DESPITE THE FACT that Romanian anti-Semitism found its most visible and concrete manifestations in the sphere of legislation during the late 1930s and that systematic, state-sponsored violence would not be organized until 1941, widespread popular anti-Semitic violence in the months after the conflict with the Soviet Union in 1941 signaled that a new phase had arrived in the story of the Romanian Holocaust. The timing of these events reflected not only the more general drift in a Central and Eastern Europe dominated by Nazi Germany, but the specifics of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Germany, which permitted the Soviets to occupy territories belonging to Romania. Many Jews regarded the Soviets as potentially better suzerains than the Romanians, while others remained indifferent to them or even hostile. But Romanian nationalists exploited anti-Semitic stereotypes to portray the Jewish community as a whole as a pro-Communist fifth column. Other resentments of the Jews as a capitalist element in a predominantly peasant-worker environment, fanned by unscrupulous fascist publicists, came to the surface. Coupled with the opportunism of criminal and semicriminal elements eager for plunder, these emotions spilled over into bloody mob violence against Jewish communities in some parts of the country. The government largely stood aside from these events, though on paper at least it disapproved of public lawlessness. Still, in some cases participation of soldiers and police officers pointed toward the possibility of deliberate state involvement in the future.
During the spring and summer of 1940, the Romanian fascist movement expanded at an accelerated pace. By coming to an agreement with the Iron Guard, Carol II hoped to save his throne and compensate for certain failures of his foreign policy. On June 22, Carol founded his Party of the Nation and transformed Romania, in official terminology, from a “corporate” to a “totalitarian” state. The Iron Guard and its new leader, Horia Sima, played a considerable role in this national party.
Also in June 1940, less than a year after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the USSR issued an ultimatum demanding that Romania cede Bessarabia and Bukovina. The forced cession of these provinces, along with a number of communities in Dorohoi District in July, was a heavy blow to Romanian prestige and triggered severe reactions in the country’s internal political life. In the face of this Soviet aggression Carol made an overture to Nazi Germany by appointing as prime minister a pro-Nazi industrialist, Hermann Goering’s friend Ion Gigurtu, and as foreign minister an equally pro-German corporatist theoretician, Mihail Manoilescu.
The Soviets imposed humiliating conditions upon their capitalist neighbor. The Romanian forces were given three days to withdraw, but the Soviets did not respect even this term, entering the country and undertaking their first arrests before June 29. It infuriated Romanian nationalists that many Ukrainians happily greeted reunification with their long-lost cousins and that Jews were pleased with the downfall of the anti-Semitic regime. Whatever the perceptions of the Romanians, however, the great majority of Jews were fearful of the anticipated Stalinist changes; but Communists and other leftists were enthusiastic. Inside their truncated state Romanians sought scapegoats, and who might better fulfill this role than those whom nationalists had traditionally branded traitors and spies?1
Jacques Truelle, ambassador of France, reported a picture at variance with that of Romania’s fascists: “while numerous incidents did occur during the evacuation of Bessarabia and Bukovina in 1940, it is a fact that the Jews were not the only participants, but that all of the Romanian scum in these provinces, as well as the Ukrainian, Russian, and other minorities, joined . . . in insulting the Romanian regiments withdrawing without a fight.”2 But the notion of the Jewish Communist, saboteur, and enemy of the Romanian people now began to appear more frequently in popular propaganda and official reports. Intelligence agencies reinforced the anti-Semitic trend: one document of July 4, 1940, titled “Jewish Activity: The Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina During the Evacuation,” describes more than twenty incidents, some unverified and others implausible, reportedly provoked by Jewish Communists. “In Bolgrad,” ran one account, “the Communists [proudly] wore the six-pointed Jewish star and a red ribbon.”3 But a Jewish witness from Secureni recalls the opposite:
News of the entry of the Russians spread with the speed of lightning in the town. . . . We were afraid to go out into the street, since we did not yet know what the attitude of our new masters would be. Suddenly, from the opposite direction we saw the arrival of . . . Lipovans [ethnic Russians from Bessarabia and the Danube Delta] wearing their holiday clothes and carrying armfuls of flowers to greet the Russians; then they began to dance to honor the conqueror. . . . We Jews truly felt glad, believing that everything had happened for the best and that we were saved. . . . Time showed us how much we were mistaken. . . . Shortly after the occupation the Soviet authorities began deportations to Siberia. . . . Most of those deported were Jews, but many Christians were too.
Exactly what any of the various demonstrations meant remains elusive, however, for as the same witness recounts, “about eight to ten days after the declaration of war on June 22, 1941, . . . these same Lipovans . . . came out to offer the Germans flowers, bread, and salt.”4
Massacres attended the Romanian withdrawal. The killings typically were carried out by soldiers but sometimes by Romanian or Ukrainian mobs. The ugliest of them accompanied the withdrawal from Bukovina, the first taking place in the community of Milcoreni (in Dorohoi District). Following orders by an officer named Goilav, soldiers seized and abused the family of Sloime Weiner, including his son, User, and his daughters, Roza Weiner and Fani Zekler (the latter carrying an infant). Leading this group to the Tureatca Forest, the soldiers also caught a lame shoemaker named Moscovici, his wife, and their two children, as well as the wife of Isac Moscovici (apparently unrelated to the shoemaker) and their two young daughters. The mob made all of them line up in front of a ditch and then proceeded to shoot them. Isac Moscovici fell into the soldiers’ hands shortly thereafter, to be beaten so badly that he died on the way to the hospital.5
Other victims fell too. On June 30, soldiers from the Romanian Sixteenth Infantry Regiment under Valeriu Carp killed eight people in the village of Ciudei, including Moise Schachter; Dr. Conrad Kreis; the Hessman brothers; Herman Gross; and the latter’s wife, daughter, and grandson. Kreis was savagely tortured and his body dismembered.6 Marius Mircu, a Jewish reporter, later explained the incident as revenge for the participation of Kreis and certain others (“the leaders of the Communist organization” of Ciudei) in a delegation greeting the Soviets. Carp ordered the four he considered guilty to be bound hand and foot, and after breaking their legs, he and his men “smashed their skulls, tied them to trees, and dismembered them with bayonettes.”7 On that same day in Suceava a group of eighteen soldiers under a lieutenant broke into the home of the Jew Suhar Lax de Costina. After torturing him they tied him to a horse’s tail to be dragged for almost three kilometers to the edge of the village, where his bullet-riddled corpse was later found in the woods.8
July 1, 1940, found Commander Carp and his men in action again, this time in the environs of nearby Zăhăreşti. The men gathered thirty-six Jews from surrounding villages, some whose names have been traced: Leon Hamer, Leib Stekel, Ira Lupovici, Nuta Druckman, Moise Haller, Bartfeld, Herr, and the Edelsteins, mother and daughter. A witness recalled that they were tortured horribly: “Some of them had their tongues torn out, their ears and fingers cut off. Afterward, they were lined up around a pit, shot, and thrown in.”9 Carp forced two of the Jews to take part in the firing squad; we can identify one of these as Fredi Dermer from Suceava. The commander brought his own daughter along to enjoy the spectacle. At his orders the men tossed a dead horse onto the bodies of the dead Jews lying in the pit. In January 1941, surviving Jews exhumed the corpses and gave them a Jewish burial in the Suceava cemetery.
