REVIEWS 565 Iancu, Carol and Platon, Alexandru-Florin (eds). Pogromul de la Iași și Holocaustul în România. Le Pogrom de Iași et la Shoah en Roumanie. Editura Universității ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’, Iași, 2015. 364 pp. RON34.00. Amongst the most appalling acts of inhumanity to be perpetrated against the Jews by the Romanian authorities during the Second World War was the pogrom in the Romanian city of Iaşi at the end of June 1941. It has become a convention to include a succession of events — including deportations of Jews by train — that took place over the period 29 June–6 July in Iaşi under the title ‘pogrom’ when in fact it can be argued that the pogrom itself, strictly speaking, spanned the days 29–30 June. This volume, which contains the proceedings of an international conference held in Iaşi in June 2011 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the tragedy, follows that convention. Reconstructing the events of the pogrom, during which scholars give estimates ranging from 1,000 to 14,000 for the numbers of Jews massacred in Iaşi, and calculations that a further 2,713 died during deportation by train southward, is no simple matter. The numbers themselves of those shot in the city are the subject of dispute. The self-serving nature of official reports — some of which contradict each other in essential details — and the absence of an accurate record of the number of victims are impediments to providing a clear account of the murderous behaviour of the German and Romanian forces, and of the criminal incompetence of the Romanian military authorities. Since this volume is principally addressed to a Romanian audience — sixteen of the twenty-five papers are in Romanian, the remainder in French — which has been fed a diet by ultra-nationalists of exaltation of Romania’s wartime pro-German leader Marshal Antonescu, and minimalization of his responsibility for the death of up to 300,000 Jews, the breadth of the papers is significant for they provide context for this episode of the Holocaust in Romania. A number of the papers use eye-witness accounts to corroborate official reports on the pogrom. However, more clarity to its background would have been brought had the reader been told that in preparation for the GermanRomanian attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 the three armies in the ‘General Antonescu Army Group’ each took up a position along the river Prut. The city of Iaşi came within the area of deployment of the German Eleventh Army, and consequently Antonescu declared it a German military zone on the understanding that it would continued to be administered by the Romanian civil authorities. Antonescu took steps to secure the Prut and the area behind it. The Jews in Moldavia were the target of these measures, since Antonescu harboured strong doubts about their loyalty to the Romanian state. On 21 June 1941, the Romanian Army General Staff sent the army, police, gendarmerie SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 566 and prefects an order from Antonescu by telegram that all able-bodied Jews between the ages of eighteen and sixty should be moved immediately from the villages in the frontier area between the Siret and the Prut to the camp in Târgu-Jiu in the south and to the surrounding villages. The remaining Jews from the area, as well as Jews from other villages in Moldova, were to be deported by train with their necessary belongings within forty-eight hours to towns in the province. The first reports from Romanian officials to reach Antonescu explained the murders of Jews in Iaşi as a response by the Germans to the actions of Communist agents, parachuted in to make contact with the Jews in order to carry out sabotage behind the German-Romanian lines. On 1 July, Antonescu ordered an immediate investigation into the violence by General Emanoil Leoveanu,theChiefofPolice.Instead,however,ofhavingonereport,historians are faced by an extraordinary situation: the existence of two reports, written and signed by the same person — Leoveanu — bearing the same date and number, but with a different content. One of the reports argues that the pogrom...
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Jan 1, 2017
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