Black Earth(98)

Traditionally Romania had been a client of France, with whose culture Romanian elites identified, whose language was widely spoken, and whose foreign policy had brought Romania’s territorial gains after the First World War. Germany had invaded and defeated France in spring 1940, and then forced Romania to cede territory to its neighbors. In this situation, Antonescu’s only option, as he saw matters, was to ally with Germany, on the logic that Paris no longer counted and Berlin could alter borders. Romanian propaganda did not criticize German actions, but instead focused on Soviet aggression. Jews lost all of their rights in summer 1940. As part of Bucharest’s courting of Berlin, Romanian law was modeled on German law. On January 7, 1941, Antonescu, visiting Berlin, became the first foreign leader to learn of Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union. Hitler took the Romanian army seriously; after the destruction of Poland, it was the only sizable force in eastern Europe that could be exploited against the Red Army. Understanding Hitler’s intentions and enjoying Hitler’s trust, Antonescu felt free to break with the Iron Guard and govern alone.

When on July 2, 1941, Romanian troops joined the German Eleventh Army in an attack on the USSR from Romanian territory, this was, like the German campaign generally, a reinvasion. Romanian troops first reached lands, northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, that had been part of Romania until a year before, when the Red Army had occupied them. As in the Baltic states, the Soviets were in the midst of mass deportations when the Romanian reinvasion took place. On the night of June 12, three weeks before the arrival of Romanian troops, the Soviet NKVD had deported at least 26,173 Romanian citizens and arrested about 6,250 more. Like Germany, Romania portrayed the Soviet Union as a Judeobolshevik state. Massive pogroms were initiated on Romanian territory in the days before the invasion, far exceeding anything possible in prewar Germany. As Romanian forces reinvaded the lands that had been lost to the Soviets, they shot a large number of Jews in the towns, killing some 43,500 in all.

The Romanian political rhetoric was similar to that presented by the Germans. Both Hitler and Antonescu proclaimed a liberation from Judeobolshevism. Germans were telling others (Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Belarusians, and Russians) that Jews were communists and communists were Jews. Romanians were telling this to other Romanians. The Germans were unaware at first that most collaboration with the Soviet order had not been Jewish. The Romanians knew that they were creating an alibi for their own people by blaming the Jews for Soviet rule. As elsewhere on the eastern front, the first reaction of local people was personal score settling, with little or no account taken of ethnicity. Romanian forces actually intended to protect local Soviet collaborators who were not Jewish and to punish those who were, and other Jews along the way. Their task was defined as “killing all Jews while protecting pro-Soviet gentiles from the rage of their neighbors.” As local Romanians understood, “Nobody except Jews was persecuted at this time!” The ethnicization of guilt was fully planned and conscious.

Romanian soldiers quickly regained these prewar Romanian territories and occupied a good deal of the south of Soviet Ukraine. Like German soldiers, they were followed by special units whose initial assignment was to provoke pogroms. On July 6, 1941, an order from Romanian counterintelligence specified that pogroms were to be organized and given the appearance of spontaneity. In several cases, local populations, Romanians or Ukrainians, killed Jews before the arrival of Romanian troops. As elsewhere, however, most people watched passively. Romanian forces, like German ones in these same weeks, were frustrated that pogroms were not more widespread. After the initial pogroms came a general deportation of Jews from the recovered territories of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina further east to Romanian-occupied territories of the Soviet Union, known as “Transnistria.” Some Jews were deported from one part of Transnistria to another. During these deportations, local Romanians and others took advantage of the obvious exclusion of Jews from legal protection. Some raped Jewish women. Others bribed gendarmes for the right to pick prosperous-looking Jews from the columns in order to murder them for their clothing. Nearly two hundred thousand Jews were assembled in makeshift camps created from pigpens, barns, and open fields, where they began to die almost immediately. Those who survived these camps recalled that they were helped by local people, especially women, who gave them food and water at risk to themselves. Romanian troops, meanwhile, carried out mass shootings of Jews as revenge for combat losses to the Red Army. After seventy thousand Romanian troops were lost in the battle for Odessa in October 1941, Romanian soldiers shot twenty-six thousand Jews beyond the city. All in all, this Romanian campaign of comprehensive deportation and sporadic massacre resembled the contemporary German idea of shipping the Jews to Siberia.