2 Romanian identification cards compulsory labor for Hebrew WW2 1942 and 1944

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (807) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US, Item: 176270374144 2 Romanian identification cards compulsory labor for Hebrew WW2 1942 and 1944. [156] In parallel with the military losses, Romania was confronted with large-scale economic problems. [159] On the German side, those directly involved in harnessing Romania's economic output for German goals were economic planners Hermann Göring and Walther Funk, together with Hermann Neubacher, the Special Representative for Economic Problems.  2 Romanian identification cards compulsory labor for Hebrew WW2 1942 and 1944 Holocaust Shoah scarce 2 Identification cards for compulsory labor for Hebrew Koch Willy from Bucharest issued by Institutul Central de Statistica (Central Institute for Statistics). The general manager of the Institute, Sabin Manuilă, sheltered at the institute during the Holocaust about 2.800 intelectual Hebrews, saving them for a certain death in other forced labor detachements (even given the fact the Manuilă's wife, Veturia, was a close friend of Maria Antonescu, wife of head of the state Ion Antonescu). These ID's belonged to one of those surviving Hebrews. The 1942 ID has the signature of Sabin Manuilă. Translation from Romanian of the 1942 ID: "ID No. 1050 Koch Willy born in year 1916, living in ... Bucharest, Udricani street, nr. 12bis, is distributed ... for compulsory work at Central Institute of Statistics of the Ministers Council Presidency from Bucharest, Splaiul Unirii (street) nr. 28, on the virtue of (Romanian Military) High General Quarter order nr. 83349 from 11 May 1942. The named person works at Central Institute of Statistics starting from 30 June 1942". Signed General Manager S. Manuil _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2 Identification cards for compulsory labor for Hebrew Koch Willy from Bucharest issued by Institutul Central de Statistica (Central Institute for Statistics). The general manager of the Institute, Sabin Manuilă, sheltered at the institute during the Holocaust about 2.800 intelectual Hebrews, saving them for a certain death in other forced labor detachements (even given the fact the Manuilă's wife, Veturia, was a close friend of Maria Antonescu, wife of head of the state Ion Antonescu). These ID's belonged to one of those surviving Hebrews. The 1942 ID has the signature of Sabin Manuilă. Translation from Romanian of the 1942 ID: "ID No. 1050 Koch Willy born in year 1916, living in ... Bucharest, Udricani street, nr. 12bis, is distributed ... for compulsory work at Central Institute of Statistics of the Ministers Council Presidency from Bucharest, Splaiul Unirii (street) nr. 28, on the virtue of (Romanian Military) High General Quarter order nr. 83349 from 11 May 1942. The named person works at Central Institute of Statistics starting from 30 June 1942". Signed General Manager S. Manuil Maria Antonescu (born Maria Niculescu, also known as Maria General Antonescu, later Maria Mareșal Antonescu, or Rica Antonescu; 3 November 1892 – 18 October 1964) was a Romanian socialite and philanthropist and the wife of World War II authoritarian Prime Minister and Conducător Ion Antonescu. A long-time resident of France, she was twice married before her wedding to Antonescu, and became especially known for her leadership of charitable organization grouped in the Social Works Patronage Council organization, having Veturia Goga for her main collaborator. The Council profited significantly from antisemitic policies targeting Romanian Jews, and especially from the deportation of Bessarabian Jews into Transnistria, taking over several hundred million lei resulting from arbitrary confiscations and extortion. Arrested soon after the August 1944 Coup which overthrew her husband, Maria Antonescu was briefly a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union, and, after a period of uncertainty, tried and sentenced by the new communist regime on charges of economic crimes (embezzlement). Imprisoned for five years and afterward included in the Bărăgan deportations, she spent the final years of her life under internal exile at Bordușani. Biography Early life Born in Calafat, Maria was the daughter of Romanian Army officer Teodor Niculescu, who had fought in the Romanian War of Independence,[2] and his wife Angela (or Anghelina).[3] Angela's sister had married Titică Orăscu, a member of the boyar aristocracy.[2] According to researcher and journalist Lavinia Betea, Teodor Niculescu may have squandered the family fortune, which, she argues, may explain why Maria did not have a dowry.[4] She married Gheorghe Cimbru, a Police officer, with whom she had a son, also known as Gheorghe.[5][6] The child was physically disabled by poliomyelitis.[4][6] Cimbru died before 1919, after which date Maria Niculescu is known to have moved to Paris.[3] In July 1919, she married a second time, to businessman Guillaume Auguste Joseph Pierre Fueller,[3] a French Jew.[4][7] Having divorced from Fueller in 1926 and married Antonescu, Romania's former military attaché in France, she soon after moved to Bucharest, where her new husband served as Secretary General of the Defense Ministry. The two reportedly met and fell in love before her divorce was final.[4] Sources diverge on the marriage date, which is either indicated as 29 August 1927,[3] or an unspecified day in 1928.[8] Their life as a couple was reportedly marked by Antonescu's rigidity and distaste for the public life.[6] However, as Antonescu reached prominence and earned important political assignments, Maria too became the focus of public attention.[3][4][6][9] Reputedly, when she eventually did become politically important, the upper class viewed her as rather a parvenue.[6][9] In 1938, when the relationship between Ion Antonescu and King Carol II degenerated into open conflict, the monarch engineered Ion Antonescu's trial for bigamy, based on charges that she and Fueller had never actually divorced. Assisted by his lawyer Mihai Antonescu, the future Conducător disproved the claim, and the perception that he was being persecuted by an authoritarian ruler reportedly earned him the public's respect.[4][6][10] By then, although the officer spoke out against Carol II's extramarital affair with the commoner Elena Lupescu, his own marriage to a divorcée was being treated with contempt by some commentators of the time.[4][6] Early war years In late 1940, as a result of a major social crisis, the National Legionary State was set up in Romania, and Carol relinquished the throne in favor of the junior king Michael I. Antonescu took over with dictatorial powers, as Conducător, and struck a partnership in government with the fascist Iron Guard. At around this time, Maria became good friends with Veturia Goga, widow of antisemitic Premier Octavian Goga. Their friendship slowly turned into a political lobby, which also involved Veturia (or Sanda) Manuilă, wife of the sociologist Sabin Manuilă, Veturia Barbul, wife of diplomat Gheorghe Barbul, writer Georgeta Cancicov (wife of bureaucrat Mircea Cancicov) and, for a while, Elvira Sima, married to Iron Guard commander Horia Sima.[9] The political wives' circle was in some ways Maria Antonescu's "court", rivaling that of Queen Mother Helen, just as Antonescu's had come to rival the kingly court; for this and other reasons, Queen Helen became especially distrustful of Maria Antonescu's political initiatives.[9] Reportedly, the queen complained to her foreign contacts that the Antonescus were "inconsiderate".[11] Nevertheless, at the very start of 1941, Maria Antonescu joined the board of Regina Elisabeta Society, a welfare organization chaired by Queen Helen.[12] She also took over a new state-run charity, Sprijinul ("The Support"), which reputedly made her a contender in the conflict opposing her husband to the Guard, before the Legionary Rebellion of early 1941 brought the Guard's downfall. According to Spanish historian Francisco Veiga, her humanitarian effort was endorsed by the more conservative pro-Antonescu factions in reaction to Guardist projects such as Ajutorul Legionar.[13] Sprijinul ensured participation from Veturia Goga.[13] They were also joined by the wife of World War I hero, General Constantin Prezan,[6] and by Sanda Manuilă.[3][14][15] As a mark of emancipation after the 1941 Rebellion, Elvira Sima was formally purged, and accused (falsely) of having embezzled charity funds.[9] From his exile in Nazi Germany, Horia Sima accused the "three Veturias" of having masterminded his and his wife's downfall, through their contacts with Maria Antonescu.[14] The latter was promoted to head of the Social Works Patronage Council, merging all the recognized charities. It had been established by decree on 20 November 1940,[16][1] but received its charter only on 12 June 1942. It specified that the council was "a State institution with its own juridical person and patrimony", whose members ex officio included government ministers and the Patriarch of All Romania; others were designated by Conducător decrees.[1] As reported by Revista de Igienă Socială (the Romanian eugenicists' review), "its vast program" included "coordinating public and private benefit institutions in the realm of welfare, guiding and controlling private charities, and lastly taking the initiative in setting up new social welfare establishments."[16] The council was especially interested in "protecting the working class", spending a reported 100 million lei on school cafeterias, and some 1 million lei on free or subsidized soup kitchens.[16] The council's establishment coincided with Romania's participation in Operation Barbarossa, which signified the recovery of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and the occupation of Transnistria. Awarded its own badge (the Blue Cross), the Council then became a direct competitor to Queen Helen's earlier work in welfare and relief, as well as a would-be replacement for the Romanian Red Cross.[9][17] Its activities were promptly covered and advertised by the regime's official propaganda.[17] Beyond simply directing the work of private welfare institutions, the council was suspected of wanting to subvert them and take over their investment.[18] It openly confiscated the patrimony of older welfare organizations, such as Umanitatea, owner of the girls' colony in Slănic.[19] During the early months of 1941, the Iron Guard having been successfully repressed, Maria Antonescu and Veturia Goga coaxed support for the regime from the old establishment parties (although nominally outlawed since Carol II's rule, these were cautiously tolerated by Antonescu). Official newspapers publicized their visit to Topoloveni, a former fief of the National Peasants' Party (PNȚ), where they met with PNȚ leader Ion Mihalache. The event was organized by Admiral Dan Zaharia, who was simultaneously a PNȚ cadre and a friend of her husband's.[20] Although she refrained from overt political statements, Maria Antonescu gave praise to Mihalache as a community and civil society leader.[21] The pro-Allied PNȚ leader, Iuliu Maniu, saw in this an attempt by Antonescu to co-opt Mihalache as a minister. His immediate response was to dissuade Mihalache from "compromising himself" with such affiliations.[21] For her part, Maria Antonescu alternated such displays of traditionalism with the public endorsement for fascist causes. In July 1941, she was an official guest at the Anti-Masonry Exhibit in Bucharest.[22] Antisemitic plunder and spoils of war Maria Antonescu with Gheorghe Alexianu (governor of Transnistria), Mihai Antonescu and Nazi German diplomats, at the "Transnistria Exhibit" (1941 or 1942) With the continuation of war on the Eastern Front, the Social Works Patronage Council took it upon itself to look after the needs of first-line soldiers and their families, as well as to protect a special category of vulnerable individuals: the IOVR (invalids, orphans, widows).[16] By December 1941, it had raised and spent some 25 million lei for the needs of men under arms and 138 million for the wounded; 9.7 million for families of active duty soldiers, and 17 million for invalids, widows or orphans.[16] Romania's participation in the war came with the generalization of antisemitic measures and the massive deportations of the Jews to occupied Transnistria, a process initiated by her husband, and marked by events in which she herself was implicated (see Holocaust in Romania). In October 1941, Wilhelm Filderman, head of the Jewish Communities' Federation, sent her and her husband letters of protest, stressing that the deportations were tantamount to death—messages which went unanswered.[23] In November, after the ghetto in Chișinău was sacked and its population deported to Transnistria, the authorities set aside confiscated property for the Patronage Council, for the Red Cross, for Romanian hospitals and the Romanian Army.[24] Such arbitrary confiscations inaugurated a chain of supply for the Patronage Council. In August 1942, the Jewish entrepreneurs Max Auschnitt and Franz von Neumann donated 50 million Swiss francs to the same charity, a precautionary measure which may have played a part in the decision to indefinitely postpone transports from Romania to Nazi extermination camps.[25] This event was notably recounted in a testimony by Ioan Mocsony-Stârcea, a member of King Michael's entourage.[26] The same month, Jewish Affairs Commissioner Radu Lecca, whose office implied regular extortion of the Jewish community, collected 1.2 billion lei from the ghettos through the government-controlled Central Jewish Office, of which 400 million were redirected toward Maria Antonescu's charities.[9][27] The total sum passed by the Central Jewish Office toward the patronage Council exceeded 780 million lei.[28] This type of abuse also touched other communities. Thus, among the special provisions ordered by Governor Gheorghe Alexianu and affecting Ukrainian peasants in Transnistria, one set produce quotas for Maria Antonescu's project, as hospital meals for wounded soldiers.[29] Having herself reserved a special Blue Cross tax from cinema revenues nationally, Maria Antonescu also looked into financing a fleet of traveling cinemas. It was furnished with spoils of war from Odessa Film Studio.[17] Lecca himself later stated: "The need for extra-budgetary money was continuously rising", arguing that, in addition to pressures from the part of Mihai Antonescu and German Ambassador Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, "Mrs. Antonescu asked for money for her patronage".[30] Occasionally, however, Maria Antonescu intervened with her husband to alleviate some antisemitic measures. She is thus believed to have persuaded the Conducător not to create a special ghetto in Iași (where the survivors of the 1941 pogrom were supposed to be confined), in exchange for which local Jews provided the Patronage Council with 5 million lei.[31] Reputedly, she and Veturia Goga also mediated between the Conducător and Petru Groza, left-wing activist and leader of the clandestine Ploughmen's Front, whose stance against the regime later made him the Antonescu regime's political prisoner.[32] It was also as a result of her intercession that Romania's Chief Rabbi, Alexandru Șafran, obtained the reversal of an order to nationalize and desecrate Bucharest's Sevastopol Jewish Cemetery.[33] However, Șafran also left an account of her unwillingness to provide water and milk for children and infants confined in Cernăuți en route to Transnistria.[34] Maria Antonescu is believed to have eventually heeded other calls, and to have pressured Ion Antonescu into allowing Jewish deportees from Dorohoi to return home.[9] She is also credited with having collected medicine, food, clothing and window panes to be sent into Transnistria, and to have accepted Patronage Council donations in exchange for allowing other Jews to escape.[9] Detention, sentencing and final years The Antonescus' status changed dramatically after King Michael and opposition forces carried out the August 1944 Coup, arresting the Conducător and taking Romania out of its Axis alliance. Her son Gheorghe Cimbru died at Călimănești on 29 August[2] or 10 September.[7] Reportedly, his death was suicide, caused by the distress he felt over his adoptive father's downfall.[4][6] Having fled to Băile Herculane,[3] Maria Antonescu was arrested in Căzănești, where she had been offered refuge by a close friend of her personal secretary.[3][35] According to one account, she had asked for protection from Queen Mother Helen who, as a noted adversary, refused to grant it.[4] In March 1945, Maria Antonescu was taken into custody by the Soviet occupation forces, and, like her husband before her, was transported into Soviet territory, where she was only interrogated once.[3][4][35] They were not told of each other, even though their cells at Moscow's Lubyanka are said to have shared a wall.[6] From November 1945, the leftist Union of Patriots issued calls for her and Veturia Goga to be tried in Romanian custody.[36] Maria Antonescu returned in April 1946, at the same time as her husband. She was submitted to interrogations by Interior Ministry Secretary, Romanian Communist Party member and public investigator Avram Bunaciu, who recorded her views on Antonescu's political choices.[3] Part of the inquiry focused on Maria Antonescu's own involvement. When asked about her support for a war of aggression, which Bunaciu defined as "a war of plunder", she replied: "When I started [work with charities] there was no war. What was I to do? Not to keep going? I originally started because of all the misery in the Romanian land."[3] She denied accusations of having participated in extortion, but admitted to having received funds from Lecca, and replied that she had never considered providing aid to Transnistrian deportees because Jews had "enough funds", and denied knowledge that Jews had been imprisoned in concentration camps.[3] Maria Antonescu's grave in Bellu cemetery According to conflicting accounts, she was simply allowed to go free,[35] or detained at Malmaison prison before her declining health made the authorities commit her to Nicolae Gh. Lupu's clinic, ultimately assigning her house arrest in a Bucharest lodging she shared with her mother.[3] She lacked the means to support herself, and was cared for by her friends and family.[3][35] After his People's Court trial and just prior to his June 1946 execution for war crimes, Ion Antonescu met his wife one final time, handing her his watch with the request that she imagine "it is my heart beating", and never let it stop.[6] Again arrested in 1950, she was indicted by the communist regime and found guilty of "bringing disaster to the country" and economic crimes in general, and of embezzlement in particular.[28] From 1950 to 1955, she was imprisoned at Mislea, a former convent in Cobia.[3][17][35] She was kept there under the rules of "in-secrecy" solitary confinement, and, according to the account of one of her fellow inmates, allowed to step out of her cell only at night, when she would collect and smoke the cigarette butts discarded by the guards.[4] After her release from prison, Maria Antonescu was assigned "obligatory domicile" on the Bărăgan Plain, within a wave of Bărăgan deportations.[3][4][6][35][37] While in Bordușani, Ialomița County, she met and befriended fellow women detainees from the White Squadron.[38] Another witness to her deportation was engineer Eugen Ionescu, who later escaped to Australia. Ionescu later retold his conversations with the Conducător's wife, specifically her complaint that Ion Antonescu had been refused trial by the International Military Tribunal.[37] The Ialomița area is characterized by weather extremes. Maria Antonescu complained that snowdrifts prevented her from leaving her home in winter, and spent much of her time knitting.[4] According to one witness account, she was also held in Giurgeni, and worked for the local state farm's cafeteria.[39] She was by then afflicted with a debilitating heart condition, and, after petitioning the authorities, was briefly allowed to return to Bucharest for treatment in 1958 or 1959.[3] Maria Antonescu was again in Bordușani from 1959 to 1964, when a turn for the worse saw her internment to a specialist clinic, and then at the Colțea Hospital, where she was cared for by a friend doctor.[3] She died there as the result of a third heart attack, and was buried in Bellu cemetery, in a tomb owned by distant relatives.[35] Legacy The Antonescus were ktitors of three Romanian Orthodox churches in separate Bucharest areas: Mărgeanului Church in Rahova, Dămăroaia Church, and the Saints Constantine and Helena Church in Muncii, where they are depicted in a mural.[40] Maria herself also founded Sfânta Maria Church of Ghencea and contributed significantly to constructing Delea Nouă Church.[41] In 1941, after floods took a toll on Argeș County, the two founded Antonești, a model village in Corbeni (partly built by Ukrainian prisoners of war, and later passed into state property).[42] Although her picture was a regular presence on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, Maria Antonescu was nevertheless perceived by some of her contemporaries as a withdrawn and secondary figure.[3] Accounts of her life were provided by various public figures, including Princess Ileana (who met her shortly before leaving the country in 1947) and anti-communist members of the Romanian diaspora.[3] Some mentions of her were made in Bénie sois-tu, prison ("Bless You, Prison"), a best-selling book of memoirs by Nicole Valéry Grossu, a former Mislea inmate and defector to France.[43] During her husband's years in power, the official press made Maria Antonescu the object of reverence, prompting speculation that she was vying for popularity with Queen Helen.[9] She was the sole subject of two nationally released films, and an obligatory presence on weekly newsreels.[17] Another propaganda film about Romanian charities was censored and had to be redone, because officials felt that it shed too much positive light on the Red Cross, and not enough on the Blue Cross.[17] Her omnipresence in press reports alienated the public, and, in 1943, she acknowledged that the society, especially "the lower class", was becoming overexposed to her Blue Cross propaganda, and that "the workers are turning against the Patronage Council".[17] According to Revista de Igienă Socială, Antonescu's Council was highly inefficient at targeting people in need, "especially so in the provinces", and its generous welfare program, that "promoted vice", ought to have been replaced with conditional cash transfers.[18] The council's soup kitchens, Revista argued, were "a desolate spectacle".[18] By then, underground propaganda was depicting Antonescu as a new and less qualified version of the infamous Elena Lupescu, who had been Carol II's mistress and string-puller.[9] According to writer Ion Caraion, the ridicule she was subjected to by adversaries of the Antonescu regime was unwittingly reflected by the press organ Timpul. Unknown hands subverted the caption of a photograph showing her, Veturia Goga and Sanda Manuilă visiting a soldier's hospital, to read as if they were having intercourse with the wounded.[15] Before his death, Antonescu addressed his wife a final letter, in which he restated his claim to innocence and belief that posterity would exonerate him.[4][44] He expressed a wish that Maria withdraw to an Orthodox monastery, adding: "There you will find the peace necessary for the soul and the piece of bread which today you cannot afford."[6][45] The Cobia nunnery imprisonment, British historian Dennis Deletant notes, was "an ironic twist" on this last wish.[35] The original was not preserved and did not reach Maria Antonescu, but its text was copied by Titus Stoica, the Conducător's attorney, a version which he hid inside an armchair just prior to being himself arrested by communist authorities. Reportedly, Stoica forgot its location, and the document was only uncovered decades later by an upholsterer.[6] In 2002, some 12 years after the Romanian Revolution overthrew communism, actress Margareta Pogonat portrayed Maria Antonescu in Binecuvântată fii, închisoare, a film directed by Nicolae Mărgineanu (based on, and named after, Valéry Grossu's book, and having Maria Ploae for its main protagonist).[43] According to Mărgineanu, Pogonat accepted "the silent, almost figurative role" having as her motivation the fact that "she herself was imprisoned at the age of 16, because her parents were landowners."[43] The Antonescu estate was passed into state property, in accordance with provisions for war criminals. This included the watch handed by Ion Antonescu to his wife, which was confiscated from her minutes after she had received it.[6] In 2008, Maria Antonescu's collateral inheritors stated a claim on the couple's villa in Predeal. It was rejected by a Brașov tribunal, which cited the original confiscation law.[46]  The history of the Jews in Romania concerns the Jews both of Romania and of Romanian origins, from their first mention on what is present-day Romanian territory. Minimal until the 18th century, the size of the Jewish population increased after around 1850, and more especially after the establishment of Greater Romania in the aftermath of World War I. A diverse community, albeit an overwhelmingly urban one, Jews were a target of religious persecution and racism in Romanian society from the late-19th century debate over the "Jewish Question" and the Jewish residents' right to citizenship, to the genocide carried out in the lands of Romania as part of the Holocaust. The latter, coupled with successive waves of aliyah, has accounted for a dramatic decrease in the overall size of Romania's present-day Jewish community. Jewish communities existed in Romanian territory in the 2nd century AD, after Roman annexation of Dacia in 106 AD. During the reign of Peter the Lame (1574–1579), the Jews of Moldavia, mainly traders from Poland who were competing with locals, were taxed and ultimately expelled.[5] The authorities decided in 1650 and 1741 that Jews had to wear clothing evidencing their status and ethnicity.[6] The first blood libel in Moldavia (and, as such, in Romania) was made in 1710, when the Jews of Târgu Neamț were charged with having killed a Christian child for ritual purposes.[7] An anti-Jewish riot occurred in Bucharest in the 1760s.[8] During the Russo-Turkish War, 1768-1774, the Jews in the Danubian Principalities had to endure great hardships. Massacres and pillages were perpetrated in almost every town and village in the country. During the Greek War of Independence, which signalled the Wallachian uprising of 1821, Jews were victims of pogroms and persecutions. In the 1860s, there was another riot motivated by blood libel accusations.[9] Antisemitism was officially enforced under the premierships of Ion Brătianu. During his first years in office (1875) Brătianu reinforced and applied old discrimination laws, insisting that Jews were not allowed to settle in the countryside (and relocating those that had done so), while declaring many Jewish urban inhabitants to be vagrants and expelling them from the country. The emigration[dubious – discuss] of Romanian Jews on a larger scale commenced soon after 1878. By 1900 there were 250,000 Romanian Jews: 3.3% of the population, 14.6% of the city dwellers, 32% of the Moldavian urban population and 42% of Iași.[10] Between the establishment of the National Legionary State (September 1940) and 1942, 80 anti-Jewish regulations were passed. Starting at the end of October, 1940, the Romanian fascist movement known as the Iron Guard began a massive antisemitic campaign, torturing and beating Jews and looting their shops (see Dorohoi Pogrom), culminating in the failed coup accompanied by a pogrom in Bucharest, in which 125 Jews were killed.[11] Military dictator Ion Antonescu eventually stopped the violence and chaos created by the Iron Guard by brutally suppressing the rebellion, but continued the policy of oppression and massacre of Jews, and, to a lesser extent, of Roma. After Romania entered the war at the start of Operation Barbarossa, atrocities against Jews became common, starting with the Iași pogrom. According to the Wiesel Commission report released by the Romanian government in 2004, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust in Romania and the occupied Soviet territories under Romanian control, among them the Transnistria Governorate. An additional 135,000 Jews living under Hungarian control in Northern Transylvania also were murdered in the Holocaust, as did some 5,000 Romanian Jews in other countries.[12][13][14] On the current territory of Romania, between 290,000 and 360,000 Romanian Jews survived World War II (355,972 persons, according to statistics from the end of the war).[15] During the communist regime in Romania, there was a mass emigration to Israel, and in 1987, only 23,000 Jews lived in Romania. Today, the majority of Romanian Jews live in Israel, while modern-day Romania continues to host a modest Jewish population. In the 2011 census, 3,271 people declared themselves to be Jewish. Early history Jewish communities on what would later become Romanian territory were attested as early as the 2nd century AD, at a time when the Roman Empire had established its rule over Dacia. Inscriptions and coins have been found in such places as Sarmizegetusa and Orșova. The existence of the Crimean Karaites, an ethnic group adherent of Karaite Judaism, suggests that there was a steady Jewish presence around the Black Sea, including in parts of today's Romania, in the trading ports from the mouths of the Danube and the Dniester (see Cumania); they may have been present in some Moldavian fairs by the 16th century or earlier.[16] The earliest Jewish (most likely Sephardi) presence in what would become Moldavia was recorded in Cetatea Albă (1330); in Wallachia, they were first attested in the 1550s, living in Bucharest.[17] During the second half of the 14th century, the future territory of Romania became an important place of refuge for Jews expelled from the Kingdom of Hungary and Poland by King Louis I. In Transylvania, Hungarian Jews were recorded in Saxon citadels around 1492.[18] Prince Roman I (1391-1394?) exempted the Jews from military service, in exchange for a tax of 3 löwenthaler per person. Also in Moldavia, Stephen the Great (1457–1504) treated Jews with consideration. Isaac ben Benjamin Shor of Iași (Isak Bey, originally employed by Uzun Hassan) was appointed stolnic, being subsequently advanced to the rank of logofăt; he continued to hold this office under Bogdan the Blind (1504–1517), the son and successor of Stephen. At this time both Danubian Principalities came under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, and a number of Sephardim living in Istanbul migrated to Wallachia, while Jews from Poland and the Holy Roman Empire settled in Moldavia. Although they took an important part in Ottoman government and formed a large part of a community of foreign creditors and traders,[16] Jews were harassed by the hospodars of the two Principalities. Moldavia's Prince Stephen IV (1522) deprived the Jewish merchants of almost all the rights given to them by his two predecessors; Petru Rareș confiscated Jewish wealth in 1541, after alleging that Jews in the cattle trade had engaged in tax evasion.[16] Alexandru Lăpușneanu (first rule: 1552–61) persecuted the community alongside other social categories, until he was dethroned by Jacob Heraclides, a Greek Lutheran, who was lenient to his Jewish subjects; Lăpușneanu did not renew his persecutions after his return on the throne in 1564. The role of Ottoman and local Jews in financing various princes increased as Ottoman economic demands were mounting after 1550 (in the 1570s, the influential Jewish Duke of the Archipelago, Joseph Nasi, backed both Heraclides and Lăpușneanu to the throne); several violent incidents throughout the period were instigated by princes unable to repay their debts.[19] During the first short reign of Peter the Lame (1574–1579) the Jews of Moldavia, mainly traders from Poland who were competing with locals, were taxed and ultimately expelled.[5] In 1582, he succeeded in regaining his rule over the country with the help of the Jewish physician Benveniste, who was a friend of the influential Solomon Ashkenazi;[5] the latter then exerted his influence with the Prince in favor of his coreligionists. In Wallachia, Prince Alexandru II Mircea (1567–1577) engaged as his private secretary and counselor Isaiah ben Joseph, who used his influence on behalf of the Jews. In 1573 Isaiah was dismissed, owing to court intrigues, but he was not harmed any further, and subsequently left for Moldavia (where he entered the service of Muscovy's Grand Prince Ivan the Terrible). Through the efforts of Solomon Ashkenazi, Aron Tiranul was placed on the throne of Moldavia; nevertheless, the new ruler persecuted and executed nineteen Jewish creditors in Iași, who were decapitated without process of law.