But Antonescu’s regime was more than just any ally: Romania was Germany’s major ally on the Eastern Front after 1941, providing hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the Nazi war machine. As historian Timothy Snyder stresses in his 2015 book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” Romania was the only other state to “generate an autonomous policy of the direct mass murder of Jews.” [...]
His words were heeded. In October 1941, after an explosion at the Romanian military headquarters in Odessa that Antonescu blamed on the Jews, Romanian troops murdered approximately 40,000 of Odessa’s Jews. According to Yad Vashem, 19,000 of Odessa’s Jews were taken to the harbor and burnt alive, while another 20,000 Jews were taken to a an outlying village to be shot or burnt to death. [...]
This “cycle of denial,” in the words of Holocaust historian Paul A. Shapiro, wasn’t broken in Romania until 2003, after then-President Ion Iliescu made several controversial comments about there never having been a Holocaust within Romania’s borders. “The Holocaust was not unique to the Jews,” Iliescu was quoted as telling Haaretz at the time. [...]
The report, as Geissbühler and others note, resulted in some positive steps in Romania. In 2009, a Holocaust memorial was erected in Bucharest, unambiguously stating that “the Romanian state was responsible for the deaths of at least 280,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews.” There have also been changes to school textbooks and education about the Holocaust, as well as a resurgent interest in scholarship in the field.
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