Also on July 1, 1940, in Şerbăuţi (Suceava District) the chief of police, Adjutant Bujica, and his friend, the farmer Hapinciu, murdered Şmil Gheller, his wife, Sally, and Leib Ellenboghen with a revolver and threw the bodies into a stream. Their remains were retrieved early in 1941 and given a proper burial, also in Suceava.10 In his standard compilation, Cartea neagră (The Black Book), Matatias Carp records numerous crimes committed in early July 1940:
In Comănesti-Suceava the Zisman brothers were thrown from a train and shot. Rabbi Leib Schactel and his two sons were first tortured, then killed at the edge of the village. The wife of the rabbi was shot while praying. Sloime Medler was killed by a bayonette to the nape of the neck. In Crăiniceni, district of Rădăuţi, the Aizic brothers and Burah Wasserman were shot by a group of eight soldiers under an infantry sergeant. In Adîncata the Jews Weinstein, Maratiev, and Feigenbaum were killed. In Găureni-Suceava the landowner Moise Rudich was shot. In Liuzii Humorului (Suceava), Natan Somer was killed; in Igesti, also in Suceava, M. Hibner, his wife and sons, and Iosub Hibner and his four children were killed by soldiers and farmers.
Numerous killings took place in July on the trains, especially in Moldavia. Jewish travelers, especially Jewish soldiers, were shot and their bodies left in the fields. Some died under torture; others were permanently disabled.11 In Rădăuţi Romanian soldiers shot six Jews.12 Many were thrown from moving trains; other victims were buried along the rail line in unmarked graves. On July 2, for example, Leon Cohn, a hairdresser from Bucharest on his way to service in the Twenty-ninth Infantry Regiment, was thrown from the train in Văculeşti along with three Jewish friends; farmers buried their bodies, and the local mayor filled out their death certificates weeks later.13
The largest massacres took place in the towns of Galaţi and Dorohoi. Near the Galaţi train station on June 30, a unit of the Romanian army cut down at least four hundred Jews attempting to flee to the USSR.14 The July 3 issue of the newspaper Timpul (The Times) confirmed another anti-Semitic outrage involving an undetermined number of Jewish dead and wounded in Galaţi that also took place on June 30.15
During its withdrawal from Bukovina the Twenty-ninth Infantry encountered Soviet troops. A Romanian officer, Captain Boroş, and a Jewish soldier, Iancu Solomon, died in the clash. Solomon’s funeral was to be held July 1 in Dorohoi. An honor guard composed of ten Jewish soldiers, including Sergeant Emil Bercovici and under the command of a Christian noncommissioned officer, was dispatched to the cemetery. As the coffin was being lowered into the grave, rifle shots rang out. The Romanians in charge ordered the soldiers to leave the cemetery. Several civilian Jews hid in the mortuary chapel. At the cemetery gate another platoon disarmed the Jewish soldiers and shot them. Bercovici’s body was positioned near a machine gun, and the troublemakers convinced the mob that had gathered that “the Jews” had opened fire on the retreating Romanian soldiers. Before long the rioters had massacred another forty Jews, including four children: Freida Rudik (seven years old), Tomy Rudik (six), Moise Rudik (two), and Simion Cohn (two)—all neighbors who had lived on Regina Maria Street. All of the victims, with the exception of a ninety-four-year-old man who was struck at the base of the skull, were shot in the head, chest, or abdomen.
The pogrom continued in the city after local residents had marked the houses of the gentiles with painted crosses. Soldiers invaded the homes of Jews, raping, pillaging, and murdering: they shot Avram Calmanovici and cut off his genitals; they shot Eli and Friga Reizel, cutting off Friga’s ears to get her earrings. After shooting her soldiers cut off Rifca Croitoru’s breasts. A Jewish survivor injured in the incident at the cemetery, Sulimovici, was saved by a police sergeant. At the hospital he found thirty other injured Jews. The mob shot eighty-year-old Hers Ionas on Brătianu Street; Bercu Aclipei, Isac Rabinovici, Manole Wittner, and a Mr. and Mrs. Zeliger were simply shot. Many other Jews found refuge through the efforts of Lieutenant Isăcescu, Captain Stino, Lieutenant Colonel Marino, Colonel Ilasievici, and General Sănătescu.16
According to several sources, the Dorohoi pogrom resulted in two hundred deaths.17 The Romanian historians Ion Calfeteanu and Aurica Simion cite a figure of 160—90 in the city, the others hunted down nearby.18 Carp counts 136 killed in Dorohoi and its surroundings, but his figure does not include Jews thrown from moving trains, victims whose number can only be guessed. In 109 cases the murderers can be identified as soldiers and peasants; in three cases, policemen and townsmen. We have no information regarding the other killers.