[5] At around the same time, in Wallachia, the violent repression of creditors peaked under Michael the Brave, who, after killing Turkish creditors in Bucharest (1594), probably engaged in violence against Jews settled south of the Danube during his campaign in Rumelia (while maintaining good relations with Transylvanian Jews).[20] Early Modern Age In 1623, the Jews in Transylvania were awarded certain privileges by Prince Gabriel Bethlen, who aimed to attract entrepreneurs from Ottoman lands into his country; the grants were curtailed during following decades, when Jews were only allowed to settle in Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia).[21] Among the privileges granted was one allowing Jews to wear traditional dress; eventually, the authorities in Gyulafehérvár decided (in 1650 and 1741) to allow Jews to wear only clothing evidencing their status and ethnicity.[6] The status of Jews who had converted to Eastern Orthodoxy was established in Wallachia by Matei Basarab's Pravila de la Govora and in Moldavia by Vasile Lupu's Carte românească de învățătură.[22] The latter ruler (1634–1653) treated the Jews with consideration until the appearance of the Cossacks (1648), who marched against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and who, while crossing the region, killed many Jews; the violence led many Ashkenazi Jews from Poland took refuge in Moldavia and Wallachia, establishing small but stable communities.[23] Massacres and forced conversions by the Cossacks occurred in 1652, when the latter came to Iași on the occasion of the Vasile Lupu's daughter marriage to Timush, the son of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and during the rule of Gheorghe Ștefan.[24] According to Anton Maria Del Chiaro, secretary of the Wallachian princes between 1710 and 1716, the Jewish population of Wallachia was required to respect a certain dresscode. Thus, they were prohibited from wearing clothes of other color than black or violet, or to wear yellow or red boots.[25] Nevertheless, the Romanian scholar Andrei Oișteanu argued that such ethnic and religious social stigma was uncommon in Moldavia and Wallachia, as well as throughout the Eastern Orthodox areas of Europe.[26] The first blood accusation in Moldavia (and, as such, in Romania) was made April 5, 1710, when the Jews of Târgu Neamț were charged with having killed a Christian child for ritual purposes´.[7] The instigator was a baptized Jew who had helped to carry the body of a child, murdered by Christians, into the courtyard of the synagogue[citation needed]. On the next day five Jews were killed, others were maimed, and every Jewish house was pillaged, while the representatives of the community were imprisoned and tortured. Meanwhile, some influential Jews appealed to Prince Nicholas Mavrocordatos (the first Phanariote ruler) in Iași, who ordered an investigation resulting in the freeing of those arrested. This was the first time that the Orthodox clergy participated in attacks on Jews. It was due to the clergy's instigations that in 1714 a similar charge was brought against the Jews of the city of Roman – the murder by a group of Roman Catholics of a Christian girl-servant to Jewish family was immediately blamed on Jews; every Jewish house was plundered, and two prominent Jews were hanged, before the real criminals were discovered by the authorities. The Great Synagogue (Iași), built c. 1670 Under Constantin Brâncoveanu, Wallachian Jews were recognized as a special guild in Bucharest, led by a starost.[27] Jews in both Wallachia and Moldavia were subject to the Hakham Bashi in Iași, but soon the Bucharest starost assumed several religious duties.[28] Overtaxed and persecuted under Ștefan Cantacuzino (1714–1716),[29] Wallachian Jews obtained valuable privileges during Nicholas Mavrocordatos' rule (1716–1730) in that country (the Prince notably employed the Jewish savant Daniel de Fonseca at his court).[30] Another anti-Jewish riot occurred in Bucharest in the 1760s, and was encouraged by the visit of Ephram II, Patriarch of Jerusalem.[8] In 1726, in the Moldavian borough of Onițcani, four Jews were accused of having kidnapped a five-year-old child, of killing him on Easter and of collecting his blood in a barrel. They were tried at Iași under the supervision of Moldavian Prince Mihai Racoviță, and eventually acquitted following diplomatic protests. The event was echoed in several contemporary chronicles and documents — for example, the French ambassador to the Porte, Jean-Baptiste Louis Picon, remarked that such an accusation was no longer accepted in "civilized countries".[31] The most obvious effects on the condition of the Jewish inhabitants of Moldavia were witnessed during the reign of John Mavrocordatos (1744–1747): a Jewish farmer in the vicinity of Suceava reported the prince to the Porte for allegedly using his house to rape a number of kidnapped Jewish women; Mavrocordatos had his accuser hanged. This act aroused the anger of Mahmud I's kapucu in Moldavia, and the prince paid the penalty with the loss of his throne.[8] Russo-Turkish Wars Main article: History of the Russo-Turkish wars During the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, Jews in the Danubian Principalities endured great hardships. Massacres and pillages were perpetrated in almost every town and village in the country. When peace was restored, both princes, Alexander Mavrocordatos of Moldavia and Nicholas Mavrogheni of Wallachia, pledged their special protection to Jews, whose condition remained favorable until 1787, when both Janissaries and the Imperial Russian Army took part in pogroms. The community was also subject to persecutions by the locals. Jewish children were seized and forcibly baptized. Ritual-murder accusations became widespread, with one made at Galați in 1797 leading to exceptionally severe results – with Jews being attacked by a large mob, driven from their homes, robbed, waylaid on the streets, and many killed on the spot, while some were forced into the Danube and drowned, and others who took refuge in the synagogue were burned to death in the building; a few escaped after being given protection and refuge by a priest. In 1803, shortly before his death, the Wallachian Metropolitan Iacob Stamati instigated attacks on the Bucharest community by publishing his Înfruntarea jidovilor ("Facing the Jews"), which pretended to be the confession of a former rabbi; however, Jews were offered refuge by Stamati's replacement, Veniamin Costachi.[32] A seminal event occurred in 1804, when ruler Constantine Ypsilanti dismissed accusations of ritual murder as "the unfounded opinion" of "stupid people", and ordered that their condemnation be read in churches throughout Wallachia; the allegations no longer surfaced during the following period.[33] During the Russo-Turkish War of 1806-1812, the Russian invasion was again accompanied by massacres of Jews. Kalmyk irregular soldiers in Ottoman service, who appeared in Bucharest at the close of the Russo-Turkish War, terrorised the city's Jewish population. At around the same time, a conflict emerged in Wallachia between Jews under foreign protection (sudiți) and local ones (hrisovoliți), after the latter tried to impose a single administration for the community, a matter which was finally settled in favor of the hrisovoliți by Prince Jean Georges Caradja (1813).[28] In Habsburg-ruled Transylvania, the reforms carried out by Joseph II allowed Jews to settle in towns directly subject to the Hungarian Crown. However, pressure placed on the community remained stringent for the following decades. Early 19th century Lithograph of a cosmopolitan fair in Iași (c. 1845); two Orthodox Jews are visible to the right The Bucharest Synagogue (restored after World War II), originally built 1864 – 1866 By 1825, the Jewish population in Wallachia was estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000 people, almost all Sephardi. Of these, the larger part resided in Bucharest (probably as many as 7,000 in 1839); and at around the same time, Moldavia was home to about 12,000 Jews.[34] In parallel, the Jewish population in Bukovina rose from 526 in 1774 to 11,600 in 1848.[35] In the early 19th century, Jews who sought refuge from Osman Pazvantoğlu's campaign in the Balkans established communities in Wallachian-ruled Oltenia.[30] In Moldavia, Scarlat Callimachi's Code (1817) allowed Jews to purchase urban property, but prevented them from settling in the countryside (while purchasing town property became increasingly difficult due to popular prejudice).[30] During the Greek War of Independence, which signaled the Wallachian uprising of 1821 and the Danubian Principalities' occupation by Filiki Eteria troops under Alexander Ypsilantis, Jews were victims of pogroms and persecutions in places such as Fălticeni, Hertsa, Piatra Neamț, the Secu Monastery, Târgoviște, and Târgu Frumos. Jews in Galați managed to escape over the Prut River with assistance from Austrian diplomats.[33] Weakened by the clash between Ypsilantis and Tudor Vladimirescu, the Eterists were massacred by the Ottoman intervention armies, and during this episode, Jewish communities engaged in reprisals in Secu and Slatina.[33] Following the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople (which allowed the two principalities to freely engage in foreign trade), Moldavia, where commercial niches had been largely left unoccupied, became a target for migration of Ashkenazi Jews persecuted in Imperial Russia and the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. By 1838, their number seems to have reached 80,000,[36] and over 195,000, or almost 12% of the country's population, in 1859 (with an additional 50,000 passing through to Wallachia between the two estimates).[37] Despite initial interdictions under the Russian occupation of 1829 (when it was first regulated that non-Christians were not to be regarded as citizens), many of the new immigrants became leaseholders of estates and tavern-keepers, serving to increase both the revenue and demands of boyars, and leading in turn to an increase in economic pressures over those working the land or buying products[38] (usual prejudice against Jews accused tavern-keepers of encouraging alcoholism). At the same time, several Jews rose to prominence and high social status, with most families involved in Moldavian banking around the 1850s being of Jewish origin.[39] After 1832, following adoption of the Organic Statute, Jewish children were accepted in schools in the two Principalities only if they wore the same clothing as others. In Moldavia, the 1847 decree of Prince Mihail Sturdza compelled Jews to abandon the traditional dress code.[40] Before the Revolutions of 1848, which found their parallel in the Wallachian revolution, many restrictive laws against Jews were enacted; although they had some destructive effects, they were never strictly enforced. In various ways, Jews took part in the Wallachian revolt; for example, Constantin Daniel Rosenthal, the painter, distinguished himself in the revolutionary cause, and paid for his activity with his life (being tortured to death in Budapest by Austrian authorities). The major document to be codified by the 1848 Wallachian revolutionaries, the Islaz Proclamation, called for "the emancipation of Israelites and political rights for all compatriots of different faiths".[41] After the end of the Crimean War, the struggle for the union of the two principalities began. Both parties, Unionists and anti-Unionists sought support of Jews, with each promising full equality; and proclamations to this effect were issued between 1857 and 1858. In 1857, the community published its first magazine, Israelitul Român, edited by the Romanian radical Iuliu Barasch. This process of gradual integration resulted in the creation of an informal Jewish Romanian identity, while conversion to Christianity, despite encouragement by the authorities,[30] remained confined to exceptional cases.[33] Under Alexandru Ioan Cuza State Jewish Theater in Bucharest An ornately decorated Jewish Cemetery building, Brasov, Romania From the beginning of the reign of Alexandru Ioan Cuza (1859–1866), the first ruler (Domnitor) of the united principalities, the Jews became a prominent factor in the politics of the country. This period was, however, inaugurated by another riot motivated by blood libel accusations, begun during Easter 1859 in Galați.[9] Regulations on clothing were confirmed inside Moldavia by two orders of Mihail Kogălniceanu, Minister of Internal Affairs (issues in 1859 and 1860 respectively).[40] Following adoption of the 1859 regulation, soldiers and civilians would walk the streets of Iași and some other Moldavian towns, assaulting Jews, using scissors to shred their clothing, but also to cut their beards or their sidelocks; drastic measures applied by the Army Headquarters put a stop to such turmoil.[40] In 1864, Prince Cuza, owing to difficulties between his government and the general assembly, dissolved the latter and decided to submit a draft of a constitution granting universal suffrage. He proposed creating two chambers (of senators and deputies respectively), to extend the franchise to all citizens, and to emancipate the peasants from forced labor (expecting to nullify the remaining influence of the landowners – no longer boyars after the land reform). In the process, Cuza also expected financial support from both the Jews and the Armenians – it appears that he kept the latter demand reduced, asking for only 40,000 Austrian florins (the standard gold coins; about US$ 90,000 at the exchange rate of the time) from the two groups. The Armenians discussed the matter with the Jews, but they were not able to come to a satisfactory agreement in the matter. While Cuza was pressing in his demands, the Jewish community debated the method of assessment. The rich Jews, for unclear reasons, refused to advance the money, and the middle class argued that the sum would not lead to tangible enough results; Religious Jews insisted that such rights would only interfere with the exercise of their religion. Cuza, on being informed that the Jews hesitated to pay their share, inserted in his draft of a constitution a clause excluding from the right of suffrage all who did not profess Christianity. 1860s and 1870s Nicolae Grigorescu: Jew with Goose (c. 1880) – a Romanian Jew holding a petition and a goose for bribery. When Charles von Hohenzollern succeeded Cuza in 1866 as Carol I of Romania, the first event that confronted him in the capital was a riot against the Jews. A draft of a constitution was then submitted by the government, Article 6 of which declared that "religion is no obstacle to citizenship"; but, "with regard to the Jews, a special law will have to be framed in order to regulate their admission to naturalization and also to civil rights".[42] On June 30, 1866, the Bucharest Synagogue was desecrated and demolished (it was rebuilt in the same year, then restored in 1932 and 1945). Many Jews were beaten, maimed, and robbed. As a result, Article 6 was withdrawn and Article 7 was added to the 1866 Constitution; it read that "only such aliens as are of the Christian faith may obtain citizenship". For the following decades, the issue of Jewish rights occupied the forefront of the Regat's political scene. With few notable exceptions (including some of Junimea affiliates[43] — Petre P. Carp, George Panu, and I.L. Caragiale), most Romanian intellectuals began professing antisemitism; its most virulent form was the one present with advocates of Liberalism (in contradiction to their 1848 political roots), especially Moldavians, who argued that Jewish immigration had prevented the rise of an ethnic Romanian middle class. The first examples of modern prejudice were the Moldavian Fracțiunea liberă și independentă (later blended into the National Liberal Party, PNL) and the Bucharest group formed around Cezar Bolliac.[44] Their discourse saw Jews as non-assimilated and perpetually foreign – this claim was, however, challenged by some contemporary sources,[45] and by the eventual acceptance of all immigrants other than Jews. Antisemitism was carried into the PNL's mainstream, and was officially enforced under the premierships of Ion Brătianu. During his first years in office, Brătianu reinforced and applied old discrimination laws, insisting that Jews were not allowed to settle in the countryside (and relocating those that had done so), while declaring many Jewish urban inhabitants to be vagrants and expelling them from the country. According to the 1905 Jewish Encyclopedia: "A number of such Jews who proved their Romanian birth were forced across the Danube, and when [the Ottoman Empire] refused to receive them, were thrown into the river and drowned. Almost every country in Europe was shocked at these barbarities. The Romanian government was warned by the powers; and Brătianu was subsequently dismissed from office". Cabinets formed by the Conservative Party, although including Junimea's leaders, did not do much to improve the Jews' condition – mainly due to PNL opposition. Nonetheless, during this same era, Romania was the cradle of Yiddish theatre. The Russian-born Abraham Goldfaden started the first professional Yiddish theatre company in Iași in 1876 and for several years, especially during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 Romania was the home of Yiddish theatre. While its center of gravity would move first to Russia, then London, then New York City, both Bucharest and Iași would continue to figure prominently in its history over the next century.[46] Treaty of Berlin and aftermath A Greek pie-maker and his Jewish client in Bucharest, c. 1880 When Brătianu resumed leadership, Romania faced the emerging conflict in the Balkans, and saw its chance to declare independence from Ottoman suzerainty by dispatching its troops on the Russian side in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. The war was concluded by the Treaty of Berlin (1878), which stipulated (Article 44) that the non-Christians in Romania (including both Jews and Muslims in the newly acquired region of Northern Dobruja) should receive full citizenship. After a prolonged debate at home and diplomatic negotiations abroad, the Romanian government ultimately agreed (1879) to abrogate Article 7 of its constitution. This was, however, reformulated to make procedures very difficult: "the naturalization of aliens not under foreign protection should in every individual case be decided by Parliament" (the action involved, among others, a ten-year term before the applicant was given an evaluation).[47] The gesture was doubled by a show of compliance – 883 Jews, participants in the war, were naturalized in a body by a vote of both chambers. Fifty-seven persons voted upon as individuals were naturalized in 1880; 6, in 1881; 2, in 1882; 2, in 1883; and 18, from 1886 to 1900; in all, 85 Jews in twenty-one years, 27 of whom in the meantime died; c. 4,000 people had obtained citizenship by 1912.[48] Various laws were passed until the pursuit of virtually all careers was made dependent on the possession of political rights, which only Romanians could exercise; more than 40% of Jewish working men, including manual labourers, were forced into unemployment by such legislation. Similar laws were passed in regard to Jews exercising liberal professions.[49] In 1893, a piece of legislation was voted to deprive Jewish children of the right to be educated in the public schools – they were to be received only if and where children of citizens had been provided for, and their parents were required to pay preferential tuition fees[need quotation to verify]. In 1898, it was passed into law that Jews were to be excluded from secondary schools and the universities. Another notable measure was the expulsion of vocal Jewish activists as "objectionable aliens" (under the provisions of an 1881 law), including those of Moses Gaster and Elias Schwarzfeld.[50] The courts exacted the oath more judaico in its most offensive form – it was only abolished in 1904, following criticism in the French press. In 1892, when the United States addressed a note to the signatory powers of the Berlin treaty on the matter, it was attacked by the Romanian press. The Lascăr Catargiu government was, however, concerned – the issue was debated among ministers, and, as a result, the Romanian government issued pamphlets in French, reiterating its accusations against the Jews and maintaining that persecutions were deserved and came as retribution for the community's alleged exploitation of the rural population. 20th century-present Before and after World War I The Synagogue of Brașov (built 1901) The emigration of Romanian Jews on a larger scale commenced soon after 1878; numbers rose and fell, with a major wave of Bessarabian Jews after the Kishinev pogrom in Imperial Russia (1905). The Jewish Encyclopedia wrote in 1905, shortly before the pogrom, "It is admitted that at least 70 per cent would leave the country at any time if the necessary traveling expenses were furnished". There are no official statistics of emigration; but it is safe to place the minimum number of Jewish emigrants from 1898 to 1904 at 70,000. By 1900 there were 250,000 Romanian Jews: 3.3% of the population, 14.6% of the city dwellers, 32% of the Moldavian urban population and 42% of Iași.[10] Land issues and Jewish presence among estate leaseholders accounted for the 1907 Romanian Peasants' Revolt, partly antisemitic in message.[51] During the same period, the anti-Jewish message first expanded beyond its National Liberal base (where it was soon an insignificant attitude),[52] to cover the succession of more radical and Moldavian-based organizations founded by A.C. Cuza (his Democratic Nationalist Party, created in 1910, had the first antisemitic program in Romanian political history).[53] No longer present in the PNL's ideology by the 1920s, antisemitism also tended to surface in on the left-wing of the political spectrum, in currents originating in Poporanism – which favoured the claim that peasants were being systematically exploited by Jews.[54] World War I, during which 882 Jewish soldiers died defending Romania (825 were decorated), brought about the creation of Greater Romania after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and subsequent treaties. The enlarged state had an increased Jewish population, corresponding with the addition of communities in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania. On signing the treaties, Romania agreed to change its policy towards the Jews, promising to award them both citizenship and minority rights, the effective emancipation of Jews.[48] The 1923 Constitution of Romania sanctioned these requirements, meeting opposition from Cuza's National-Christian Defense League and rioting by far right students in Iași;[55] the land reform carried out by the Ion I. C. Brătianu cabinet also settled problems connected with land tenancy. Political representation for the Jewish community in the inter-war period was divided between the Jewish Party and the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania[56] (the latter was re-established after 1989). During the same period, a division in ritual became apparent between Reform Jews in Transylvania and usually Orthodox ones in the rest of the country[57] (while Bessarabia was the most open to Zionism and especially the socialist Labor Zionism). Jewish population per county in Greater Romania, according to the Wiesel Commission report, pp. 81, which counted 728,115 Jews by ethnicity and 756,930 Jews by religion The popularity of anti-Jewish messages was, nevertheless, on the rise, and merged itself with the appeal of fascism in the late 1920s – both contributed to the creation and success of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's Iron Guard and the appearance of new types of anti-Semitic discourses (Trăirism and Gândirism). The idea of a Jewish quota in higher education became highly popular among Romanian students and teachers.[58] According to Andrei Oișteanu's analysis, a relevant number of right-wing intellectuals refused to adopt overt anti-Semitism, which was ill-reputed through its association with A. C. Cuza's violent discourse; nevertheless, a few years later, such cautions were cast aside, and anti-Semitism became displayed as "spiritual health".[59] The first motion to exclude Jews from professional associations came on May 16, 1937, when the Confederation of the Associations of Professional Intellectuals (Confederația Asociațiilor de Profesioniști Intelectuali din România) voted to exclude all Jewish members from its affiliated bodies, calling for the state to withdraw their licenses and reassess their citizenship.[60] Although illegal, the measure was popular and it was commented that, in its case, legality had been supplanted by a "heroic decision".[60] According to Oișteanu, the initiative had a direct influence on antisemitic regulations passed during the following year.[60] The threat posed by the Iron Guard, the emergence of Nazi Germany as a European power, and his own fascist sympathies[citation needed], made King Carol II, who was still largely identified as a philo-Semite,[61] adopt racial discrimination as the norm. In the recent election, over 25% of the electorate had voted for explicitly antisemitic groups (either the Goga-Cuza alliance (9%) or the Iron Guard's political mouthpiece, TPT(16.5%)), and as a result, Carol was forced to let one of the two into his cabinet- he instantly chose the Goga-Cuza alliance over the rabid fascism of the Iron Guard (according to modern historian of the Balkans, Misha Glenny, he also thought that this would "take the sting out of the Guard's tail").[citation needed] On January 21, 1938, Carol's executive (led by Cuza and Octavian Goga) passed a law aimed at reviewing criteria for citizenship (after it cast allegations that previous cabinets had allowed Ukrainian Jews to obtain it illegally),[48] and requiring all Jews who had received citizenship in 1918–1919 to reapply for it (while providing a very short term in which this could be achieved – 20 days);[62] However, Carol II himself was highly hostile to antisemitism[citation needed]. His lover, Elena Lupescu, was Jewish[citation needed], as were a number of his friends in government[who?], and he soon reverted to his original policies (that is, fiercely opposing the antisemites and fascists), but with a newly violent sting. On February 12, 1938, he used the rising violence between political groups as context to seize absolute power (a move which was tacitly supported by the liberals who had come to view him as a lesser evil in comparison to Codreanu's fascist movement). As an authentic Romanian nationalist[dubious – discuss] (albeit, one who had a view of a Westernized, forcefully industrialized Romania at the expense of the peasants whom he viewed with disdain; making him completely the antithesis of the views of Codreanu[dubious – discuss]), Carol was determined that Romania should not fall into the near-absolute economic and political control that many of its neighbors already had, and moved to theatrical resistance against Nazi ideology[citation needed]. This article may be confusing or unclear to readers. In particular, Were these fascist leaders brutally killed?. Please help clarify the article. There might be a discussion about this on the talk page. (January 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) The King then arrested the entire leadership of the Iron Guard, on the grounds that they were in the pay of the Nazis, and began using the same accusation against various political opponents, both to solidify his absolute control of the country as well as negatively stigmatize Germany. In November, the fourteen most important fascist leaders (the first of which being Codreanu) were "rinsed" in acid.[63] However, Carol's policy was doomed by the reluctance of France and Britain to fight wars with the totalitarian powers of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union attacked Romania and declared the annexation of Bukovina and Bessarabia (which was to be renamed Moldova), and when Carol turned to the only possible hope – that is, assistance from the former "eternal foe", Nazi Germany – he was angrily rejected by Hitler personally, who did not have to try hard to remember how Carol had previously humiliated the cause of his ideology. Carol was forced to acknowledge the annexation, leading directly to his overthrow in a coup led by Ion Antonescu.[citation needed] In 1940, the Ion Gigurtu cabinet adopted Romania's equivalent to the Nuremberg Laws, forbidding Jewish-Christian intermarriage, and defining Jews after racial criteria (a person was Jewish if he or she had a Jewish grandparent on one side of the family).[64] Politics     Union of Romanian Jews     Jewish Party of Romania     Jewish National People's Party     General Jewish Labour Bund in Romania The Holocaust Main article: The Holocaust in Romania Romania allied itself with Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944. Under the dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, 380,000–400,000 Jews were murdered in the Holocaust in Romanian-controlled areas such as Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria.[14] The Iron Guard Victims of the Iași pogrom Memorial for the Jewish martyrs of Fălticeni Between the establishment of the National Legionary State and 1942, 80 anti-Jewish regulations were passed. Starting at the end of October, 1940, the Iron Guard began a massive antisemitic campaign, culminating in the failed coup and a pogrom in Bucharest, during which Jews were tortured and beaten, their shops looted, and 120 Jews were killed.[11] Antonescu eventually stopped the violence and chaos created by the Iron Guard by brutally suppressing the rebellion, but continued the policy of oppression and massacre of Jews, and, to a lesser extent, of Roma. Antonescu's régime Main article: Ion Antonescu § Antonescu and the Holocaust After Romania entered the war at the start of Operation Barbarossa atrocities against the Jews became common, starting with the Iași pogrom – on June 27, 1941, Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu telephoned Col. Constantin Lupu, commander of the Iași garrison, telling him formally to "cleanse Iași of its Jewish population", though plans for the pogrom had been laid even earlier – 13,266 Jews, according to Romanian authorities, were killed in July 1941. In July–August 1941, the yellow badge was imposed by local initiatives in several cities (Iași, Bacău, Cernăuți). A similar measure imposed by the national government lasted only five days (between September 3 and September 8, 1941), before being annulled on Antonescu's order.[65] However, on local initiative, the badge was still worn especially in the towns of Moldavia, Bessarabia and Bukovina (Bacău, Iași, Câmpulung, Botoșani, Cernăuți, etc.).[66] In 1941, following the advancing Romanian Army during Operation Barbarossa, and, according to Antonescu propaganda, alleged attacks by Jews, who were considered en masse "Communist agents" by the official propaganda, Antonescu ordered the deportation to Transnistria, of all Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina. "Deportation" however was a euphemism, as part of the process involved mass killing of Jews before deporting the rest in the "trains of death" (in reality long exhausting marches on foot) to the East. It is estimated that, in July–September 1941, the number of Jews killed, in Bukovina and Bessarabia, by the Romanian Army and the Romanian Gendarmerie in cooperation with the German Army and the Einsatzgruppen, is more than 45,000 people but probably closer to 60,000.[13] Of those who escaped the initial ethnic cleansing in Bukovina and Bessarabia, only very few managed to survive "trains" and the concentration camps set up in the Transnistria Governorate. In 1941–1942, the total number of deportees from Bessarabia, Bukovina, Dorohoi and the Regat was between 154,449 and 170,737 people.[13] Victims of Iași Pogrom Monument Further killings perpetrated by Antonescu's death squads (documents prove his direct orders[citation needed]) in collaboration with the German Einsatzkommando, the SS squads of local Ukrainian Germans (Sonderkommando Russland and Selbstschutz), and the Ukrainian militia targeted the local Jewish population that the Romanian Army managed to round up when occupying Transnistria. Over one hundred thousand of these were killed in massacres staged in such places as Odessa (see Odessa massacre), Bogdanovka, Akmechetka, Pechora in 1941 and 1942. Antonescu's government also made plans for mass deportations of the Romanian Jews community from the rest of the country (the Regat and southern Transylvania), numbering 292,149 people (according to a May 1942 census), to Transnistria region, or, in collaboration with the German government, to the Belzec extermination camp, but these had never been carried out.