Romania during World War II
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After a brief period of nominal neutrality, Romania joined the Axis Powers in June 1941, under the government of Ion Antonescu. An August 1944 coup led by King Michael deposed the Antonescu dictatorship and put Romania on the side of the Allies for the remainder of the war. Despite this association with the winning side "Greater Romania" was not to survive the war, losing territory to both Bulgaria and the Soviet Union.
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The war begins
On April 13, 1939, France and Britain had pledged to ensure the independence of Romania, but negotiations on a similar Soviet guarantee collapsed when Romania refused to allow the Red Army to cross its frontiers. On August 23, 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which stipulated, among other things, the Soviet "interest" in Bessarabia, along with the explicit lack of any such German interest in the area. Eight days later, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Romania officially remained neutral, granting refuge to members of Poland's fleeing government. After the September 21 assassination of prime minister Călinescu, King Carol tried to maintain neutrality for several months more, but France's surrender and Britain's retreat from Europe rendered meaningless their assurances to Romania.
In 1940, Romania lost territory in both east and west. In July, after issuing an ultimatum to Romania, the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia; two thirds of Bessarabia were collated to a small part of USSR to form the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. The rest (Northern Bukovina and Budjak) was apportioned to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Shortly thereafter, on August 30 under the Second Vienna Award (or Vienna Diktat / Vienna Arbitration), Germany and Italy forced Romania to "give back", half of Transylvania to Hungary; this arguably historically Hungarian area was henceforward known as "Northern Transylvania", as against "Southern Transylvania", which remained Romanian. On September 7, under the Treaty of Craiova, the Kadrilater or "Quadrilateral" (the southern part of Dobrudja) was ceded to Bulgaria (from which it had been taken at the end of the Second Balkan War in 1913). Given the relatively recent unification of all the territories Romanians have felt as historically belonging to them on one hand, and on the other hand the fact that so much land was lost without a fight, these territorial losses shattered the underpinnings of Carol's power.
Ion Gigurtu's government, formed July 4, 1940 was the first to include an Iron Guardist minister: Horia Sima, a particularly virulent anti-Semite who had become the nominal leader of the movement after Codreanu's death, was one of the few prominent legionnaires to survive the carnage of the preceding years.
Antonescu comes to power
In the immediate wake of the loss of Northern Transylvania, on September 4, 1940, the Iron Guard (led by Sima) and General (later Marshal) Ion Antonescu united to form a "National Legionary State" government, which forced the abdication of Carol II in favor of his 19-year-old son Mihai. Carol (and his mistress Magda Lupescu) went into exile and Romania (despite the recent betrayal over territorial cessions) leaned strongly toward the Axis.
In power, the Iron Guard stiffened already harsh anti-Semitic legislation (as well as enacting legislation directed against Armenian and Greek businessmen, tempered at times by the willingness of officials to take bribes) and wreaked vengeance upon its enemies. Nazi troops, who began crossing into Romania on October 8, 1940 soon numbered over 500,000; and on November 23, 1940 Romania joined the Axis Powers. More than 60 former dignitaries or officials were executed in Jilava prison on November 27, 1940 while awaiting trial; historian and former prime minister Nicolae Iorga and economist Virgil Madgearu, also a former government minister, were assassinated without even the pretense of an arrest.
The cohabitation between the Iron Guard and Antonescu was never an easy one. On January 20, 1941 the Iron Guard attempted a coup, combined with a pogrom against the Jews of Bucharest. Within four days, Antonescu had successfully suppressed the coup. The Iron Guard was forced out of the government. Sima and many other legionnaires took refuge in Germany; others were imprisoned.
On June 22, 1941, Nazi German armies with Romanian support attacked the Soviet Union. After recovering Bessarabia and Bukovina, Romanian units fought side by side with the Nazi Germans onward to Odessa, Sevastopol, and Stalingrad. The Romanian contribution of troops was enormous, second only to Nazi Germany itself and exceeding that of all of Nazi Germany's other allies combined. A Country Study by the U.S. Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress attributes this to "morbid competition with Hungary to curry Hitler's favor ... [in hope of]... regaining northern Transylvania."<ref>U.S. governmment Country study: Romania, c. 1990.</ref>
Romania annexed Soviet lands immediately east of the Dnister, including the city of Odessa. Romania's most important general, Petre Dumitrescu, was given command of the Romanian Third Army, advancing far into the Soviet Union before eventually being pushed back during the latter stage of the war. The German Sixth Army was briefly put at his disposal in November, 1942 during a German attempt to relieve the Romanian Third Army following a devastating Soviet offensive.
Image:Ploiesti-bombarded-by-the-US.jpg
Throughout the Antonescu years, Romania supplied Nazi Germany and the Axis armies with oil, grain, and industrial products, mostly without monetary compensation. Consequently, by 1943 Romania became a target of Allied bombardment, notably the August 1, 1943 attack on the oil fields of Ploieşti. Also, due to the uncompensated exports, inflation skyrocketed in Romania, and (quoting again from that same Country Study) "even government officials began grumbling about German exploitation." <ref>U.S. governmment Country study: Romania, c. 1990.</ref>
Prior to the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, Antonescu's government considered war with Hungary over Transylvania an inevitability after the expected victory over the Soviet Union.