Ambassador Miguel A. Rivera of Chile informed Santiago of 180 victims in the Dorohoi episode, warning that this event was merely a prelude to what was coming.19 The pogroms in the district of Dorohoi do not appear to have resulted from orders of central military or civilian authorities but, rather, from uncoordinated local military initiatives and from anti-Semitic agitation, in the atmosphere of wartime catastrophe. Chaos was the milieu in which reinvigorated anti-Semitism thrived. In July and August anti-Semites expelled Jewish families from the rural areas of Moldavia. All Jews from the districts of Dranceni and Răducăneni, for example, were evacuated to Huşi; in that town 120 were arrested (it is not known how many were deportees, how many residents) before being interned in specially established camps.20
On September 6, 1940, the Iron Guard and Marshal Antonescu forced King Carol II to abdicate, blaming him for the loss of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and northern Transylvania. Although exhibiting clearly totalitarian features, his rule had been pro-Western; in his dictatorship he had imitated the corporatist model of Portugese dictator Antonio Salazar rather than the populist one of Hitler. Equally hated by the Iron Guard and Antonescu, Carol came to serve as the scapegoat for the failures of the Romanian political class. As we have seen, following the abdication the Iron Guard proclaimed Romania a “National Legionnaire State”; to the new king, Michael I, they allotted a merely symbolic role. Antonescu took over leadership of the government as president of the Council of Ministers, gaining the title of “Conducator.” Horia Sima, leader of the Iron Guard, became vice president of the Council of Ministers, making him the second highest-ranked man in Romania. The Iron Guard held portfolios in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Mihail Sturdza); Internal Affairs (Constantin Petrovicescu, supervised by Ion Antonescu through his confidant and undersecretary of state for internal affairs Colonel Alexandru Rioşanu); National Education, Religion, and the Arts (Traian Brăileanu); Public Works and Communications (Pompiliu Nicolau); and Labor, Health, and Social Security (Vasile Iaşinschi). Antonescu retained control of the War Ministry, but the three undersecretariats went not to politicians, but to career military men. Legionnaires “seconded” those running the Ministry of National Economy and the National Bank. In addition, Legionnaires controlled all of the prefectures, the press, and virtually all senior-level posts in the ministries, excepting only War, Justice (with titular head Mihai Antonescu, another of Ion’s confidants), and Agriculture (headed by conservative Nicolae Mareş).
The change in government led to a new wave of anti-Semitic excesses. The exclusion of Jews from the remaining professional associations that had continued to tolerate them and the graffiti that marked Jewish businesses in the provinces were the least of those measures. And yet on September 14, 1940, the same day that he named the Legionnaire cabinet, Marshal Antonescu met with Wilhelm Filderman, the renowned Jewish leader. Antonescu apologized for “romantic incidents” perpetrated by “exploited young men,” agreed to overturn such irresponsible decisions as the “abolition” of Judaism, and even “ordered” an end to the painting of the word “Jewish” on stores and businesses.21 Antonescu wrote to the UER that if the Jews did not “undermine the government,” the community had nothing to fear.22 Strangely, as we have already seen, Filderman’s visit was only the first of a series of meetings and other communications with Antonescu, one of the paradoxes of the Romanian Holocaust: Hitler would hardly have received representatives of German Jewry or overturned anti-Jewish measures.
But whatever Antonescu’s gestures of moderation, at the grassroots level all hell broke loose. Between September 26 and 30, 1940, Legionnaire police arrested hundreds of Jews in Buzău, Arad, and Iaşi, holding some of these people for several days, torturing some, and robbing many. Anti-Semitic activists organized boycotts of Jewish stores, while petty officials closed synagogues in Bucharest and the provinces. On October 11, the Legionnaire prefect of Cîmpulung, Cristea Rusu, simply ordered all Jewish-owned stores closed in his jurisdiction. In the company of Legionnaire chief Erhan and the commander of the local garrison, Colonel Mociulski, Rusu carried out the systematic pillaging of Jewish property the next day. Legionnaires and policemen carried out the looting while the soldiers maintained order—had the mob gotten in on the act, there would have been less for the authorities to destroy. Ringleaders of one mob tortured Rabbi Moses Iosif Rubin in order to extract a confession to the effect that he had used his synagogue to hide dynamite intended for sabotage. They then dragged him through the town, between sentinels aiming revolvers at his head, and finally harnessed him and his sons to one of the carts transporting the goods that had been stolen from him.23
Elsewhere too mobs plundered Jewish stores and manhandled their owners. On October 21, 1940, the police arrested ten Jews in Vaslui, releasing one for some reason but subjecting the other nine to torture for several days; one of the latter attempted suicide. Officials, neighbors, or ugly crowds expelled many Jews from their homes or confiscated their businesses. Petty officials and greedy competitors took over manufacturing enterprises owned by Jews, and even the pathetic possessions of itinerant peddlers were looted. On October 29, the eighty-five-year-old traveling salesman Paul Leibovici of Bucharest fell under attack by Legionnaires in the commune of Teişani (district of Prahova). These thugs beat the old man in the town hall, took him to the forest, and threatened to hang him if he didn’t deliver the goods he had purchased in the villages—these “valuables” were beans and nuts.24 In that same month a crowd robbed the shop Herman Naftuli Bringles kept in Cernavodă; the mob then shaved the heads of each member of his family, both men and women, before chasing the Jews from the town.25
Filderman sent several memoranda regarding the ongoing anti-Semitic persecutions that had occurred throughout October to Ion Antonescu; to the ministers of internal affairs, justice, and labor; to the director of the State Bureau of Investigation; to the mayor of Bucharest; and to the presiding judge of the Court of Appeals.26 On October 31, Antonescu once again received Filderman, who recorded the following notes shortly thereafter:
Prime Minister Ion Antonescu . . . [exhorted] the Jewish population to understand the circumstances, without exaggerating isolated instances of abuse that the government had no intention of tolerating, and to encourage the Jews to continue to tend to their affairs. . . . Jews who had arrived in the country after 1919, even those holding Romanian citizenship, would have to leave Romania, while native Jews could work on a proportional numbers basis.27
Filderman’s diligent efforts proved fruitless: Antonescu was prepared to protect neither the property nor the lives of Romanian Jews at that time.
November 1940 saw the first Jewish deaths at the hands of the “National Legionnaire” government. On November 2, in Bucharest, the Legionnaire police arrested Lucian Rosen, aged fifteen, charging that he had posted Communist handbills. Dragging him to the prefecture, the policemen savagely beat him with a metal object, strangled him, threw him from a sixth-floor window, and finally (on the chance he might still be alive) shot him.28 On November 22, Legionnaire police arrested the merchant Solomon Klein and discovered 1.5 million lei on his person. The next day his corpse was returned to his family—minus the money—with the explanation that he had thrown himself out a fourth-floor window at police headquarters.29 On November 23, Teodor Gerber, sixteen years old, was arrested (for the second time in several days); two days later his lifeless body was returned to his parents.30
On November 10, 1940, Legionnaire police in Ploieşti burst into the synagogue at 4 Municipal Street to arrest sixty Jews in the middle of services, charging that the ostensible worshippers had come for a Communist meeting. The police took the Jews to headquarters, where they abused and beat them. On the fourteenth of the month Horia Sima ordered them freed. The Ploieşti police, however, refused to comply. On November 27, in defiance of a renewed release order, they took eleven of their captives to a secret location where they were murdered; their bullet-riddled bodies were found in ditches on the outskirts of town the next day.31
The Iron Guard didn’t reserve its hatred exclusively for the Jews. On November 26 and 27, 1940, sixty-three Romanian politicians, senior military officers, and policemen accused of complicity in the recent arrest and execution of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (Sima’s predecessor as head of the Iron Guard during the reign of Carol II) were executed by Legionnaires in Jilava Prison near Bucharest. Among the victims were former Bucharest prefect Gabriel Marinescu, Generals Gheorghe Argeşeanu and Ion Bengliu, and former head of the intelligence services Mihail Morusov, who, according to the statement of Codreanu’s father, used Sima as an informant.32 Also on November 27, 1940, Nicolae Iorga, former prime minister, preeminent historian, politician of the right, father of “Romanism,” xenophobe, and anti-Semite, was assassinated, as was the economist and prominent National Peasant party member Virgil Madgearu. Former prime ministers Constantin Argetoianu, Gheorghe Tătăreşcu (saved by Alexandru Rioşanu), and Gheorghe Gigurtu (saved by Sima) and former ministers Mihail Ghelmegeanu and Nicolae Marinescu nearly shared the same fate. These assassinations and attempted assassinations sent shock waves through the Romanian political class: no one was safe, anyone could be arbitrarily executed. Where each feared for his life, who would oppose the Iron Guard over a matter so “trivial” as the persecution of a few Jidani (the plural form of Jidan, the pejorative term for “Jew”)?