[13] The change in policy toward the Jews began in October 1942, and by March–April 1943, Antonescu permanently stopped all deportations despite German pressure,[67] as he began to seek peace with the Allies, although at the same time he levied heavy taxes and forced labor on the remaining Jewish communities. Also, sometimes with the encouragement of Antonescu's regime, thirteen boats left Romania for the British Mandate of Palestine during the war, carrying 13,000 Jews (two of these ships were sunk by the Soviets (see Struma disaster), and the effort was discontinued after German pressure was applied). Discussions regarding the repatriation of deported Jews followed, and in January 1943, the leader of the Romanian-Jewish community Wilhelm Filderman began talks with the Romanian government in order to start repatriating Romanian Jews deported to Transnistria. On November 15, 1943, an official report of the Romanian government indicated that 49,927 Romanian Jews were alive in Transnistria (of which 6,425 were originally from the Regat). In December 1943, partial repatriation began, and in March 1944, Antonescu government ordered general repatriation for all Romanian Jews deportees from Transnistria. Between December 20, 1943, and March 30, 1944, almost 11,000 people (including orphans) were repatriated from different camps and ghettos in Transnistria. However, the decision came too late to organize the repatriation of the last large number of deportees, and the fate of tens of thousands of deportees remaining in Transnistria became unknown.[13] Results Historical and political situations have determined the destinies of the Romanian Jews in different ways, depending on the regions in which they were living, and proximity to the front being the most important variable.[13] The total number of deaths is not certain, but even the lowest respectable estimates run to about 250,000 Jews (plus 25,000 deported Romani, of which approximately 11,000 were murdered).[13] According to the Wiesel Commission report released by the Romanian government in 2004, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered or died in various forms on Romanian soil, in the war zones of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and in the occupied Soviet territories under Romanian's control (Transnistria Governorate).[12][13] At least 15,000 Jews from the Regat were murdered in the Iași pogrom and as a result of other anti-Jewish measures. Half of the estimated 270,000 to 320,000 Jews living in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and the former Dorohoi County in Romania were murdered or died between June 1941 and November 1943. Between 45,000 and 60,000 Jews were killed in Bessarabia and Bukovina by Romanian and German troops in 1941. Between 104,522 and 120,810 deported Romanian Jews died as a result of the expulsions to Transnistria. After a wave of random initial killings, Jews in Moldavia were subject to pogroms, while those in Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dorohoi were concentrated into ghettos from which they were deported to concentration camps in the Transnistria Governorate, including camps built and run by Romanians. Romanian soldiers and gendarmes also worked with the German Einsatzkommando, the Ukrainian militia, and the SS squads of local Ukrainian Germans to massacre Jews in conquered territories east of the Romania's 1940 border. In Transnistria, between 115,000 and 180,000 indigenous Ukrainian Jews were murdered, especially in Odessa and the counties of Golta and Berezovka.[13] At the same time, 135,000 Jews living under Hungarian control in Northern Transylvania were deported to and died in concentration and extermination camps. In addition, 5,000 Romanian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust in other countries.[13] A majority of the Romanian Jews living within the 1940 borders did survive the war. The change in the Romanian government policy during 1942-1943 led to the survival of at least 290,000 Romanian Jews (although they were subject to a wide range of harsh conditions, including forced labor, financial penalties, and discriminatory laws), and to the subsequent repatriation of thousands of people. Also, thousands of Romanian Jews living abroad were able to survive thanks to renewed Romanian diplomatic protection. However, the total number of victims makes Romania count as first, according to the Wiesel Commission, "Of all the allies of Nazi Germany, [responsible] for the deaths of more Jews than any country other than Germany itself".[13] During the postwar period, the history of the Holocaust was distorted or simply ignored by East European communist regimes. The trials of war criminals began in 1945 and continued until the early 1950s, but they received public attention only for a short period of time.[13] In postcommunist Romania, Holocaust denial has been a diffuse phenomenon, and until 2004, when researchers made numerous documents publicly available, many in Romania denied knowledge that their country participated in the Holocaust.[68] The Romanian government has recognized that a Holocaust took place on its territory and held its first Holocaust Day in 2004.[69] In memory of the victims of the Holocaust and particularly to reflecting on Romania's role in the Holocaust, the Romanian government decided to make October 9 the National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust. Holocaust denial in Romania Main article: Holocaust denial Decades after the Holocaust, especially during the Communist era in Romania, educating and learning about the Holocaust was considered taboo. Textbooks did mention the Holocaust in passing, but it failed to acknowledge the role of the Romanian government in the systematic murder of the Jewish and Romani people. Holocaust denial is still prevalent in Romanian society.[70] During the Communist era from 1945 to 1989, the government influenced every part of society, including history education. When World War Two was mentioned, textbooks said that Romania was fighting against Hitler, and when the textbooks mentioned that Romania collaborated with the Nazis, it says that Romania actually lost their national independence and was occupied by Germany not that they willingly helped the Nazis and supported them. When the textbooks mentioned the killings of the Jewish people, which was not common during the time since any mention of the Holocaust was ignored and omitted, they were glossed, diminished, or distorted. When the Holocaust was mentioned, it was painted as just another broader casualty of the War in short passing and hid any responsibility of the nation while mentioning Romania's exceptional standing in Europe. Instead, the textbooks painted the Communists as the main victim of the Nazis.[71] Holocaust education took a long time to be implemented in post-Communist Romania. Democratization in Romania started in December 1989, but it took 10 years, until 1999, for Holocaust education to be raised as an issue and for a law to pass. Although Holocaust education was accepted in 1999, it took months for the government to solidify their curriculum to show the atrocities of the Holocaust and their role in it.[72] As of 2021, Romania has made strides to rid itself from the past of Holocaust denial. It has joined the International Holocaust Remembrance alliance in 2004, and took over chairmanship in 2016, as well as constantly organizing and sponsoring events surrounding Holocaust education.[73] In 2021, the first sentence over Holocaust denial was made in the country. The accused was Vasile Zărnescu, a former Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) member who published several articles and a book against the veracity of the Holocaust.[74] Post-War See also: Romanian Jews in Israel According to the Wiesel Commission, "... at least 290,000 Romanian Jews survived". Howard M. Sachar estimated that 360,000 Romanian Jews were still alive at the end of World War II. According to statistics from the end of the war, 355,972 Romanian Jews lived on the territory of Romania.[15] Mass emigration to Israel ensued (see Bricha and Aliyah). According to Sachar, for the first two post-war years, tens of thousands of Romanian Jews left for Mandatory Palestine; the Romanian government did not try to stop them, especially due to its desire to reduce its historically suspect and now impoverished Jewish minority. Afterwards, Jewish emigration began to encounter obstacles. In 1948, the year of Israeli independence, Zionism came under renewed suspicion, and the government began a campaign of liquidation against Zionist funds and training farms. However, emigration was not completely banned; Romanian Foreign Minister Ana Pauker, herself a Jew with a father and brother in Israel, negotiated an agreement with Israeli ambassador Reuven Rubin, who himself was a Romanian Jewish immigrant to Israel, under which the Romanian government would allow 4,000 Jews a month to emigrate to Israel; this decision was at least partially influenced by a large Jewish Agency bribe to the Romanian government. This agreement applied mainly to ruined businessmen and other economically "redundant" Jews. Around this time, Israel also secured another agreement with the Romanian government, under which Romania issued 100,000 exit visas for Jews and Israel supplied Romania with oil drills and pipes to aid the struggling Romanian oil industry.[75] By December 1951, about 115,000 Romanian Jews had emigrated to Israel.[76] During the period of transition towards a communist regime in Romania, following Soviet occupation (see Soviet occupation of Romania), Jewish society and culture were subject to the same increasingly tight control by the authorities. The community leader Wilhelm Filderman had been arrested already in 1945 and had to flee the country in 1948.[77] Antonescu, after a brief detention in the Soviet Union, was shot in June 1946 for war crimes. On April 22, 1946, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej attended a meeting of Jewish organizations and called for the creation of a new body, the Jewish Democratic Committee, which was in reality a section of the Romanian Communist Party PCR.[78] After the proclamation of the People's Republic of Romania on December 30, 1947, the government formed by the PCR outlawed all Jewish organizations at a meeting on June 10–June 11, 1948, stating that "the party must take a stand on every question concerning the Jews of Romania and fight vigorously against reactionary nationalist Jewish currents (that is, Zionism)". Between 1952 and 1953 the Stalinist antisemitic charges of "rootless cosmopolitanism" brought about the purging of the party's own leadership (including Jewish ex-premier and foreign minister Ana Pauker);[79] the charges were then inflicted upon the larger part of the Jewish community, beginning with a trial engineered by Iosif Chișinevschi.[80] Jews who were perceived as Zionists were given harsh labour sentences in communist prisons such as Pitești (where they were subject to torture and brainwashing experiments; a few of them died in detention).[77] The 1952 trial of the engineers made responsible for the failure of the Danube-Black Sea Canal project also involved allegations of Zionism (notably aimed at Aurel Rozei-Rozenberg, who was eventually executed).[81] During the Cold War, Romania was the only communist country not to break its diplomatic relations with Israel.[82] Throughout the period of Communist rule, Romania allowed limited numbers of Jews to emigrate to Israel, in exchange for much-needed Israeli economic aid. By 1965, Israel was funding agricultural and industrial projects throughout Romania, and in exchange, Romania allowed a trickle of Jewish emigration to Israel. When Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power in 1965, he initially ended the trade in deference to the Eastern bloc's Arab allies. However, Romania was the only Warsaw Pact nation not to break diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six-Day War of 1967,[82] and by 1969, Ceaușescu decided to exchange Jews for cash from Israel. He wanted economic independence from the Soviet Union, which was content to keep Romania a backwater and as nothing more than a supplier of raw materials, but to fund economic projects, he needed hard cash. As a result, from then until the Ceaușescu regime fell in 1989, about 1,500 Jews a year were granted exit visas to Israel in exchange for a payment of cash for every Jew allowed to leave, in addition to other Israeli aid. The exact payments were determined by the age, education, profession, employment, and family status of the emigrant. Israel paid a minimum of $2,000 per head for every emigrant, and paid prices in the range of $25,000 for doctors or scientists. In addition to these payments, Israel also secured loans for Romania and paid off the interest itself, and supplied the Romanian Army with military equipment.[75][83] Jews in Romania (2002 census) As a result of aliyah, the Romanian-Jewish community was gradually depleted. By 1987, just 23,000 Jews were left in Romania, half of whom were over 65 years old.[84] Romanian Jews became in the 1980s Israel's second largest ethnic community, outnumbered only by the Moroccans.[82] Nevertheless, Romania still has a small Jewish community with some active synagogues, and the oldest uninterrupted Yiddish-language theater in the world.[85] With the fall of communism in Romania, Jewish cultural, social, and religious life has been undergoing a revival. Acts of antisemitism, such destruction of cemetery gravestones, continue to take place, but they are very rare.[86] In 2016, the Romanian Jewish population was estimated as ranging between 9,300 and 17,000.[87] There are also 3,000 Israeli-born people living in Romania.[88] In Romania there is also a small number of Jewish immigrants from the other parts of the world.[89] Every year, tens of Romanian Jewish families from Israel return to their native country.[90] Hasidic Judaism and Haredi Judaism are also present in the country. Chabad has the Yeshua Tova Synagogue, a kosher restaurant, a Jewish kindergarten, a Jewish school and a youth organization, all of them located in Bucharest.[89][91][92][93] The group also has 2 community centers: one in Voluntari and one in Cluj.[94] Satmar also has plans to build a community in Romania. In 2021, a synagogue was inaugurated in Sighetu Marmației;[95] a hotel, a kosher restaurant and a Jewish school are under construction in Sighetu Marmației, all of them under Aaron Teitelbaum's organization.[96] As of 2021, there is also a project to build a rabbinical seminary in Oradea.[97] The Federation of the Jewish Communities in Romania Party has one seat in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Romanian Parliament. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, 140 Jewish orphans have fled from Ukraine to Romania and Republic of Moldova.[98] Historical population The historical Jewish population in Romania can be seen below. The 1930 census was the only one to cover Greater Romania. Censuses in 1948, 1956, 1966, 1977, 1992, 2002 and 2011 covered Romania's present-day territory.[99] All but the 1948 census, which asked about mother tongue, had a question on ethnicity. Moldavia and Wallachia each held a census in 1859. The Romanian Old Kingdom (Regat) conducted statistical estimates in 1884, 1889 and 1894, and held censuses in 1899 and 1912. Ion Antonescu's regime also held two: a general one in April 1941, and one for those with "Jewish blood" in May 1942. Year Population Territory (Historical regions) 1866 134,168 Romanian United Principalities (Moldavia, Wallachia, Southern Bessarabia) 1887 300,000 Romanian Old Kingdom (Regat) (Moldavia, Wallachia, Northern Dobruja) 1899 256,588 Romanian Old Kingdom 1930 728,115 Kingdom of Romania (Greater Romania) (Moldavia, Wallachia, Dobruja, Transylvania, Bukovina, Bessarabia) 1941 356,237 Kingdom of Romania (Moldavia, Wallachia, Northern Dobruja, Southern Transylvania, Southern Bukovina) 1956 146,264 Socialist Republic of Romania (Moldavia, Wallachia, Northern Dobruja, Transylvania, Southern Bukovina) 1966 42,888 Socialist Republic of Romania 1977 24,667 Socialist Republic of Romania 1992 8,955 Romania 2002 5,785 Romania 2011 3,271 Romania Notes: Census in 1930 with the regions acquired in 1918–1920; census in 1941 without the territories lost in 1940;[100] censuses in 1956,[101] 1966, 1977, 1992, 2002 and 2011 covered Romania's present-day territory Source: Demographic history of Romania YIVO provides somewhat different population figures for Romania's Jewish population, specifically 400,000 in 1945, 280,000 in 1951, 200,000 in 1960, 70,000 in 1970, 33,000 in 1980, 17,000 in 1990, and 11,000 in 2000.[102] Hasidic dynasties originating from today's Romania Main article: List of Hasidic dynasties Major groups     Satmar, originating from Satu Mare, one of the world's largest groups[citation needed]     Klausenburg, originating from Cluj-Napoca, the world's 9th largest group[citation needed]     Spinka, originating from Săpânța - 10th[citation needed]     Temishvar originating from Timișoara 3rd largest in the world Other groups     Bohush, from Buhuși[103]     Botoshan, from Botoșani     Bucharest, from Bucharest     Deyzh, from Dej     Faltichan, from Fălticeni     Margareten, from Marghita     Nasod, from Năsăud     Pashkan, from Pașcani     Roman, from Roman     Sasregen, from Reghin     Seret, from Siret     Shotz, from Suceava     Shtefanesht, from Ștefănești     Siget, from Sighetu-Marmației     Temishvar, originating from Timișoara     Vasloi, originating from Vaslui See also     Judaism portalflagRomania portal     History of the Jews in Carpathian Ruthenia     History of the Jews in Hungary (details on Jewish history in Transylvania and Northern Transylvania)     History of the Jews in Moldova     Klezmer, a Jewish musical tradition in which Romanian influence is possibly the most important     List of Romanian Jews     List of synagogues in Romania     National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust     Patria disaster     Struma disaster     Văcărești, Bucharest Sabin Manuilă (or Mănuilă; February 19, 1894 – November 20, 1964) was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian statistician, demographer and physician. A nationalist activist during World War I, he became noted for his pioneering research into the biostatistics of Transylvania and Banat regions, as well as a promoter of eugenics and social interventionism. As a bio- and geopolitician, Manuilă advocated the consolidation of Greater Romania through population exchanges, colonization, state-sponsored assimilation, or discriminatory policies. Manuilă entered national politics in the early 1930s, representing the National Peasants' Party as a junior cabinet member. A disciple of the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti, who obtained him a membership in the Romanian Academy, he directed Romania's first Statistical Institute. During World War II, he rose to prominence as an expert adviser of Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu, applauding the antisemitic legislation and making antiziganism an official policy of the Romanian state. He was among the first intellectuals to propose the deportation of Romanian Jews and Romanies into occupied Transnistria. Additionally, Manuilă involved himself in the diplomatic standoffs between Romania and the Kingdom of Hungary, fighting against the loss of Northern Transylvania, then campaigning for her recovery. By 1944, Manuilă was an Antonescu opponent, and involved himself in the August coup that toppled him. He remained active on the political scene even after the start of Soviet occupation, serving as Undersecretary of State on two successive coalition governments. He fell out with the Romanian Communist Party, and escaped the country before the imposition of a communist regime, rallying with the Romanian National Committee. He lived his final years in the United States, employed by Stanford University and the Census Bureau. Biography Early life and activism Manuilă was born in Sâmbăteni, Arad County, on the traditional border between the regions of Banat and Crișana, both of which were then in Austria-Hungary. He was the son of Fabriciu Manuilă, a Romanian Orthodox archpriest from Lipova. As an ethnic Romanian activist, Father Fabriciu had been fighting the region's Magyarization, joining efforts with Sabin's uncle, Vasile Goldiș, who was a prominent militant in the Romanian National Party.[1] As noted by scholar M. Benjamin Thorne, the Manuilă family also harbored racist prejudice against the Romanies (Gypsies), which may have shaped Sabin's political stances.[2] He was educated at home and later graduated high school in Brașov. Since he could not pursue his studies in Romanian, Sabin entered the medical faculty of Budapest University in 1912, but remained active in Romanian nationalist circles, and published articles in political newspapers.[3] He interrupted his studies from 1914 to 1918, taking part in World War I. A medic in the Austro-Hungarian Army, he saw action on the Russian Front,[4] and was wounded.[5][6] By November 1918, following the split of Austria-Hungary and the democratization of Hungary, Manuilă was working as a physician in Lipova.[7] He resumed his nationalist activities in support of Crișana and Transylvania's union with Romania, joining the Romanian National Guard and becoming its local commander.[4] In December, he was called upon by his university colleagues to represent them at the Alba Iulia Great National Assembly, where he voted for union with Romania.[8] The motion for union was read out by his uncle, Goldiș; Fabriciu and Sabin's brother, Camil Manuilă, were also present.[9] In 1919, he obtained his doctorate in medicine.[5][10] In 1920,[5] he married Veturia Leucuția, a Banat native who would later become a doctor and set up an infrastructure for nursing education in Romania. She had also been a student representative at Alba Iulia.[11] Sabin was soon after employed by Cluj (Babeș-Bolyai) University, first as head of its children's hospital and assistant lecturer to Victor Babeș, then as head the social hygiene department.[12] His scientific, teaching and publishing career took off between 1919 and 1926. He collected thousands of blood samples throughout Transylvania, pioneering the study of serology and immunology, and publishing his findings in Western scientific journals.[13] During this period, he also began writing articles about epidemiology and the healthcare system's organization. His monograph on Epidemiile din Transilvania ("Epidemics in Transylvania") was presented by Babeș to the Romanian Academy, earning Manuilă the Academy Prize for 1921.[13] His project doubled as an inquiry into racial science: Manuilă followed Ludwik Hirszfeld's ideas about the "racial index", concluding that there existed a distinct serological cluster of Balkan peoples, of which Romanians were a distinct subtype. The conclusion was discussed by other serologists: Gheorghe Popoviciu, who concluded that Manuilă's data were flawed, and that Romanians were not a race apart; and Petru Râmneațeanu, who believed that Manuilă was largely correct.[14] Manuilă became an assistant to Iuliu Moldovan, a pioneer in Romanian public health, but also a promoter of eugenics—a field which also interested Manuilă, who suggested the sterilization of the disabled and the encouragement of births among the healthy.[15] The recipient of a Rockefeller Scholarship,[16] he studied biostatistics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore in 1925–1926. Visiting Charles Davenport's laboratory, he became convinced that American liberal eugenicism was a viable model for Romania.[17] Also a Rockefeller scholar,[18] Veturia followed her husband to America. She became an enthusiast of social work and interventionism,[19] and later an outspoken conservative feminist.[20] Camil Manuilă, meanwhile, settled in Timișoara and became a noted figure in the business community, and eventually secretary of the Banat Chamber of Commerce and Industry.[21] In 1925, he was president of the Romanian Football Federation.[22] Bucharest relocation and 1930 census A title page of the 1930 census, featuring Manuilă's name Upon his return, Manuilă was named inspector general for public health in Transylvania.[5][23] In 1927, he gave lectures on eugenics and biopolitics at ASTRA Society.[24] Founding a biopolitical and biometrical research center at Cluj University, he began cooperating with the eugenicist Sheldon C. Reed on "biological issues".[25] Also in 1927, Manuilă moved to the national capital Bucharest, where he began collaborating with Dimitrie Gusti and with the statistical school of Octav Onicescu.[5] Focusing on biopolitics, his research took him into the exploration of local demographics and demographic history. He was especially active in the field of "ethnodemographic prognosis", one of the first and few Romanians who took up this chore.[26] According to fellow statistician Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, his "organisation of Romania's vital statistics was an international paragon".[27] In 1929, he entered Gusti's Romanian Social Institute, and that year, together with five other doctors, he participated in a Gusti-coordinated monograph-writing campaign at Drăguș village in the vicinity of Făgăraș.[5][28] As such, he led operations for the nationwide census of 1930, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation,[29] subsequently leading the Institute of Demography and Census. At the Social Institute, with Gusti's consent, he established a section for eugenics and biological anthropology.[30] Supervised by Gusti and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Manuilă and his wife also created a Bucharest School of Social Work, which doubled as an institute for the propagation of eugenic ideals.[31] It was located on YMCA grounds, and had Henri H. Stahl, Francisc Rainer, Gheorghe Banu, Mircea Vulcănescu and Xenia Costa-Foru among its lecturers.[32] At the time, Manuilă himself made groundbreaking discoveries about the demography of Transylvania and the Romanianization of its cities. In 1929, he put out the treatise Evoluția demografică a orașelor și minorităţilor etnice din Transilvania ("The Demographic Evolution of Cities and Ethnic Minorities in Transylvania"), which earned him another Academy prize.[33] He made projects about population exchanges between Greater Romania and its various neighbors, with the goal of discarding "elements with a centrifugal tendency" and keeping "ethnic purity", and even proposed the colonization of his native Crișana with Romanians from Hungary.[34] Moreover, Manuilă campaigned for the adoption of social welfare and biopolitical laws that, he argued, would curb emigration from Romania[35] and promote the consolidation of a Romanian urban society.[36] However, he believed that Romanianization was largely a natural phenomenon, and a facet of urbanization: the Romanian rural majority of the Austro-Hungarian period was moving into the cities.[33] Uniquely among Romanian eugenicists, he endorsed fully the abortion-rights option, noting that natalism, while practical, should never infringe on a woman's informed choice.[37] ICS foundation Active politically, Manuilă joined the National Peasants' Party (PNȚ),[38] and began corresponding on social matters with the International Agrarian Bureau.[39] From 1927 to 1930, he was a high-ranking civil servant within the Labor, Health and Social Protection Ministry,[5][6] and was Undersecretary of State in a PNȚ cabinet, under Prime Minister Iuliu Maniu.[40] He later became Maniu's adviser in matters of sociology.[41] He represented Romania at congresses held by the International Statistical Institute, the International Institute of Sociology, the League of Nations Committee on Population, and International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP).[41] He sided with Corrado Gini's wing of the IUSSP, which promoted the natalist and racialist dogmas of Italian fascism.[42] In 1933, the advent of Nazi Germany brought racism into the focus of Romanian intellectuals. In a 1934 interview, Manuilă expressed biopolitical reserves about Nazi racial doctrines. Although he believed in the "evident scientific facts" of racial determinism, he observed that "racial science" was still "young", and argued that Nazis were "compromising" the racial agenda. He also stated that Romanian Jews were "not a racial, but an economic problem, to which was added a sentimental factor".[43] In August 1935, he was Vice President of the IUSSP Congress in Berlin, which was effectively a propaganda display for Nazi biopolitics, with Eugen Fischer as the host.[44] By the end of the decade, Manuilă became convinced about the dangers of miscegenation, an idea which came to him from fellow sociologist Iordache Făcăoaru.[45] Returning to the Institute of Demography and Census, Manuilă helped Gusti organize another expedition, this time to his native Sâmbăteni (1934), and studied first-hand the region's depopulation.[46] He also refocused on his eugenic projects: in 1935, he helped establish the Romanian Royal Eugenics Society (presided upon by Gheorghe Marinescu), also attending the Congress of Latin Eugenic Societies in Mexico City.[47] Also that year, he addressed a memo to the Ministry of Education, proposing to assimilate, peacefully but resolutely, Romania's Hungarian-speaking Székelys.[48] He also insisted on his old idea of "eradicating" the Hungarians of Crișana and bringing in their stead Romanians stranded across the border in Hungary, and demanded a strict policy of linguistic discrimination in Transylvania-proper.[49] Nonetheless, Manuilă toned down the racialism of other eugenicists, who wanted the Székelys and their Csango relatives to be counted as separate from Hungarians, based on claims that both of the former had Romanian ancestry. He reputedly based his rejection on a linguistic rationale, as all three communities were Hungarian-speaking.[50] In 1937, Sabin Manuilă was an official host, and Veturia a guest speaker, at the Bucharest Anthropological Congress, placed under the patronage of King Carol II.[51] From 1938,[5] Manuilă headed his own Central Statistical Institute (Institutul Central de Statistică, ICS), while also serving as Secretary General of the Statistical Society, seconding Gusti.[18] This move was a sign of his quarrels with Moldovan, who nevertheless continued to influence the Manuilă's work.[52] His new research produced several detailed monographs, including a 1937 study on Populația României ("The Population of Romania"),[53] and a 1938 Romanian encyclopedia (Enciclopedia României), which detailed and examined the 1930 census data.[54] Dealing with the Great Depression, his articles of the time discuss the "overpopulation" of Romania's universities as a cause of white-collar unemployment, proposing a government selection of the human capital.[55] However, when Carol II ordered him to estimate the number of jobless people with a college diploma, Manuilă counted 6,000 individuals, which was well below official expectations.[56] World War II racism Manuilă had a sinuous career during the first years of World War II, when his interest shifted toward geopolitics and historical geography.[5] In 1938, upon Gusti's recommendation, he was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy; until 1940, he was also a department head within Banu's Institute of Hygiene and Public Health.[5][6] In 1939, Carol II's National Renaissance Front (FRN) terminated Manuilă's ICS, and all statisticians were left unemployed.[57] During 1940, the regime again appealed to Manuilă's expertise. At the time, Romania had abandoned its friendship with the Western Allies, and was testing a rapprochement with Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers. This, however, meant negotiating territorial exchanges with the Nazi-backed Kingdom of Hungary. With Mihail Manoilescu and other Foreign Affairs officials, Manuilă attended the meeting in Turnu Severin, where the Romanian side first took into consideration population exchanges between Romania and Hungary.[58] In the end, a Nazi-mediated Vienna Award carved out the region of Northern Transylvania and assigned it to Hungary. Manuilă was present at the proceedings.[59] The ICS returned to prominence in late 1940: following the Award and the political turmoil it generated, Romania became a National Legionary State, ruled over by Ion Antonescu. Manuilă and his staff were directly subordinated to the Conducător, "substantiating governmental policy decisions" and, after Romania's entry into the conflict as a Nazi ally, making demographic projects in view of a future peace.[60] Historian Viorel Achim noted in 2005: "Marshal Antonescu and other high-ranking officials would consult him on every population policy issue. While they did not always take his advice, he usually succeeded in bringing them round to his views."[26] Historian Vladimir Solonari notes that Antonescu's ascendency signified Manuilă's own promotion: "Antonescu [...] absolutely trusted his expertise", and presented the ICS with a state monopoly on statistical research. Also according to Solonari, Manuilă transformed himself into "an enthusiastic supporter" of Nazi racial policies, "that he now wanted to introduce in Romania."