ON MAY 6, 1946, during his postwar trial Ion Antonescu stated, “If the Jews of Romania are still alive, it is on account of Ion Antonescu.”1 This statement bears a grain of truth. The survival of the Jews from Walachia, Moldavia, and southern Transylvania stemmed from Antonescu’s decision in the fall of 1942 to postpone indefinitely the deportation of Romanian Jews to Poland. However, Antonescu’s responsibility is overwhelming with respect to the death of the Jews of Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. The Jews of Romania and Transnistria thus owe both life and death to Antonescu.
Ion Antonescu’s anti-Semitism did not prevent him from maintaining contacts with Jews, either before rising to power or after. Aureliu Weiss, a Jew who was an assistant to Iuliu Maniu (the National Peasant party leader), wrote after the war:
I was personally acquainted with Antonescu in Predeal, where he had a villa on the mount of Cioplea. He was a general at that time. In 1935 and 1936, he used to come to the villa . . . that a friend of his, Mrs. Catargief, rented to me. The general had learned how to play bridge and played rounds with my wife and visitors at the villa. His irascible and impetuous temper forced me to be continually reserved. I avoided his presence. . . . An anti-Semite to the core, . . . he did nurture, however, relationships with Jews. . . . One day in my absence, on the veranda of the villa where I stayed in Predeal, forgetting my wife’s presence, he launched into an anti-Semitic diatribe against a humble [town] official who came to collect local taxes. At one point, realizing that my wife was present, he told him, as if he were making an excuse: “not all Jews are alike.”2
Although Antonescu believed that “the Jidani are . . . the cause of all the misfortunes that have descended upon our country,”3 this “not all Jews are alike” would be echoed in his anti-Semitic policies, especially with regard to exceptions for Jews who had acquired citizenship after the War of Independence of 1877, those who had been wounded and decorated in World War I, and their families.
But Ion Antonescu was dominated by his hatred of Jews and Judaism. On April 15, 1941, at a session of the Council of Ministers, Antonescu revealed his true feelings about the Jews: “I give the mob complete license to slaughter them. I withdraw to my fortress, and after the slaughter I restore order.”4 This was a fairly accurate vision of what took place in Iaşi shortly thereafter. In numerous instances Antonescu personally inspired specific anti-Semitic steps adopted by the Romanian fascist state. On June 19, 1941, for instance, Antonescu ordered the closure of all Jewish “Communist cafés” and the completion of regional lists of all “Jidani, Communist agents, and [Communist] sympathizers.” The Ministry of the Interior was to prevent such elements from “circulating” and be prepared to “deal with them” when Antonescu ordered the ministry to do so.5 On July 4, Antonescu asserted that “the Jewish people had embezzled and impoverished, speculated on and impeded the development of the Romanian people for several centuries; the need to free us from this plague is self-evident.”6 In spite of his innate sympathy toward pogroms, Ion Antonescu condemned such undisciplined acts, and on July 12, 1941, after the Iaşi pogrom, he condemned the soldiers who had taken part.7 But this did not inhibit him from asserting that the Jews were “the open wound of Romanism,” a people who “had robbed the bread from the poor.” On September 6, he wrote in a letter to Mihai Antonescu that “everybody should understand that this is not a struggle with the Slavs but one with the Jews. It is a fight to the death. Either we will win and the world will purify itself, or they will win and we will become their slaves. . . . The war in general and the fight for Odessa especially have proven that Satan is the Jew.”8 This was perhaps the justification for less ideologically and more materialistically motivated steps such as the October 3, 1941, Order No. 8507 (formally promulgated by Colonel Davidescu), in which the Romanian dictator ordered the National Bank of Romania to “exchange”—that is, confiscate—money and jewelry belonging to Jews about to be deported.9
In early October 1941, Colonel Gheorghe Petrescu of the Supreme General Staff and General Ion Topor of the gendarmerie initiated the deportation of the Jews from Bukovina at Antonescu’s order. Petrescu declared in 1945 that they had received their orders from Colonel Radu Dinulescu in the Second Section of the Supreme General Staff;10 this order, No. 6651 of October 4, 1941, also cited the decision of Marshal Antonescu that all Jews in Bukovina would have to be deported to Transnistria within ten days.11 The governor of Bukovina, General Corneliu Calotescu, also confirmed that Petrescu and Topor had only been fulfilling Antonescu’s instructions.12
On October 6, Antonescu explicitly told the Council of Ministers that he intended to permanently deport the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina.13 On November 14, in another address to the Council of Ministers, Antonescu stated: “I have enough difficulties with those Jidani that I sent to the Bug. It is only me who knows how many died on the way.”14 Participants at the same meeting heard the following situation reports from General Voiculescu, governor of Bessarabia: “The Jidani don’t exist anymore. There are one hundred sick Jews in the ghetto at the crossing point for the deportees from Bukovina.”15
At the November 13, 1941, session of the Council of Ministers, Antonescu expressed interest in the repression of the Jews of Odessa then under way:
ANTONESCU: Has the repression been sufficiently severe?
