The History of the Holocaust in Romania

Drawing from an exhaustive collection of original Jewish accounts and sources not available until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in the late 1980s, Jean Ancel provides a detailed analysis of the path of antisemitism that led to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust in Romania.

The Romanians and other nations inside and outside the Balkans related differently to “their Jews” and “other Jews,” that is, those living in districts annexed to Romania after the First World War and those in areas occupied and annexed to the Romanian military administration after the Soviet invasion in June 1941. The Jews of the Regat, the core Romanian principality, suffered pogroms, decrees, and degradation, but on the whole they survived the Holocaust.

Although more Jews survived in Romania than in any other non-occupied country allied with Germany, contemporary Romanian sources show that the Antonescu regime and Romania itself killed at least 400,000 Jews, including 180,000 Ukranian Jews. Among Nazi Germany’s allies, Romania contributed most to the extermination of the Jewish people.