[61] The ICS remained "the most important" instrument of "ethnopolitics", and as such mediated between Antonescu and Nazi racial scientists, in particular members of the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy.[62] Manuilă built contacts with Friedrich Burgdörfer, Wilfried Krallert, and Alessandro Molinari.[63] As scholar Maria Bucur writes, Manuilă made a transition to the far-right, but without establishing "explicit links" with the governing Iron Guard.[64] When the Iron Guard was eventually banned, following the rebellion and pogrom of January 1941, its leadership insisted that Veturia Manuilă had played a hand in the affair. They cited her as an anti-Guardist influence on the dictator's wife, Maria Antonescu.[65] Manuilă did however support the passage of Jewish segregation laws, adopting the corollaries of economic antisemitism, according to which Jewish wealth and influence needed to be kept in check.[66] Map of the results of the 1941 census, with counties sorted by ethnicity. Romanians in purple, Ukrainians in light green (concentrated in Transnistria, Bukovina and the Budjak), with Jews in yellow, Germans in red, and Hungarians in dark green. Romanies shown as slivers of light brown, with higher concentrations in Bucharest and Oltenia Manuilă's antisemitism was more nuanced than the Guard's own policies. In his 1940 article about "racial commands", where he proposed to create a "Superior Council for the Protection of the Race",[67] Manuilă insisted that the Jews were a largely harmless community, both self-segregated and endogamous.[68] He elaborated on this issue with articles hosted by the Deutsches Archiv für Landes- und Volksforschung (1941), describing the "Jewish Question" in Romania as "qualitative", not "quantitative", and insisting that the Jewish population figures circulated in Romanian antisemitic circles were unrealistic.[69] Instead, he claimed that "Romania's racial issue" was to be found among the Romanies (Gypsies), whom he described as "dysgenic", subversive, and exogamous.[70] He endorsed their compulsory sterilization.[71] This idea was supported by Burgdörfer, who described the Romanies as being of "capital importance" among Romania's issues in racial hygiene.[72] Manuilă soon began work on a new census, "a giant, extremely complex operation"[72] which was intended to give added weight to Romania's claims on her neighbors.[73] According to historian Victor Neumann, this enterprise was also notable for the "ideologized criteria and notions" which it vented in its published form.[74] A special section of the 1941 census involved the cataloging of all Jewish property, a summary of which was sent to the German Main Security Office.[75] Manuilă also advised government to add the criminal status of Romani individuals in its census data, including sentences for being "work-shy".[76] Manuilă and Transnistria deportations In late 1941, with Romania's participation on the Eastern Front as a German ally, Manuilă again proposed, in his memos to Antonescu, a population exchange, meaning to solve the issue of Northern Transylvania. He and Antonescu discussed this matter face to face, during a meeting in the Bessarabian town of Tighina.[77] Manuilă also envisaged the mass return of ethnic Romanians from Bulgaria and Serbia, the eventual relocation to Germany of all Germans in Romania, and a voluntary repatriation of the Csangos and Romanian Turks.[78] He later advised Antonescu on resettling scattered communities of Romanian Ukrainians into the more compact Transnistria.[79] These were to be then moved in other areas, where they were to replace Jews, Ukrainians and Russian Bessarabians—a measure that was actually set in motion in November 1941.[80] Manuilă also discussed Romania's new shape in the New Order, proposing a revision of Greater Romania's pre-1940 borders, excluding most of Southern Dobruja. The country was to annex Pokuttya and Békéscsaba, but not Transnistria. She was also to cede much of Hotin, Storojineț and Cernăuți counties to a Nazified Ukraine, and some western areas (including Salonta, Oradea and Satu Mare) to Hungary.[81] Some references were made to the Timok Valley and the traditional homelands of the Aromanians, but the project made no explicit annexation proposal concerning those lands.[82] More significantly, the paper also envisaged the unilateral deportation to Transnistria of all Romanian Jews and Romanies, identifying them as stateless peoples with no outside protection.[83] This measure was supposed to enforce Romania's "ethnic homogeneity", and was presumably influenced by Manuilă's confidence in Moldovan's eugenic movement,[84] but did not, in fact, call for the physical elimination of either community.[85] The Manuilă's working relationship with Antonescu also involved them in other issues specific to the Holocaust in Romania. Veturia Manuilă worked with Maria Antonescu on the state-run charity office, called Patronage Council.[65][86] In addition to its social work attributes, the institution was involved in extorting Jews who were subject to deportation.[86][87] In 1942, Manuilă's demographic inspections in Transnistria made him a silent witness of the 1941 Odessa massacre and death marches to Berezivka.[65] Later that year, Transnistria Governor Gheorghe Alexianu ordered Manuilă and Făcăoaru to carry out an anthropometric study of the Romanian soldiers, to gather evidence on possible Jewish exogamy.[65] In 1943, Antonescu assigned Manuilă, Făcăoaru, and Banu to a governmental task-force "for the Promotion and Protection of the Biological Capital of the Nation"; Moldovan was its chairman.[88] According to Achim, the population-exchange texts do not exhibit a racist agenda, and are also "non-imperialistic". They are "in unison" with Antonescu's policies of ethnic cleansing, but were not in themselves the basis of a government program.[89] Nonetheless, one of the memos stands as a historical premiere, since Manuilă made official claims about a "Gypsy problem", again describing the Romanies as a "dysgenic" threat,[90] "social and national non-values, and a racial hazard".[91] He also assessed that Romanies had been systematically under-counted in the 1930 census,[92] and that this apparent assimilation reflected "extreme humanitarianism" on the Romanian side, and had gone on for far too long.[91] According to scholar Dennis Deletant, this approach is "redolent of Nazi ideology", seeking "scapegoats for the woes of the Romanian people".[93] Both Deletant and Thorne note that Manuilă's eugenic ideas about the Romanies did in fact shape Antonescu's "ethnic policies", leading to the Romanies' deportation.[94] 1944 Coup and aftermath Despite his official positions and involvement in racial projects, Manuilă was still affiliated with the PNȚ, which was in the semi-clandestine opposition to Antonescu. Radu Lecca, an Antonescu adviser who oversaw the deportations to Transnistria, later claimed that Manuilă was spying on the regime for the Americans.[95] As noted by Achim: "Manuilă, despite his antiminority opinions, was perceived by many contemporaries, both before and after the war, as a democrat."[96] At the ICS, he revived Gusti's old team in 1941, assigning them their own Office for Studies.[97] He therefore collaborated with sociologists of all backgrounds: leftists such as Stahl and Anton Golopenția, alongside Făcăoaru, arrested by Antonescu for his role in the Iron Guard[98] (Golopenția was directly involved in the project to resettle Romanians from Ukraine to Transnistria).[99] With Manuilă's acquiescence, members of this team extended their protection to some 5,000 Jews, employing them at the ICS and preventing their deportation or internment in labor camps.[100] This was contrary to Manuilă's regular agenda: in early 1942, he himself had sent Antonescu notes about deporting all "useless" Jews, the latter being defined by race.[65] According to Bucur, both Manuilă and Făcăoaru were probably informed that the deportees were being decimated on arrival by a massive typhus epidemic.[101] The ICS also hosted an illegal cell of the Romanian Communist Party (PCdR), which worked closely with the communist resistant Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu.[38] This group and the Institute as a whole played a major part in the antifascist coup of August 1944. During the events, Golopenția and his men occupied the building housing Radio Bucharest,[38] while Manuilă, from his home on Schitu Măgureanu Boulevard, ensured communications between the PCdR and Maniu.[102] Following the start of Soviet occupation, Manuilă joined the Romanian Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union (ARLUS), for a while heading its Sociological Section.[57] At the same time, with an article in Revista Fundațiilor Regale, he argued that America's victory in the war was a direct evidence of its superior health policies.[103] Manuilă and Făcăoaru were publicly congratulated by the Jewish community for their role in rescuing their coreligionists.[100] At the time, Manuilă was obfuscating his earlier participation in the passage of antisemitic regulations. In his December 1944 interview with the Jewish magazine Curierul Israelit, he asserted: "The adoption of racial laws constitutes a great aberration in the mind, is not congruent with this century, and is alien to the traditions of the Romanian nation."[65] Manuilă soon joined the Union of Patriots, a PCdR ally, and, in November, was appointed Undersecretary of State for Stately Organization, serving under Constantin Sănătescu.[104] According to other sources, however, he was still (or also) a PNȚ representative.[57][96] Under Sănătescu, Romania joined the Allies, and fought in particular against the Hungarians in Northern Transylvania. Manuilă was co-opted on the advisory council of the Commissariat for Transylvania's Liberated Regions, created by his patron Maniu as a special branch of government. Alongside the goal of returning Romanian administrators to the area, the Commissariat also made a specific point of dissuading Hungarian irredentism.[105] Manuilă also campaigned internationally for the recognition of Romanian rule in Northern Transylvania, citing demographic and historical evidence in his English-language tract, The Vienna Award and Its Demographical Consequences (1945).[106] He was consumed with a project to set up the Western Faculty of Medicine in Timișoara, with which he hoped to tackle the Banat depopulation issue.[73] Communist takeover and defection Manuilă kept his government post after Sănătescu fell and was replaced with Nicolae Rădescu, but was forced out by the communist purge of the power structures, in March 1945.[57] He returned to the ICS, but found himself in conflict with both the party cell and the corporate trade union. Having lost his job at ARLUS and his seat on the Romanian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, he was eventually demoted by the Institute in August 1947.[57] His position was filled in by Golopenția, who, although a protégé of the communist Miron Constantinescu,[107] was seen by Manuilă as a worthy successor.[57] Manuilă became a political suspect, but not because of his Nazi contacts; rather, Manuilă was perceived as an Americophile.[96] With Georgescu-Roegen and the state carrier inspector Max Manolescu, Manuilă considered a plan to escape from Romania by plane, but this was thwarted by police during a routine checkup. According to Georgescu-Roegen, their plan also involved Pătrășcanu, who had fallen out with his communist partners.[108] Seizing his last opportunity just before the communist regime took over,[109] Manuilă appealed to the anti-communist resistance figure Silviu Craciunas, who ran a people-smuggling operation. Using this channel, and with assistance from three Jewish anticommunists (Lola Roth and the brothers Leibovici), Manuilă crossed the porous border into the Hungarian Republic.[110] Sabin and Veturia Manuilă defected in Austria,[111] and eventually made their way to the United States. In 1948, Manuilă settled in New York City, where he continued his scientific and publishing work. Additionally, he was involved in the exile community, taking part in its cultural and political activities. He worked with the Iuliu Maniu Foundation, the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), the National Committee for a Free Europe, and a virtual government-in-exile, the Romanian National Committee (RNC).[112] He also headed a section on the Study of Displaced Populations at the International Institute of Sociology, under Gini's presidency.[113] Veturia Manuilă was also involved in such work, joining the National Council of Romanian Women in Exile and speaking on Radio Free Europe.[114] In 1952, Manuilă became an RNC representative to the United Nations and, three years later, was sworn in as an executive member of the RNC.[115] His brother Camil was also a member of the RNC staff by 1956, by which time the committee's hope for an anticommunist takeover in Romania were evidently unrealistic.[116] In 1950, Manuilă debated over Romania's fate behind the Iron Curtain with George Sokolsky, the American broadcaster, who had noted that, as home to a fascist regime, Romania deserved its status. Manuilă retorted that: "for a period, [Romania] had a fascist government, it is true. But Romania has overthrown it with decision and firmness. Italy had, Germany had, Japan had fascist governments, which were never overthrown until conquered. Yet they are today recipients of American favors." As noted by scholar Johanna Granville, this reply omitted to mention that the overthrow of fascism had in fact resulted in Northern Transylvania being returned to Romania.[117] Stranded in Romania and sacked from his position at the institute, Golopenția drew up schemes for the decommunization in Romania, recording his thoughts and his intention to contact Manuilă. His notes were picked up by the Securitate during the Pătrășcanu trial, and resulted in Golopenția's fatal imprisonment.[118] Later life and legacy Professionally, Manuilă was employed by Stanford University Institute for Food Research, where he published a monograph on The Agricultural Economy of the Danubian Countries: 1935-1945, then as a Counselor for the United States Census Bureau.[119] Working at ACE and the Commission for Refugees Help, he dealt with issues of social security, population trends, and refugees' social integration.[120] During the 1950s, he also completed work on demographic histories of the Romanian Jews (Regional Development of the Jewish Population in Romania in 1957, Populația Evreiască din România in 1958).[121] These brought him close to Wilhelm Filderman, the exile Jewish Romanian political activist and RNC affiliate, who helped him obtain raw data. Manuilă presented his and Filderman's findings at the International Statistical Institute's 30th Congress, in Stockholm (1957).[122] However, according to Holocaust historian Jean Ancel, Filderman "knew nothing of Manuilă's 'other face'", and Manuilă profited from his "good faith" to grossly underestimate Romania's share in the genocide. Filderman's more realistic notes were never published by Manuilă, who mis-cited them as backing his own data; Filderman, Ancel notes, never had a chance to question the text, having fallen ill with Alzheimer's disease between their compiling and the Stockholm presentation.[65] In September 1963, Manuilă attended the 20th International Congress of Sociology, in Córdoba, Argentina, where he presented a paper on wartime demographics in Romania, noting the increase of living standards in the 1960s.[123] He died in New York City on November 20, 1964.[41] His widow Veturia continued to publish memoirs and studies in social science. She died in Brick Township in 1986.[10] Stripped of his Romanian Academy membership during the four decades of communist rule, Manuilă was posthumously readmitted in July 1990, that is to say six months after the Romanian Revolution.[41] Access to his archive at the ICS was strictly prohibited under communism, and remained restricted after 1989.[124] As critically noted by Bucur, his subsequent depictions in Romanian historiography are those of a "tolerant, rational, balanced" scientist, glossing over his wartime activities.[125] Controversially, in the mid-1990s Manuilă's studies on minority populations were included in works of Holocaust revisionists Kurt Treptow and Larry Watts, alongside fabricated quotes from Filderman, in what was read as an effort to induce doubt about Antonescu's antisemitic crimes.[65][126] Manuilă's claims and the related fabrications were reused in denialist claims stated by authors such as Gheorghe Buzatu and Raoul Șorban.[127]  Ion Antonescu (/ˌæntəˈnɛskuː/; Romanian: [i'on antoˈnesku] (listen); 14 June [O.S. 2 June] 1882 – 1 June 1946) was a Romanian military officer and marshal who presided over two successive wartime dictatorships as Prime Minister and Conducător during most of World War II. Having been responsible for facilitating the Holocaust in Romania, he was tried for war crimes and executed in 1946. A Romanian Army career officer who made his name during the 1907 peasants' revolt and the World War I Romanian Campaign, the antisemitic Antonescu sympathized with the far-right and fascist National Christian and Iron Guard groups for much of the interwar period. He was a military attaché to France and later Chief of the General Staff, briefly serving as Defense Minister in the National Christian cabinet of Octavian Goga as well as the subsequent First Cristea cabinet, in which he also served as Air and Marine Minister. During the late 1930s, his political stance brought him into conflict with King Carol II and led to his detainment. Antonescu nevertheless rose to political prominence during the political crisis of 1940, and established the National Legionary State, an uneasy partnership with the Iron Guard's leader Horia Sima. After entering Romania into an alliance with Nazi Germany and ensuring Adolf Hitler's confidence, he eliminated the Guard during the Legionary Rebellion of 1941. In addition to being Prime Minister, he served as his own Foreign Minister and Defense Minister. Soon after Romania joined the Axis in Operation Barbarossa, recovering Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Antonescu also became Marshal of Romania. An atypical figure among Holocaust perpetrators, Antonescu enforced policies independently responsible for the deaths of as many as 400,000 people, most of them Bessarabian, Ukrainian and Romanian Jews, as well as Romanian Romani. The regime's complicity in the Holocaust combined pogroms and mass murders such as the Odessa massacre with ethnic cleansing, and systematic deportations to occupied Transnistria. The system in place was nevertheless characterized by singular inconsistencies, prioritizing plunder over killing, showing leniency toward most Jews in the Old Kingdom, and ultimately refusing to adopt the Final Solution as applied throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. This was made possible by the fact that Romania, as a junior ally of Nazi Germany, was able to avoid being occupied by the Wehrmacht and preserve a degree of political autonomy. Aerial attacks on Romania by the Allies occurred in 1944 and Romanian troops suffered heavy casualties on the Eastern Front, prompting Antonescu to open peace negotiations with the Allies, ending with inconclusive results. On 23 August 1944, the king Michael I led a coup d'état against Antonescu, who was arrested; after the war he was convicted of war crimes, and executed in June 1946. His involvement in the Holocaust was officially reasserted and condemned following the 2003 Wiesel Commission report. Biography Early life and career Born in the town of Pitești, north-west of the capital Bucharest, Antonescu was the scion of an upper-middle class Romanian Orthodox family with some military tradition.[1] He was especially close to his mother, Lița Baranga, who survived his death.[2] His father, an army officer, wanted Ion to follow in his footsteps and thus sent him to attend the Infantry and Cavalry School in Craiova.[1] During his childhood, his father divorced his mother to marry a woman who was a Jewish convert to Orthodoxy.[3] The breakup of his parents' marriage was a traumatic event for the young Antonescu, and he made no secret of his dislike of his stepmother, whom he always depicted as a femme fatale who destroyed what he saw as his parents' happy marriage.[3] According to one account, Ion Antonescu was briefly a classmate of Wilhelm Filderman, the future Romanian Jewish community activist whose interventions with Conducător Antonescu helped save a number of his coreligionists.[4] After graduation, in 1904, Antonescu joined the Romanian Army with the rank of Second Lieutenant. He spent the following two years attending courses at the Special Cavalry Section in Târgoviște.[1] Reportedly, Antonescu was a zealous and goal-setting student, upset by the slow pace of promotions, and compensated for his diminutive stature through toughness.[5] In time, the reputation of being a tough and ruthless commander, together with his reddish hair, earned him the nickname Câinele Roșu ("The Red Dog").[5] Antonescu also developed a reputation for questioning his commanders and for appealing over their heads whenever he felt they were wrong.[5] During the repression of the 1907 peasants' revolt, he headed a cavalry unit in Covurlui County.[1][5] Opinions on his role in the events diverge: while some historians believe Antonescu was a particularly violent participant in quelling the revolt,[5][6] others equate his participation with that of regular officers[5] or view it as outstandingly tactful.[1] In addition to restricting peasant protests, Antonescu's unit subdued socialist activities in Galați port.[6] His handling of the situation earned him praise from King Carol I, who sent Crown Prince (future monarch) Ferdinand to congratulate him in front of the whole garrison.[1] The following year, Antonescu was promoted to Lieutenant, and, between 1911 and 1913, he attended the Advanced War School, receiving the rank of Captain upon graduation.[1] In 1913, during the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria, Antonescu served as a staff officer in the First Cavalry Division in Dobruja.[1] World War I Major Ion Antonescu (second from the right) with General Constantin Prezan and his wife Olga Prezan (first and second from the left, respectively), 1916 Ion Antonescu (bottom row, center) with the other officers of the Section "Operations" of the wartime General Staff (Marele Cartier General), end of March 1918 After 1916, when Romania entered World War I on the Allied side, Ion Antonescu acted as chief of staff for General Constantin Prezan.[1] When enemy troops crossed the mountains from Transylvania into Wallachia, Antonescu was ordered to design a defense plan for Bucharest.[1] The Romanian royal court, army, and administration were subsequently forced to retreat into Moldavia. Antonescu took part in an important decision involving defensive efforts, an unusual promotion which probably stoked his ambitions.[5] In December, as Prezan became the Chief of the General Staff, Antonescu, who was by now a major, was named the head of operations, being involved in the defence of Moldavia. He contributed to the tactics used during the Battle of Mărășești (July–August 1917), when Romanians under General Eremia Grigorescu managed to stop the advance of German forces under the command of Field Marshal August von Mackensen.[7] Being described as "a talented if prickly individual",[8] Antonescu lived in Prezan's proximity for the remainder of the war and influenced his decisions.[9] Such was the influence of Antonescu on General Prezan that General Alexandru Averescu used the formula "Prezan (Antonescu)" in his memoirs to denote Prezan's plans and actions.[10] That autumn, Romania's main ally, the Russian Provisional Government, left the conflict. Its successor, Bolshevik Russia, made peace with the Central Powers, leaving Romania the only enemy of the Central Powers on the Eastern Front. In these conditions, the Romanian government made its own peace treaty with the Central Powers. Romania broke the treaty later in the year, on the grounds that King Ferdinand I had not signed it. During the interval, Antonescu, who viewed the separate peace as "the most rational solution," was assigned command over a cavalry regiment.[9] The renewed offensive played a part in ensuring the union of Transylvania with Romania. After the war, Antonescu's merits as an operations officer were noticed by, among others, politician Ion G. Duca, who wrote that "his [Antonescu's] intelligence, skill and activity, brought credit on himself and invaluable service to the country."[9] Another event occurring late in the war is also credited with having played a major part in Antonescu's life: in 1918, Crown Prince Carol (the future King Carol II) left his army posting to a commoner. This outraged Antonescu, who developed enduring contempt for the future king.[5] Diplomatic assignments and General Staff positions General Antonescu (left) with Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Căpitan of the Iron Guard, at a skiing event in 1935 Lieutenant Colonel Ion Antonescu retained his visibility in the public eye during the interwar period. He participated in the political campaign to earn recognition at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 for Romania's gains in Transylvania. His nationalist argument about a future state was published as the essay Românii. Origina, trecutul, sacrificiile și drepturile lor ("The Romanians. Their Origin, Their Past, Their Sacrifices and Their Rights"). The booklet advocated extension of Romanian rule beyond the confines of Greater Romania, and recommended, at the risk of war with the emerging Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the annexation of all Banat areas and the Timok Valley.[11] Antonescu was known for his frequent and erratic changes of mood, going from being extremely angry to being calm to angry again to being calm again within minutes, behaviour that often disoriented those who had to work with him.[3] The Israeli historian Jean Ancel wrote that Antonescu's frequent changes of mood were due to the syphilis he contracted as a young man, a condition he suffered from for the rest of his life.[3] He became attache in Paris in 1922. He negotiated a credit worth 100 million French francs to purchase French weaponry.[12] He worked together with Romanian diplomat Nicolae Titulescu; the two became personal friends.[13] He was also in contact with the Romanian-born conservative aristocrat and writer Marthe Bibesco, who introduced Antonescu to the ideas of Gustave Le Bon, a researcher of crowd psychology who had an influence on Fascism.[14] Bibesco saw Antonescu as a new version of 19th century nationalist Frenchman Georges Boulanger, introducing him as such to Le Bon.[14] In 1923, he made the acquaintance of lawyer Mihai Antonescu, who was to become his close friend, legal representative and political associate.[15] After returning to Romania in 1926, Antonescu resumed his teaching in Sibiu, and, in the autumn of 1928, became Secretary-General of the Defense Ministry in the Vintilă Brătianu cabinet.[13] He married Maria Niculescu, for long a resident of France, who had been married twice before: first to a Romanian Police officer, with whom she had a son, Gheorghe (died 1944), and then to a Frenchman of Jewish origin.[16] After a period as Deputy Chief of the General Staff,[13] he was appointed its Chief (1933–1934). These assignments coincided with the rule of Carol's underage son Michael I and his regents, and with Carol's seizure of power in 1930. During this period Antonescu first grew interested in the Iron Guard, an antisemitic and fascist-related movement headed by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. In his capacity as Deputy Chief of Staff, he ordered the Army's intelligence unit to compile a report on the faction, and made a series of critical notes on Codreanu's various statements.[13] As Chief of Staff, Antonescu reportedly had his first confrontation with the political class and the monarch. His projects for weapon modernization were questioned by Defense Minister Paul Angelescu, leading Antonescu to present his resignation.[13] According to another account, he completed an official report on the embezzlement of Army funds which indirectly implicated Carol and his camarilla (see Škoda Affair).[5][17] The king consequently ordered him out of office, provoking indignation among sections of the political mainstream.[5] On Carol's orders, Antonescu was placed under surveillance by the Siguranța Statului intelligence service, and closely monitored by the Interior Ministry Undersecretary Armand Călinescu.[18] The officer's political credentials were on the rise, as he was able to establish and maintain contacts with people on all sides of the political spectrum, while support for Carol plummeted. Among these were contacts with the two main democratic groups, the National Liberal and the National Peasants', parties known respectively as PNL and PNȚ.[5] He was also engaged in discussions with the rising far right, antisemitic and fascist movements; although in competition with each other, both the National Christian Party (PNC) of Octavian Goga and the Iron Guard sought to attract Antonescu to their side.[5][19] In 1936, to the authorities' alarm, Army General and Iron Guard member Gheorghe Cantacuzino-Grănicerul arranged a meeting between Ion Antonescu and the movement's leader, Corneliu Codreanu. Antonescu is reported to have found Codreanu arrogant, but to have welcomed his revolutionizing approach to politics.[18] Defense portfolio and the Codreanu trials In late 1937, after the December general election came to an inconclusive result, Carol appointed Goga Prime Minister over a far right cabinet that was the first executive to impose racial discrimination in its treatment of the Jewish community. Goga's appointment was meant to curb the rise of the more popular and even more radical Codreanu. Initially given the Communications portfolio by his rival, Interior Minister Armand Călinescu, Antonescu repeatedly demanded the office of Defense Minister, which he was eventually granted.[20] His mandate coincided with a troubled period, and saw Romania having to choose between its traditional alliance with France, Britain, the crumbling Little Entente and the League of Nations or moving closer to Nazi Germany and its Anti-Comintern Pact. Antonescu's own contribution is disputed by historians, who variously see him as either a supporter of the Anglo-French alliance or, like the PNC itself, more favourable to cooperation with Adolf Hitler's Germany.[5] At the time, Antonescu viewed Romania's alliance with the Entente as insurance against Hungarian and Soviet revanchism, but, as an anti-communist, he was suspicious of the Franco-Soviet rapprochement.[21] Particularly concerned about Hungarian demands in Transylvania, he ordered the General Staff to prepare for a western attack.[22] However, his major contribution in office was in relation to an internal crisis: as a response to violent clashes between the Iron Guard and the PNC's own fascist militia, the Lăncieri, Antonescu extended the already imposed martial law.[23] The Goga cabinet ended when the tentative rapprochement between Goga and Codreanu[24] prompted Carol to overthrow the democratic system and proclaim his own authoritarian regime (see 1938 Constitution of Romania, National Renaissance Front). The deposed Premier died in 1938, while Antonescu remained a close friend of his widow, Veturia Goga.[25] By that time, revising his earlier stance, Antonescu had also built a close relationship with Codreanu, and was even said to have become his confidant.[26][27] On Carol's request, he had earlier asked the Guard's leader to consider an alliance with the king, which Codreanu promptly refused in favour of negotiations with Goga, coupled with claims that he was not interested in political battles, an attitude supposedly induced by Antonescu himself.[28] Soon afterward, Călinescu, acting on indications from the monarch, arrested Codreanu and prosecuted him in two successive trials. Antonescu, whose mandate of Defense Minister had been prolonged under the premiership of Miron Cristea, resigned in protest of Codreanu's arrest.[29] Antonescu's mandate ended on 30 March 1938. He also served as Air and Marine Minister between 2 February and his resignation on 30 March.[30] He was a celebrity defense witness at the latter's first[27] and second trials.[29] During the latter, which resulted in Codreanu's conviction for treason, Antonescu vouched for his friend's honesty while shaking his hand in front of the jury.[29] Upon the conclusion of the trial, the king ordered his former minister interned at Predeal, before assigning him to command the Third Army in the remote eastern region of Bessarabia (and later removing him after Antonescu expressed sympathy for Guardists imprisoned in Chișinău).