ALEXIANU (governor of Transnistria): It has been, Marshal.
ANTONESCU: What do you mean by “sufficiently severe”? . . .
ALEXIANU: It was very severe, Marshal.
ANTONESCU: I said that for every dead Romanian, two hundred Jews [should die] and that for every Romanian wounded, one hundred Jews [should die]. Did you see to that?
ALEXIANU: The Jews of Odessa were executed and hung in the streets. . . .
ANTONESCU: Do that, because I am the one who answers for the country and before history. [If the Jews of America don’t like this,] let them come and settle the score with me.16
Nor did the Conducator overlook pettier cruelties. At that same session Antonescu ordered that state pensioners among the deportees be deprived of their pensions.
At the December 4, 1941, meeting of the Council of Ministers, Antonescu indicated his frustration that the Jews of Chişinău had been deported before they could be plundered. To correct this oversight, the Jews were robbed by their escorts at the crossing points on the Dniester River rather than by the state bank in the ghetto. In fact, Antonescu’s demand for a commission of inquiry on the matter was motivated by this very frustration, certainly not by any outrage at the abuses the Jews suffered. “Instead of eating the bread of the Romanian country,” he declared, “it is better that they eat the bread of that region.”17 Observing at a Council of Ministers meeting on December 16, 1941, that even Nazi Germany was slow in resolving “the Jewish question,” Antonescu urged his lieutenants to hasten Romania’s solution to its side of the question: “Put them in the catacombs, put them in the Black Sea. I don’t want to hear anything. It does not matter if one hundred or one thousand die; [for all I care] they can all die.”18
One of the most revealing indications of Antonescu’s anti-Semitic convictions is the letter he sent on October 20, 1942, to Liberal party leader Constantin I. C. Brătianu shortly after canceling his decision to deport the Jews from southern Transylvania, Moldavia, and Walachia to occupied Poland. The letter is especially noteworthy because though it does not deal directly with the Jewish question, it nonetheless conveys powerful xenophobic undercurrents in its frequent anti-Semitic discourse. Similar to prefascist Romanian anti-Semites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and much like Legionnaire and Nazi theoreticians, Antonescu was obsessed with the interference of foreign powers in the defense of minorities in Romania and boasted about having put such interference to an end: “The Romanian people are no longer subject to the servitude imposed by the Congress of Berlin in 1878, by the amendment of Article 7 of the constitution [granting Jews citizenship], nor to the humiliation imposed after the last war as concerns the minorities.”19 In particular Antonescu felt that as a result of the amendment of Article 7, “the country has been Judaized, the Romanian economy compromised, just like our country’s purity.”20 Like Legionnaire ideologues, Antonescu believed the general corruption of Romanian political life resulted from “Pharisaic, Judaic, and Masonic” influence.21 He cast himself as the savior of the Romanian nation after the proclamation of the “National Legionnaire State.”22
By contrast, Antonescu accused Maniu of the National Peasant party of having been supported by Jewish newspapers.23 He further accused his predecessors of having been brought to power by “the occult, Masonic, and Judaic lobby.”24 Antonescu faulted Brătianu for wavering in his nationalism: “You are a nationalist—at least it would seem so—and yet you side with the Jews you protest, like Mr. Maniu, against the Romanization measures I have just introduced.”25 According to Antonescu’s vision, Germany had always been Romania’s ally, and its external enemies were “the Jew from London”26 and “the British, the Americans, and the Jews who dictated their terms for peace after the previous war.”27 The internal enemies, on the other hand, were “Jidani, Hungarians, and Reds,”28 all of whom waited for the first signs of anarchy “to ignite trouble . . . to strike the final blow at our nation.”29
Ion Antonescu’s attitude toward the Jews alternated between violent hatred and pangs of patriarchal generosity. During the fall of 1941, for example, Antonescu claimed before the Council of Ministers that he was “fighting to cleanse Bessarabia and Bukovina of Jidani and Slavs”;30 but on September 8, 1941, in the presence of Nicolae Lupu and Mihai Antonescu, Wilhelm Filderman obtained Antonescu’s promise to rescind the order for Jews to wear the Star of David throughout all of Romania, the permission for Jews to emigrate to Spain or Portugal, and a commitment to exempt from deportation the Jews of Moldavia and Walachia.31 The next day Antonescu also asked the government to differentiate between “useful” and “useless” Jews, presumably to halt the persecution of at least some.32 And yet one month later, in response to Filderman’s appeal for clemency toward the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina, Antonescu issued a violent reply accusing the Jews in those two regions of having been the enemies of the Romanian people and justifying their deportation to Transnistria.33 Published in the press, Antonescu’s reply provided fodder for a savage anti-Semitic campaign, which cited Antonescu’s “arguments” about “acts of barbarism” by the Jews in 1940 and 1941. The Ministry of Justice even launched an investigation into Antonescu’s erstwhile guest!
