"The harvest of anger": politics of salvation and ethnic-cleansing in 1940s Romania: fascist thinkers and authoritarian doers

Abstract

During the Second World War, between 270 000 and 320 000 Jews, 12 500 Roma and Sinti, and thousands of Ukrainian and Russian civilians died at the hands of the Romanian authorities. The huge number of victims is the direct result of an intentional, state sponsored and state organized policy of ethnic-cleansing implemented from 1940 up to 1944 by an authoritarian regime with certain fascist features. The present study attempts to indicate that politics of salvation and ethnic-cleansing, which played a central role in Antonescu’s regime, represents the legacy of Romanian fascism and, consequently, to indicate that the Romanians were not puppets and/or "Hitler’s willing executioners". Though Romanian fierce anti-Semitic and unpleasantly xenophobic hyper-nationalism will be briefly discussed, my main focus will be on Anger as a key motivation in the politics of the revolutionary Iron Guard and the frustrated and unrestrained dictatorship of Ion Antonescu that turned to the armed forces, police, and the gendarmerie as professional practitioners of violence, as to enforce his ideal vision of the nation and society and implement his Politics of Salvation. Accordingly, I will point out that ethnic-cleansing was triggered not only by xenophobia but also by the determination and possibility of the Romanian military government to vent with the advent of war against USSR of "righteous anger" on the weak, thus adding the "cleansing of the ground" to the magnitude of an (uncertain) victory against the external enemy.