Romania's Holy War

Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust

Grant T. Harward

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501759963, 9781501759963
• eBook ISBN: 9781501759987
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Romania's Holy War rights the widespread myth that Romania was a reluctant member of the Axis during World War II. In correcting this fallacy, Grant T. Harward shows that, of an estimated 300,000 Jews who perished in Romania and Romanian-occupied Ukraine, more than 64,000 were, in fact, killed by Romanian soldiers. Moreover, the Romanian Army conducted a brutal campaign in German-occupied Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, and civilians. Investigating why Romanian soldiers fought and committed such atrocities, Harward argues that strong ideology—a cocktail of nationalism, religion, antisemitism, and anticommunism—undergirded their motivation.

Romania's Holy War draws on official military records, wartime periodicals, soldiers' diaries and memoirs, subsequent war crimes investigations, and recent interviews with veterans to tell the full story. Harward integrates the Holocaust into the narrative of military operations to show that most soldiers fully supported the wartime dictator, General Ion Antonescu, and his regime's holy war against "Judeo-Bolshevism." The army perpetrated mass reprisals, targeting Jews in liberated Romanian territory; supported the deportation and concentration of Jews in camps or ghettos in Romanian-occupied Soviet territory; and played a key supporting role in SS efforts to exterminate Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory.

Harward proves that Romania became Nazi Germany's most important ally in the war against the USSR because its soldiers were highly motivated, thus overturning much of what we thought we knew about this theater of war. Romania's Holy War provides the first complete history of why Romanian soldiers fought on the Eastern Front.

Chapter 1

Ideology of Holy War

In autumn 1937, Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, an eight-year-old Jewish boy, traveled with his family from Oradea to a village near Turda in the Transylvanian mountains to visit family. When they arrived, the local “intelligentsia” (mostly ethnic Hungarians and Jews) spoke fearfully about Corneliu Codreanu, leader of the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael, who was then riding through the countryside electioneering. Nagy-Talavera decided he wanted to see this man who inspired such terror. A friend, the son of a Romanian Orthodox priest, lent him Romanian peasant garb, and then both joined the crowd anxiously awaiting the “Captain” outside a church. Nagy-Talavera, who later survived Auschwitz, never forgot this experience. “A tall, darkly handsome man dressed in the white costume of a Romanian peasant rode into the yard on a white horse…. I could see nothing monstrous or evil in him. On the contrary. His childlike, sincere smile radiated over the miserable crowd…. An old, white-haired peasant woman made the sign of the cross on her breast and whispered to us, ‘The emissary of the Archangel Michael!’ ”¹ The introduction of universal male suffrage in Romania after the First World War triggered a proliferation of right-wing populist leagues, parties, and movements that radicalized Romanian society and created fertile ideological soil for fascism.² Although the Legionary movement was violently suppressed just before the Second World War, the ideologies of nationalism, religion, antisemitism, and anticommunism that had fostered the growth of fascism remained and formed the basis for Romania’s holy war.

Nazi Germany and the USSR’s titanic struggle has always been recognized as ideological, but Romania’s part in it has fallaciously been portrayed as unideological. In truth, centuries of religious tradition, age-old anti-Judaism combined with modern antisemitism, a century of nationalist zealotry, and burgeoning anticommunist paranoia predisposed Romanians to embrace the holy war. These ideological beliefs cut across class boundaries, uniting soldiers horizontally with comrades and vertically with officers. The Romanian Army started mobilizing in 1937, so there was time for soldiers to form primary groups, many of which experienced the humiliating withdrawal from eastern Romania in 1940 that army propaganda blamed on Jews. Romanian units boasted strong cohesion because of these primary groups when they invaded the USSR in 1941, intensifying combat and atrocity motivation. When soldiers lost comrades in battle, they took furious reprisals against supposed Jewish communists. When commanders ordered soldiers to cold-bloodedly “cleanse the terrain” of Jews, members of primary groups pressured each other to shoulder part of this “dirty work” so the rest were not burdened with it; those who avoided participating were mocked, even threatened, by comrades.³ Yet primary groups were literally shot to pieces in bloody battles. Ideology enabled survivors to create new bonds with replacements and allowed men thrown together as near strangers to risk their lives for each other because they fought for the same cause.⁴ Even as Romanian soldiers’ morale waned beginning in 1943, nationalism, religion, antisemitism, and anticommunism motivated them to fight well into 1944.