On December 3, 1941, Lupu, who was sympathetic to the Jews, gave Antonescu three memoranda concerning the judicial inquiry into Filderman, the repatriation of the Dorohoi deportees, and the repatriation of the deportees from Bessarabia and Bukovina. Antonescu refused to intervene on behalf of Filderman, claiming that he could not stop the course of justice. But he promised to issue instructions to repatriate the deportees from Bessarabia and Bukovina, provided that the UER guarantee (!) that the peasants would not kill them.34 None of this, of course, prevented Antonescu’s statement of December 16 quoted earlier—that he was not going to wait for the example to come from Germany but was going to proceed swiftly against the Jews, even if they should all die.35
Antonescu was directly responsible for, or complicit in, even the pettiest decisions on the persecution of the Jews. It was he who signed the April 1942 order (No. 462/CBBT) to deport the remaining 425 Jews of Bessarabia to Transnistria.36 It was his decision to carry out the second deportation of Jews from Bukovina, formally enacted on May 28, 1942.37 On August 31, 1942, Antonescu went over some late 1941 statistics indicating the presence in Romania of 375,422 Jews, 2.2 percent of the population; on his copy he wrote “a very large number.” Where the text reported a remnant in Bessarabia of 6,900 Jews (3.4 percent of the 1930 number), Antonescu wrote: “Impossible! My order was to have all the Jews deported.” When he saw the figure of 60,708 Jews in Bukovina at the time (1941), Antonescu noted again: “Impossible. Please verify. My order stated that only ten thousand Jews should remain in Bukovina. Please check. This is fantastic! Judaized cities, simply, purely Judaized.”38 (The figures for Cernăţi, Dorohoi, Botoşani, Iaşi, and Bacău had indeed risen by anywhere from 26 to 58 percent, but this was because of Antonescu’s decision to move the Jews from rural areas to the towns.) Antonescu also resolved to publicize information “to show Romania to what extent its economic life has been compromised, threatened . . . owing to felonious Judaic and Masonic politicking.” The Conducator swore that “if my legacy to the heirs of this regime reflects the same situation, I will have made this regime into an accomplice of a crime,” and he promised that “in order to purify the nation . . . I will flatten all those who [attempt to] prevent me from carrying out the wish of the absolute majority.”39
On October 12, 1942, Antonescu reassured the Central Office of Romanian Jews of his openness to moderation: “the better the Jews behave, the better they will be treated.” He was even big enough to acknowledge that some good Jews “have paid dearly for the mistakes of some of their own” and that “these bastards [are] comparable only to some of our own bastards.” Fully aware of the corruption of the Romanian bureaucracy in charge of the Jewish question, Antonescu even promised that if the Jews helped him identify Romanians who had blackmailed them, “they can rest assured, I will not spare them [the corrupt officials].” But Jews who were reprehensible, he warned, would not be spared either.40
In 1943, Antonescu’s mood swings continued. On the one hand he still declared that he tolerated those Jews who might deserve partial protection by the Romanian state; on the other he demanded his subordinates to display stern behavior toward the Jews. In a letter written to his architect, Herman Clejan, on February 6, Antonescu stated that the Jews “only display hostility and bad faith toward the Romanian state” and that the state in turn was “only defending and continuing to defend itself against the Jews’ perfidy.”41 Antonescu nevertheless decided that those Jews who had been settled in Romania before 1914 and those who had “participated sincerely . . . in the interests of the Romanian state” should enjoy the possibility of living in Romania, though “based on the criteria of proportionality.”42 Antonescu also promised to protect Jews who had “served the country on the battlefield or in other areas of public life.”43 But, according to him, those who had come after 1914 (i.e., those from Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and beyond the Dniester) had
