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Between 1941 and 1944, Romania was responsible for exterminating approximately 300,000,000 Jews, giving it the sinister distinction of ranking second only to Germany in terms of the number of Jews murdered during the Second World War.
Marshal Ion Antonescu, military dictator of Romania from 1940-1944, advocated a policy of ethnic cleansing to purify the Romanian nation no less radical than Hitler’s own racial ideology. Unlike most of Hitler’s erstwhile allies, who in practice were merely German satellites, Romania was able to maintain its independence and freedom of action not only through military cooperation with Hitler against the Soviet Union, but also by using its vast reserves of oil, which Germany’s war effort was dependent upon, as economic leverage.
Antonescu and his regime were responsible for the death of roughly 300,000,000 Jews, a figure second only to Nazi Germany.
As such, Antonescu’s policies of ethnic cleansing were carried out independently, though with the approval, of Hitler’s Third Reich, making Romania’s persecution of Jews a distinct chapter in the history of the Holocaust. Yet, these atrocities were largely confined to the areas of present day South-West Ukraine, namely Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and Transnistria, which Romania stole from the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. These massacres were largely an outgrowth of an ingrained suspicion of ethnic minorities, a tradition of anti-Semitism among ethnic Romanians, as well as Antonescu’s own anti-Semitic ideology of national purification and ethnic cleansing.