“Scientific” racism did not motivate most Romanian soldiers. During the interwar period a small number of Romanian eugenicists advocated racial ideas that influenced intellectuals and government policy makers to make some public health and education reforms based on eugenics, but they had limited impact on the general public.⁵ While Nazis perceived Slavs as subhuman, Romanians viewed Slavs as people, especially as many were fellow Eastern Orthodox Christians, and treated them relatively humanely; German occupation in Reichskommissariat Ukraine was far harsher than Romanian occupation in Transnistria.⁶ This is not to deny racism existed in Romania. Of course, antisemitism—a form of racism—existed. Anti-Gypsy bigotry was rife in society. Soon after taking power, Antonescu declared that not only Jews but also Greeks, Armenians, and Gypsies would be interned in camps and made to work “because only this way we will force them to leave.”⁷ This promise had dire repercussions for thousands of Gypsy soldiers and their families. Romanian officers were more likely than their soldiers to racialize Slavs as “Asiatic.”⁸ This helped justify reprisals targeting Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, and civilians. Nonetheless, scientific racism was an alien concept to most peasant conscripts in the Romanian Army.

Nationalism

The first major sign of Romanian nationalism was an uprising in Wallachia in 1821 led by a Russian-trained officer named Tudor Vladimirescu, who, in cahoots with Greek nationalists, sought to throw off Ottoman rule; but the revolt floundered, and he was assassinated by his Greek allies. Ironically, afterward the sultan began choosing Romanian boyars over Greek grandees as princes in Wallachia and Moldavia. The next steps in Romanian nation building occurred under Russian tutelage. After a victorious campaign against the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Army occupied Wallachia and Moldavia from 1829 to 1834, during which time General Pavel Kiselyov promulgated reforms called the Organic Regulations, which created modern state institutions in the principalities.⁹ Meanwhile, Romanian priests who joined the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church in Transylvania, then in the Austrian Empire, traced Romanians back to the Romans and Dacians of antiquity.¹⁰ These ideas quickly jumped across the border and became popular among Romanian nationalists in the Ottoman Empire. Additionally, boyars in Wallachia and Moldavia began sending sons to Paris instead of Constantinople for education, drifting away from Greek culture toward Romanian culture.¹¹ In 1848, Romanian nationalists orchestrated a revolution in Bucharest in Wallachia (another revolt, in Iaşi in Moldavia, was nipped in the bud), but the revolution lacked popular support and was crushed by Russo-Turkish forces.¹² In the Crimean War’s aftermath, Romanian nationalists engineered elections making Alexandru Ioan Cuza prince in both principalities in January 1859, resulting in de facto unification.¹³ Officially known as the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, but still a vassal to the Ottoman Empire, the Romanian state began a sustained period of nation building.

The Romanian countryside proved resistant to nationalism’s allure at first. To create an “imagined community” around shared language, religion, history, and culture requires a literate population.¹⁴ Most Romanians, however, were illiterate serfs who felt little national solidarity with boyars to whom they still owed feudal dues, or to the aloof middle class. In 1864, Prince Cuza implemented land reform, emancipated serfs, and abolished boyar ranks and privileges. (“Boyar” remained a colloquial term for a large landowner.) The great noble families retained much of their land, however, wielding substantial economic and political power; the lesser noble families with little land began assimilating into the middle class.¹⁵ Despite the continued power of the great landowners, serfdom’s abolishment facilitated the development of national consciousness in the countryside. Educated village notables—clergy, teachers, civil servants, and well-off peasants—became the flag bearers of nationalism in the countryside. In 1866, a “monstrous coalition” of Liberals and Conservatives frightened by Cuza’s reforms launched a coup, forcing the prince into exile. He was replaced with Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen of Prussia, who became Prince Carol of Romania.¹⁶ After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, Romania became independent in 1878 and proclaimed itself a kingdom in 1881. Nationalism was ascendant. Mihai Eminescu’s Poems, equal parts ode to Romania and tirade against foreigners, enjoyed unprecedented popular success in 1883.¹⁷ An economic boom based on grain production and exploited peasant labor under now King Carol I convulsed Romania, modernizing cities but impoverishing the countryside. Peasants lived in small, crowded, and unsanitary houses, subsisted primarily on vegetables and mămăligă (polenta), and suffered high rates of disease, alcoholism, and infant mortality.¹⁸ These conditions triggered local peasant revolts in 1888, 1889, 1894, and 1900. Tardily, Romania made some investments in the countryside, like Minister of Education Spiru Haret’s programs to construct village schools, train rural teachers, and publish agricultural periodicals for peasant smallholders. This resulted in a spike in rural literacy, which jumped from 15 percent in 1899 to 33 percent in 1912.¹⁹ Nationalism spread among peasants. Village teachers taught students that they were the embodiment of the nation, officers lectured recruits that they were the bulwark of the nation, and politicians speechified to landholding male voters that they controlled the future of the nation. Such nationalist rhetoric clashed with reality.