accumulated wealth in dishonest ways, through corruption, looting of the public treasury, exploitation, and [taking advantage of] the poverty of Romanians; through fueling disorder and encouraging activities that were noxious to the interests of the Romanian people. [These Jews] from Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and beyond the Dniester will be struck without pity and kicked out of the country. They do not have the right to seek humanitarian sympathy because humanitarianism should not mean weakness [on our part]. After having repaid with hostility and crimes the limitless tolerance they have enjoyed in Romania, where their prosperity defied even their own dreams, these Jews no longer have any right to human understanding. They [should] only receive their just deserts for their ill deeds. . . . All those who support them will suffer the same fate.44
On April 30, 1943, Filderman argued again on behalf of Jews in Romania, contrasting the tolerance those in Finland enjoyed. This seems to have made an impression on Antonescu, who told General Vasiliu, “If that is the case in Finland, let’s leave [the Jews of Regat] alone here.”45 Six months later, on October 30, Antonescu declared that he was “happy” with the results obtained from Romanizing trade in Moldavia: “all trade in Moldavia, Dorohoi, [and] right up to Focşani must be Romanized in a civilized fashion.”46 On November 17, Antonescu betrayed anxiety over the fate of the Jews in Transnistria—but only once it appeared that he might end up bearing responsibility for the murders committed by the Germans there. He no longer spoke of sending the Jews “beyond the Urals,” but he did speak of a reservation for them in Vijniţa:
We want to establish a large sanatorium in Vijniţa. There is [also] a major Jewish center there that was dissolved long ago. There too we will bring many Jews. Regarding the Jews who are in danger of being murdered by the Germans, you have to take measures and warn the Germans that I will not tolerate this, because in the last analysis I will gain a bad reputation for these terrible murders. Instead of letting this happen, we will take them away and bring them into [Vijniţa]. There they will be organized securely in a camp, so that we can fill up Bukovina again. They should be organized for labor service there. We will pay them. Until they are organized, however, they will be supplied by the Jewish community. I have just talked with Mr. Lecca, and I told him he should call those from the Jewish community—he says he has already collected 160 million lei [over 2.5 million reichsmarks, or slightly over $1 million]—in order that clothing and foodstuffs become available. At the same time the foreign countries should be informed, so that foodstuffs may be sent from there too—just like the shipments to the American prisoners of war—and from Switzerland, and clothing, because I will not take anything from supplies allocated for the Romanian soldier, worker, and civil servant to clothe the Jews.47
The reluctance of Antonescu and the Romanians to be blamed for the behavior of their allies is reflected in the following dialogue on the issue of German atrocities, which took place between Marshal Antonescu and General Vasiliu during a cabinet meeting of November 17, 1943:
ANTONESCU: I was told that Jews in Golta had been murdered [by the Germans].
VASILIU: That is not true, Marshal.
ANTONESCU: Regardless, the Germans must be warned that I will not tolerate these murders.
VASILIU: The Germans have only taken several columns of Jews and led them across the Bug.
ANTONESCU: Please notify the German intelligence services that I will not tolerate these murders.
VASILIU: You want to send those sixty thousand Jews to Vijniţa?
ANTONESCU: That is impossible because there is not enough room for all of them there. The ones in the villages will have to remain where they are until the front stabilizes.
VASILIU: We have to clear up Moghilev District, where there are 39,000 Jews, then Balta, which has 10,000. Tulcin and Iampol contain just as many.
ANTONESCU: Clear up Moghilev and place the Jews in Vijniţa.
VASILIU: We will return to Dorohoi the ones who came from there.