Whatever misgivings any Romanians may have entertained, Nazi Germany was enthusiastic. The Legionnaire movement received an especially positive evaluation from the SS for these crimes. As Heinrich Himmler wrote to Sima in early December,
During the initial period of [our] takeover, our enemies were [also] found guilty and shot by the movement, outside the scope of the national justice system. . . . In the case of the Legionnaires who avenged the death of their dear captain [and] innumerable comrades, this kind of action is just, since it could never be carried out under the legal system, which is hindered by judicial provisions and will always be subordinate to their formalities. I send you my best wishes, to you and the Legionnaire movement, which has demonstrated so much self-denial on behalf of your fatherland.33
And whatever image Antonescu was trying to project during the audiences with Filderman, perhaps his real attitude toward violence—even against Romanians—came out in other statements. The victims of the Jilava murders, Antonescu learned, had been shot repeatedly: 587 separate bullet wounds were found on the bodies of thirteen victims; others had died from blows to the skull with heavy, sharpened objects (perhaps axes); and still others had died from stab wounds.34 Upon hearing of the savagery of the killings, Antonescu remarked to General Petroviceanu: “I am not sorry about what happened to them, since they caused so much damage to our country.”35 Ironically, even though there had been no love lost between Antonescu and the Legionnaires’ victims (Iorga in particular had been close to Carol II, Antonescu’s sworn enemy), Antonescu understood that the assassinations could be exploited one day to discredit the Legionnaire movement, which he did, in fact, do following the abortive “Legionnaire Rebellion,” the attempted Iron Guard coup d’état, shortly thereafter. For the time being, however, immunity for the Jilava murderers served as a green light inviting the Legionnaires to yet more audacious mayhem.
One of these events was the January 19 murder of the Jew Alexandru Spiegel in Hîrsova. After beating him with a bullwhip (Spiegel suffered severe injury to his genitals), the Legionnaires tied their victim, naked and barefoot, to a post in the town square. Three Iron Guard farmers stood watch to prevent any rescue attempt. It was so cold that they carried out this duty by turns, replacing one another on two-hour shifts. They contrived to prop up the victim’s head so that schoolchildren brought in especially for the purpose might bombard him with snowballs. Spiegel passed away at 9:00 P.M. that night.36
Between September 6, 1940, and January 22, 1941, anti-Semites murdered eleven Jews in Ploieşti and three in Bucharest. Physical abuse and robbery accompanied each other, though the sadistic pleasure the bullies derived from torturing a captive apparently was often an end in itself. On November 6, 1940, Legionnaires in Bucharest arrested and beat one hundred Jews at the Iron Guard Center at 1 Traian Street. They then escorted them in columns to Legionnaire headquarters on Roma Street, where they continued to abuse them from noon until midnight; the victims were then released. That same day another group of thugs dragged thirty more Jews to police headquarters, where they were brutally beaten.37 Hundreds of other Jews in Bucharest underwent similar treatment on November 10.
On November 22, the terror exploded in Călăraşi. Legionnaire goons rounded up forty-five Jewish men in a midnight raid, cramming them into a cellar at their headquarters, where they beat them “almost ceaselessly.” Having stretched them out “naked, face to the floor,” teams of four Legionnaires at a time beat their victims with wet cords, fresh teams relieving those who tired. Rabbi Moses Faibis Goldenberg was singled out for special attention because he had been accused of attempting to arrange the murder of two key Legionnaires in order to thwart anticipated attacks on the Jewish community. Dr. Silviu Cohn was alleged to have been Rabbi Goldenberg’s co-conspirator. Wounded twice during World War I, Cohn was tied to an execution post in the town center, where the pharmacist Duţescu slapped him until blood streamed down his face; children and hoodlums taunted him and pulled his hair. When the Legionnaires had finished the beatings—on November 25—they ordered all the Jews to leave town within five days, holding some back temporarily, however, by order of the mayor, to sweep the streets. Administrative officials complicit in the episode arranged a formal ban on the exiles’ travel to Bucharest, Ploieşti, Brăila, or Constanţa. Threats and other forms of pressure forced a number of Jewish merchants to sell all of their property to Legionnaires. The merchant Iancu Lerey, a disabled veteran of World War I (his hand had been amputated after the battle of Tatlogeac), was forced to sell out to his partner, Tudor Velicu, at 20 percent of the value of his share.38
Anti-Semitic brutes, officials, and mobs forced Jews to perform humiliating labor not only in Călăraşi. On December 12, the police commissioner of Tîrgovişte, a man named Vătăşescu, ordered the town’s Jews, regardless of age, social status, or education, to clean mud from the streets.39 Similar episodes took place in Brăila, Buzău, Constanţa, and Petroşani.40 In the commune of Pungeşti (district of Vaslui) the members of the Jewish community—men, women, children, the elderly—were forced to perform labor that included cleaning floors, sweeping streets, and constructing roads; the most powerful landowner in the area, Jack Marcopol, arranged to have them perform labor on his private property.41
Eager to criticize Iron Guard “lawlessness,” Ion Antonescu expressed indignation about some of these departures from good order at the January 11, 1941, meeting of the Council of Ministers.42 Nothing the Conducator said or did restrained the outrages of the winter of 1940–1941. The members of the Iron Guard drew their symbol on the heads of their victims; they expropriated their property; they expelled Jews from towns. In their zeal to do harm to the Jews the anti-Semites thought little of the harm their actions might cause the majority population, with only an occasional exception: in Urziceni on November 5, for instance, a Jewish dentist, the only one for miles around, was not only permitted but positively forced to remain.43
The expropriations had another unanticipated effect. Besides destroying a large number of businesses and impairing the national economy, as both Marshal Antonescu and even representatives of Germany acknowledged, these seizures sometimes led to a strengthening of ethnic German capital in Romania. The Nazis’ racial ideology made the Volksdeutsch (German people) abroad virtual countrymen; German diplomacy undertook the advocacy of their interests. In the case of Romania this translated into the definition of the ethnic German minority as a privileged group. The liberal leader Constantin I. C. Brătianu pointed out this situation to Ion Antonescu in a December 18, 1940, letter in which he argued that “the liquidation of Jewish businesses” for which Romanian buyers could not be found and the “terror” fomented by anti-Semitic youth opened broad new opportunities for the German minority to expand its role in the economy. “Instead of nationalization, we are experiencing ‘denationalization.’ ”44 Ethnic Germans benefited from the support of Germany’s foreign investment banks and proved themselves quite capable of exerting influence on the Legionnaires to help them take over Jewish firms. This occurred in November and December 1940 in Petroşani, Sibiu, Mediaş, and Braşov.
