Black Earth(99)

From the perspective of Bucharest, however, this anti-Jewish campaign was an attempt at the ethnic cleansing of one of several enemies of the Romanian state. It was carried out in zones where state territory had changed hands twice in two years, and where Jews could be blamed for defeat, scapegoated for collaboration, and eliminated under the cover of war. Romanian authorities also planned to deport Jews from the central part of the country untouched by war, but this proved difficult and in the end did not take place. Romanian Jews in central Romania had never lost their citizenship; there was no cover of war, nor any blame for communism to allocate. Of the 280,000 or so Jews killed as a result of Romanian policy, some 15,000 had lived in prewar Romania on territories that had not changed hands during the war. This was, of course, a significant number, but only about six percent of the total. Just as 97 percent of the Jews killed by Germany had lived beyond prewar Germany, so 94 percent of the Jews killed by Romania lived on territories Romania had lost to the USSR or had gained from the USSR.

In 1942, Romanian policy towards Jews, previously quite cooperative with the Germans, drifted in the other direction. Berlin wanted the remaining Jews under Romanian control sent to Auschwitz, but none were. Bucharest’s refusal had to do with calculations of sovereignty. Romania was deporting and murdering Jews on the basis of its own reasoning and for its own purposes. Romanian leaders were annoyed by the high-handedness of the Germans sent to Bucharest to negotiate and vexed that they were asked to deport their Jews while Hungarian Jews and Italian Jews, citizens of other allies of Germany, remained at home. They worried that the removal of Jews would benefit the German ethnic minorities in towns in Transylvania and thus increase German influence in Romania. Above all, Romanians were displeased that their contribution to the war on the eastern front had not led to the return of northern Transylvania from Hungary.

Romanian policy was to murder Jews as a minority that could be removed during the war without larger political consequences. When this calculation changed, so did policy. Romanian policy had also been to deport and murder Gypsies under cover of war; since this policy was coordinated with Jewish policy, it was halted by a kind of accident. In October 1942, the Romanians halted their own deportations and ceased their own killing policies. They also ended discussions of sending Jews to Auschwitz. In 1943, Hitler tried and failed to change Antonescu’s mind. Hitler’s argument was that Romania’s place in a future German Europe depended upon its current attitude towards Jews; Antonescu was of the opinion that the masses of Romanian corpses around Stalingrad were sacrifice enough. Rather than send Jews to Auschwitz in 1943, Bucharest once again extended its protection to Romanian Jews living abroad. The following year Romania reversed its alliances, and its armies finished the war fighting not alongside but against the Germans. All in all, about two-thirds of Romania’s Jews survived.

The Romanian Holocaust began with the trauma of lost territory and an associated change not just of government but of regime, from monarchy to military dictatorship. It took place chiefly on the lands that the new regime believed it could win back by force from the Soviet Union. Romanian Jews in places where state territory did not change hands usually saw the end of the war. Romanian Jews at the site of a double regime change—where the Soviet Union destroyed Romanian state structures and then Romania did the same to Soviet structures—usually did not. The logic of the Romanian Holocaust was similar to that of the German Holocaust, with one major exception: Antonescu, unlike Hitler, saw his own state as worth protecting and thus considered the Jewish question, antisemite though he was, to be one issue among others. When the survival of the state was in question, Antonescu slowed the persecution of Jews. Hitler, who actually believed in a world of races rather than a world of states, did the opposite.

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Under their longtime ruler, Regent Miklós Horthy, Hungarian leaders set a course towards an alliance with Germany, always keeping an eye on neighbor and rival Romania. Bucharest gained considerable territories after the First World War; its gains then were a part of Budapest’s losses. Hungary, treated as a defeated power, lost most of its territory and population by the terms of the Treaty of Trianon of 1920. It recouped some of these losses thanks to Germany twenty years later. As a result of the destruction of Czechoslovakia, it was awarded southern Slovakia as well as Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Romania’s loss of northern Transylvania in summer 1940 was Hungary’s gain. All of these annexations, achieved without military effort, bound Hungary to Germany. If Hitler could award territory, he could also take it away. Romania fought alongside Germany against the USSR to regain territory; Hungary joined that invasion so as not to lose that same territory. Their war in the East was largely a contest for German favor in the Transylvanian Question.