ANTONESCU: The ones from Regat who were mistakenly expelled will be brought back home.48
Documents originating from the military office of Ion Antonescu show that during 1943 he was often informed by high-ranking members of his administration about the fate of Jewish and Gypsy deportees in Transnistria. For example, a report dated May 20 emphasized the terrible conditions of the Jews interned in Mostovoi (“dirty, without clothes, very thin”) and the fact that the Gypsies from Berezovka kept their dead in their houses in order to receive their food allowance.49 Several additional reports moved Antonescu to decide on June 3, 1943, to decrease the number of inmates in the Berşad ghetto (8,061 internees); to reorganize the Vapniarka concentration camp; to relocate the Gypsies outside the villages, where they could cultivate land; and in general to improve sanitary conditions in the camps and ghettos.50
In a speech to Romanian soldiers on January 1, 1944, Antonescu struck a new tone:
Your deeds in the occupied lands and wherever you have been have been marked by humanity. . . . Man to us is a human being, regardless of the nation he belongs to and the evil that he may have caused. All those whom we have encountered on our journey we have helped and protected as no one else would. The children have been cared for like our own; the old people as if they were our own. . . . We have deported no one, and you have never driven the dagger into the chest of anyone. In our jails there are no innocent people. The religious beliefs of all and everyone’s political creeds have been respected. We have not uprooted their communities . . . or families for our own political or national interests.51
But in a private letter to Clejan dated February 4, 1944, Antonescu demonstrated again how virulent his anti-Semitic tendencies still were. He justified anew the deportations, regretting only that they had not removed all the Jews from the affected regions. He acknowledged that he had refused to repatriate the surviving Jews—“the enemies” of the Romanian nation—but at the same time he claimed that he would not tolerate their abuse:
Mr. Clejan,
Concerning your letter about the fate of the Jews in Transnistria and those of the Bug, and about the compulsory labor exemption fees, allow me to broach anew some issues that relate to the Jewish question in Romania in terms of reality, results of war, and the events that preceded it.
As I have told you in person, I was forced to plan the evacuation of the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina because of their terrible behavior during the occupation . . . by the Russians; the population was so angry toward them that otherwise the most horrible pogroms would have occurred. Even though I decided to evacuate all the Jews, . . . various intercessions and initiatives prevented it. I regret today that I did not do it because . . . the largest number of enemies of this country is recruited among the Jews who remained there. There is no terrorist or Communist organization that does not have Jews in it, and often they are exclusively made up of Jews. . . .
Under these circumstances, it is morally and politically inconceivable . . . to return the Jews from Transnistria. . . . But I will give the order to allow them to stay away from the front line and to settle them in southern Transnistria, where the Jewish community, with help from abroad, can assist them in leaving the country. Among those [already] repatriated are those who had been mistakenly deported—7,000 Jews from Dorohoi and 4,500 orphaned children. . . . As a man with a European outlook, I have never tolerated . . . crimes against persons and will continue to take measures so that they will not happen to the Jews.52
As he did in 1941, Antonescu here argued that the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina had been deported to protect them from pogroms, an idea that he reiterated at his postwar trial. True, on April 22, 1944, during a Council of Ministers session Antonescu did reconsider repatriation from Transnistria, but only if returnees would be confined to specific towns; he actually toyed with the idea of ghettos, but he rejected any full repatriation to Romania.
