of terrorized Jews forcibly crossing Transnistria, mostly without food and water, in a myriad of...

Hitler's forgotten ally: Ion Antonescu and his regime, Romania 1940-44

This book is the first complete study, in English, of Antonescu's part in the Second World War. Ion Antonescu was Romania's ruler from September 1940 to August 1944 and a major ally of Hitler. Romania fielded the third largest Axis army of the war, joined the Tripartite Pact in November 1940 as a sovereign state, participated in the attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941 as an equal partner of Germany, and was never occupied by the Wehrmacht.

An Important New Document on the Romanian Policy of Ethnic Cleansing during World War II

A newly discovered plan approved by Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu in December 1942 anticipated massive population transfers on Romanian territory. The following reconstructs its context to show how it and other recently discovered plans related to the Antonescu regime's calculations on the outcome of World War II and priorities for postwar arrangements. The article argues that the existence of such population transfer proposals necessitates a substantive reinterpretation of the sources and dynamics of the Holocaust in Romania.

JEAN ANCEL. Preludiu la asasinat: Pogromul de la Iasi, 29 iunie 1941 [The Pogrom in Iasi, June 29, 1941]. Translated by CAROL BINES. Foreword by YEHUDA BAUER. (Historia.) Bucharest: Editura Polirom. 2005. Pp. 491. $29.50

One week after the German and Romanian armies attacked the Soviet Union, on June 29–30, 1941, the Jewish community in Iaşi (Jassy), in Romanian Moldavia, was shattered by a large-scale pogrom, initiated and supervised by the Romanian army and the local police, with the support of German soldiers on their way to the eastern front. Jews who were arrested and survived the first day's killings perished in the subhuman conditions of the subsequent deportation on the “death trains.” Very few chapters of Holocaust history were so willfully distorted in the aftermath of the event and in the decades that followed. The official statement issued two days after the massacre—“In Iaşi 500 Judeo-communists have been executed”—was only the beginning of the official mystification that continued unaffected by the changes in the political regimes, due to a common desire to obfuscate a massacre that preceded the larger mass killings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen. The official version used by the subsequent communist regime was to reduce the crime to the proportion of mere violent incidents provoked by former members of the Fascist Iron Guard (which had been dismantled by the military dictator Ion Antonescu in January 1941 following a rebellion of his former allies), incited and supported by the German military. The “death trains,” in which thousands of Jews perished after several days of being sealed in boxcars without air and water, were presented as an effort made by the Romanian police to save the victims from the Germans. The culmination of the lies and self-delusion was Antonescu's declaration at his trial in 1946: “In my all life I didn't order the extermination against any person. In my home never a chicken was slaughtered. It's not me who ordered but the General Headquarters” (p. 293).

The German-Romanian Relationship and the Final Solution

On January 14, 1941, Adolf Hitler revealed to the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu the plan to invade the USSR, and on June 12, 1941 his “Guidelines for the Treatment of the Eastern Jews.” Well before the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, Antonescu launched Romania’s Final Solution in response to Hitler’s cue. What we know of the Antonescu-Hitler connection argues against the functionalist interpretation of the Final Solution. Though subsequently forgotten, the Antonescu-Hitler understandings were invoked at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference, when the new communist government sought to blame Germany and exonerate Romania of responsibility in the death of the Jews deported to Transnistria in 1941/42.

Fruitful Death: Mircea Eliade and Ernst Jünger on Human Sacrifice, 1937–1945

AbstractMircea Eliade, the writer and historian of religions, and Ernst Jünger, the hero of the Great War, novelist, and essayist, met in the 1950s and co-edited twelve issues of the periodical Antaios. Before they met and cooperated, however, and while the German writer knew about Eliade from their common friend, Carl Schmitt, they both dealt with the subject of human sacrifice. Eliade began to do so in the thirties, and his interest in that theme was at least in part an aspect of his political activism on behalf of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, or the Iron Guard, the nationalistic and anti-Semitic movement lead by Corneliu Codreanu. Sacrificial ideology was a central aspect of the Legion's political theories, as well as of the practice of its members. After the Iron Guard was outlawed by its allies, and many of its members had been killed, and while the Romanian regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu was still fighting alongside the National Socialist regime in the Second World War, Eliade turned to other aspects of sacrificial ideology. In 1939 he wrote the play Iphigenia, celebrating Agamemnon's daughter as a willing victim whose death made the Greek conquest of Troy possible; and as a member of the regime's diplomatic service in Lisbon he published a book in Portuguese on Romanian virtues (1943), in which he presented what he called Two Myths of Romanian Spirituality, extolling his nation's readiness to die through the description of the sacrificial traditions of Master Manole and of the Ewe Lamb (Mioritza). Jünger's attitude to sacrifice ran along lines that were less traditional: possibly already while serving as a Wehrmacht officer, in his pamphlet Der Friede, the German writer attributed sacrificial status to all the victims of the Second World War, soldiers, workmen, and unknowing innocents, and saw their death as the ransom of a peace "without victory or defeat." In this article, the sacrificial ideologies of the two intellectuals are compared in order to reflect upon the complex interplay between traditional religious themes, more or less freely re-interpreted and transformed, political power, and violent conflict, in an age of warfare marked by fascisms and by the terrible massacre some refer to by the name of an ancient Greek sacrificial practice.