Romania and the Holocaust
Even after the fall of the Iron Guard, the Antonescu regime, allied with Nazi Germany, continued the policy of oppression and massacre of Jews, and, to a lesser extent, Roma. According to an international commission report released by the Romanian government in 2004, Romania murdered in various forms, between 280,000 to 380,000 Jews in Romania and in the war zone of Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria. <ref>Ilie Fugaru, Romania clears doubts about Holocaust past, UPI, November 11, 2004</ref> <ref>International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report: Executive Summary</ref>
Though much of the killing was done in war zone by Romanian troops, there were also substantial persecutions in back of the front line. During the Iaşi pogrom of July 1941 over 12,000 Jews were massacred or killed slowly in trains travelling back and forth across the countryside.
Half of the 320,000 Jews living in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Dorohoi district in Romania were murdered within months of the entry of the country into the war during 1941. Even after the initial killing, Jews in Moldavia, Bukovina and Bessarabia were subject to frequent pogroms, and were concentrated into ghettos from which they were sent to concentration camps, including camps built and run by Romanians. The number of deaths in this area is not certain, but even the lowest respectable estimates run to about 250,000 Jews (and 25,000 Roma) in these eastern regions, while 120,000 of Transylvania's 150,000 Jews died at the hands of the Hungarians later in the war.
Romanian soldiers also worked with the Einsatzkommando, German killing squads, to massacre Jews in conquered territories. Romanian troops were in large part responsible for the Odessa massacre, in which over 100,000 Jews were shot during the autumn of 1941.
Nonetheless, in stark contrast to many countries of Eastern and Central Europe, the majority of Romanian Jews survived the war, although they were subject to a wide range of harsh conditions, including forced labor, financial penalties, and discriminatory laws. Antonescu's government made plans for mass deportations from Old Kingdom to Belzec, but never carried them out.
Despite the survival of a majority of the Jews living in Romania proper, the report commissioned and accepted by the Romanian government in 2004 on the Holocaust concluded:
Of all the allies of Nazi Germany, Romania bears responsibility for the deaths of more Jews than any country other than Germany itself. The murders committed in Iasi, Odessa, Bogdanovka, Domanovka, and Peciora, for example, were among the most hideous murders committed against Jews anywhere during the Holocaust. Romania committed genocide against the Jews. The survival of Jews in some parts of the country does not alter this reality.<ref>International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, Final Report: Executive Summary (PDF), p. 7, Accessed December 2005. </ref>
See also: Ion Antonescu#Antonescu and the Holocaust
The royal coup
In February 1943, with the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, the tide of the war had turned against the Axis Powers. By 1944, the Romanian economy was in tatters due to the expenses of the war (and Allied bombardment), and resentment of the heavy hand of Nazi Germany was growing even among those who had once enthusiastically supported the war. King Mihai, who initially had been largely a figurehead, led a successful August 23, 1944 coup with support from opposition politicians and the army, deposing the Antonescu dictatorship. The king offered a non-confrontational retreat to German ambassador Manfred von Killinger, but the Germans considered the coup reversible, and tried to turn the situation around by military attacks. The Romanian army was under orders to defend Romanian objectives against any German attacks, and the king had offered to put Romania's battered armies on the side of the Allies. Although, in retrospect, the royal coup has been estimated to have shortened the war by as much as six months (Constantiniu, 1997, p. 442), the complexities of negotiations between the USSR and UK postponed formal Allied recognition of the de facto change of orientation until September 12. During this time, Soviet troops started moving into Romania, acting as if Romania was still an enemy, robbing and raping at will, and taking approximately 140,000 prisoners. Romania incurred additional heavy casualties fighting the Nazi Germans in Transylvania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
After the war
Under the 1947 Treaty of Paris, the Allies refused co-belligerent status to Romania. Northern Transylvania was, once again, recognised as an integral part of Romania, but the USSR was allowed to annex Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Parts in the extreme north and south became part of the Ukrainian SSR; the rest, together with a thin stretch of land on the left bank of the river Dniestr, became a new "Moldavian SSR". Since 1991, these territories are part of Ukraine and of the Republic of Moldova, respectively.
In Romania proper, Soviet occupation following World War II led to the formation of a communist People's Republic in 1947 and the abdication of the king.
Notes
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References
This article incorporates public domain text from the Library of Congress Country Studies.
- Some passages in this article have been taken from the (public domain) U.S. Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress Country Study on Romania, sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Army, researched shortly before the 1989 fall of Romania's Communist regime and published shortly after. [1], accessed July 19, 2005. The few quotations of opinions from that piece are explicitly cited.
- Constantiniu, Florin, O istorie sinceră a poporului român ("An Honest History of the Romanian People"), Ed. Univers Enciclopedic, Bucuresti, 1997, ISBN 973-9243-07-Xpt:Romênia durante a II Guerra Mundial