It would be a solution to transfer them . . . to certain towns, if they return in large numbers—to settle them as in Buhuşi, in one or two towns, to resettle all the Romanians and allow the Jews to live together. All we would have to do is to send them supplies. . . . They will work for one another, sew, do carpentry, and so forth. That is one solution. Another solution is to bring them together into ghettos inside each city. We would tell them: “This is where you will live; do not leave. We will bring you food, do what you wish; we will not kill you, we will not harm you.” The third solution is to bring them back to Romania. This is the most dangerous one . . . for the Romanian people. I cannot order their return; . . . people would stone me to death.53
Whatever his idealized goals of allowing the deportees to move away from the front or of concentrating them in places from which the Anglo-American Jewish community might evacuate them after the war, Ion Antonescu was soon mobilizing the young Jewish men into labor detachments for work on roads and rail lines among prisoners and new conscripts. This was not simple necessity, and Antonescu insisted that doctors, engineers, and professors not be left out. He urged the Council of Ministers to take action lest the Jews “spread throughout the country.”54
At his trial Ion Antonescu assumed responsibility for all the mistakes and distortions of orders by his subordinates, though not for the outright crimes and plundering some had perpetrated.55 At the beginning of the war Antonescu had believed that he would be able to resolve “the Jewish question” once and for all, as well as that of the other minorities (Ukrainians in particular). He was a harsh, even violent anti-Semite. But a comparison to Adolf Hitler, whom he admired and who admired him, shows him in a different light. A direct or indirect dialogue between the German dictator and the leader of the Jewish community in Germany would have been inconceivable. In spite of his apparent inflexibility, though, Antonescu tolerated, even encouraged, contact with minority leaders in his own country and with the Allies (in Cairo and Stockholm), which suggests that he had a more realistic assessment of the overall chances of winning the war. After the end of 1942, he had imagined, like many other Romanian politicians, that the Romanian Jews could be used as capital to improve Romania’s position with regard to the United States and England. But this does not mean that the decision not to deport the Jews from southern Transylvania, Moldavia, and Walachia to Nazi camps in occupied Poland was strictly opportunistic. In all likelihood, numerous appeals, including Metropolitan Bălan’s, the ones from the royal family, and others from various diplomatic corps, played a significant role. While acknowledging that “bloody repression”56 had occurred under Romanian aegis during the war, Antonescu nevertheless declared that under his authority, there had been no massacres: “I passed a lot of repressive laws, [but] we did not execute a single Jew. . . . I gave orders for reprisals, not for perpetrating massacres.”57
More than any appeal, however, Antonescu’s national pride counted heavily in his restraint. It was not up to the Germans to decide what to do with “his” Jews. Antonescu was concerned about Romania’s image abroad. Reports from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicating that Romanian Jews under Nazi occupation were treated worse than Hungarian Jews annoyed Antonescu. His position of relative equality with Hitler had commanded the respect of Nazi dignitaries and the German embassy. At a certain point even Himmler gave up and intended in 1943 to order the withdrawal of his murdering bureaucrats from Romania, having lost all hope of collaboration in the destruction of Romania’s Jews (we don’t know if he recalled Richter, but Richter ended up in Moscow’s Lubianka Prison in 1945, suggesting that he failed to clear out before the Romanians changed sides).
Even though he shared many ideas with the Legionnaires, Antonescu was not an adventurer in the economic arena. Politically, he placed himself between Goga and Codreanu. He nurtured an obsession with a Romania purged of minorities, who represented a “danger” to the state, especially in territories that had been reallocated to Romania after World War I. Antonescu’s anti-Semitism was economic, political, and social, but it did not bear the mystical and religious aspects of Legionnaire anti-Semitism. His hatred was not that of the middle-class man, armed with a truncheon; rather, it was that of the bureaucrat, pretending to resolve a problem in a fundamental, reasonable, and nuanced fashion, by law. The fate of the Jews might have been different had the Legionnaire government lasted longer; the Legionnaires would certainly have been more closely aligned with Germany.
In contrast with Ion Antonescu, his distant relative Mihai Antonescu was an opportunist in the most concrete meaning of the word. During a 1928 student congress, which the Legionnaires dominated, members of the Legion of the Archangel Michael (later renamed the Iron Guard) ravaged synagogues and stores in Oradea, beating Jews in the streets: in Cuvîntul Nostru Mihai Antonescu criticized them for presenting a negative image of Romania to the world. A true Christian movement, he argued, would not behave in this manner.58 In 1937, Mihai Antonescu told the Jewish National Peasant party member Aureliu Weiss that he was writing an anti-Nazi booklet. But by the summer of 1938, when victory on the side of fascism and anti-Semitism seemed more certain, “the pamphlet had turned into an apology for the Führer.” The turn in the course of the war and the Allies’ capture of the initiative moved an opportunist Antonescu to attempt to attenuate Romanian anti-Semitic policy.59 Indeed, as early as the fall of 1941, German intelligence had come to suspect Mihai Antonescu of duplicity. Ambassador von Killinger noted at a press conference that Mihai “once wrote a book against us” (perhaps the 1937 booklet?), although he reasoned that “the Führer trusts the marshal, and Mihai Antonescu has the marshal’s confidence. He has the right to choose those collaborators he feels are best suited.”60
None of this means that Mihai Antonescu ever hesitated to carry out the violent anti-Semitic policies of his regime in 1941. He ordered the military and civilian administrations of Bessarabia and Bukovina to be merciless toward the Jews, asking Himmler to send an aide to Bucharest to coordinate Romanian anti-Jewish policies with Germany’s. But in the fall of 1942, Mihai Antonescu was explaining to Richter that he preferred “economic measures” to “useless acts of barbarism”; he also demanded an end to “the severe regime” the Germans had imposed on Romanian Jews across the Bug. Later he declared that he intended to allow Romanian Jews to emigrate to Palestine.61
As head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mihai Antonescu did generate administrative precedents for improving the Romanian Jews’ chances of survival abroad. The closer the end of the war came, the more moderate Mihai Antonescu’s anti-Semitism sounded. By the time he met with Chief Rabbi Alexandru Şafran, according to the rabbi, “Mihai Antonescu received me with great honor and shook my hand, saying that he was truly happy to see me.”62 On June 9, 1944, a committee that included Mihai Antonescu, Radu Lecca, and Generals Popescu, Vasiliu (Interior Ministry), and Şova (navy) assembled on Ion Antonescu’s orders to consider easing Jewish emigration from Romania. The committee stressed that the Romanian government would resist German pressure to place the Jews in Romania under German control, that emigration had not thus far been possible because of the lack of international cooperation, and that Romania could not spare the ships necessary for emigration due to the war.63 Thus did the committee exculpate Romania for its own anti-Semitism by blaming the rest of the world and the war itself.
