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Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944, by Dennis Deletant. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 379 pp. $74.95.
The politics of memory have remained a prominent feature of Romania’s political life since 1989. Perhaps no other historical issue has energized Romanian public discourse more than the image of its wartime dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu. Following a more than forty-year absence from the indigenous historiography, Antonescu reemerged in the 1990s, promoted by Romanian nationalists as a veritable national hero whose leadership in World War II was informed less by his sympathy for fascism than by his patriotic determination to defend the Romanian nation against the perils of Bolshevist encroachment. Such apologists have consistently ignored the responsibility Romania’s dictator bears for the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews who perished as a result of policies Antonescu either officially decreed or directly inspired. Dennis Deletant has ably deconstructed Antonescu’s record to establish the paradoxical nature of his regime, to clarify the motivations behind the Marshal’s wartime conduct and also to challenge many of the assumptions prevalent in both the Romanian and Western historiographies.
The author observes that until the end of communist rule in 1989, three strategies were prevalent in the Romanian historiography to explain the country’s experience in the Second World War. The first of these is “justification,” offering that the Romanian regime in occupied Transnistria was decidedly more benign than German rule in its Soviet occupied territories. The second approach he describes as “evasion,” which emphasizes Romania’s role as an ally of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Germany after the royal coup of August 1944. The final strategy is “victimization,” which argues that Romania simply fell victim to the predatory designs of German political and military ambition and ascribes equal blame to the territorial designs of the Soviet Union, Hungary and Bulgaria, who capitalized on Romania’s political isolation to bring their revisionist claims to fruition (p. 262). None of these approaches even acknowledges Antonescu, much less engages the debate over his wartime leadership.
Deletant establishes convincingly that while Antonescu may have had little choice other than to remain at Germany’s side after recovering the lands awarded to the Soviet Union in 1940, Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, his decision to cross the Dniester was informed at least as much by his messianic determination to defeat Bolshevism, which he declared to be “the great enemy of civilization” (p. 85), as by his loyalty to Hitler. The Marshal’s expedient elision of “Jewish-Communists” allowed him to rationalize the deportation and destruction of Jews residing in Bessarabia and Bukovina not only as a security threat lying behind Romanian army lines, but also as part of his broader, racially driven determination to “purify” the Romanian nation. However, Antonescu paradoxically distinguished between what he regarded as dispensable and indispensable Jews. Those Jews residing inside Romania’s January 1941 borders not only were never deported, but continued to occupy critical positions in the national economy. Deletant persuasively describes the sheer arbitrariness in the application of official policies in this respect, a reality that enabled many Jews to evade “Romanianization” laws by purchasing dispensations from local authorities. These Jews were neither confined to ghettos nor were they required to wear the Star of David.
The author establishes quite convincingly that Antonescu was pursuing his own agenda with the deportations to Transnistria, which were not only executed independently of Germany, but at certain junctures overwhelmed the Wehrmacht’s capacity to provide the requisite logistical support to facilitate further expulsion eastward. In instances where illness or infirmity hampered such movement, it was Romanian, not German forces who ordered mass executions of those Jews who could not proceed. “This was a solely Romanian affair” (p. 182). Deletant places the moral responsibility for these murders, and for the deaths of those Jews who perished from disease, exposure, and starvation squarely on Antonescu’s shoulders. Further, the author observes that Antonescu’s longer-range plans included populating Transnistria with Romanians and driving the Jews beyond the Urals if possible (p. 152). Those intentions are congruent with the nearly apocalyptic abandon with which the Marshal pursued his eugenic goal of cleansing the Romanian nation of its foreign elements, observing that “it is not frontiers that consolidate a nation, but the homogeneity and purity of its race” (p. 155). Indeed, the perception of alien threats to the integrity of the Romanian ethnic constitution prompted Antonescu to begin deporting nomadic Roma eastward as well beginning in 1942. Roma who had more or less assimilated in urban settings were spared, mirroring the survival of their urban Jewish compatriots residing within Romania’s pre-1941 borders.
While Deletant places his discussion of the fate of Romania’s Jews within the larger context of the country’s mid-twentieth century experience, including its interwar political development and Marshal Antonescu’s trial after the war, it is his treatment of the Jewish question that makes this book especially valuable. While acknowledging the value of its contribution to our understanding of the formative years of Antonescu’s development and the shaping of his worldview, Deletant challenges many of the assumptions of the only other substantial study of Antonescu in the English-language historiography, Larry Watts’s Romanian Cassandra: Ion Antonescu and the Struggle for Reform, 1916–1941 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1993). The author’s analysis clearly disputes Watts’s contention that antisemitism was not an overt feature of Antonescu’s outlook and that on the whole, relatively speaking, he was “a good man” (p. 274). Deletant has used an extensive array of primary sources, including published document collections as well as material from the major Romanian archives and those of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to construct a persuasive narrative that is consistent with the findings of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, which concluded that “[o]f all of Nazi Germany’s allies Romania bears the responsibility for the greatest contribution to the extermination of the Jews, apart from Germany itself” (p. 6). Romania’s then President Iliescu endorsed the Commission’s findings in 2004. However, his subsequent decision to award historian Gheorghe Buzatu, an Antonescu apologist, with the order of “The Star of Romania” reveals that the politics of Antonescu’s memory and his responsibility for the destruction of such a substantial part of Romanian Jewry remains as contentious as ever within Romania.
Daniel M. Pennell
University of Pittsburgh |