[31] Attempting to discredit his rival, Carol also ordered Antonescu's wife to be tried for bigamy, based on a false claim that her divorce had not been finalized. Defended by Mihai Antonescu, the officer was able to prove his detractors wrong.[32] Codreanu himself was taken into custody and discreetly killed by the Gendarmes acting on Carol's orders (November 1938).[33] Carol's regime slowly dissolved into crisis, a dissolution accelerated after the start of World War II, when the military success of the core Axis Powers and the non-aggression pact signed by Germany and the Soviet Union saw Romania isolated and threatened (see Romania during World War II). In 1940, two of Romania's regions, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, were lost to a Soviet occupation consented to by the king. This came as Romania, exposed by the Fall of France, was seeking to align its policies with those of Germany.[34] Ion Antonescu himself had come to value a pro-Axis alternative after the 1938 Munich Agreement, when Germany imposed demands on Czechoslovakia with the acquiescence of France and the United Kingdom, leaving locals to fear that, unless reoriented, Romania would follow.[35] Angered by the territorial losses of 1940, General Antonescu sent Carol a general note of protest, and, as a result, was arrested and interned at Bistrița Monastery.[5][36] While there, he commissioned Mihai Antonescu to establish contacts with Nazi German officials, promising to advance German economic interest, particularly in respect to the local oil industry, in exchange for endorsement.[37] Commenting on Ion Antonescu's ambivalent stance, Hitler's minister to Romania, Wilhelm Fabricius, wrote to his superiors: "I am not convinced that he is a safe man."[38] Rise to power Banner of Ion Antonescu as Conducător Ion Antonescu's portrait Romania's elite had been intensely Francophile ever since Romania had won its independence in the 19th century, indeed so Francophile that the defeat of France in June 1940 had the effect of discrediting the entire elite.[39] Antonescu's internment ended in August, during which interval, under Axis pressure, Romania had ceded Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria (see Treaty of Craiova) and Northern Transylvania to Hungary (see Second Vienna Award). The latter grant caused consternation among large sections of Romania's population, causing Carol's popularity to fall to a record low and provoking large-scale protests in Bucharest, the capital. These movements were organized competitively by the pro-Allied PNȚ, headed by Iuliu Maniu, and the pro-Nazi Iron Guard.[5] The latter group had been revived under the leadership of Horia Sima, and was organizing a coup d'état.[40] In this troubled context, Antonescu simply left his assigned residence. He may have been secretly helped in this by German intercession,[41] but was more directly aided to escape by socialite Alice Sturdza, who was acting on Maniu's request.[42] Antonescu subsequently met with Maniu in Ploiești, where they discussed how best to manage the political situation.[5][42][43] While these negotiations were carried out, the monarch himself was being advised by his entourage to recover legitimacy by governing in tandem with the increasingly popular Antonescu, while creating a new political majority from the existing forces.[5][42] On 2 September 1940, Valer Pop, a courtier and an important member of the camarilla, first advised Carol to appoint Antonescu as Prime Minister as the solution to the crisis.[44] Pop's reasons for advising Carol to appoint Antonescu as Prime Minister were partly because Antonescu, who was known to be friendly with the Iron Guard and who had been imprisoned under Carol, was believed to have enough of an oppositional background to Carol's regime to appease the public and partly because Pop knew that Antonescu, for all his Legionary sympathies, was a member of the elite and believed he would never turn against it. When Carol proved reluctant to make Antonescu Prime Minister, Pop visited the German legation to meet with Fabricius on the night of 4 September 1940 to ask that the German minister phone Carol to tell him that the Reich wanted Antonescu as Prime Minister, and Fabricius's promptly did just that.[45] Carol and Antonescu accepted the proposal, Antonescu being ordered to approach political party leaders Maniu of the PNȚ and Dinu Brătianu of the PNL.[5][42][46] They all called for Carol's abdication as a preliminary measure,[5][42][47] while Sima, another leader sought after for negotiations, could not be found in time to express his opinion.[42] Antonescu partly complied with the request but also asked Carol to bestow upon him the reserve powers for Romanian heads of state.[5][48] Carol yielded and, on 5 September 1940, the general became Prime Minister, and Carol transferred most of his dictatorial powers to him.[5][49] The latter's first measure was to curtail potential resistance within the Army by relieving Bucharest Garrison chief Gheorghe Argeșanu of his position and replacing him with Dumitru Coroamă.[50] Shortly afterward, Antonescu heard rumours that two of Carol's loyalist generals, Gheorghe Mihail and Paul Teodorescu, were planning to have him killed.[51] In reaction, he forced Carol to abdicate, while General Coroamă was refusing to carry out the royal order of shooting down Iron Guardist protesters.[52] Michael ascended the throne for the second time, while Antonescu's dictatorial powers were confirmed and extended.[5][53] On 6 September, the day Michael formally assumed the throne, he issued a royal decree declaring Antonescu Conducător (leader) of the state. The same decree relegated the monarch to a ceremonial role.[54] Among Antonescu's subsequent measures was ensuring the safe departure into self-exile of Carol and his mistress Elena Lupescu, granting protection to the royal train when it was attacked by armed members of the Iron Guard.[5] The regime of King Carol had been notorious for being the most corrupt regime in Europe during the 1930s, and when Carol fled Romania, he took with him the better part of the Romanian treasury, leaving the new government with enormous financial problems.[55] Antonescu had expected, perhaps naïvely, that Carol would take with him enough money to provide for a comfortable exile, and was surprised that Carol had cleared out almost the entire national treasury. For the next four years, a major concern of Antonescu's government was attempting to have the Swiss banks where Carol had deposited the assets return the money to Romania; this effort did not meet with success.[55] Horia Sima's subsequent cooperation with Antonescu was endorsed by high-ranking Nazi German officials, many of whom feared the Iron Guard was too weak to rule on its own.[56] Antonescu therefore received the approval of Ambassador Fabricius.[57] Despite early promises, Antonescu abandoned projects for the creation of a national government,[5][58] and opted instead for a coalition between a military dictatorship lobby and the Iron Guard.[5][59] He later justified his choice by stating that the Iron Guard "represented the political base of the country at the time."[60] Right from the outset, Antonescu clashed with Sima over economic questions, with Antonescu's main concern being to get the economy growing so as to provide taxes for a treasury looted by Carol, while Sima favored populist economic measures that Antonescu insisted there was no money for.[61] Antonescu-Sima partnership Horia Sima, Antonescu and King Michael I of Romania, 1940 The resulting regime, deemed the National Legionary State, was officially proclaimed on 14 September. On that date, the Iron Guard was remodelled into the only legally permitted party in Romania. Antonescu continued as Premier and Conducător, and was named as the Guard's honorary commander. Sima became Deputy Premier and leader of the Guard.[5][62][63][64] Antonescu subsequently ordered the Guardists imprisoned by Carol to be set free.[65] On 6 October, he presided over the Iron Guard's mass rally in Bucharest, one in a series of major celebratory and commemorative events organized by the movement during the late months of 1940.[66] However, he tolerated the PNȚ and PNL's informal existence, allowing them to preserve much of their political support.[67] There followed a short-lived and always uneasy partnership between Antonescu and Sima. In late September, the new regime denounced all pacts, accords and diplomatic agreements signed under Carol, bringing the country into Germany's orbit while subverting its relationship with a former Balkan ally, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.[68] Germans troops entered the country in stages, in order to defend the local oil industry[69] and help instruct their Romanian counterparts on Blitzkrieg tactics.[70] On 23 November, Antonescu was in Berlin, where his signature sealed Romania's commitment to the main Axis instrument, the Tripartite Pact.[5][71] Two days later, the country also adhered to the Nazi-led Anti-Comintern Pact.[72] Other than these generic commitments, Romania had no treaty binding it to Germany, and the Romanian-German alliance functioned informally.[73] Speaking in 1946, Antonescu claimed to have followed the pro-German path in continuation of earlier policies, and for fear of a Nazi protectorate in Romania.[74] During the National Legionary State period, earlier antisemitic legislation was upheld and strengthened, while the "Romanianization" of Jewish-owned enterprises became standard official practice.[5][75] Immediately after coming into office, Antonescu himself expanded the anti-Jewish and Nuremberg law-inspired legislation passed by his predecessors Goga and Ion Gigurtu,[76] while tens of new anti-Jewish regulations were passed in 1941–1942.[77] This was done despite his formal pledge to Wilhelm Filderman and the Jewish Communities Federation that, unless engaged in "sabotage," "the Jewish population will not suffer."[78] Antonescu did not reject the application of Legionary policies, but was offended by Sima's advocacy of paramilitarism and the Guard's frequent recourse to street violence.[5][79] He drew much hostility from his partners by extending some protection to former dignitaries whom the Iron Guard had arrested.[80] One early incident opposed Antonescu to the Guard's magazine Buna Vestire, which accused him of leniency and was subsequently forced to change its editorial board.[81] By then, the Legionary press was routinely claiming that he was obstructing revolution and aiming to take control of the Iron Guard, and that he had been transformed into a tool of Freemasonry (see Anti-Masonry).[82] The political conflict coincided with major social challenges, including the influx of refugees from areas lost earlier in the year and a large-scale earthquake affecting Bucharest.[83] Disorder peaked in the last days of November 1940, when, after uncovering the circumstances of Codreanu's death, the fascist movement ordered retaliations against political figures previously associated with Carol, carrying out the Jilava Massacre, the assassinations of Nicolae Iorga and Virgil Madgearu, and several other acts of violence.[5][84] As retaliation for this insubordination, Antonescu ordered the Army to resume control of the streets,[85] unsuccessfully pressured Sima to have the assassins detained, ousted the Iron Guardist prefect of Bucharest Police Ștefan Zăvoianu, and ordered Legionary ministers to swear an oath to the Conducător.[86] His condemnation of the killings was nevertheless limited and discreet, and, the same month, he joined Sima at a burial ceremony for Codreanu's newly discovered remains.[87] The widening gap between the dictator and Sima's party resonated in Berlin. When, in December, Legionary Foreign Minister Mihail R. Sturdza obtained the replacement of Fabricius with Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, perceived as more sympathetic to the Iron Guard, Antonescu promptly took over leadership of the ministry, with the compliant diplomat Constantin Greceanu as his right hand.[88] In Germany, such leaders of the Nazi Party as Heinrich Himmler, Baldur von Schirach and Joseph Goebbels threw their support behind the Legionaries,[5][89] whereas Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Wehrmacht stood by Antonescu.[5] The latter group was concerned that any internal conflict would threaten Romania's oil industry, vital to the German war effort.[5][90] The German leadership was by then secretly organizing Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union.[91][92] Legionary Rebellion and Operation Barbarossa Foreign Minister of the Third Reich Joachim von Ribbentrop (right) and Romanian leader Ion Antonescu in June 1941. Antonescu and Adolf Hitler at the Führerbau in Munich (June 1941). Joachim von Ribbentrop and Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel in the background Antonescu's plan to act against his coalition partners in the event of further disorder hinged on Hitler's approval,[5][63][93][94] a vague signal of which had been given during ceremonies confirming Romania's adherence to the Tripartite Pact.[5][95] A decisive turn occurred when Hitler invited Antonescu and Sima both over for discussions: whereas Antonescu agreed, Sima stayed behind in Romania, probably plotting a coup d'état.[5][96] While Hitler did not produce a clear endorsement for clamping down on Sima's party, he made remarks interpreted by their recipient as oblique blessings.[97] On 14 January 1941 during a German-Romanian summit, Hitler informed Antonescu of his plans to invade the Soviet Union later that year and asked Romania to participate.[98] By this time, Hitler had come to the conclusion that while Sima was ideologically closer to him, Antonescu was the more competent leader capable of ensuring stability in Romania while being committed to aligning his country with the Axis. The Antonescu-Sima dispute erupted into violence in January 1941, when the Iron Guard instigated a series of attacks on public institutions and a pogrom, incidents collectively known as the "Legionary Rebellion."[5][99] This came after the mysterious assassination of Major Döring, a German agent in Bucharest, which was used by the Iron Guard as a pretext to accuse the Conducător of having a secret anti-German agenda,[100] and made Antonescu oust the Legionary Interior Minister, Constantin Petrovicescu, while closing down all of the Legionary-controlled "Romanianization" offices.[101] Various other clashes prompted him to demand the resignation of all Police commanders who sympathized with the movement.[102] After two days of widespread violence, during which Guardists killed some 120 Bucharest Jews,[5][103] Antonescu sent in the Army, under the command of General Constantin Sănătescu.[5] German officials acting on Hitler's orders, including the new Ambassador Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, helped Antonescu eliminate the Iron Guardists, but several of their lower-level colleagues actively aided Sima's subordinates.[104] Goebbels was especially upset by the decision to support Antonescu, believing it to have been advantageous to "the Freemasons."[105] After the purge of the Iron Guard, Hitler kept his options open by granting political asylum to Sima—whom Antonescu's courts sentenced to death—and to other Legionaries in similar situations.[106] The Guardists were detained in special conditions at Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.[107] In parallel, Antonescu publicly obtained the cooperation of Codreanists, members of an Iron Guardist wing which had virulently opposed Sima, and whose leader was Codreanu's father Ion Zelea Codreanu.[108] Antonescu again sought backing from the PNȚ and PNL to form a national cabinet, but his rejection of parliamentarism made the two groups refuse him.[109] Antonescu traveled to Germany and met Hitler on eight more occasions between June 1941 and August 1944.[110] Such close contacts helped cement an enduring relationship between the two dictators, and Hitler reportedly came to see Antonescu as the only trustworthy person in Romania,[5][111] and the only foreigner to consult on military matters.[112] The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that Hitler after first meeting Antonescu "...was greatly impressed by him; no other leader Hitler met other than Mussolini ever received such consistently favourable comments from the German dictator. Hitler even mustered the patience to listen to Antonescu's lengthy disquisitions on the glorious history of Romania and the perfidy of the Hungarians—a curious reversal for a man who was more accustomed to regaling visitors with tirades of his own."[113] In later statements, Hitler offered praise to Antonescu's "breadth of vision" and "real personality."[114] A remarkable aspect of the Hitler-Antonescu friendship was neither could speak others' language. Hitler only knew German while the only foreign language Antonescu knew was French, in which he was completely fluent.[115] During their meetings, Antonescu spoke in French which was then translated into German by Hitler's translator Paul Schmidt and vice versa since Schmidt did not speak Romanian either. The German military presence increased significantly in early 1941, when, using Romania as a base, Hitler invaded the rebellious Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Kingdom of Greece (see Balkans Campaign).[116] In parallel, Romania's relationship with the United Kingdom, at the time the only major adversary of Nazi Germany, erupted into conflict: on 10 February 1941, British Premier Winston Churchill recalled His Majesty's Ambassador Reginald Hoare, and approved the blockade of Romanian ships in British-controlled ports.[117] On 12 June 1941, during another summit with Hitler, Antonescu first learned of the "special" nature of Operation Barbarossa, namely, that the war against the Soviet Union was to be an ideological war to "annihilate" the forces of "Judeo-Bolshevism," a "war of extermination" to be fought without any mercy; Hitler even showed Antonescu a copy of the "Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia" he had issued to his forces about the "special treatment" to be handed out to Soviet Jews.[98] Antonescu completely accepted Hitler's ideas about Operation Barbarossa as a "race war" between the Aryans, represented by the Nordic Germans and Latin Romanians on the Axis side vs. the Slavs and Asians, commanded by the Jews on the Soviet side.[118] Besides anti-Semitism, there was an extremely strong current of anti-Slavic and anti-Asian racism to Antonescu's remarks about the "Asiatic hordes" of the Red Army.[119] The Asians Antonescu referred were the various Asian peoples of the Soviet Union, such as the Kazakhs, Kalmyks, Mongols, Uzbeks, Buryats, etc. During his summit with Hitler in June 1941, Antonescu told the Führer that he believed it was necessary to "once and for all" eliminate Russia as a power because the Russians were the most powerful Slavic nation and that as a Latin people, the Romanians had an inborn hatred of all Slavs and Jews.[119] Antonescu went on to tell Hitler: "Because of its racial qualities, Romania can continue to play its role as an anti-Slavic buffer for the benefit of Germany."[119] Ancel wrote that Romanian anti-Slavic racism differed from the German variety in that the Romanians had traditionally feared the Slavic peoples whereas the Germans had traditionally held the Slavic peoples in contempt.[120] In Antonescu's mind, the Romanians as a Latin people had attained a level of civilization that the Slavs were nowhere close to, but theoretically the Slavic Russians and Ukrainians might be able to reach under Romanian auspices, through Antonescu's remarks to Hitler that "We must fight this race (i.e. the Slavs) resolutely" together, with the need for "colonization" of Transnistria, suggested that he did think this would happen in his own lifetime.[118] Subsequently, the Romanians assigned to Barbarossa were to learn that as a Latin people, the Germans considered them to be their inferiors, albeit not as inferior as the Slavs, Asians and Jews who were viewed as untermenschen ("sub-humans").[118] Hitler's promise to Antonescu that after the war, the Germanic and Latin races would rule the world in a partnership turned out to be meaningless.[119] King Michael I and Antonescu at the border, on the river Prut, watching the deployment of the Romanian Army in 1941 In June of that year, Romania joined the attack on the Soviet Union, led by Germany in coalition with Hungary, Finland, the State of Slovakia, the Kingdom of Italy, and the Independent State of Croatia. Antonescu had been made aware of the plan by German envoys, and supported it enthusiastically even before Hitler extended Romania an offer to participate.[121] On 18 June 1941, Antonescu gave orders to his generals about "cleansing the ground" of Jews when Romanian forces entered Bessarabia and Bukovina.[98] Right from the start, Antonescu proclaimed the war against the Soviet Union to be a "holy war", a "crusade" in the name of Eastern Orthodox faith and the Romanian race against the forces of "Judeo-Bolshevism".[122] The propaganda of the Antonescu regime demonized everything Jewish as Antonescu believed that Communism was invented by the Jews, and all of the Soviet leaders were really Jews.[123] Reflecting Antonescu's anti-Slavic feelings, despite the fact that the war was billed as a "crusade" in defence of Orthodoxy against "Judeo-Bolshevism", the war was not presented as a struggle to liberate the Orthodox Russians and Ukrainians from Communism; instead rule by "Judeo-Bolshevism" was portrayed as something brought about the innate moral inferiority of the Slavs, who thus needed to be ruled by the Germans and the Romanians.[123] The Romanian force engaged formed a General Antonescu Army Group under the effective command of German general Eugen Ritter von Schobert.[124] Romania's campaign on the Eastern Front began without a formal declaration of war, and was consecrated by Antonescu's statement: "Soldiers, I order you, cross the Prut River" (in reference to the Bessarabian border between Romania and post-1940 Soviet territory).[125] A few days after this, a large-scale pogrom was carried out in Iași with Antonescu's agreement; thousands of Jews were killed in the bloody Iași pogrom.[92][126] Antonescu had followed a generation of younger right-wing Romanian intellectuals led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu who in the 1920s–30s had rejected the traditional Francophila of the Romanian elites and their adherence to Western notions of universal democratic values and human rights.[127] Antonescu made it clear that his regime rejected the moral principles of the "demo-liberal world" and he saw the war as an ideological struggle between his spiritually pure "national-totalitarian regime" vs. "Jewish morality".[128] Antonescu believed that the liberal humanist-democratic-capitalist values of the West and Communism were both invented by the Jews to destroy Romania.[128] In a lengthy speech just before the war, Antonescu attacked democracy in the most violent terms as it allowed Jews equal rights and thus to undercut the Romanian "national idea".[128] As such, Antonescu stated what was needed was a "new man" who would be "tough", "virile" and willing to fight for an ethnically and religiously "pure" Romania.[128] Despite his quarrel with Sima, much of Antonescu's speech clearly reflected the influence of the ideas of the Iron Guard that Antonescu had absorbed in the 1930s.[128] Antonescu's anti-Semitism and sexism went so far that he tacitly condoned the rape of Jewish women and girls in Bessarabia and northern Bukovinia by his forces under the grounds that he was going take away all of the property that the Jews had "stolen" from the Romanians, and as far he was concerned, Jewish females were just another piece of property.[129] Since the Jewish women were going to exterminated anyway, Antonescu felt there was nothing wrong about letting his soldiers and gendarmes have "some fun" before shooting them.[129] After becoming the first Romanian to be granted the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, which he received from Hitler at their 6 August meeting in the Ukrainian city of Berdychiv, Ion Antonescu was promoted to Marshal of Romania by royal decree on 22 August, in recognition for his role in restoring the eastern frontiers of Greater Romania.[130] In a report to Berlin, a German diplomat wrote that Marshal Antonescu had syphilis and that "among [Romanian] cavalry officers this disease is as widespread as a common cold is among German officers. The Marshal suffers from severe attacks of it every several months."[3] Antonescu took one of his most debated decisions when, with Bessarabia's conquest almost complete, he committed Romania to Hitler's war effort beyond the Dniester—that is, beyond territory that had been part of Romania between the wars—and thrust deeper into Soviet territory, thus waging a war of aggression.[92][131] On 30 August, Romania occupied a territory it deemed "Transnistria", formerly a part of the Ukrainian SSR (including the entire Moldavian ASSR and further territories).[92][132] Like the decision to continue the war beyond Bessarabia, this earned Antonescu much criticism from the semi-clandestine PNL and PNȚ.[92] Insofar as the war against the Soviet Union was a war to recover Bessarabia and northern Bukovina – both regions that been a part of Romania until June 1940 and that had Romanian majorities – the conflict had been very popular with the Romanian public opinion.[133] But the idea of conquering Transnistria was not as that region had never been part of Romania, and a minority of the people were ethnic Romanian.[133] Soon after the takeover, the area was assigned to a civil administration apparatus headed by Gheorghe Alexianu and became the site for the main component of the Holocaust in Romania: a mass deportation of the Bessarabian and Ukrainian Jews, followed later by transports of Romani Romanians and Jews from Moldavia proper (that is, the portions of Moldavia west of the Prut). The accord over Transnistria's administration, signed in Tighina, also placed areas between the Dniester and the Dnieper under Romanian military occupation, while granting control over all resources to Germany.[134] In September 1941, Antonescu ordered Romanian forces to take Odessa, a prize he badly wanted for reasons of prestige.[135] Russians had traditionally been seen in Romania as brutal aggressors, and for Romanian forces to take a major Soviet city and one of the largest Black Sea ports like Odessa would be a sign of how far Romania had been "regenerated" under Antonescu's leadership. Much to Antonescu's intense fury, the Red Army were able to halt the Romanian offensive on Odessa and 24 September 1941 Antonescu had to reluctantly ask for the help of the Wehrmacht with the drive on Odessa.[136] On 16 October 1941 Odessa fell to the German-Romanian forces. The Romanian losses had been so heavy that the area around Odessa was known to the Romanian Army as the Vale of Tears.[136] Antonescu's anti-Semitism was sharpened by the Odessa fighting as he was convinced that the only reason why the Red Army had fought so fiercely around Odessa was that the average Russian soldier had been terrorized by bloodthirsty Jewish commissars into fighting hard.[136] When Wilhelm Filderman wrote a letter to Antonescu complaining about the murder of Jews in Odessa, Antonescu wrote back: "Your Jews, who have become Soviet commissars, are driving Soviet soldiers in the Odessa region into a futile bloodbath, through horrendous terror techniques as the Russian prisoners themselves have admitted, simply to cause us heavy losses".[136] Antonescu ended his letter with the claim that Russian Jewish commissars had savagely tortured Romanian POWs and that the entire Jewish community of Romania, Filderman included were morally responsible for all of the losses and sufferings of the Romanians around Odessa.[136] In the fall of 1941, Antonescu planned to deport all of the Jews of the Regat, southern Bukovina and southern Transylvania into Transnistria as the prelude to killing them, but this operation was vetoed by Germany, who complained that Antonescu had not finished killing the Jews of Transnistria yet.[137] This veto was largely motivated by bureaucratic politics, namely if Antonescu exterminated all of the Jews of Romania himself, there would be nothing for the SS and the Auswärtiges Amt to do.[137] Killinger informed Antonescu that Germany would reduce its supplies of arms if Antonescu went ahead with his plans to deport the Jews of the Regat into Transnistria and told him he would be better off deporting the Jews to the death camps in Poland that the Germans were already busy building.[138] Since Romania had almost no arms industry of its own and was almost entirely dependent upon weapons from Germany to fight the war, Antonescu had little choice, but to comply with Killinger's request. Reversal of fortunes Antonescu (right) being greeted by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop during a 1943 visit to Germany. Marshal Erich von Manstein (left) welcomes Marshal Antonescu and General Dumitrescu (right) during a 1943 visit to Germany The Romanian Army's inferior arms, insufficient armour and lack of training had been major concerns for the German commanders since before the start of the operation.[139] One of the earliest major obstacles Antonescu encountered on the Eastern Front was the resistance of Odessa, a Soviet port on the Black Sea. Refusing any German assistance, he ordered the Romanian Army to maintain a two-month siege on heavily fortified and well-defended positions.[92][140] The ill-equipped 4th Army suffered losses of some 100,000 men.[141] Antonescu's popularity again rose in October, when the fall of Odessa was celebrated triumphantly with a parade through Bucharest's Arcul de Triumf, and when many Romanians reportedly believed the war was as good as won.[92] In Odessa itself, the aftermath included a large-scale massacre of the Jewish population, ordered by the Marshal as retaliation for a bombing which killed a number of Romanian officers and soldiers (General Ioan Glogojeanu among them).[92][142] The city subsequently became the administrative capital of Transnistria.[92][143] According to one account, the Romanian administration planned to change Odessa's name to Antonescu.[144] Antonescu's planned that once the war against the Soviet Union was won to invade Hungary to take back Transylvania and Bulgaria to take back the Dobruja with Antonescu being especially keen on the former.[145] Antonescu planned on attacking Hungary to recover Transylvania at the first opportunity and regarded Romanian involvement on the Eastern Front in part as a way of proving to Hitler that Romania was a better German ally than Hungary, and thus deserving of German support when the planned Romanian-Hungarian war began.[145] The Conducător had also created an intra-Axis alliance against Hungary along with Croatia and Slovakia.[146] As the Soviet Union recovered from the initial shock and slowed down the Axis offensive at the Battle of Moscow (October 1941 – January 1942), Romania was asked by its allies to contribute a larger number of troops.[147] A decisive factor in Antonescu's compliance with the request appears to have been a special visit to Bucharest by Wehrmacht chief of staff Wilhelm Keitel, who introduced the Conducător to Hitler's plan for attacking the Caucasus (see Battle of the Caucasus).[147] The Romanian force engaged in the war reportedly exceeded German demands.[147] It came to around 500,000 troops[147][148] and thirty actively involved divisions.[149] As a sign of his satisfaction, Hitler presented his Romanian counterpart with a luxury car.[147] On 7 December 1941, after reflecting on the possibility for Romania, Hungary and Finland to change their stance, the British government responded to repeated Soviet requests and declared war on all three countries.[150] Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and in compliance with its Axis commitment, Romania declared war on the United States within five days. These developments contrasted with Antonescu's own statement of 7 December: "I am an ally of the [German] Reich against [the Soviet Union], I am neutral in the conflict between Great Britain and Germany. I am for America against the Japanese."[151] Antonescu arrives at the front with General Ewald von Kleist in June 1942, during the Axis summer offensive Case Blue A crucial change in the war came with the Battle of Stalingrad in June 1942 – February 1943, a major defeat for the Axis. Romania's armies alone lost some 150,000 men (either dead, wounded or captured)[147] and more than half of the country's divisions were wiped out.[152] The loss of two entire Romanian armies who all either killed or captured by the Soviets produced a major crisis in German-Romanian relations in the winter of 1943 with many people in the Romanian government for the first time questioning the wisdom of fighting on the side of the Axis.