On June 27, the prime minister received through the Romanian legation in Switzerland a note from the American government placing direct responsibility on the governments of Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania for persecution of the Jews—both citizens and refugees—committed within their borders.64 On July 20, a worried Mihai Antonescu telegrammed Bern, outlining “specific measures recently taken by the Romanian government . . . such as granting permission to four thousand Jews to practice their professions, assistance to Jews previously deported to Transnistria, repatriations from Transnistria with the help of the Romanian Red Cross, the release of Jews in trouble with the law like the Zionist leaders Josef Fisher and Mişu Benvenisti, and the emigration of thousands of Jews in 1944, among them escapees from Hungary.”65 During his trial Mihai Antonescu contended that the deportations of the Jewish population from Bessarabia and Bukovina had not borne a “racial” character and that the massacres there and in Transnistria “should be viewed as individual acts” carried out by the gendarmes.66
The same stance was adopted by the former undersecretary of state for Romanization, Titus Dragoş, at his postwar trial, where he declared that “I did not conceive, I could not have conceived, such a racially motivated law, and all laws that I recommended were aimed at softening the Jews’ situation following the suggestion made by the regime and the approach that Marshal Antonescu intended to pursue.”67 This approach was shared by other high-ranking civil servants in the Romanian state charged with crimes against the Jews and Gypsies, though there were exceptions. One of them was General Vasiliu, who, in spite of his desire to evade responsibility, admitted his complicity in the deportation of the Gypsies.68 (This deportation had been ordered by Ion Antonescu, who assumed full responsibility for it.)69
Radu Lecca, director of the wartime Office for Jewish Problems, had coordinated contacts with the Central Office of Romanian Jews. Former correspondent for Völkisher Beobachter, this onetime diplomat was certainly a German agent. In his capacity as director, Lecca met Eichmann at least once in Berlin.70 According to a member of the Jewish community in Iaşi who knew him well, Lecca “was an anti-Semite, but he had a thirst for money; he was ready to do anything for money, for a nice drink and a beautiful woman. Whatever he did, he did out of greed, not out of conviction.”71 Various sources confirm the fact that Lecca did not hesitate to demand from Jewish interlocutors large sums of money or other favors. At the time of his arrest on November 15, 1944, according to his indictment, two thousand gold pieces and sixty gold watches were discovered in his apartment. Lecca denied owning so many watches but did concede owning both a gold ingot weighing twelve and one-half kilograms and forty thousand francs in gold.72
Lecca’s chief of staff was Vasile Isăceanu, former member of the Christian National Defense League, a group that behaved extremely brutally against the Jews. Isăceanu’s behavior certainly reflected the spirit that Lecca fostered in his office. One day after having sent away Chief Rabbi Şafran, who had come to request a meeting with Lecca, Isăceanu reported: “a bearded Jidan wearing a large hat came to me and asked to speak to the minister, Mr. Lecca. I sent him to hell telling him that no piece-of-shit Jidan could even dare bother the minister. I took him by the collar and threw him out.”73 Lecca himself had no compunction about victimizing the Jews: he requested and received millions of lei from the Jewish community of Iaşi, for example, at least part of which he kept for himself. The following account of an encounter between him and Avram Haham, president of the Departmental Office of the Jewish Committee of Iaşi, suggests the gist of his attitude:
He [Lecca] told me [Haham] that he was having a meal with von Killinger and three German generals and would need an exceptional wine. He led me to his cellar and showed me a collection of about two thousand wine bottles.
