Holocaust in Romania - Corvinus Library - Hungarian History

The orig i nal work com prises four volumes. The first one de scribes theanti-Se mitic pogroms by the Iron Guard, a fas cist Ro ma nian organizationtrained in part by the Ge stapo. The Iron Guard orig i nally started as an ex -treme right-wing stu dent movement but is soon grew into an SA type para -mil i tary ter ror gang. After Romania’s war time dic ta tor Ion Antonescutook power in September 1940, the Iron Guard was un leashed on the po -lit i cal op po si tion and es pe cially on the Jew ish pop u la tion of the coun try.During the fol low ing month thousands of Jewish homes and busi nesseswere looted and de stroyed, thousands of Jews tor tured and killed in awhole se ries of the most bru tal pogroms. The car nage was ended, tem po -rarily, only by the sup pres sion of the Iron Guard it self by MarshalAntonescu , not for their un speak able crimes, of course, but because by thattime the Iron Guard became a rival of the dic ta tor himself. An other aptparallel with the ul ti mate fate of the Ger man SA.The sec ond volume deals with the mass mur der of the Jewish populationin and around the Ro ma nian town of Iasi . These events took place af terRo ma nia en tered the war against the So viet Un ion on the side of Nazi Ger -many in June, 1941. Iasi was a town with a large Jewish com mu nity inclose prox im ity to the So viet front. In this instance the Jews served—as sooften in their tragic his tory—as scape goats. Scapegoats for any fail ure orthe Ro ma nian army against the Soviets, for the evac u a tion of Bessarabiadue to a Soviet ul ti ma tum, for any suc cess ful Soviet at tack or bombingraid. Dur ing the next few weeks tens of thousands of Jews were killed andde ported. “De ported” mean ing not some semi-or derly trans fer, but meth -ods that in them selves amounted to a way of mass kill ing. Very few of these“de port ees” had a chance to reach any kind of destination.The third vol ume is a chron i cle of sim i lar mass kill ings on ter ri to ries thatwere tem po rarily oc cu pied by Romania dur ing the war, in clud ingTransnistria , Bukovina , Bessarabia and the Black Sea port of Odessa. TheJews of Bessarabia, the strongly anti-Se mitic region that be came part ofRo ma nia in 1918, died by the tens of thou sands in such in ter ment campsas Edineti , in death marches and ghettos. In Bukovina , more than 100com mu ni ties were up rooted and driven east ward. Most of the atroc i tieswere com mit ted in Transnistria , a ter ri to rial unit un fa mil iar to most stu -dents of history of ge og ra phy. This was an ar ti fi cial prov ince de clared byIon Antonescu , and carved out of Ukrai nian ter ri tory be tween the riversDnyester (Ro ma nian: Nistru ) and Bug. It was pos sessed by Ro ma nia for 24