[153] Outside of the elites, by 1943 the continuing heavy losses on the Eastern Front, anger at the contempt which the Wehrmacht treated their Romanian allies and declining living standards within Romania made the war unpopular with the Romanian people, and consequently the Conducător himself. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that: "The string of broken German promises of equipment and support, the disregard of warnings about Soviet offensive preparations, the unfriendly treatment of retreating Romanian units by German officers and soldiers and the general German tendency to blame their own miscalculations and disasters on their allies all combined to produce a real crisis in German-Romanian relations."[153] For part of that interval, the Marshal had withdrawn from public life, owing to an unknown affliction, which is variously rumoured to have been a mental breakdown, a foodborne illness or a symptom of the syphilis he had contracted earlier in life.[154] He is known to have been suffering from digestive problems, treating himself with food prepared by Marlene von Exner, an Austrian-born dietitian who moved into Hitler's service after 1943.[155] The Mareșal tank destroyer, named after Marshal Antonescu, who was involved in its development. It later inspired the German Hetzer Upon his return, Antonescu blamed the Romanian losses on German overseer Arthur Hauffe, whom Hitler agreed to replace.[156] In parallel with the military losses, Romania was confronted with large-scale economic problems. Romania's oil was the Reich's only source of natural oil after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 to August 1944 (Germany also had synthetic oil plants operating from 1942 onwards), and as such for economic reasons, Romania was always treated as a major ally by Hitler.[145] While Germany monopolized Romania's exports,[157] it defaulted on most of its payments.[158] Like all countries whose exports to Germany, particularly in oil, exceeded imports from that country, Romania's economy suffered from Nazi control of the exchange rate (see Economy of Nazi Germany).[159] On the German side, those directly involved in harnessing Romania's economic output for German goals were economic planners Hermann Göring and Walther Funk, together with Hermann Neubacher, the Special Representative for Economic Problems.[160] A recurring problem for Antonescu was attempting to obtain payments for all of the oil he shipped to Germany while resisting German demands for increased oil production.[145] The situation was further aggravated in 1942, as USAAF and RAF were able to bomb the oil fields in Prahova County (see Bombing of Romania in World War II, Operation Tidal Wave).[161] Official sources from the following period amalgamate military and civilian losses of all kinds, which produces a total of 554,000 victims of the war.[162] To improve the Romanian army's effectiveness, the Mareșal tank destroyer was developed starting in late 1942. Marshal Antonescu, after whom the vehicle was named, was involved in the project himself.[163] The vehicle later influenced the development of the German Hetzer.[164][165] In this context, the Romanian leader acknowledged that Germany was losing the war, and he therefore authorized his Deputy Premier and new Foreign Minister Mihai Antonescu to set up contacts with the Allies.[147][166] In early 1943, Antonescu authorized his diplomats to contact British and American diplomats in Portugal and Switzerland to see if were possible for Romania to sign an armistice with the Western powers.[167] The Romanian diplomats were informed that no armistice was possible until an armistice was signed with the Soviet Union, a condition Antonescu rejected.[167] In parallel, he allowed the PNȚ and the PNL to engage in parallel talks with the Allies at various locations in neutral countries.[147][168] The discussions were strained by the Western Allies' call for an unconditional surrender, over which the Romanian envoys bargained with Allied diplomats in Sweden and Egypt (among them the Soviet representatives Nikolai Vasilevich Novikov and Alexandra Kollontai).[169] Antonescu was also alarmed by the possibility of war being carried on Romanian territory, as had happened in Italy after Operation Avalanche.[170] The events also prompted hostile negotiations aimed at toppling Antonescu, and involving the two political parties, the young monarch, diplomats and soldiers.[147][171] A major clash between Michael and Antonescu took place during the first days of 1943, when the 21-year-old monarch used his New Year's address on national radio to part with the Axis war effort.[172] Ouster and arrest Main article: King Michael's Coup In March 1944, the Soviet Red Army broke the Southern Bug and Dniester fronts, advancing on Bessarabia. This came just as Field Marshal Henry Maitland Wilson, the British Allied commander of the Mediterranean theatre, presented Antonescu with an ultimatum.[147] After a new visit to Germany and a meeting with Hitler, Antonescu opted to continue fighting alongside the remaining Axis states, a decision which he later claimed was motivated by Hitler's promise to allow Romania possession of Northern Transylvania in the event of an Axis victory.[147] Upon his return, the Conducător oversaw a counteroffensive which stabilized the front on a line between Iași and Chișinău to the north and the lower Dniester to the east.[147] This normalized his relations with Nazi German officials, whose alarm over the possible loss of an ally had resulted in the Margarethe II plan, an adapted version of the Nazi takeover in Hungary.[147][173] However, Antonescu's non-compliance with the terms of Wilson's ultimatum also had drastic effects on Romania's ability to exit the war.[147] By then, Antonescu was conceiving of a separate peace with the Western Allies,[147][174] while maintaining contacts with the Soviets.[175] In parallel, the mainstream opposition movement came to establish contacts with the Romanian Communist Party (PCR), which, although minor numerically, gained importance for being the only political group to be favored by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.[176] On the PCR side, the discussions involved Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu and later Emil Bodnăraș.[147][177] Another participating group at this stage was the old Romanian Social Democratic Party.[178] Large-scale Allied bombings of Bucharest took place in spring 1944, while the Soviet Red Army approached Romanian borders.[179] The Battle for Romania began in late summer: while German commanders Johannes Frießner and Otto Wöhler of the Army Group South Ukraine attempted to hold Bukovina, Soviet Steppe Front leader Rodion Malinovsky stormed into the areas of Moldavia defended by Petre Dumitrescu's troops.[180] In reaction, Antonescu attempted to stabilize the front on a line between Focșani, Nămoloasa and Brăila, deep inside Romanian territory.[147] On 5 August, he visited Hitler one final time in Kętrzyn. On this occasion, the German leader reportedly explained that his people had betrayed the Nazi cause, and asked him if Romania would go on fighting (to which Antonescu reportedly answered in vague terms).[181] After Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov more than once stated that the Soviet Union was not going to require Romanian subservience,[182] the factions opposing Antonescu agreed that the moment had come to overthrow him, by carrying out the Royal Coup of 23 August.[147][183] On that day, the sovereign asked Antonescu to meet him in the royal palace building, where he presented him with a request to take Romania out of its Axis alliance.[147][184] The Conducător refused, and was promptly arrested by soldiers of the guard, being replaced as Premier with General Constantin Sănătescu, who presided over a national government.[147][185] The new Romanian authorities declared peace with the Allies and advised the population to greet Soviet troops.[147] On 25 August, as Bucharest was successfully defending itself against German retaliations, Romania declared war on Nazi Germany.[186] The events disrupted German domination in the Balkans, putting a stop to the Maibaum offensive against Yugoslav Partisans.[187] The coup was nevertheless a unilateral move, and, until the signature of an armistice on 12 September,[147][188] the country was still perceived as an enemy by the Soviets, who continued to take Romanian soldiers as prisoners of war.[147] In parallel, Hitler reactivated the Iron Guardist exile, creating a Sima-led government in exile that did not survive the war's end in Europe.[189] Placed in the custody of PCR militants, Ion Antonescu spent the interval at a house in Bucharest's Vatra Luminoasă quarter.[147][190] He was afterward handed to the Soviet occupation forces, who transported him to Moscow, together with his deputy Mihai Antonescu, Governor of Transnistria Gheorghe Alexianu, Defense Minister Constantin Pantazi, Gendarmerie commander Constantin Vasiliu and Bucharest Police chief Mircea Elefterescu.[147][191] They were subsequently kept in luxurious detention at a mansion nearby the city,[147][192] and guarded by SMERSH, a special counter-intelligence body answering directly to Stalin.[147] Shortly after Germany surrendered in May 1945, the group was moved to Lubyanka prison. There, Antonescu was interrogated and reputedly pressured by SMERSH operatives, among them Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, but transcripts of their conversations were never sent back to Romania by the Soviet authorities.[147][193] Later research noted that the main issues discussed were the German-Romanian alliance, the war on the Soviet Union, the economic toll on both countries, and Romania's participation in the Holocaust (defined specifically as crimes against "peaceful Soviet citizens").[147] At some point during this period, Antonescu attempted suicide in his quarters.[147][191] He was returned to Bucharest in spring 1946 and held in Jilava Prison. He was subsequently interrogated by prosecutor Avram Bunaciu, to whom he complained about the conditions of his detainment, contrasting them with those in Moscow, while explaining that he was a vegetarian and demanding a special diet.[194] Trial and execution In May 1946, Ion Antonescu was prosecuted at the first in a series of People's Tribunals, on charges of war crimes, crimes against the peace and treason.[147][195] The tribunals had first been proposed by the PNȚ,[147] and were comparable to the Nuremberg Trials in Allied-occupied Germany.[147][196] The Romanian legislative framework was drafted by coup participant Pătrășcanu, a PCR member who had been granted leadership of the Justice Ministry.[197] Despite the idea having earned support from several sides of the political spectrum, the procedures were politicized in a sense favourable to the PCR and the Soviet Union,[147][198] and posed a legal problem for being based on ex post facto decisions.[199] The first such local trial took place in 1945, resulting in the sentencing of Iosif Iacobici, Nicolae Macici, Constantin Trestioreanu and other military commanders directly involved in planning or carrying out the Odessa massacre.[200] Antonescu was represented by Constantin Paraschivescu-Bălăceanu and Titus Stoica, two public defenders whom he had first consulted with a day before the procedures were initiated.[201] The prosecution team, led by Vasile Stoican, and the panel of judges, presided over by Alexandru Voitinovici, were infiltrated by PCR supporters.[202] Both consistently failed to admit that Antonescu's foreign policies were overall dictated by Romania's positioning between Germany and the Soviet Union.[147][203] Nevertheless, and although references to the mass murders formed just 23% of the indictment and corpus of evidence (ranking below charges of anti-Soviet aggression),[204] the procedures also included Antonescu's admission of and self-exculpating take on war crimes, including the deportations to Transnistria.[147][205] They also evidence his awareness of the Odessa massacre, accompanied by his claim that few of the deaths were his direct responsibility.[206] One notable event at the trial was a testimony by PNȚ leader Iuliu Maniu. Reacting against the aggressive tone of other accusers, Maniu went on record saying: "We [Maniu and Antonescu] were political adversaries, not cannibals."[147] Upon leaving the bench, Maniu walked toward Antonescu and shook his hand.[147][207] Antonescu's execution at Jilava, 1 June 1946. Ion Antonescu was found guilty of the charges. This verdict was followed by two sets of appeals, which claimed that the restored and amended 1923 Constitution did not offer a framework for the People's Tribunals and prevented capital punishment during peacetime, while noting that, contrary to the armistice agreement, only one power represented within the Allied Commission had supervised the tribunal.[199] They were both rejected within six days, in compliance with a legal deadline on the completion of trials by the People's Tribunals.[208] King Michael subsequently received pleas for clemency from Antonescu's lawyer and his mother, and reputedly considered asking the Allies to reassess the case as part of the actual Nuremberg Trials, taking Romanian war criminals into foreign custody.[209] Subjected to pressures by the new Soviet-backed Petru Groza executive, he issued a decree in favour of execution.[210] Together with his co-defendants Mihai Antonescu, Alexianu and Vasiliu, the former Conducător was executed by a military firing squad on 1 June 1946. Ion Antonescu's supporters circulated false rumours that regular soldiers had refused to fire at their commander, and that the squad was mostly composed of Jewish policemen.[211] Another apologetic claim insists that he himself ordered the squad to shoot, but footage of the event has proven it false.[212] However, he did refuse a blindfold and raised his hat in salute once the order was given.[213] The execution site, some distance away from the locality of Jilava and the prison fort, was known as Valea Piersicilor ("Valley of the Peach Trees").[147][214] His final written statement was a letter to his wife, urging her to withdraw into a convent, while stating the belief that posterity would reconsider his deeds and accusing Romanians of being "ungrateful".[215] Ideology Ethnic nationalism and expansionism Romania in 1942: Northern Transylvania was ceded to Hungary, Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria, and Transnistria became a governorate under Romanian administration. Antonescu's policies were motivated, in large part, by ethnic nationalism. A firm believer in the restoration of Greater Romania as the union of lands inhabited by ethnic Romanians, he never reconciled himself to Hungary's incorporation of Northern Transylvania. Although Hungary and Romania were technically allied through the Axis system, their relationship was always tense, and marked by serious diplomatic incidents.[216] The Romanian leader kept contacts with representatives of ethnic Romanian communities directly affected by the Second Vienna Award, including Transylvanian Greek-Catholic clergy.[217] Another aspect of Antonescu's nationalist policies was evidenced after the Balkans Campaign. Antonescu's Romania did not partake in the military action, but laid a claim to the territories in eastern Vojvodina (western Banat) and the Timok Valley, home to a sizeable Romanian community. Reportedly, Germany's initial designs of granting Vojvodina to Hungary enhanced the tensions between Antonescu and Miklós Horthy to the point where war between the two countries became a possibility.[218] Such incidents made Germany indefinitely prolong its occupation of the region.[219] The Romanian authorities issued projects for an independent Macedonia with autonomy for its Aromanian communities,[220] while an official memorandum on the Timok Valley, approved by Antonescu, made mention of "Romanian" areas "from Timok [...] to Salonika".[221] The Conducător also maintained contacts with Aromanian fascists in Axis-occupied Greece, awarding refuge to Alcibiades Diamandi and Nicola Matussi of the Roman Legion, whose pro-Romanian policies had brought them into conflict with other Aromanian factions.[222] Conducător Antonescu thought Hitler willing to revise his stance on Northern Transylvania, and claimed to have obtained the German leader's agreement, using it to justify participation on the Eastern Front after the recovery of Bessarabia.[147][223] However, transcripts of the Hitler-Antonescu conversations do not validate his interpretation.[111][147] Another version has it that Hitler sent Antonescu a letter informing him that Bessarabia's political status still ultimately depended on German decisions.[147] In one of his letters to Hitler, Antonescu himself stated his anti-communist ideological motivation: "I confirm that I will pursue operations in the east to the end against that great enemy of civilization, of Europe, and of my country: Russian Bolshevism [...] I will not be swayed by anyone not to extend this military cooperation into new territory."[224] Antonescu's ideological perspective blended national sentiment with generically Christian and particularly Romanian Orthodox traits. British historian Arnold D. Harvey writes that while this ideology seems a poor match with Nazi doctrine, especially its anti-religious elements, "It seems that Hitler was not even perturbed by the militant Christian orientation of the Antonescu regime".[114] It is also possible that, contrary to Antonescu's own will, Hitler viewed the transfer of Transnistria as compensation for the Transylvanian areas, and that he therefore considered the matter closed.[225] According to the Romanian representative in Berlin, Raoul Bossy, various German and Hungarian officials recommended the extension of permanent Romanian rule into Transnistria, as well as into Podolia, Galicia and Pokuttya, in exchange for delivering the whole of Transylvania to Hungary (and relocating its ethnic Romanian majority to the new provinces).[226] American political scientist Charles King writes: "There was never any attempt to annex the occupied territory [of Transnistria], for it was generally considered by the Romanian government to be a temporary buffer zone between Greater Romania and the Soviet front line."[227] At his 1946 trial, Antonescu claimed that Transnistria had been occupied to prevent Romania being caught in a "pincer" between Germany's Drang nach Osten and the Volksdeutsch communities to the east, while denying charges of having exploited the region for Romania's benefit.[228] Romanian historian Lucian Boia believes that Ion Antonescu may have nevertheless had expansionist goals to the east, and that he implicitly understood Operation Barbarossa as a tool for containing Slavic peoples.[229] Similar verdicts are provided by other researchers.[230] Another Romanian historian, Ottmar Trașcă, argues that Antonescu did not wish to annex the region "at least until the end of the war", but notes that Antonescu's own statements make reference to its incorporation in the event of a victory.[231] In addition to early annexation plans to the Southern Bug (reportedly confessed to Bossy in June 1941),[232] the Conducător is known to have presented his ministers with designs for the region's colonization.[233] The motivation he cited was alleged malnutrition among Romanian peasants, to which he added: "I'll take this population, I'll lead it into Transnistria, where I shall give it all the land it requires".[231] Several nationalists sympathetic to Antonescu acclaimed the extension of Romanian rule into Transnistria, which they understood as permanent.[234] Antisemitism and antiziganism Part of a series on Antisemitism Yellowbadge logo.svg     Part of Jewish history and discrimination     History Timeline Reference Definitions Manifestations Antisemitic tropes Antisemitic publications Antisemitism on the Internet Persecution Opposition Category     vte Iași pogrom in Romania, June 1941 A recurring element in Antonescu's doctrines is racism, and in particular antisemitism. This was linked to his sympathy for ethnocratic ideals, and complemented by his statements in favor of "integral nationalism" and "Romanianism".[235] Like other far right Romanians, he saw a Jewish presence behind liberal democracy, and believed in the existence of Judeo-Masonry.[236] His earliest thoughts on Codreanu's ideology criticize the Legionary leader for advocating "brutal measures" in dealing with the "invasion of Jews", and instead propose "the organization of Romanian classes" as a method for reaching the same objective.[13] Politician Aureliu Weiss, who met General Antonescu during that interval, recalled that, although antisemitic "to the core", he was capable of restraint in public.[237] According to historian Mihail Ionescu, the Conducător was not averse to the Iron Guard's "Legionary principles", but wanted antisemitism to be "applied in an orderly fashion", as opposed to Horia Sima's revolutionary ways.[5] Historian Ioan Scurtu believes that, during the Legionary Rebellion, Antonescu deliberately waited before stepping in, in order for the Guard to be "profoundly discredited" and for himself to be perceived as a "savior".[5] In April 1941, he let his ministers know that he was considering letting "the mob" deal with the Jews, "and after the slaughter, I will restore order."[237] Lucian Boia notes that the Romanian leader was indeed motivated by antisemitic beliefs, but that these need to be contextualized in order to understand what separates Antonescu from Hitler in terms of radicalism.[238] However, various other researchers assess that, by aligning himself with Hitler before and during Operation Barbarossa, Antonescu implicitly agreed with his thoughts on the "Jewish Question", choosing racial over religious antisemitism.[92][239] According to Harvey, the Iași pogrom made the Germans "evidently willing to accept that organized Christianity in Romania was very different from what it was in Germany".[114] Antonescu was a firm believer in the conspiracy theory of "Jewish Bolshevism", according to which all Jews were supporters of communism and the Soviet Union.[92][240] His arguments on the matter involved a spurious claim that, during the 1940 retreat from Bessarabia, the Jews had organized themselves and attacked Romanian soldiers.[92][241] In part, this notion exaggerated unilateral reports of enthusiasm among the marginalized Jews upon the arrival of Red Army troops.[242] In a summer 1941 address to his ministers, Antonescu stated: "The Satan is the Jew. [Ours] is a battle of life and death. Either we win and the world will be purified, either they win and we will become their slaves."[243] At around the same time, he envisaged the ethnic cleansing ("cleaning out") of Jews from the eastern Romanian-held territories.[92][244] However, as early as February 1941, Antonescu was also contemplating the ghettoization of all Jewish Romanians, as an early step toward their expulsion.[245] In this context, Antonescu frequently depicted Jews as a disease or a poison.[246] After the Battle of Stalingrad, he encouraged the army commanders to resist the counteroffensive, as otherwise the Soviets "will bring Bolshevism to the country, wipe out the entire leadership stratum, impose the Jews on us, and deport masses of our people."[247] Ion Antonescu's antiziganism manifested itself as the claim that some or all Romani people, specifically nomadic ones, were given to criminal behavior.[248] The regime did not act consistently on this belief: in various cases, those deported had close relatives drafted into the Romanian Army.[249] Although racist slogans targeting Romani people had been popularized by the Iron Guard, it was only under Antonescu's unchallenged rule that solving the "Gypsy problem" became official policy and antiziganist measures were enforced.[250] After a February 1941 inspection, Antonescu singled out Bucharest's Romani community for alleged offences committed during the blackout, and called on his ministers to present him with solutions.[251] Initially, he contemplated sending all Romani people he considered undesirable to the inhospitable Bărăgan Plain, to join the ranks of a local community of manual labourers.[252] In 1942, he commissioned the Romanian Central Institute for Statistics to compile a report on Romani demography, which, in its edited form, provided scientifically racist conclusions, warning the Conducător about alleged Romani-Romanian miscegenation in rural Romania.[253] In doing so, Antonescu offered some credit to a marginal and pseudoscientific trend in Romanian sociology, which, basing itself on eugenic theories, recommended the marginalization, deportation or compulsory sterilization of the Romani people, whose numeric presence it usually exaggerated.[254] Among those who signed the report was demographer Sabin Manuilă, who saw the Romani presence as a major racial problem.[255] The exact effect of the report's claims on Antonescu is uncertain.[256] Fascism and conservatism Antonescu sporting an Iron Guard green shirt and displaying the Roman salute together with Horia Sima during a mass rally in October 1940. Historians are divided on whether Romania under Antonescu was a fascist regime or merely a right-wing military dictatorship. There is a historiographic dispute about whether Ion Antonescu's regime was fascist or more generically right-wing authoritarian, itself integrated within a larger debate about the aspects and limits of fascism. Israeli historian of fascism Zeev Sternhell describes Antonescu, alongside his European counterparts Pierre-Étienne Flandin, Francisco Franco, Miklós Horthy, François de La Rocque, Philippe Pétain and Italian King Victor Emmanuel III, as a "conservative", noting that all of them "were not deceived by a [fascist] propaganda trying to place them in the same category [as the fascist movements]."[257] A similar verdict is provided by German historian of Europe Hagen Schulze, who views Horthy, Franco and the Romanian leader alongside Portugal's Estado Novo theorist António de Oliveira Salazar and Second Polish Republic founder Józef Piłsudski, as rulers of "either purely military dictatorships, or else authoritarian governments run by civilian politicians", and thus a category apart from the leaders of "Fascist states."[258] For Schulze, the defining elements of such governments is the presence of a "conservative establishment" which ensured "social stability" by extending the control of a "traditional state" (thus effectively blocking "revolutionary suggestions" from the far left and the far right alike).[258] The term "conservative autocrat" is used in relation to the Conducător by British political theorist Roger Griffin, who attributes to the Iron Guard the position of a subservient fascist movement,[259] while others identify Antonescu's post-1941 rule as a military rather than a fascist dictatorship.[260] Several other scholars prefer "conservative" as a defining term for Antonescu's policies.[94][261] Antonescu described himself as "by fate a dictator", and explained that his policies were "militaristic"[25] or, on one occasion, "national-totalitarian".[262] Nevertheless, other historians theorize a synthesis of fascist and conservative elements, performed by Antonescu and other European leaders of his day. Routledge's 2002 Companion to Fascism and the Far Right uses the terms "para-fascist" to define Antonescu, adding: "generally regarded as an authoritarian conservative [Antonescu] incorporated fascism into his regime, in the shape of the Iron Guard, rather than embodying fascism himself."[63] "Para-fascist" is also used by Griffin, to denote both Antonescu and Carol II.[263] American historian of fascism Robert Paxton notes that, like Salazar, Romania's dictator crushed a competing fascist movement, "after copying some of [its] techniques of popular mobilization."[264] Political scientists John Gledhill and Charles King discuss the Iron Guard as Romania's "indigenous fascist movement", remark that Antonescu "adopted much of the ideology of the Guardists", and conclude that the regime he led was "openly fascist".[265] References to the fascist traits of Antonescu's dictatorship are also made by other researchers.[14][266] The synthetic aspect of Antonescu's rule is discussed in detail by various authors. British historian Dennis Deletant, who notes that the fascist label relies on both Antonescu's adoption of some fascist "trappings" and the "dichotomy of wartime and postwar evaluation" of his regime, also notes that post-1960 interpretations "do more to explain his behaviour than the preceding orthodoxy."[267] Deletant contrasts the lack of "mass political party or ideology" with the type of rule associated with Nazism or Italian fascism.[25] British-born sociologist and political analyst Michael Mann writes: "The authoritarian regimes of Antonescu [...] and Franco [...] purported to be 'traditional', but actually their fascist-derived corporatism was a new immanent ideology of the right."[268] Another distinct view is held by Romanian-born historian of ideas Juliana Geran Pilon, who describes Romania's "military fascist regime" as a successor to Iron Guardist "mystical nationalism", while mentioning that Antonescu's "national ideology was rather more traditionally militaristic and conservative."[269] Power base, administration and propaganda Commemorative stamp issued after the Siege of Odessa, with the profiles of Romanian Army and Wehrmacht soldiers over a slogan reading Războiul sfânt contra bolșevismului ("The Holy War against Bolshevism"). In theory, Antonescu's policies had at least one revolutionary aspect. The leader himself claimed: "I want to introduce a patriotic, heroic, military-typed education, because economic education and all the others follow from it."[25] According to Boia, his arrival in power was explicitly meant to "regenerate" Romania, and his popularity hinged on his being perceived as a "totalitarian model" and a "saviour" figure, like Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and Carol II before him.[270] The "providential" and "saviour" themes are also emphasized by historian Adrian Majuru, who notes that Antonescu both adopted such ideals and criticized Carol for failing to live up to them.[271] Seeing his rule as legitimized by the national interest,[271][272] the general is also known to have referred to political pluralism as poltronerie ("poltroonishness").[5] Accordingly, Antonescu formally outlawed all political forces in February 1941, codifying penal labor as punishment for most public forms of political expression.[273] In Deletant's assessment, his regenerative program was more declarative than factual, and contradicted by Antonescu's own decision to allow the informal existence of some opposition forces.[274] At the same time, some historians believe his monopolizing of power in the name of a German alliance turned Romania into either a "puppet state" of Hitler[63] or one of Germany's "satellite" governments.[275] However, Deletant notes: "Romania retained her sovereignty throughout the period of the alliance [with Nazi Germany]. [...] Antonescu had, of course, his own country's interests uppermost in his mind, but in following Hitler, he served the Nazi cause."[276] He describes Romania's contribution to the war as that of "a principal ally of Germany", as opposed to a "minor Axis satellite."[148] Although he assigned an unimportant role to King Michael, Antonescu took steps to increase the monarchy's prestige, personally inviting Carol's estranged wife, Queen Mother Helen, to return home.[277] However, his preferred military structures functioned in cooperation with a bureaucracy inherited from the National Renaissance Front.[271][278] According to historian of fascism Philip Morgan: "Antonescu probably wanted to create, or perpetuate, something like Carol's front organization."[279] Much of his permanent support base comprised former National Christian Party members, to the point where he was seen as successor to Octavian Goga.[280] While maintaining a decorative replacement for Parliament—known as Adunarea Obștească Plebiscitară a Națiunii Române ("The General Plebiscitary Assembly of the Romanian Nation") and convoked only twice—[281] he took charge of hierarchical appointments, and personally drafted new administrative projects. In 1941, he disestablished participative government in localities and counties, replacing it with a corporatist structure appointed by prefects whom he named.[281] In stages between August and October 1941, he instituted civilian administration of Transnistria under Governor Gheorghe Alexianu, whose status he made equivalent to that of a cabinet minister.[282] Similar measures were taken in Bukovina and Bessarabia (under Governors Corneliu Calotescu and Gheorghe Voiculescu, respectively).[283] Antonescu strictly relied on the chain of command, and his direct orders to the Army overrode civilian hierarchies. This system allowed room for endemic political corruption and administrative confusion.