In 1907, a peasant uprising erupted across Romania. The situation in the countryside had become critical by this point, as almost 32 percent of peasant households owned less than two hectares (about five acres) and were barely able to survive, while in comparison just over 4 percent owned seven to ten hectares and were well-off.²⁰ Great landowners employed middlemen called arendaşi, or “lessors,” to enforce leases and collect rents; many arendaşi, especially in Moldavia, were Jews. A growing number of peasants believed that the absentee great boyars and Jews represented a corrupt alliance exploiting the nation. The uprising started on 21 February when peasants in northern Moldavia protested unfair leases. From the start the revolt had strong antisemitic overtones, as peasants first attacked Jewish arendaşi and merchants who were blamed for high rents and price gouging, respectively. Over the following three weeks, peasant revolts spread throughout Moldavia and even into Wallachia where there were few Jews, becoming a nationwide jacquerie against boyars and arendaşi (regardless of ethnicity). The nature of the revolt varied from place to place, manifesting itself as protests, attacks on manors, pogroms, land seizures, and a few revolutionary committees.²¹ The Conservative government was replaced by a Liberal one on 12 March, which declared a state of emergency. Concerned that infantry regiments might sympathize with the rebels, the Romanian Army primarily relied on cavalry and artillery regiments to fire on peasant crowds, leaving thousands dead and wounded.²² The state brutally restored order by 5 April; however, the peasant uprising of 1907 had shaken Romania to its foundations.

The First World War would act as a catalyst strengthening nationalism in Romania. After the peasant uprising, the Liberal government enacted reforms limiting lease terms, creating a fund to help peasants purchase land, increasing lending to agricultural cooperatives, and limiting how much land could be leased.²³ These reforms mostly benefited well-off peasants and were only halfheartedly enforced. Romania’s intervention in the Second Balkan War in 1913, resulting in the annexation of southern Dobruja, garnered little nationalist support. Romania’s intervention in the First World War in August 1916 to “liberate” Transylvania was greeted with more nationalist enthusiasm, especially by the middle class. The Romanian Army’s advance was halted, however, and then quickly turned into a rout, leaving Wallachia occupied, and only the arrival of the Russian Army allowed it to hold on to most of Moldavia. The conflict transformed from a war of conquest into a war of defense, and soldiers were bombarded with nationalist, religious, and antisemitic propaganda. After news of the February Revolution in Russia, the Liberal government decided it had to act to mend the rift between the peasants and the great landowners and middle class to avoid revolution in Romania. In March 1917, in a speech to soldiers at the front, King Ferdinand I announced that after the war peasants would receive land and equal rights.²⁴ Romanian soldiers rallied to the cause and fought off Austro-German summer offensives. The October Revolution in Russia left Romania isolated but prompted Bessarabia to vote to unify with Romania in April 1918. Romania was compelled to sign the Treaty of Bucharest with the Central Powers in May, but re-declared war just before the Armistice in November. Bukovina and Transylvania respectively voted to join Romania in November and December. Thus, the Romanian Army snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, nearly realizing nationalist dreams of bringing all Romanians under one state.

Greater Romania’s new territories had differing levels of national consciousness. It was strongest among ardeleni in Transylvania—Transylvania is also known as “Ardeal” in Romanian—who had resisted Magyarization.²⁵ It was weaker among bucovineni in Bukovina and basarabeni in Bessarabia.²⁶ Many basarabeni identified as Moldavians and, radicalized by revolution, preferred independence or joining the Soviet Union.²⁷ Further complicating the situation were large minority populations in each territory. Romania pursued “Romanianization” in these regions. Romanianization meant replacing minorities in administrative positions, developing Romanian-language education, and patronizing Romanian culture. Minority n...

Table of contents

• List of Figures, Tables, and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Terms
• Note on Names and Spelling
• Introduction
• 1. Ideology of Holy War
• 2. Army Culture, Interwar Politics, and Neutrality
• 3. 1940–1941: From Neutral to Axis
• 4. 1941: Holy War and Holocaust
• 5. 1941–1942: Doubling Down on Holy War
• 6. 1942–1944: Holy War of Defense
• 7. Propaganda and Discipline
• 8. Women and Minorities
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index