In Cartea neagră Matatias Carp’s analysis of the seizures and sales shows that the number of robberies was low during September 1940 and that there probably were no forced expropriations during that month. October showed a clear-cut increase in the number of such incidents in six localities, half in Moldavia (the only incident in Transylvania took place in Alba Iulia). November saw the greatest number, since cases of pillaging and forced transfers of ownership occurred in about forty-five localities; of this number, twenty-two took place in Transylvania, the remainder being evenly divided between Walachia and Moldavia. In December there was a reduction of about 30 percent in the number of communities witnessing this type of activity, though now Bucharest alone accounted for 10 percent of all incidents. On a regional basis Transylvania continued to lead, followed closely by Walachia and then Moldavia. Just as Bucharest was atypical in December, in that month and in January 1941 the city of Iaşi demonstrated an anomaly in the other direction: its major Jewish population experienced less suffering than in September, October, or November. But perhaps this had more to do with the soothing effects of the six million lei the community paid to the district’s Legionnaire commander, Vlad Sturdza, than to any lack of zeal for persecution in that city itself.45
The targets of expropriation and plunder varied greatly: schools, synagogues, even cemeteries were not exempt; above all, commercial and industrial firms attracted “purchasers,” with preference going to stores, hotels, and restaurants. Money, jewels, and furs were popular items, and therefore their enthusiasts “Romanized” many a private home. Interested neighbors “bought,” “appropriated,” or “confiscated” cattle, sheep, horses, timber, firewood, radios, and grain.
On December 9, 1940, the Union of Jewish Communities of Romania submitted a twenty-six-page appeal to Marshal Antonescu, summarizing the arrests, physical abuse, expropriations, and murders thirty-nine Jewish communities had experienced during the preceding months. Antonescu replied by ordering Minister of the Interior Constantin Petrovicescu, a Legionnaire, to open an investigation. But even though this interchange took place a month before the antagonism between Antonescu and the Iron Guard came to a head, his action does suggest the strain that had come to suffuse their relations by year’s end:
I will not be able to tolerate indefinitely disorder which shakes the entire country. . . . I do not protect [those] Jews who are primarily guilty of the misfortunes afflicting our nation. At the same time, as head of the government, I cannot tolerate acts that compromise the effort to achieve recovery by means of law and order, an effort impeded daily by the thoughtless actions of people unconscious of the evil they are causing to our nation and to the Legionnaire movement. For the last time I am appealing to those who are supposed to wield authority within the [Iron Guard] and to those who bear governmental responsibilities to repudiate these actions that, while exacerbating our situation, serve no useful purpose.46
That a crisis was brewing between Antonescu and the Guard seems further indicated by the fact that his previous order went unheeded. A new thirty-eight-page memorandum signed by Wilhelm Filderman on January 9, 1941, stated that the investigation had as often as not been carried out by the very parties guilty of the outrages, who intimidated the victims into stating that nothing had happened to them. The Union of Jewish Communities of Romania report contained a long list of incidents, beatings, and seizures of property that had taken place in more than thirty localities since December 9: more than 100 arrests, 120 cases of physical abuse, and nearly 300 confiscations of shops or money.47 And these figures do not represent the whole picture either, since the fear of reprisals held many Jews back from appealing to the authorities, even through the Union of Jewish Communities of Romania.
This was, of course, only one source of the friction between the Conducator and the Guard, but it did contribute to the crisis that soon broke out and to which we will turn our attention momentarily. One should not overstate the importance of differences on the Jewish question: as late as January 10, 1941, Antonescu reproached the minister of the interior for not having interned illegal Jewish immigrants responsible for engaging in commerce, promoting communism, and other alleged misdeeds.48 But Antonescu did represent a different brand of—or, rather, an approach to—anti-Semitism, one slightly less virulent and slightly more considered than that of the Iron Guard. Despite this, we shall soon have occasion to see how even after his victory other considerations moved Antonescu to countenance, if not urge, far more horrible outrages against the Jews.
On January 10, at the last meeting of the Council of Ministers attended by Legionnaires, Antonescu expressed his concern over the economic disruption caused by the Iron Guard’s anti-Semitic excesses, which, for him, were emblematic of that organization’s general irresponsible radicalism:
Terrible things are occurring in our country. The country is being bolshevized. Bolsheviks have penetrated the Legionnaire movement. In Brăila, for example, [Jewish] intellectuals were made to clean up snow: lawyers, doctors, rabbis [alike]. . . . Jewish businesses and stores have been seized, thereby destroying both trade and credit. Under such conditions, after two months we will be confronting an economic catastrophe. Factories are no longer shipping finished goods because the Jewish store owners are no longer buying merchandise.49
Under the guise of Romanization, the Legionnaires had exploited the state apparatus—the police in particular—for purposes of outright robbery. Most businesses that “passed into the hands” of Legionnaires had quickly fallen into ruin. On a national scale this had produced a dire impact. Antonescu, an army officer who represented what Barrington Moore has called “the honorable fascism of the clerks,” did want the economic dispossession of the Jews and their physical removal, but he had considered this the end result to be realized only gradually and lawfully. In this he had the tacit agreement of his German friends, who needed a well-functioning Romanian economy to support their anticipated war effort against the USSR.
