Romania whitewash of Transnistria invasion angers Holocaust survivors

Dubossary, 14 September 1941: Mass shooting of Jewish women by a detachment of Einsatzgruppe D, a mobile killing squad.

BUCHAREST (Tiraspol Times) - According to a Romanian court, the country's 1941 invasion of Pridnestrovie - then called Transnistria - was legitimate. Relatives of more than 300,000 Jews who died as a result disagree, and the whitewash has Holocaust survivors in tears. The Bucharest Court of Appeals delivered the decision in December 2006. As a consequence of the ruling, members of the Romanian government who had been condemned in 1946 for their decision to attack Pridnestrovie (Transnistria, in Romanian) together with the Nazis were pardoned of any war crime of invading foreign territory.

The name Transnistria was decreed into existence by the Romanian dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, in the summer of 1941.

Territorially, Transnistria was the largest killing field in the Holocaust. Many authors refer to it as "The Romanian Auschwitz". The name of that territory was in existence until the spring of 1944, when the Soviet Army re-conquered southern Ukraine.

Pridnestrovie (its official name today) at the time was part of the Soviet Union, whose successor state - Russia - today feels that the ruling by the court runs counter to accepted principles of international law as well as common, human decency and morality.
" - Pardoning an accomplice of the Nazis, whose crimes against the civilians from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union cannot be forgotten, contradicts the logic and essence of peace accords," the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in an official statement issued 1 March 2007.

Initial war crimes conviction overturned on appeal

After World War II, Ion Antonescu and twenty of his collaborators were found guilty of war crimes. Last year the trial was judged again by the Court of Appeals in Bucharest following an appeal lodged by Alexandru Alexianu, the son of one of the convicted. The court reviewed the charges of invasion of a foreign land and ruled that the Tribunal of the People was not aware of all the conditions that "made it legitimate at the time for Antonescu to attack the Soviet Union."

In World War II, Romania was a partner of the German-Italian-Japanese Axis. The country was led by Marshall Ion Antonescu. In June 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Romanian troops crossed the country's eastern border together with the Germans.

Romania wanted to get Moldova back from the Soviet Union. Moldova had long been part of Romania, but had been absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1940 as a result of a Hitler-Stalin pact. This agreement, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, joined Moldova with Pridnestrovie for the first time in history in a substate entity, the Moldavian SSR. Moldova later officially denounced the Pact as being "null and void" from the outset, and in its own Declaration of Independence declared that the pact was overturned.

Before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which for the first time joined the two sides, the Dniester River was the border between the two traditionally distinct and different lands: Moldova on one side, Romanian speaking and ethnically Romanian. And Pridnestrovie on the other side, Russian speaking and home to a majority Slavic population.

After getting Moldova back, Antonescu did not stop but, in 1941, decided to cross the Dniester river and take what he referred to as "Transnistria".

Never part of Romania

Although ethnic Romanians have at various times made up a sizeable minority of the population, they were never a majority and the area was never considered part of the traditional lands of Romanian settlement. The territory east of the Dniester river belonged to Kievan Rus' and the Slavic kingdom of Halych-Volhynia from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, passing to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and then into the hands of Russia in the eighteenth century.

By this time, Principality of Moldavia had been in existence for almost five hundred years with the Dniester marking its eastern boundary for all this time. Even with the rise of Romanian nationalism in the nineteenth century, the far reaches of Transylvania were considered the western boundary of the Romanian lands while the Dniester formed the eastern. The national poet Mihai Eminescu, in his famous poem Doina, spoke of a Romania stretching only "from the Dniester to the Tisza" and not farther east.

In World War II, when Romania, aided by Nazi Germany, for the first time in history took control of Pridnestrovie there was never any attempt to annex the occupied territory beyond the Dniester for it was generally considered merely a temporary buffer zone between Greater Romania and the Soviet front line. Transnistria had never been considered part of Bessarabia (Moldova) either: Two preeminent political figures of the day, Iuliu Maniu and Dinu Brătianu, declared that "the Romanian people will never consent to the continuation of the struggle beyond our national borders."

Ethnic cleansing was carried out in Romania throughout the years when Romania was an ally of the Axis.

" - Antonescu admitted during his trial that he was personally guilty of the deportation of 150,000-170,000 Jews from Bassarabia and Bucovina, of which 100,000 never came back," says historian Serban Radulescu Zoner. "He also admitted to being responsible for the Odessa massacre in which tens of thousands of people were killed."

About 25,000 gypsies were also deported, and half of them were never heard of again. Half of Romania's population of more than 800,000 Jews, the third largest Jewish population in Europe at the time, also perished.

Whitewash of crimes by Romania and Holocaust deniers

Despite the evidence, Romania today feels that what Ion Antonescu did in Transnistria was OK. The decision by the Bucharest Court, in justifying the invasion, is in line with how most Romanians feel about Antonescu and his actions. Antonescu made it to number 6 in the Top 10 of the Greatest Romanians in a vote on a Romanian TV show last fall.

Thanks to Romanian government attempts to cover up its killings of Europe's third-largest Jewish population, knowledge of the killings fields of Transnistria is absent from most official histories of World War II war crimes.

" - Today Transnistria is a historic phantom, having vanished without a trace. But in Jewish history it is inscribed in blood and tears; it will never be forgotten. Transnistria spells horror --horror that defies description; savage revolting acts of cruelty and bestiality; ... in which one group of men torture, rob, and destroy their helpless victims in cold blood. Transnistria symbolizes genocide," writes Julius Fischer in his book "Transnistria, The Forgotten Cemetery."

With the latest decision by Bucharest, new legitimacy has been given to Holocaust denial and Romanian whitewashing of World War II atrocities which were carried out both against Jews as well as against the non-Romanian Slavic majority of Pridnestrovie at the time.

Unlike Nazi Germany, which targeted for annihilation the Jewish population of an entire continent, Romania's Fascist regime was concerned with "solving the Jewish Problem" only within its own borders, reports Dr. Felicia Steigman Carmelly, another Transnistria survivor. Whereas the Third Reich prepared, and conducted each stage of the "Final Solution" plan with scientific and administrative precision, the Romanian approach was less organized and less methodical. However, whatever the Romanian perpetrators lacked in planning and technical means, they made up with fervor and determination in their brutality.

Even German Nazi officials who were not known for their compassion were disgusted by the activities of the Romanians. Reporting on the deportation and killings of Romanian Jews in 1941, the Italian journalist, Curzio Malaparte, describes the following exchange between Hans Frank, the Nazi-appointed Governor General of Poland, and his subordinate, Fischer, the Governor of Warsaw:
" - The Romanian people are not a civilized people," said Frank contemptuously.
" - That's right, they have no culture," said Fischer.

Carmelly, now residing in Canada, says that during the last five decades Romania's governments did not assume responsibility for the annihilation of about half of its Jewry. That chapter in the country's history was constantly ignored. Some Romanian politicians, historians, and writers are currently trying to whitewash the atrocities inflicted on the Jews by altering, or even entirely denying certain historical facts.

The whitewashing is done, says Carmelly, by attempting to attribute the wartime abominations to a fringe of the population. In fact, anti-Semitism was a widespread historical phenomenon in Romania. During the Holocaust, Romanians of all socio-economic strata became willing and active participants in the persecution and killing of Jews. (With information from Inter Press Service News Agency)

See also:
» Transnistria, the artificial name for "the Romanian Auschwitz"
» US State Dept supervisor lectures on Transnistria Holocaust