Interwar East Central Europe, 1918-1941 by Sabrina P. Ramet

Author:Sabrina P. Ramet [Ramet, Sabrina P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367135713
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Ethnic cleansing

Romania began its attack on the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Four days earlier, Antonescu had ordered the evacuation of rural Jews in the region between the Siret and Prut rivers and had instructed the authorities in Galaţi to concentrate the city’s Jews into a ghetto.179 In Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, the army evacuated 40,000 people by 31 July 1941, “cleansing” 441 villages and small towns, and killing up to 14,850 people in a pogrom in the city of Iaşi that ended with thousands of Jews being forced into tightly packed “death trains,” where many died from heat, thirst, and starvation.180 The pogrom itself took place on 29–30 June and was a disorganized and gruesome affair involving local antisemites, police, and soldiers.181 Tens of thousands of Jews fled before the Axis advance. Including those who were deported or conscripted into the Red Army, roughly 140,000–150,000 Jews from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were living in the Soviet Union by February 1942. Between 35,000 and 45,000 of them did not survive the war.182

As the Romanian army advanced through Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, soldiers, gendarmes, German Einsatzgruppen D units, and local antisemites rounded up and murdered Jews in village after village, killing between 43,500 and 60,000 people during the month of July 1941.183 Both regular soldiers and members of designated “death squads” (echipe de execuţii) carried out the murders.184 A number of massacres were also instigated and carried out by locals without the involvement of soldiers or gendarmes. In some instances, perpetrators had been or were affiliated with antisemitic organizations such as LANC, the Legion of the Archangel Michael, or the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, while others had been encouraged to attack Jews by observing decades of antisemitic policies implemented by the Romanian state.185 Locals and bureaucrats competed with one another for the plunder of Jewish property.186

In late July 1941, the Romanian army organized Jews from northern Bessarabia into convoys and herded them across the River Dniester, only to have them sent back by German officers on the other side. Murder, plunder, rape, or death from hunger and disease took their toll on the roughly 32,000 Jews involved, and, in mid-August, the small number of survivors were eventually interned at the Vertujeni camp.187 During August 1941 the authorities established transit camps at Vertujeni, Mărculeşti, Edineţi, and Secureni as well as at several smaller sites. Supervised by the gendarmerie, but without any provision for food, shelter, and medicine, the deplorable conditions in the camps meant that scores of people died each day, their bodies thrown into mass graves.188 Romanian troops occupied Chişinău (as Kishinev was now called) on 16 July and soon massacred roughly 10,000 Jews. They concentrated the remaining Jews into a ghetto, where they were plundered, used for forced labor, and deported piecemeal across the River Dneister before the ghetto was liquidated on 30 October 1941.189

Further deportations became possible once the Tighina convention of 30 August 1941 gave Romania control of the territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers, which was renamed Transnistria.

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