Since at least 1935, Romanian oil had been a preoccupation of the Berlin authorities; in the summer of 1938, it became a principal interest of German diplomacy.50 In an August 8, 1940, letter to Prime Minister Ion Gigurtu, Goering made the improvement of relations directly conditional on deliveries of oil.51 Relations between the Iron Guard and Berlin had not proven a simple matter. While the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and its Sicherheitsdienst (SD, or the security service) and SS—the ideological and repressive organs of Nazism—had encouraged the Legionnaires, the same could not be said for Germany’s Foreign Ministry, the Economics Ministry, and the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, which rightly feared that the Iron Guard would disrupt the Romanian economy.52 Another factor tipped the scales in favor of Antonescu in Berlin: the Romanian army, which, despite certain sympathies of some superior officers for the Legionnaires, was not dominated by the latter.
Berlin had not failed to note the strained relations between the Legionnaires and Antonescu. As early as November 23, 1940, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had warned his Legionnaire counterpart, Mihail Sturdza, not to allow ideological fervor to jeopardize the requirements of the military.53 The next day Sturdza received similar advice from Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.54 Antonescu was aware of these conversations and sought to demonstrate his de facto leadership power over the Iron Guard by forbidding Sturdza from trying to directly influence Hitler. Instead, he himself visited the Führer on January 14, 1941, winning him over, as an observer recalled, to his own position:
the main difficulty [were] elements who do not realize that the revolution is not a condition to be perpetuated but . . . followed immediately by constructive activity. . . . Following his line of thought, [Hitler] recalled, with a certain liveliness in his voice, that he had needed six or seven years to eliminate those elements who had not understood. He added that Marshal Antonescu might be forced to proceed in the same fashion.55
In a still less veiled reference to his purge of the Brownshirts in the “Night of the Long Knives,” Hitler told Antonescu, “You have to get rid of . . . fanatical militants who think that, by destroying everything, they are doing their duty.”56 Nor did the United States remain totally in the dark, for in early February 1941, the German economic attaché in Bucharest told the American ambassador that “everything accomplished in the name of Romanization of businesses” would have to be undone and that although “the Jews must go away . . . they would be liquidated gradually and in accordance with the law.”57 Antonescu’s reining in of the radicals had already gotten under way by January 18, when he eliminated the position of Romanization commissar, an act Iron Guard leaders interpreted as an overt attack. After Antonescu’s return from Germany the tension between him and the Iron Guard had intensified; some Legionnaires now began to demand his recall and the establishment of a “pure” Legionnaire government led by Horia Sima.
The murder of a German air force commander, Doering, in Bucharest, probably by an agent of the British Intelligence Service, was used by both sides as a pretext to start hostilities. On January 20, 1941, Antonescu dismissed Minister of Internal Affairs Petrovicescu, who was close to the Iron Guard, ostensibly for having failed to protect Doering. Antonescu also dismissed Alexandru Ghika, director of the police forces, and Constantin Mamuica, director of another department at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Guard replied by refusing to accept these dismissals and proceeding to arm its followers. The Legionnaires barricaded the Criminal Investigation Bureau floor at the Bucharest Prefecture of Police, its central headquarters on Roma Street, and the police barracks. By the evening of January 21, the mutiny had spread throughout the country. At first German Ambassador Wilhelm Fabricius tried to mediate, seeking to persuade the Guard to acknowledge Antonescu’s authority. Indeed, agents of the SD and the SS in Bucharest initially threw their support behind the rebels; subsequently, they sought to protect the Legionnaires from Antonescu’s wrath and helped hundreds escape to Germany. (In his memoirs Walter Schellenberg, acting head of Amt VI [foreign intelligence], even cited Reinhard Heydrich as the instigator of the putsch!)58 Whatever the Germans’ original confusion, however, and despite whatever cross-purposes may have been at work, Hitler’s personal order to put German troops at Antonescu’s disposal soon reestablished German unity of purpose and tipped the balance in the Conducător’s favor. The Führer’s phone call reassuring Antonescu of his support came in a sense after the fact: loyalist forces were already mopping up the last rebels.59 On February 6, Manfred von Killinger, the new German ambassador, would report that Antonescu had emerged in definitive control, thanks to Hitler and the German army.60
Suppression of the rebellion cost the Romanian army twenty-one dead and fifty-three wounded.61 In the country as a whole 374 persons reportedly died and 380 were wounded—Jews, Guardists, soldiers—but these figures may be low.62 Of equal or greater significance were the repressions carried out afterward. What happened to the Legionnaires after the rebellion? Rank-and-file members not involved were left alone, though Legionnaire activities henceforth came under close secret police surveillance. Some leaders found protection from German diplomats or security personnel, who smuggled them out of the country. Many other rank and file and some of the involved leaders surrendered; the army interned them at first, sending them to the front at the beginning of the war against the USSR.
July 1941 found the following leaders condemned to life sentences at hard labor: Horia Sima, leader of the Legionnaire movement and onetime vice president of the Council of Ministers; his deputy, Traian Borobaru; Vasile Iaşinschi, former minister of labor; Corneliu Georgescu and Constantin Pop, both former undersecretaries at the Ministry of National Economy; Nicolae Pătraşcu, Iron Guard general secretary; Viorel Trifa, president of the National Union of Christian Romanian Students; Dumitru Grozea, head of the Legionnaire Worker’s Corps; Ilie Gîrneaţă, head of the Legionnaires’ charitable activities; and others. With the exception of a certain Sîrbu, all these leading Iron Guard members escaped, most of them with German help, and ended up in Berlin.63 Sentenced to prison terms ranging between five and fifteen years were Alexandru Ghika, former director of the police at the Ministry of Internal Affairs; Constantin Mamuica, former departmental director in the Ministry of Internal Affairs; and Mihail Sturdza, former minister of foreign affairs.