[284] The Romanian leader also tolerated a gradual loss of authority over the German communities in Romania, in particular the Transylvanian Saxon and Banat Swabian groups, in agreement with Hitler's views on the Volksdeutsche. This trend was initiated by Saxon Nazi activist Andreas Schmidt in cooperation with the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle,[285] resulting in de facto self-governance under a Nazi system[286] which was also replicated among the 130,000 Black Sea Germans of Transnistria.[287] Many young German Romanian men opted to join the Schutzstaffel as early as 1940 and, in 1943, an accord between Antonescu and Hitler automatically sent ethnic Germans of recruitable age into the Wehrmacht.[286] The regime was characterized by the leader's attempts to regulate even remote aspects of public life, including relations between the sexes. He imposed drastic penalties for misdemeanors,[288] and the legal use of capital punishment was extended to an unprecedented level.[289] He personally set standards for nightclub programs, for the length of skirts and for women's use of bicycles,[5] while forcing all men to wear coats in public.[25] His wife Maria was a patron of state-approved charitable organizations, initially designed to compete with successful Iron Guardist ventures such as Ajutorul Legionar.[290] According to Romanian-born gender studies academic Maria Bucur, although the regime allowed women "to participate in the war effort on the front in a more regularized, if still marginal, fashion", the general tone was sexist.[291] The administrative apparatus included official press and propaganda sectors, which moved rapidly from constructing Carol's personality cult to doing the same for the new military leader: journals Universul and Timpul, as well as Camil Petrescu's România magazine, were particularly active in this process.[271] Some other such venues were Porunca Vremii,[292] Nichifor Crainic's Sfarmă-Piatră,[293] as well as all the seemingly independent newspapers and some ten new periodicals the government founded for this purpose.[294] Among the individual journalists involved in propaganda were Crainic, Petrescu, Stelian Popescu,[271][295] and Curentul editor Pamfil Șeicaru[296] (the Conducător purposefully ignored support from Carol's former adviser, corporatist economist and newspaperman Mihail Manoilescu, whom he reportedly despised).[297] Much of the propaganda produced during the Antonescu era supported the antisemitic theses put forth by the Conducător.[298] Antisemitism was notable and virulent at the level of Romanian Army units addressing former Soviet citizens in occupied lands, and reflected the regime's preference for the ethnic slur jidani (akin to "kikes" or "Yids" in English).[299] The religious aspect of anti-communism surfaced in such venues, which frequently equated Operation Barbarossa with a holy war or a crusade.[300][301] Romania's other enemies were generally treated differently: Antonescu himself issued objections to the anti-British propaganda of explicitly pro-Nazi papers such as Porunca Vremii.[302] A special segment of Antonescu's post-1941 propaganda was Codrenist: it revisited the Iron Guard's history to minimize Sima's contributions and to depict him as radically different from Codreanu.[303] Antonescu and The Holocaust See also: The Holocaust in Romania Iași pogrom Main article: Iași pogrom One of the "death trains" formed in the wake of the Iași pogrom, stopping to unload the dead Three weeks after gaining power and inaugurating the National Legionary regime, Ion Antonescu declared to Italian interviewers at La Stampa that solving the "Jewish Question" was his pressing concern, and that he considered himself "haunted" by the large Jewish presence in Moldavian towns.[304] Antonescu's crimes against the Jewish population were inaugurated by new racial discrimination laws: urban Jewish property was expropriated, Jews were banned from performing a wide range of occupations and forced to provide community work for the state (muncă de interes obștesc) instead of the inaccessible military service,[305] mixed Romanian-Jewish marriages were forbidden and many Jews, primarily those from strategic areas such as Ploiești, were confined to internment camps.[306] The expulsion of Jewish professionals from all walks of life was also carried out in the National Legionary period, and enforced after the Legionary Rebellion.[307] After a post-Legionary hiatus, "Romanianization" commissions resumed their work under the supervision of a National Center, and their scope was extended.[308] Often discussed as a prelude to the Holocaust in Romania and in connection with Antonescu's views on "Jewish Bolshevism", the Iași pogrom occurred just days after the start of Operation Barbarossa, and was partly instigated, partly tolerated by the authorities in Bucharest. For a while before the massacre, these issued propaganda claiming that the Jews in Iași, whose numbers had been increased by forced evictions from smaller localities,[309] were actively helping Soviet bombers find their targets through the blackout and plotting against the authorities, with Antonescu himself ordering that the entire community be expelled from the city on such grounds.[92][310] The discourse appealed to local antisemites, whose murderous rampage, carried out with the officials' complicity, resulted in several thousand deaths among Jewish men, women and children.[92][311] In the aftermath of the pogrom, thousands of survivors were loaded into the so-called "death trains". These overcrowded and sealed Romanian Railways cattle wagons circled the countryside in the extreme heat of the summer, and periodically stopped to unload the dead.[92][312] At least 4,000 people died during the initial massacre and the subsequent transports.[313] Varied estimates of the Iași massacre and related killings place the total number of Jews killed at 8,000,[314] 10,000,[315] 12,000 or 14,000.[92][316] Some assistance in their murder was provided by units of the German XXXth Army Corps, a matter which later allowed the authorities to shift blame from themselves and from Antonescu—who was nonetheless implicated by the special orders he had released.[92][317] The complicity of the Special Intelligence Service and its director Eugen Cristescu was also advanced as a possibility.[318] The subsequent attempts at a cover-up included omissive explanations given by the central authorities to foreign diplomats and rewriting official records.[319] Transnistria Main article: Transnistria Governorate Romanian soldiers participating in the deportation of Jewish families (German photograph, July 1941) Right upon setting up camp in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Romanian troops joined the Wehrmacht and the Schutzstaffel-organized Einsatzgruppen in mass shootings of Bessarabian and Ukrainian Jews,[92][320] resulting in the deaths of 10,000[321] to 20,000 people.[322] Scholar Christopher R. Browning compares these killings with similar atrocities perpetrated by locals in Reichskommissariat Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia (see Holocaust in Latvia, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust in Ukraine).[323] From then on, as the fighting troops progressed over the Dniester, the local administration deported large numbers of Jews into the fighting zone, in hopes that they would be exterminated by the Germans.[92][324] Antonescu himself stated: "I am in favor of expelling the Jews from Bessarabia and [Northern] Bukovina to the other side of the border [...]. There is nothing for them to do here and I don't mind if we appear in history as barbarians [...]. There has never been a time more suitable in our history to get rid of the Jews, and if necessary, you are to make use of machine guns against them."[325] He also explained that his aim was: "the policy of purification of the Romanian race, and I will not give way before any obstacle in achieving this historical goal of our nation. If we do not take advantage of the situation which presents itself today [...] we shall miss the last chance that history offers to us. And I do not wish to miss it, because if I do so further generations will blame me."[326] He made a contradictory statement about the murder of Jews in Chișinău, claiming that their perpetrators were "bastards" who "stained" his regime's reputation.[327] Antonescu saw the "war" against the Jews as being just as important as the war against the Soviet Union, and regularly demanded reports from his officers in Bessarabia and Transnistria about their measures against the Jews.[328] In late August 1941, in Tighina, Antonescu called a secret conference attended by himself, the governors of Bessarabia and Bukovina and the governor-designate of Transnistria to discuss his plans regarding the Jews in those regions.[328] Many deaths followed, as the direct results of starvation and exhaustion,[92][329] while the local German troops carried out selective shootings.[330] The survivors were sent back over the river, and the German commanders expressed irritation over the methods applied by their counterparts.[92][331] Romanian authorities subsequently introduced ghettos or transit camps.[92][332] After the annexation of Transnistria, there ensued a systematic deportation of Jews from Bessarabia, with additional transports of Jews from the Old Kingdom (especially Moldavia-proper).[92][333] Based on an assignment Antonescu handed down to General Ioan Topor,[334] the decision involved specific quotas, and the transports, most of which were carried out by foot, involved random murders.[92][335] In conjunction with Antonescu's expansionist ambitions, it is possible that the ultimate destination for the survivors, once circumstances permitted it, was further east than the Southern Bug.[336] On 11 October 1941, the chief of the Federation of Jewish Communities, Wilhelm Filderman issued a public letter to Antonescu asking him to stop the deportations, writing: "This is death, death for no reason except that they are Jews."[337] Antonescu replied to Filderman in a long letter explaining that because the entire Jewish community of Bessarabia had allegedly collaborated with the Soviets during the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, his policies were a justified act of revenge.[337] On 11 November 1941, Antonescu sent Filderman a second letter stating no Jews would be allowed to live in the "liberated territories" and as for the Jews of the Regat:     We decided to defend our Romanian rights because our all-too-tolerant past was taken advantage of by the Jews and facilitated the abuse of our rights by foreigners, particularly the Jews...We are determined to put an end to this situation. We cannot afford to put in jeopardy the existence of our nation because of several hundred thousand Jews, or in order to salvage some principle of humane democracy that has not been understood properly."[337] The deportees' remaining property was nationalized, confiscated or left available for plunder.[338] With its own Jewish population confined and subjected to extermination,[92][339] Transnistria became infamous in short time, especially so for its five main concentration camps: Peciora, Akhmechetka, Bogdanovka, Domanovka and Obodovka.[92][340] Manned by Romanian Gendarmes and local Ukrainian auxiliaries who acted with the consent of central authorities, Transnistrian localities became the sites of mass executions, particularly after the administrators became worried about the spread of typhus from the camps and into the surrounding region.[92][341] At a Cabinet meeting on 16 December 1941 to discuss the fate of the Jews of Transnistria, Antonescu stated:     The question of the Yids is being discussed in Berlin. The Germans want to bring the Yids from Europe to Russia and settle them in certain areas, but there is still time before this plan is carried out. Meanwhile, what should we do? Shall we wait for a decision in Berlin? Shall we wait for a decision that concerns us? Shall we ensure their safety? Pack them into catacombs! Throw them into the Black Sea! As far I am concerned, 100 may die, 1,000 may die, all of them may die"[342] Between 21–24 and 28–31 December 1941, Romanian gendarmes and Ukrainian auxiliaries killed about 70,000 Jews at the Bogdanovca camp; the massacre was Antonescu's way of dealing with a typhus epidemic that had broken out among the Jews of Transnistria owing to the poor living conditions that had been forced to endure.[343] The last wave of Jewish deportations, occurring in June 1942, came mainly from the Cernăuți area in Northern Bukovina.[92][344] Also in the summer of 1942, Ion Antonescu became a perpetrator of the Porajmos, or Holocaust-related crimes against the Romani people, when he ordered the Transnistrian deportation of Romanian Romani from the Old Kingdom, transited through camps and resettled in inhumane conditions near the Southern Bug.[92][345] They were joined there by 2,000 conscientious objectors of the Inochentist church, a millennialist denomination.[346] As Antonescu admitted during his trial, he personally supervised these operations, giving special orders to the Gendarmerie commanders.[347] In theory, the measures taken against Romani people were supposed to affect only nomads and those with a criminal record created or updated recently, but arbitrary exceptions were immediately made to this rule, in particular by using the vague notion of "undesirable" to define some members of sedentary communities.[348] The central authorities noted differences in the criteria applied locally, and intervened to prevent or sanction under-deportation and, in some cases, over-deportation.[349] Antonescu and Constantin Vasiliu had been made aware of the problems Transnistria faced in feeding its own population, but ignored them when deciding in favour of expulsion.[350] With most of their property confiscated,[351] the Romani men, women and children were only allowed to carry hand luggage, on which they were supposed to survive winter.[352] Famine and disease ensued from criminal negligence, Romani survival being largely dependent on occasional government handouts, the locals' charity, stealing and an underground economy.[353] Once caught, escapees who made their way back into Romania were returned by the central authorities, even as local authorities were objecting.[354] Odessa massacre Main article: 1941 Odessa massacre Map of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Odessa ghetto marked with gold-red star. Transnistria massacres marked with red skulls. The Odessa massacre, an act of collective punishment carried out by the Romanian Army and Gendarmes, took the lives of a minimum of between 15,000[355] and 25,000[356] to as many as 40,000[357] or even more than 50,000[147][358] Jewish people of all ages. The measure came as the enforcement of Antonescu's own orders, as retaliation for an explosion that killed 67 people at Romanian headquarters on that city. Antonescu believed that the original explosion was a terrorist act, rejecting the possibility of the building in question having been fitted with land mines by the retreating Soviets.[92][359] In addition, Antonescu blamed the Jews, specifically "Jewish commissars" in the Red Army, for the losses suffered by his 4th Army throughout the siege,[360] although both an inquiry he had ordered and German assessments pointed to the ill-preparedness of Romanian soldiers.[361] While the local command took the initiative for the first executions, Antonescu's personal intervention amplified the number of victims required, and included specific quotas (200 civilians for every dead officer, 100 for every dead soldier).[362] By the time of the explosion, the Jewish population was already rounded up into makeshift ghettos, being made subject to violence and selective murders.[363] Purportedly the largest single massacre of Jews in the war's history,[358] it involved mass shootings, hangings, acts of immolation and a mass detonation.[92][364] Antonescu is quoted saying that the Romanian Army's criminal acts were "reprisals, not massacres".[92] Survivors were deported to the nearby settlement of Slobidka, and kept in inhumane conditions. Alexianu himself intervened with Antonescu for a solution to their problems, but the Romanian leader decided he wanted them out of the Odessa area, citing the nearby resistance of Soviet troops in the Siege of Sevastopol as a ferment for similar Jewish activities.[365] His order to Alexianu specified: "Pack them into the catacombs, throw them into the Black Sea, but get them out of Odessa. I don't want to know. A hundred can die, a thousand can die, all of them can die, but I don't want a single Romanian official or officer to die."[366] Defining the presence of Jews in occupied Odessa as "a crime", Antonescu added: "I don't want to stain my activity with such lack of foresight."[367] As a result of this, around 35,000–40,000 Jewish people were deported out of Odessa area and into other sectors of Transnistria.[368] Several thousands were purposefully driven into Berezivka and other areas inhabited by the Black Sea Germans, where Selbstschutz organizations massacred them.[369] Overall death toll and particularities Romanian Gendarmerie report of 1942, accounting for 24,686 Romani deportees to Transnistria A common assessment ranks Antonescu's Romania as second only to Nazi Germany in its antisemitic extermination policies.[370] According to separate works by historians Dennis Deletant and Adrian Cioroianu, the flaws of Antonescu's 1946 trial notwithstanding, his responsibility for war crimes was such that he would have been equally likely to be found guilty and executed in a Western Allied jurisdiction.[371] The often singular brutality of Romanian-organized massacres was a special topic of reflection for Jewish Holocaust escapee and American political theorist Hannah Arendt, as discussed in her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem.[372] Official Romanian estimates made in 2003 by the Wiesel Commission mention that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were killed by Romanian authorities under Antonescu's rule.[373][374] The Transnistria deportations account for 150,000 to 170,000 individual expulsions of Jews from Romania proper, of whom some 90,000–120,000 never returned.[147][375] According to Romanian-born Israeli historian Jean Ancel, the Transnistria deportations from other areas account for around 145,000 deaths, while the number of local Transnistrian Jews killed could be as high as 280,000.[376] More conservative estimates for the latter number mention some 130,000–180,000 victims.[377] Other overall estimates speak of 200,000[378] to over 300,000[379] Jews purposefully killed as a result of Romania's action. According to historians Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic: "none of these massacres was carried out by the Germans, although [the latter] certainly encouraged such actions and, in some cases, may have coordinated them."[380] The Romani deportations affected some 25,000 people, at least 11,000 of whom died in Transnistria.[381] The Jewish population in the Old Kingdom, numbering between 300,000 and 400,000 people, survived the Holocaust almost intact.[382] Reflecting on this fact, Lucian Boia noted that Antonescu could not "decently" be viewed as a rescuer of Jews, but that there still is a fundamental difference between the effects of his rule and those of Hitler's, concluding that the overall picture is not "completely dark."[383] For Dennis Deletant, this situation is a "major paradox" of Antonescu's time in power: "more Jews survived under [Antonescu's] rule than in any other country within Axis Europe."[148] American historian of Romania William O. Oldson views Antonescu's policies as characterized by "violence, inconsistency and inanity",[384] but places them in the wider context of local antisemitism, noting some ideological exceptions from their respective European counterparts. These traits, he argues, became "providential" for the more assimilated Jewish communities of the Old Romanian Kingdom, while exposing Jews perceived as foreign.[385] Discussing Antonescu's policy of ethnic cleansing, Polonksy and Mihlic note: "[it] raises important questions about the thin line between the desire to expel an unwanted minority and a small-scale genocidal project under sanctioned conditions."[380] American military historian Gerhard L. Weinberg made reference to the Antonescu regime's "slaughter of large number of Jews in the areas ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940 when those areas were retaken in 1941 as well as in [...] Transnistria", but commented: "the government of Marshal Ion Antonescu preferred to rob and persecute Jews [from Romania]; the government would not turn them over to the Germans for killing."[358] Alongside the noticeable change in fortunes on the Eastern Front, a main motivator for all post-1943 changes, noted by various historians, was the manifold financial opportunity of Jewish survival.[386] Wealthier Jews were financially extorted in order to avoid community work and deportation, and the work of some professionals was harnessed by the public sector, and even by the Army.[387] From the beginning, the regime had excepted from deportations some Jews who were experts in fields such as forestry and chemistry, and some others were even allowed to return despite antisemitic protests in their home provinces.[388] Economic exploitation was institutionalized in late 1941-early 1942, with the creation of a Central Jewish Office. Supervised by Commissioner Radu Lecca and formally led by the Jewish intellectuals Nandor Gingold and Henric Streitman, it collected funds which were in part redirected toward Maria Antonescu's charities.[389] Small numbers of Romanian Jews left independently for the Palestine as early as 1941, but British opposition to Zionist plans made their transfer perilous (one notorious example of this being the MV Struma).[390] On a personal level, Antonescu's encouragement of crimes alternated with periods when he gave in to the pleas of Jewish community leader Wilhelm Filderman.[391] In one such instance, he reversed his own 1942 decision to impose the wearing of yellow badges,[392] which nevertheless remained in use everywhere outside the Old Kingdom and, in theory, to any Romanian Jews elsewhere in Axis-controlled Europe.[393] Assessing these contradictions, commentators also mention the effect of Allied promises to prosecute those responsible for genocide throughout Europe.[394] In the late stages of the war, Antonescu was attempting to shift all blame for crimes from his regime[395] while accusing Jews of "bring[ing] destruction upon themselves".[396] The regime permitted non-deported Romanian Jews and American charities to send humanitarian aid into Transnistrian camps, a measure it took an interest in enforcing in late 1942.[92][397] Deportations of Jews ceased altogether in October of the same year. A common explanation historians propose for this reassessment of policies is the change in Germany's fortunes on the Eastern Front, with mention that Antonescu was considering using the Jewish population as an asset in his dealings with the Western Allies.[92][398] It nevertheless took the regime more than a year to allow more selective Jewish returns from Transnistria, including some 2,000 orphans.[92][399] After Transnistria's 1944 evacuation, Antonescu himself advocated the creation of new camps in Bessarabia.[400] In conversations with his cabinet, the Conducător angrily maintained that surviving Jews were better off than Romanian soldiers.[401] The policies applied in respect to the Romani population were ambivalent: while ordering the deportation of those he considered criminals, Ion Antonescu was taking some interest in improving the lives of Romani laborers of the Bărăgan Plain.[402] According to Romanian historian Viorel Achim, although it had claimed the existence of a "Gypsy problem", the Antonescu regime "did not count it among its priorities."[403] By 1943, Antonescu was gradually allowing those deported to return home. Initially, Constantin Vasiliu allowed the families of soldiers to appeal their deportation on a selective basis.[404] Romanian authorities also appear to have been influenced by the objections of Nazi administrators in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, who feared that the newly arrived population would outnumber local Germans.[405] By January 1944, the central authorities ordered local ones not to send back apprehended fugitives,[406] instructed them to provide these with some food and clothing, and suggested corporal punishment for Romani people who did not adhere to a behavioural code.[407] As the Romanian administrators abandoned Transnistria, most survivors from the group returned on their own in summer 1944.[408] Antonescu and the Final Solution projects Ion Antonescu and his subordinates were for long divided on the issue of the Final Solution, as applied in territories under direct Nazi control from 1941. At an early stage, German attempts to impose the RSHA's direct control over Old Kingdom Jews drew some objections from Mihai Antonescu, but the two sides agreed to a common policy with reference to Soviet Jews.[409] In various of his early 1940s statements, Ion Antonescu favorably mentions the Axis goal of eliminating the Jewish presence in the event of victory.[410] The unrestrained character of some Romanian actions toward Jews alarmed Nazi officials, who demanded a methodical form of extermination.[411] When confronted with German decisions to push back Jews he had expelled before the occupation of Transnistria, Antonescu protested, arguing that he had conformed with Hitler's decisions regarding "eastern Jews".[412] In August 1941, in preparation for the Final Solution's universal application, Hitler remarked: "As for the Jewish question, today in any case one could say that a man like Antonescu, for example, proceeds much more radically in this manner than we have done until now. But I will not rest or be idle until we too have gone all the way with the Jews."[413] By summer 1942, German representatives in Romania obtained Antonescu's approval to deport the remaining Jewish population to extermination camps in occupied Poland.[92][414] Among those involved on the German side were mass murderer Adolf Eichmann and his aide Gustav Richter,[415] while the Romanian side was represented by Jewish Affairs Commissioner Lecca (reporting to Antonescu himself).[416] Richter directed Lecca in setting up the Central Jewish Office, which he assumed would function as a Judenrat to streamline extermination policies.[417] According to such plans, only some 17,000 Jews, labeled useful to Romania's economy, were to be exempt.[92][418] The transports had already been announced to the Romanian Railways by autumn 1942, but the government eventually decided to postpone these measures indefinitely as was done with most other deportations to Transnistria.[92][419] Antonescu's new orders on the matter were brought up in his conversations with Hitler at Schloss Klessheim, where both leaders show themselves aware of the fate awaiting Jewish deportees to Poland.[420] By then, German authorities charged with applying the Final Solution in Eastern Europe completely abandoned their plans with respect to Romania.[421] In August 1942, Antonescu had worked out plans with the SS for deporting all of the Jews of the Regat or the "Old Kingdom" to the German-run death camps in Poland, but then cancelled the deportation.[422] The principal reasons for his change of mind were signs of disapproval from court circles, a warning from the American government passed on by the Swiss ambassador that he would prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity after the Allies had won if the deportation went ahead, and most importantly because Hitler would not undo the Second Vienna Award and return northern Transylvania to Romania.[423] Antonescu saw the deportation of the Jews of the Regat as the pro quid quo for the return of Transylvania and unable to obtain satisfactory promises from the German Ambassador Baron Manfred von Killinger that Romania would be rewarded with the return of Transylvania in exchange for handing over its Jews, Antonescu cancelled the deportation until the Germans would make him a better offer.[423] According to Oldson, by the final stage of the war Romania rejected "all extreme measures against Jews who could not be proven to be communists."[424] The planned transports to Palestine, the prospect of which irritated Nazi German observers, implied a hope that the Allies' focus would shift away from the regime's previous guilt and, at the same time, looked forward to payments to be made in exchange for each person saved.[425] The contrary implications of Romanian nationalism, manifested as reluctance to obey German commands and discomfort with drastic change in general, are occasionally offered as further explanations of the phenomenon.[426] While reflecting upon the issue of emigration to Palestine, Antonescu also yielded to pleas of Jewish community leaders, and allowed safe passage through Romania for various Northern Transylvanian Jews fleeing the Holocaust in Hungary.[427] He was doing the same for certain Northern Transylvanian Romani communities who had escaped southwards.[428] In that context, Nazi German ideologues began objecting to Antonescu's supposed leniency.[429] Antonescu nevertheless alternated tolerance of illegal immigration with drastic measures. In early 1944, he issued an order to shoot illegal immigrants, which was probably never enforced by the Border Police[430] (who occasionally turned in Jewish refugees to the German authorities).[431] The Antonescu regime allowed the extermination of the Romanian Jewish diaspora in other parts of Europe,[432] formally opposing their deportation in some cases where it appeared Germany was impinging upon Romania's sovereignty.[433] Opposition and political persecution Political mainstream January 1942 letter of protest, signed by Iuliu Maniu and Dinu Brătianu and addressed to Antonescu The circumstances of wartime accounted for cautious and ambivalent approaches to Antonescu's rule from among the Romanian political mainstream, which grouped advocates of liberal democracy and anti-fascism. According to Gledhill and King: "Romanian liberals had been critical of their government's warm relationship with Hitler, which had been developing throughout the 1930s, but the [1940] Soviet attack on Romanian territory left them with little chance but to support Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union."[265] Other authors also cite the Greater Romanian agenda of the Antonescu executive as a reason behind the widespread acquiescence.[434] The tendency was illustrated by Dinu Brătianu, who, in late January 1941, told his National Liberal colleagues that the new "government of generals" was "the best solution possible to the current crisis", urging the group to provide Antonescu with "all the support we can give him."[272] An early point of contention between Antonescu and the National Peasants' Party came in spring 1941, when Antonescu's support for the Balkans Campaign and Romania's claim to parts of Vojvodina were met with a letter of protest from Iuliu Maniu, which Antonescu dismissed.[435] Maniu and Brătianu also issued several condemnations of Antonescu's decision to continue the war beyond the Dniester.[301][436] One such letter, signed by both, claimed that, while earlier steps had been "legitimized by the entire soul of the nation, the Romanian people will never consent to the continuation of the struggle beyond our national borders."[437] Maniu specifically mentioned the possibility of Allied victory, accused Antonescu of diverting attention from the goal of Greater Romania (Northern Transylvania included), and stressed that Romania's ongoing participation in the Axis was "troubling enough".[301] Antonescu is known to have publicly admonished opposition leaders for their disobedience, which he equated with obstruction,[438] and to have monitored their activities through the Special Intelligence Service.[439] However, some early communiqués he addressed to Brătianu also feature offers of resignation, which their recipient reluctantly rejected.[440] The Germans objected to such ambiguities, and Hitler once advised Antonescu to have Maniu killed, an option which the Conducător rejected because of the PNȚ leader's popularity with the peasants.[439] While tolerating contacts between Maniu and the Allies, Antonescu arrested the clandestine British envoys to Romania, thus putting a stop to the 1943 Operation Autonomous.[441] In parallel, his relationship with Queen Mother Helen and Michael rapidly deteriorated after he began advising the royal family on how to conduct its affairs.[442] Dissent from Antonescu's policies sometimes came from inside his own camp. Both the officer corps and the General Staff were divided on the issue of war beyond the Dniester, although it is possible that the majority agreed it would bring Northern Transylvania back to Romania.