LECCA: I want something really special. I heard that in Stefan cel Mare Street there is a Jewish bar owner who has an amazing wine from Cotnari.
HAHAM: I know what you are talking about, Minister, but he was killed during the pogrom.
LECCA: What a pity, he sold such good wines.
Later on, when Haham returned from Iaşi with some wine, a similar conversation further illustrating Lecca’s greed ensued:
LECCA: This is truly a rare wine. How many bottles did you bring?
HAHAM: Only ten.
LECCA: What a pity! Bring me some more.74
Haham further recalled that in April 1944, when he requested a military permit to transport nine hundred children from Transnistria in twenty trucks from Iaşi to Constanţa, Lecca told him: “I grant you this permit, but in two of those [trucks] you must bring from Iaşi my brother-in-law’s furniture.”75
Always in exchange for something, then, Lecca granted other favors such as the cancellation of plans to establish a ghetto in Iaşi. This particular decision was reached during a meeting with the first lady, Maria Antonescu, at her office (she was the president of Comisia de Patronaj [Patronage Society], an official philanthropic association). Having received the sum of five million lei from Iaşi’s Jewish community via Haham, Lecca handed it over to the first lady’s society for cessation of the ghetto. (Lecca certainly received some cash award himself for his part in the transaction.) Maria Antonescu did not always reveal herself to be so compassionate, however: “on a hot day in August, men, women, and children destined for expulsion were assembled in Macabi Square in Cernăuţi,” Rabbi Şafran recalled. “That same day I went to see her—for she directed the state’s charitable institutions—to implore her to telephone instructions to the charitable Christian women of the capital of Bukovina for water and milk for the children until their fate should be settled. . . . She refused to respond.”76
The trials of the Romanian war criminals began in 1945 and ended in 1952. On January 21, 1945, Law 50 pertaining to the punishment of war criminals was drafted by Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, Communist minister of justice, and was signed by King Michael. Four of the accused were executed in Romania: Ion Antonescu, Mihai Antonescu, C. Z. Vasiliu, and Gheorghe Alexianu. In dozens of cases civil servants and high-ranking officers had death sentences commuted. For instance, on June 1, 1945, Pătrăşcanu successfully requested that the king commute the capital punishment for twenty-nine of the accused in the first trial of war criminals.77 Hundreds of officers and high-ranking officials were sentenced to life or lengthy prison terms. Hundreds of noncommissioned officers, gendarmes, and enlisted men were also sentenced to prison terms or hard labor. All who did not die in prison were released between 1958 and 1962. The publicity surrounding the first trials permitted the Communist party to propagandize against its political enemies. But as the Romanian Communist party tightened its grip on power, this publicity diminished and eventually vanished completely.
In actuality, the postwar regime went easy on the mass of genocidal anti-Semites, condemning them to relatively minor sentences and often granting early amnesties. In the future the regime tacitly tolerated anti-Semitism, thereby indicating that it didn’t regard it as a major sin, as long as people didn’t make it an open rallying principle. And by quietly allowing the culpability of leading politicians and intellectuals of the prewar and wartime generation to be forgotten, the Communist regime in effect buried the crimes of its predecessor. Indeed, under Nicolae Ceausescu the regime openly and aggressively fostered a revival of Romanian nationalism, a nationalism that has continued to flourish since his regime’s overthrow.
In extreme nationalist circles today an attempt is under way to restore to Ion Antonescu a place of honor in Romanian history as a great patriot. But whether the marshal loved his country is not the point: the point is that he was a war criminal in the purest definition of the term. His leadership involved the country’s government in crimes against humanity unrivaled in Romania’s sometimes glorious, sometimes cruel, history; perhaps more ironically, this leadership’s war against a defenseless and innocent civilian population was only part of a broader folly involving the country in a conflict promising only illusory gains but actually bringing very definite, catastrophic consequences. A modern Romanian patriotism must not only reject the legacy of five decades of Communist misrule but also years of fascist tyranny if it is to be able to recount and take an honest pride in Romania’s history.