Those found guilty of the murder of the inmates at Jilava Prison on November 26 and 27 were sentenced to death: Stefan Zăvoianu, former general secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and former prefect of the Iron Guard police; Gheorghe Creţu, Octavian Marcu, Constantin Savu, and loan Tănăsescu, former members of the Legionnaire police; and Dumitru Anghel, a rank-and-file Legionnaire. Sentenced to death in absentia were Dumitru Grozea and thirteen other Legionnaires, most of them former policemen, including the murderers of Nicolae Iorga.64
In all 9,352 Legionnaires were arrested for participation in the rebellion, nearly half of them in Bucharest. Of these, 2,980 had been tried by August 1941, 1,842 receiving jail terms.65 Their grants of protection to the rebels had so compromised the SS and SD in Antonescu’s eyes that officially they had to withdraw all their representatives from Romania.66
The Legionnaire groups that sought refuge in Germany continued to trouble Romanian-German relations. There is no reason why Hitler might not have kept them as a possible Trojan horse for insertion at a later date, though his first impulse seems to have been to offer their heads to Antonescu as a gesture of support: Hitler wanted to cement the relationship as he contemplated the impending invasion of the Soviet Union. In May the German ambassador told the marshal that not only had “the Führer decided to hand over Horia Sima and all the Legionnaires who are in Germany to [you] if [you] so desire,” but that “we have requested in writing from all the Legionnaire refugees in Germany a . . . pledge not to engage in political activity.” More remarkably, Antonescu indicated his indifference, perhaps motivated by the desire to demonstrate the trust he felt toward the Führer, perhaps as a gesture of magnanimity toward the radical right in his own country: “I thank the Führer for this new act of consideration toward Romania, but . . . it would be painful for me to sentence and execute men who once collaborated with my government.” None of this, however, meant that the Conducator would tolerate shenanigans: “I do ask that Herr Hitler keep a close watch over all Romanian political refugees, [and if] they fail to live by the pledges they have made, I will demand that they be extradited and brought to justice.”67
Many of the refugees were soon at work in the Heinkel airplane factory in the Berkenbrüken camp; some of the leaders cultivated their frustrated ambitions from their exile in Rostock.68 It was thence that Sima slipped away in late 1942, turning up in Italy to embitter relations among all involved. Hitler in particular already had been angered by political overtures to him by Sima. Sima’s flight may have been facilitated by Kurt Geisler, the former Gestapo head in Romania, settling an old score with the Antonescu government that had expelled him.69 When Sima escaped Ribbentrop accused Himmler himself of involvement, triggering Hitler’s wrath against the SS chief.70 Following Sima’s escape the Berkenbrüken Legionnaires were transferred to Buchenwald, others to Dachau; nevertheless, one should bear in mind that in the camps these wayward but basically devoted fascists enjoyed privileged status. In early 1943, a group of leading Legionnaires disavowed Sima, working for improved relations with Marshal Antonescu. Sima was eventually extradited from Italy and was for a while under arrest in Berlin.71 After Romania broke with the Axis powers on August 23, 1944, the dream of the ultras came true, and Hitler permitted them to form a Romanian government-in-exile with Sima at its head; by that time, however, it was too late.
Back in the spring of 1941, three Legionnaires had been executed for the murder of a Jew and the attempted murder of another, the acts committed after the coup attempt; this punitive response was the Antonescu government’s attempt to show that it meant to enforce “law and order.” Their sentences were exceptional: few were punished for crimes against the Jewish population during the Legionnaire Rebellion.72 And yet the paralysis of government during those two days had afforded the opportunity for the outbreak of some of the worst anti-Semitic violence that had so far taken place, the chief focus of the last part of this chapter.
From the start Legionnaire propaganda named the Jews as instigators of their conflict with Antonescu. As such, one flier of a Legionnaire student organization demanded the “replacement” of all “Jewish-oriented persons” in the government.73 The Legionnaire press organ, Cuvîntul (Word), stressed the centrality of “all of the Jidani and bandits in our country” as targets in their planned coup.74 Dumitru Grozea cursed the “Masonic hydra” that showed its strength through government officials who had “sold out to the Jews.”75 Elsewhere, Cuvîntul Nostru (Our Word) editorialized that the need to exorcise the “Judeo-Masonic plot” demanded the union of army and Guard, arguing that “if someone has to be shot, let [it not be] our own. . . . We have other targets.”76
Such propaganda—indeed, the entire political show of the five-month Legionnaire government—constituted a tremendous incitement to pogroms. In the chaos caused by the struggle between the Iron Guard and Antonescu, many saw the moment for the “Great Pogrom.” In Bucharest alone at least 120 Jews would pay with their lives for this perception; Carp lists 116 victims by name, along with four unidentified corpses.77 This list matches almost exactly another published on September 20, 1941, by The Record of the United Romanian Jews of America,78 though the latter adds Teodor Gerber and Lucien Rosen (killed by Legionnaires prior to the mutiny) and Max London (murdered by Legionnaires afterward).79 The Romanian chargé d’affaires in Washington, D.C., Brutus Coste, acknowledged a figure of 118 in a conversation with Ray Atherton, head of the European Division of the State Department, but apologetically blamed “irresponsible, marginal elements.”80 Raul Hilberg cites German and American sources on the Bucharest pogrom in support of figures of 630 dead and 400 disappeared.81 Most likely, these sources exaggerate the numbers: the Jewish community of Bucharest was, after all, in a better position to compile evidence regarding the number of victims; this was the source for the figures cited in Carp’s book in 1946.
Most of the murders during the three-day rebellion took place in Jilava Forest, the rest at the slaughterhouse at the intersection of the roads of Fundeni and Pentelimon, in Buchareştii Noi District, and in the streets and houses of various residential districts. On January 21, the Legionnaires gathered about two hundred Jews into the basement of their headquarters. The fascists did not forget to take all of the victims’ valuables before they set upon the Jews. They next drove the Jews in the basement up to the attic under a rain of blows with truncheons and iron bars. The Legionnaires then beat them with a bullwhip and copper rods on the face, palms, buttocks, and soles of the feet in a room especially set aside for that purpose. Prisoners were finally made to drink from the basin in which Rabbi Gutman had been permitted to wash the blood from his head.