[443] A prominent case was that of Iosif Iacobici, the Chief of the Romanian General Staff, whose objection to the massive transfer of Romanian troops to the Eastern Front resulted in his demotion and replacement with Ilie Șteflea (January 1942).[147][151] Șteflea issued similar calls, and Antonescu's eventually agreed to preserve a home army just before the Battle of Stalingrad.[444] Various other military men extended their protection to persecuted Jews.[445] Overall, Antonescu met significant challenges in exercising control over the politicized sectors in the armed forces.[446] Antonescu's racial discrimination laws and Romania's participation in the Holocaust earned significant objections from various individuals and groups in Romanian society. One noted opponent was Queen Mother Helen, who actively intervened to save Jews from being deported.[92][447] The Mayor of Cernăuți, Traian Popovici, publicly objected to the deportation of Jews,[448] as did Gherman Pântea, his counterpart in Odessa.[449] The appeals of Queen Helen, King Michael, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania Nicolae Bălan, Apostolic Nuncio Andrea Cassulo and Swiss Ambassador René de Weck are credited with having helped avert the full application of the Final Solution in Antonescu's Romania.[450] Cassulo and Bălan together pleaded for the fate of certain Jews, including all who had converted to Christianity, and the former publicly protested against deportations.[451] While Romania and the United States were still at peace, American Minister Plenipotentiary Franklin Mott Gunther repeatedly attempted to make his superiors aware of Romanian actions against the Jews,[452] and Turkish diplomats unsuccessfully sought American approval for transferring Romanian Jews to safe passage through Anatolia and into Palestine.[453] Dinu Brătianu also condemned antisemitic measures, prompting Antonescu to accuse him of being an ally of "the Yid in London".[454] Together with Maniu and Ion Mihalache, Brătianu signed statements condemning the isolation, persecution and expulsion of Jews, which prompted Antonescu to threaten to clamp down on them.[455] However, both parties were occasionally ambiguous on racial issues, and themselves produced antisemitic messages.[456] Brătianu is also known for publicly defending the cause of Romani people, opposing their deportation on grounds that it would "turn back the clock on several centuries of history",[457] a stance which drew support from his civilian peers.[458] In parallel, some regular Romanians such as nurse Viorica Agarici intervened to save Jewish lives,[459] while, from inside the Jewish community, Chief Rabbi Alexandru Șafran and activist Mișu Benvenisti rallied with Wilhelm Filderman in public protests against Antonescu's decisions, being occasionally joined by A. L. Zissu.[460] In 1943, Filderman himself was deported to Mohyliv-Podilskyi, but eventually allowed to return.[461] Political underground Political prisoners of the Antonescu regime, photographed in Târgu Jiu camp, 1943. Nicolae Ceaușescu, future leader of Communist Romania, is second from left Organized resistance movements in Antonescu's Romania were comparatively small-scale and marginal. In addition to a Zionist underground which aided Jews to pass through or flee the country,[462] the regime was confronted with local political movements of contrasting shades. One of them comprised far left and left-wing elements, which Antonescu's rise to power had caught in an unusual position. The minor Romanian Communist Party, outlawed since the rule of Ferdinand I for its Cominternist national policies, had been rendered virtually inactive by the German-Soviet non-aggression pact. Once reanimated by Operation Barbarossa, the PCR was unable to create an actual armed resistance movement, although it was able to coordinate the policies of several other small leftist groups.[463] Speaking shortly before the invasion of the Soviet Union, and adopting the "Jewish Bolshevism" position, Antonescu ordered authorities to compile lists comprising "the names of all Jewish and communist agents", who were to be kept under close surveillance.[464] Among people arrested on suspicion of communism, Jews were sent to Transnistrian sites such as Vapniarka and Rîbnița, while others were interned in regular facilities such as those in Caransebeș and Târgu Jiu.[465] In all, some 2,000 Jewish Romanian deportees to the region had been accused of political crimes (the category also included those who had tried to escape forced labor).[466] According to one estimate, people held on charges of being communists accounted for just under 2,000 people, of whom some 1,200 were jailed in Romania proper.[467] Capital punishment was used against various partisan-like activists,[468] while the vast majority of communist prisoners in Rîbnița were massacred in March 1944.[469] At the other end of the political spectrum, after the Legionary Rebellion and the Iron Guard's decapitation, many Legionaries who opposed the regime, and whom Antonescu himself believed were "communists in [Legionary] green shirts",[281] were killed or imprisoned.[470] An Iron Guardist underground was nevertheless formed locally, and probably numbered in thousands.[263] Some of Antonescu's political prisoners from both camps were given a chance to redeem themselves by joining units on the Eastern Front.[471] Although repressed, divided and weak, the PCR capitalized on the Soviet victories, being integrated into the mainstream opposition. At the same time, a "prison faction" emerged around Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, opposing both the formal leadership and the so-called "Muscovite" communists who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union before the war.[472] While maneuvering for control within the PCR during and after 1944, "prison" communists destroyed a third group, formed around the PCR's nominal leader Ștefan Foriș (whom they kidnapped and eventually killed).[473] The PCR leadership was still suffering from a crisis of legitimacy after beginning talks with the larger parties.[474] The Soviets and "Muscovite" communists campaigned among Romanian prisoners of war in order to have them switch sides in the war, and eventually managed to set up the Tudor Vladimirescu Division.[475] Cultural circles Measures enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime had contradictory effects on the Romanian cultural scene. According to Romanian literary historians Letiția Guran and Alexandru Ștefan, "the Antonescu regime [...] did not affect negatively cultural modernity. The Romanian cultural elite regarded Antonescu's policies for the most part with sympathy."[476] Nevertheless, other researchers record the dissent of several cultural environments: the classic liberalism and cosmopolitanism of aging literary theorist Eugen Lovinescu, the "Lovinescian" Sibiu Literary Circle, and the rebellious counterculture of young avant-garde writers (Ion Caraion, Geo Dumitrescu, Dimitrie Stelaru, Constant Tonegaru).[477] Prominent left-wing writers Tudor Arghezi, Victor Eftimiu and Zaharia Stancu were political prisoners during the Antonescu years.[478] Author George Călinescu also stood out against the official guidelines, and, in 1941, took a risk by publishing a synthesis of Romanian literature which emphasized Jewish contributions,[479] while composer George Enescu pleaded with Antonescu personally for the fate of Romani musicians.[458] Similar acts of solidarity were performed by various prominent intellectuals and artists.[480] In August 1942, King Michael received a manifesto endorsed by intellectuals from various fields, deploring the murders in Transnistria, and calling for a realignment of policies.[481] Another such document of April 1944 called for an immediate peace with the Soviet Union.[482] On a more intimate level, a diary kept by philosopher and art critic Alice Voinescu expresses her indignation over the antisemitic measures and massacres.[483] A special aspect of political repression and cultural hegemony was Antonescu's persecution of Evangelical or Restorationist Christian denominations, first outlawed under the National Legionary regime.[484] Several thousand adherents of the Pentecostal Union and the Baptist Union were reportedly jailed in compliance with his orders.[485] Persecution targeted groups of religiously motivated conscientious objectors. In addition to the Inochentist movement, these groups included the Pentecostal Union, the Seventh-day Adventist Conference and the Jehovah's Witnesses Association.[486] Antonescu himself recounted having contemplated using the death penalty against "sects" who would not allow military service, and ultimately deciding in favor of deporting "recalcitrant" ones.[487] Legacy Consequences of the Antonescu trial The period following Antonescu's fall returned Romania to a democratic regime and the 1923 Constitution, as well as its participation in the war alongside the Allies. However, it also saw the early stages of a communist takeover—which culminated with King Michael's forced abdication on 30 December 1947 and the subsequent establishment of Communist Romania. The Antonescu trial thus fit into a long series of similar procedures and political purges on charges of collaborationism, instrumented by the Romanian People's Tribunals and various other institutions.[488] During the rigged general election of 1946 and for years after Ion Antonescu's execution, the Romanian Communist Party and its allies began using the implications of his trial as an abusive means of compromising some of their political opponents.[147][489] One such early example was Iuliu Maniu, by then one of the country's prominent anti-communists, who was accused of being a fascist and an Antonescu sympathizer, mainly for having shaken his hand during the trial.[147] The enlistment of ethnic Germans into Nazi German units, as approved by Antonescu, was used as a pretext for a Soviet-led expulsion of Germans from Romania.[286][490] On similar grounds, the Soviet occupation forces organized the capture of certain Romanian citizens, as well as the return of war refugees from Romania proper into Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Both the arrestees and the returnees were often deported deeper into the Soviet Union.[491] As part of its deteriorating relationship with Romanian Roman Catholics, and urged on by the Soviets, the communist cabinet of Petru Groza also deemed Apostolic Nuncio Andrea Cassulo a collaborator of Antonescu and a persona non grata, based on transcripts of the Cassulo-Antonescu conversations.[492] It also used such allegations to pressure several Greek-Catholic clergymen into accepting union with the Romanian Orthodox Church.[217] Nevertheless, Romanian-born Holocaust historian Radu Ioanid notes, few Romanians involved in organizing the Holocaust were prosecuted, and, of those, none were executed after the Antonescu trial. He attributes this to nationalist resistance within the administrative and judicial apparatus, to communist fears of alienating a too large number of people, to the emigration of Zionist survivors, and to the open hostility of some communists toward liberal Jewish community leaders.[493] Jews also faced conflict with the new authorities and with the majority population, as described by other researchers.[494] There were, nonetheless, sporadic trials for Holocaust-related crimes, including one of Maria Antonescu. Arrested in September 1944 and held 1945–1946 in Soviet custody, she was re-arrested at home in 1950, tried and ultimately found guilty of economic crimes for her collaboration with the Central Jewish Office.[495] Five years later, she was sent into internal exile, and died of heart problems in 1964.[496] After 1950, a large number of convicted war criminals, even some sentenced to life imprisonment, were deemed fit for "social cohabitation" (that is, fit to live amongst the general population) and released, while some suspects were never prosecuted.[497] In communist historiography Although the Marxist analytical works of the increasingly marginalized communist figure Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu make isolated mentions of the Holocaust,[498] the heavily politicized official discourse inspired by Soviet historiography interpreted Romania's wartime evolution exclusively based on the Marxist-Leninist idea of class conflict.[499] In this context, the main effort to document and expose the Antonescu-era massacres came from Jewish Romanians. This began in 1945, when Jewish journalists Marius Mircu and Maier Rudrich contributed first-hand testimonies.[500] In 1946–1948, the Jewish community leader Matatias Carp published Cartea neagră ("The Black Book"), a voluminous and detailed account of all stages of the Holocaust.[501] After forming a secondary element in Antonescu's indictment, the deportation of Romani people was largely ignored in official discourse.[502] The communist regime overemphasized the part played by the PCR in King Michael's Coup, while commemorating its 23 August date as a national holiday.[147][503] The Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej faction emerged as the winner of the interior PCR struggles and incorporated nationalist discourse. That faction claimed a decisive role in toppling Antonescu, even though a majority of its members had been jailed for most of the period.[504] In accordance with Stalinist principles, censorship produced historical revisionism that excluded focus on such negative aspects of Romanian behavior during the war as antisemitism and the Holocaust,[505] and obscured Romania's participation on the Eastern Front.[506] Beginning in the mid-1960s, when Nicolae Ceaușescu took power and embarked on a national communist course, the celebration of 23 August as the inception of the communist regime was accompanied by a contradictory tendency, which implied a gradual rehabilitation of Antonescu and his regime.[507] Historians who focused on this period believe that the revival of nationalist tenets and the relative distance taken from Soviet policies contributed to the rehabilitation process.[508] After a period of liberalization, the increasingly authoritarian Ceaușescu regime revived the established patterns of personalized rule, and even made informal use of the title Conducător.[509] Beginning in the early 1970s, when the new policies were consecrated by the July Theses, Ceaușescu tolerated a nationalist, antisemitic and Holocaust denialist intellectual faction, illustrated foremost by Săptămîna and Luceafărul magazines of Eugen Barbu and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, by poet Adrian Păunescu and his Flacăra journal, and by novelist Ion Lăncrănjan.[510] The regime also came to cultivate a relationship with exiled tycoon Iosif Constantin Drăgan, a former Iron Guard member who had come to endorse both Antonescu's rehabilitation and the national communist version of protochronism.[511] In contrast, much of dissident culture and the Romanian diaspora embraced the image of Michael I as its counterpart to the increasingly official Antonescu myth.[512] Lucian Boia described this as "the spectacular confrontation between the two contradictory myths [transposing] into historical and mythological terms a fundamental fissure which divides the Romanian society of today."[513] Topics relating to the Holocaust in Romania were distorted during the communist era. Ceaușescu himself mentioned the number of survivors of the deportations (some 50,000 people) as a total number of victims, failed to mention the victims' ethnic background, and presented most of them as "communists and antifascists."[514] The regime also placed emphasis on the Holocaust in Northern Transylvania (where the Final Solution had been applied by the Germans and the local Arrow Cross Party).[515] Vladimir Tismăneanu has said Antonescu has a "pseudo-sacred aura" and many Romanians consider the attempts to diminsh this to be an affront to their national dignity: "In post-Communist societies, fantasies of persecution offer immense gratification to large strata of frustrated individuals". These national views are based on propaganda advanced during the Ceaușescu regime.[516] Earlier accounts of the massacres, which had already been placed under restricted use, were completely removed from public libraries.[517] While a special politicized literature dealt with the Holocaust in Hungary, the entire Ceaușescu period produced only one work entirely dedicated to Romania's participation.[518] Centred on the Iași pogrom, it shifted the blame from Romanian authorities and advanced a drastically reduced death toll.[519] In its preface, official historian Nicolae Minei claimed that Romania was not responsible for any deaths among Jews.[520] Other official texts made more radical claims, openly denying that Antonescu's regime was antisemitic, and that all those killed were victims of Germany or of circumstance.[521] Debates of the 1990s Romanians' image of Antonescu shifted several times after the 1989 Revolution toppled communism. Polls carried out in the 1990s show the Conducător was well liked by portions of the general public.[522] This tendency, Lucian Boia argues, was similar to a parallel trend favoring Wallachia's 15th century Prince Vlad III the Impaler, indicating a preference for "authoritarian solutions" and reflecting "a pantheon that was largely set in place in the 'Ceaușescu era' ".[523] It was also popular at the time to see the 1944 Coup exclusively as the onset of communization in Romania,[147][524] while certain sections of the public opinion revived the notion of "Jewish Bolshevism", accusing Jews of having brought communism to Romania.[525] British historian Tony Judt connected such reflexes to growing anti-Russian sentiment and Holocaust denial in various countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and termed them collectively "mis-memory of anti-communism".[526] Vladimir Tismăneanu, a prominent Romanian-born political scientist, referred to Antonescu's "pseudo-sacred" image with the post-1989 public, and to the phenomenon as "fantasies of persecution."[527] The wartime dictator's image appealed to many politicians of the post-1989 period, and sporadic calls for his rehabilitation were issued at the highest levels of authority.[5][147][528] Far right groups issued calls for his canonization by the Romanian Orthodox Church (together with a similar request to canonize Corneliu Zelea Codreanu).[529] Certain neofascist groups claim to represent a legacy of Codrenism from which Sima was a deviationist, and these have also become Antonescu apologists.[530] A particular case in this process was that of forces gathered around the Greater Romania Party, a group often characterized as merging xenophobic or neofascist messages and the legacy of Ceaușescu's national communism.[531] Founded by party leader and former Săptămîna contributor Corneliu Vadim Tudor, România Mare magazine is known to have equated Antonescu and Ceaușescu, presenting them both as "apostles of the Romanian people".[532] In his bid for the office of President during the 1996 election, Vadim Tudor vowed to be a new Antonescu.[533] Boia remarks that this meeting of extremes offers an "extraordinary paradox".[534] Drăgan also openly resumed his activities in Romania, often in collaboration with Vadim Tudor's group,[535] founding three organizations tasked with campaigning for Antonescu's rehabilitation: the media outlet Europa Nova,[536] the Ion Antonescu Foundation and the Ion Antonescu League.[537] His colleague Radu Theodoru endorsed such projects while accusing Jews of being "a long-term noxious factor" and claiming that it was actually ethnic Romanians who were victims of a communist Holocaust.[538] Ion Coja and Paul Goma notably produced radical claims relying on fabricated evidence and deflecting blame for the crimes onto the Jews themselves.[539] Several journals edited by Ion Cristoiu repeatedly argued in favor of Antonescu's rehabilitation, also making xenophobic claims;[540] similar views were sporadically present in national dailies of various hues, such as Ziua, România Liberă[541] and Adevărul.[542] Various researchers argue that the overall tendency to exculpate Antonescu was endorsed by the ruling National Salvation Front (FSN) and its successor group, later known as Social Democratic Party,[543] who complemented an emerging pro-authoritarian lobby while depicting their common opponent King Michael and his supporters as traitors.[544] Similar attempts to deny the role of Antonescu in the Holocaust were also made by the main opposition parties, the Christian Democratic National Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party, with Radu Câmpeanu, the latter party's president, publicly describing the wartime leader as a "great Romanian" who tried to defend the Jews.[545] Sections of both governing and opposition groups contemplated the idea of rehabilitating the wartime leader, and, in May 1991, Parliament observed a moment of silence in his memory.[546] The perceived governmental tolerance of Antonescu's rehabilitation raised international concern and protests.[147][547] While the FSN-supported Romanian President Ion Iliescu publicly opposed attempts to rehabilitate Antonescu and acknowledged the "crimes he committed against the Jews", it was his successor, Emil Constantinescu, a representative of the Democratic Convention, who in 1997 became the first Romanian officeholder to recognize the collective responsibility of Romanian authorities.[548][545] Nevertheless, during the same period, Attorney General Sorin Moisescu followed a since-deprecated special appeal procedure to overturn sentences passed against Antonescu and other 1946 defendants, which he eventually withdrew.[549] To a certain degree, such pro-Antonescu sentiments were also present in post-1989 historiography. Reflecting back on this phenomenon in 2004, Maria Bucur wrote: "the perverse image of Antonescu is not the product of a propaganda campaign led by right-wing extremists, but a pervasive myth fed by historical debates and political contests, and which the public seems indifferent to or accepts unproblematically."[550] After the Revolution, archival sources concerning Antonescu, including those in the National Archives of Romania, were made more available to researchers, but documents confiscated or compiled by Soviet officials, kept in Russia, remained largely inaccessible.[551] Although confronted with more evidence from the newly opened archives, several historians, including some employed by official institutions, continued to deny the Holocaust in Romania, and attributed the death toll exclusively to German units.[552] In parallel, some continued an exclusive focus on Northern Transylvanian massacres.[553] Local authors who have actively promoted Antonescu's image as a hero and wrote apologetic accounts of his politics include historians Gheorghe Buzatu[554] and Mihai Pelin,[555] and researcher Alex Mihai Stoenescu.[556] Larry L. Watts published a similarly controversial monograph in the United States.[557] Although criticized for denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust and downplaying Antonescu's complicity, Dinu C. Giurescu was recognized as the first post-communist Romanian historian to openly acknowledge his country's participation,[558] while his colleagues Șerban Papacostea and Andrei Pippidi were noted as early critics of attempts to exculpate Antonescu.[559] The matter of crimes in Transnistria and elsewhere was first included within the Romanian curriculum with a 1999 state-approved alternative textbook edited by Sorin Mitu.[560] Wiesel Commission and aftermath Main article: Wiesel Commission In 2003, after a period in which his own equivocal stance on the matter had drawn controversy,[561] Constantinescu's successor Ion Iliescu established the Wiesel Commission, an international group of expert historians whose mission was the study of the Holocaust in Romania, later succeeded by the Elie Wiesel National Institute. The Final Report compiled by the Commission brought the official recognition of Ion Antonescu's participation in the Holocaust.[5][147][562] After that moment, public displays of support for Antonescu became illegal.[5][147][563] Antonescu's SMERSH interrogations were recovered from the Russian archives and published in 2006.[147] Despite the renewed condemnation and exposure, Antonescu remained a popular figure: as a result of the 2006 Mari Români series of polls conducted by the national station TVR 1, viewers nominated Antonescu as the 6th greatest Romanian ever.[564] The vote's knockout phase included televised profiles of the ten most popular figures, and saw historian Adrian Cioroianu using the portion dedicated to Antonescu to expose and condemn him, giving voters reasons not to see the dictator as a great Romanian.[564] The approach resulted in notable controversy after Ziua newspaper criticized Cioroianu, who defended himself by stating he had an obligation to tell the truth.[564] The same year, on 5 December, the Bucharest Court of Appeals overturned Antonescu's conviction for certain crimes against peace, on the grounds that the objective conditions of 1940 justified a preventive war against the Soviet Union, which would make Article 3 of the 1933 Convention for the Definition of Aggression inapplicable in his case[374][565][566] (as well as in those of Alexianu, Constantin Pantazi, Constantin Vasiliu, Sima and various Iron Guard politicians).[565] This act raised official protests in Moldova, the independent state formed in Bessarabia upon the breakup of the Soviet Union, and in Russia, the Soviet successor state, as well as criticism by historians of the Holocaust.[374][566][567] The Court of Appeals decision was overturned by the Romanian Supreme Court in May 2008.[565] The same year, Maria Antonescu's collateral inheritors advanced a claim on a Predeal villa belonging to the couple, but a Brașov tribunal rejected their request, citing laws which confiscated the property of war criminals.[568] Cultural legacy, portrayals and landmarks Beyond their propaganda and censorship efforts, Antonescu and his regime had a sizable impact on Romanian culture, art and literature. Owing to austere guidelines on culture and to the circumstances of wartime, this period's direct imprint is less than that of other periods in the country's history. Few large heroes' memorials were built during the war years. Memorials produced at the time were mainly roadside triptychs (troițe).[569] The Heroes' Cult organization received expropriation rights to Bucharest's Jewish cemetery in 1942, and proposed to replace it with a major monument of this category, but that plan was eventually abandoned.[570] Antonescu and his wife preferred donating to Orthodox churches, and were ktitors of churches in three separate Bucharest areas: Mărgeanului Church in Rahova, one in Dămăroaia, and the Saints Constantine and Helena Church in Muncii, where both the Marshal and his wife are depicted in a mural.[563] After floods took a toll on his native Argeș County, the Marshal himself established Antonești, a model village in Corbeni (partly built by Ukrainian prisoners of war, and later passed into state property), while ordering hydroelectric exploitation of the Argeș River.[571] He also had sporadic contacts with the artistic and literary environment, including an interview he awarded to his supporter, writer Ioan Alexandru Brătescu-Voinești.[572] His 1946 trial was notably attended and documented by George Călinescu in a series of articles for Națiunea journal.[201] Political humor of the 1940s preserved distinct images of the Romanian leader. Romanian jokes circulated under Antonescu's rule ridiculed his adoption of the title Marshal of Romania, viewing it as a self-promotion and dubbing him the "Auto-Marshal".[573] During the war, Soviet agitprop portrayed Antonescu and the other secondary Axis leaders as villains and servile dog-like creatures, representations notably present in musical theater and puppetry shows,[574] as well as in press cartoons.[575] Marin Preda's 1975 novel Delirul displays the Ceaușescu regime's ambiguous relationship with Antonescu. Critics John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope remark that the novel is "admittedly not [Preda's] best work", and discuss his "complex representation" of Antonescu as "an essentially flawed but active leader who tried to negotiate some maneuvering room between the demands of Germany and the threats of the Soviet Union [and whose failure] led to the dismantling of Romania's fragile democratic system."[576] The book sought Antonescu's rehabilitation for his attitudes on the Bessarabia-Northern Bukovina issue, but did not include any mention of his antisemitic policies, of which Preda himself may have been ignorant.[577] An international scandal followed, once negative comments on the book were published by the Soviet magazine Literaturnaya Gazeta.[578] Although an outspoken nationalist, Eugen Barbu produced a satirical image of Antonescu in his own 1975 novel, Incognito, which was described by Deletant as "character assassination".[579] During the 1990s, monuments to Antonescu were raised and streets were named after him in Bucharest and several other cities.[5][580] Among those directly involved in this process were Iosif Constantin Drăgan,[563][581] the nationalist Mayor of Cluj-Napoca, Gheorghe Funar,[582] and General Mircea Chelaru, whose resignation from the Army was subsequently requested and obtained.[563] Also during that interval, in 1993, filmmaker and Social Democratic politician Sergiu Nicolaescu produced Oglinda, which depicts Antonescu (played by Ion Siminie) apologetically.[583] The rehabilitation trend was also represented at an October 1994 commemorative exhibit at the National Military Museum.[584] The same year, a denialist documentary film, Destinul mareșalului ("The Marshal's Destiny"), was distributed by state-owned companies, a matter which raised concern.[585] After the Wiesel Commission presented its findings and such public endorsement was outlawed, statues in Antonescu's likeness were torn down or otherwise made unavailable for public viewing.[5][147][563][586] An unusual case is that of his Saints Constantine and Helena Church, where, after lengthy debates,[563] his bust was sealed inside a metal box.[5][147] Outside of this context, the publicized display of Antonescu's portraits and racist slogans by football hooligans during Liga I's 2005–2006 season prompted UEFA intervention (see Racism Breaks the Game).[587] As of 2019, Romania has nine streets named after Antonescu; locations include Constanța, Râmnicu Sărat and Bechet.[588] Awards and decorations Antonescu received a number of awards and decorations throughout his military career, most notable being the Order of Michael the Brave, which was personally awarded to him by King Ferdinand I during the Hungarian–Romanian War of 1919.[589] He also received several decorations from foreign countries. He was the first Romanian to receive the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, being awarded it by Hitler himself.[130] Award or decoration Country Date Place Note Ref Romanian Military Virtue Medal ribbon.png Medal of Military Virtue (1st Class in Gold) Romania 1913 Southern Dobruja Romania's highest military decoration at the time. Only received by one other officer in the army during the Second Balkan War. [590] Order of Michael the Brave ribbon.svg Order of Michael the Brave (3rd, 2nd, and 1st Class received) Romania 1919 Tisza River, Hungary Romania's highest military decoration. Upon crossing the River Tisza, King Ferdinand took the Order of Michael the Brave from his own uniform and presented it to Antonescu, saying "Antonescu, no one in this country knows better than the King how much they owe you." [589][591] Pilot/Observer Badge in Gold with Diamonds Germany June 1941 Bestowed to honor exceptional success, presented to Antonescu by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. [591] DEU EK 1 Klasse BAR.svg Iron Cross (2nd, and 1st Class received) Germany 6 August 1941 Berdychiv Awarded for bravery in battle as well as other military contributions in a battlefield environment. [130] DEU EK Ritter BAR.svg Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross Germany 6 August 1941 Berdychiv Nazi Germany's highest decoration for its military and paramilitary forces during World War II. First Romanian to receive the award. [130] FIN Order of the White Rose Grand Cross BAR.png Grand Cross of the White Rose of Finland with Swords Finland January 1942 Bucharest One of three highest state orders of Finland, established in 1919 by Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. [592] Krimschild.JPG Crimea Shield in gold Germany 3 July 1942 Bucharest The first recipient of this award, bestowed upon Antonescu by Erich von Manstein on Hitler's behalf [593][594][595][596][597] FIN Order of the Cross of Liberty GCross war BAR.svg Grand Cross of the Order of the Cross of Liberty with Swords Finland 10 November 1943 The oldest of the Finnish state orders [598]  
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