ROMANIA AND THE HOLOCAUST

In the late 1930s, nearly 760,000 Jews lived in Romania. By 1945, only 375,000 remained. Based on privileged access to the secret archives of the Romanian government, this book offers an unprecedented analysis of thousands of documents deliberately concealed until the 1990s. Drawing on archival records, reports, survivors' memoirs, and private letters, Radu Ioanid marshals all of this evidence to reconstruct Romanian policies of persecution and extermination of the Jews under the dictatorial regime of Ion Antonescu.

Of the hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews who perished during the Second World War, two thirds actually died at the hands of the Antonescu administration, and not in the camps of the Greater Reich, as was long believed. At least 250,000 Jews died on the direct orders of the Bucharest authorities. Mass deportations to Transnistria, massacres by police and gendarmerie in Iași, Odessa, and Berezovka: there was a genuine Romanian "final solution."

Radu Ioanid sheds light on the reality of the persecutions, the cruelty of their perpetrators, their flagrant opportunism and unbridled cynicism. This is a history of destruction and survival; of the German reaction to the chaotic Romanian violence; of a fluctuating national policy within the shifting context of the war that allowed more than 300,000 Romanian Jews to survive.

Documented studies such as Radu Ioanid's are the best response to current trends in many countries, including Romania, to rehabilitate the perpetrators of crimes from the Holocaust era.