The next morning the prisoners were divided into two groups. The fortunate ones were taken to Strauleşti, on the outskirts of Bucharest, where they were beaten for two more days, had rifle shots aimed just above their heads, and then underwent a last robbery (who knows? perhaps some of those tricky Jews had managed to hide something the first time around); they were then released to walk home in tatters. Other Legionnaires trucked the second group of more than ninety Jews via Giurgiu Road to Jilava Forest, where they shot most of them, generally one to three times, mainly in the head. Some of those in the first truck were dispatched near the bridge over the Sabar River, after which the murderers stole the gold teeth, clothes, and shoes from the eighty-six corpses that they left lying under the trees.82
Some of the victims, wounded only, managed to escape, including Rabbi Gutman. After the murderers left, Gutman took the road to Bucharest, upon which he met two Romanian gendarmes, who for some reason let him pursue his journey; German soldiers, however, detained him, taking him to the Jilava town hall, where seven Jews, some of them wounded, were already being held. That evening all were once again taken to the forest and shot, but once again the rabbi miraculously survived. Two Legionnaires stealing clothes from the dead discovered the survivor, considered whether to shoot him, but then decided to return him to the town hall, where he was merely beaten, had his hair and beard torn out, and was informed that he would be shot anyway. However, the gendarmes freed him. One of them even accompanied him back to the forest to identify the bodies of two of his sons.83 Miguel A. Rivera, the Chilean diplomat, described Rabbi Gutman’s martyrdom in one of his reports.84
Additionally, thirteen Jews were murdered at the Bucharest slaughterhouse, but two escaped, critically but not mortally wounded. Those killed included Millo Beiler and the Rauch brothers, disemboweled, their intestines hung like neckties on other corpses, which were displayed on meat hooks85 and labeled “Kosher meat.”86
Many Jews met their deaths in their own homes. For example, several members of the Frînghieru family, including four children, were murdered in their house at 15 Intrarea Colentina. Two other children who were in bed at the time, Aron and Haia, miraculously survived, even though several bullets were fired at them.87 The bullet aimed to kill little Rodriques Honores Brickman of 9 Mihai Voda Street, however, did not go astray.88
Severe beatings and other forms of humiliation usually preceded the murders, and indeed it was the physical abuse that constituted the favored medium by which the Legionnaires and their friends expressed their aptitudes. Many Jews were abused at the Bucharest Prefecture of Police, about three hundred at the Malbin synagogue, and a number of others at the headquarters of the Union of Jewish Communities and the Fifteenth Police Precinct on Matei Basarab Street. The women were, by and large, released after physical abuse, which explains the small number of women’s names that appears on the lists of murder victims.
The goings-on at the police precinct may perhaps be taken as typical of the episodes of mass physical abuse. There two police commissioners (Legionnaires, of course) supervised a team of 40 workers from the Par-comet plant who volunteered to beat 150 captives between early evening on January 21 and early afternoon on January 23. Guests from other Legionnaire centers came to observe, occasionally getting in a few good licks of their own. One of the diversions the revelers most enjoyed was inventing charges, “convicting” their prisoners, and then administering them fifty or a hundred lashes with a bullwhip. As usual, the pogromists had helped themselves to whatever valuables their victims happened to have on their persons, and after the beatings they sheared their victims’ hair with hedge cutters. Finally, they forced their charges to swallow large amounts of a homemade purgative consisting of magnesium salt (150–160 grams) mixed with petroleum, gasoline, and vinegar, and then the Legionnaires crammed their captives into a crowded room to swelter in their own fecal matter until the guards grew bored and allowed the victims to leave.89
Six synagogues were vandalized and looted in Bucharest: the Sephardic synagogue on Negru-Voda Street, Congregation Beth Hornidraş Vechiu at 78 Calea Mosilor, Congregation Podul Mogoşoaia on Atena Street, the synagogue on St. Vineri Street, “Fraterna” synagogue of 3 Mamulari Street, and “Sinagoga Mare” at 11 Dr. Beck Street. Four were set ablaze, two of these totally destroyed in the flames.90
Carp’s Cartea neagră lists the names and addresses of 1,107 Jews tormented or murdered during the Legionnaire Rebellion. A majority, 615 people, of the victims of robbery lived (or had lived) in the Dudesti Quarter, known for its high density of predominantly poor Jewish residents. Calea Moşilor and the Moşilor Quarter accounted for nearly 150 victims. In the Văcăreşti neighborhood and at Calea Rahovei and the surrounding area, 136 Jews were robbed. More than thirty victims were registered in other neighborhoods of Bucharest.91 In all, the anti-Semitic rioting directly touched at least 1,360 Jews.92
In his postwar Spanish emigration Horia Sima admitted that “these Jews became the victims of uncontrolled . . . elements at the periphery of the Legionnaire movement . . . while the heads of the Legionnaire units were busy containing the rebellion of Marshal Antonescu.” Nevertheless, the Iron Guard leader argued that the number of victims among the Jewish population of the capital “must be attributed to the risk this people brought on itself” when it “plotted to trigger an internal conflict”: the recent mayhem should be accounted to the Jews’ leaders and only to “peripheral elements” of the Legionnaire movement.93
The five months between the Legionnaire Rebellion and Romania’s entry into World War II brought Romanian Jews a hiatus of relative physical safety. Nevertheless, Jews still died as a consequence of their ethnicity. The agreement formalizing the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Bukovina foresaw the departure of those inhabitants who did not wish to become Soviet citizens and the emigration from Romania of those who preferred to live under the Soviets. Joint Romanian-Soviet committees worked toward that goal. In Bukovina a committee operated in Burdujeni until Romania closed the border in January 1941, which caught by surprise 137 people who wanted to leave, 110 of them Jews and 27 Christians. The latter were sent back to the places in Romania where they had resided; the Jews were detained at the Burdujeni train station. Romanian border guards later escorted the Jews, including women and children, through the nighttime snow to the border, where they forced them at gunpoint to attempt crossing to the Soviet side. The Soviets had just finished mining the border zone, so many of the Jews were killed or injured in explosions. Others fell when the alarmed Soviet border guards fired at them, not having been alerted to the plans of the Romanians. For their part, the Romanian guards fired upon those Jews who tried to return. As of February only fifty-eight of these Jews remained alive, interned under hellish conditions in Burdujeni until May, when they were transferred to the Tîrgu Jiu camp for political prisoners and Jews.94
From late June 1940 to the end of May 1941, more than 600 Jews were slaughtered in Romania, at least 450 of them during the summer 1940 events at Galaţi and Dorohoi. In late 1940 and early 1941, Legionnaires killed 136—in Bucharest 3 were murdered before the rebellion, 120 during, and only 1 after it. Eleven others perished in violence in Ploieşti on the eve of the rebellion and one in Hîrsova. The figure of six hundred is probably lower than the actual total, including, as it does, the official (i.e., minimal) number of victims of the Dorohoi pogrom (fifty); other sources suggest something more like two hundred victims during the Dorohoi pogrom. Dozens of Jews were thrown from moving trains, but their number probably never will be known. Neither does the estimate include the fifty-two or so who died in Burdujeni.
The overwhelming responsibility for the murders, robberies, and other abuses must be borne by military personnel and policemen, the latter often Legionnaires, though these galvanized a more diffuse—but much broader—popular malice. Still, it is important to bear in mind that there was no systematic and centralized plan for these massacres; in 1940 and early 1941, the state had not formulated such a plan.