The unforeseen defection: Romania's disengagement from the final solution

Abstract

A Romania free of Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities was for Ion Antonescu and his regime a major political aspiration. As a result, some three hundred thousands Romanian and Ukrainian Jews died along the road. Yet another three hundred thousands survived the war as Romania's government decided at a certain moment to fail its ally standards and radical policy, and disengage with the Final Solution. The decision was motivated less by humanitarianism and more by domestic and international protests and interventions, massive bribe, and a rapidly changing military and political situation. From late 1942 onward, in Romania, political and military tactics and calculation gradually downplayed radical, eliminationist anti-Semitism, without totally eradicating it. Romania’s abrupt and unforeseen defection took the Germans by surprise. Nazi officials never gave up hope, continued to sway, pressure and, finally, even threaten the Romanians to hand over their Jews, and advised the Antonescu government to stay in line with the implementation of the Final Solution as it was already too late for them to persuade the Western allies on their innocence when it comes to the Holocaust. Stubbornly refusing to loose initiative and control over their Jews at the hands of the Nazi bureaucrats, a situation they disliked as it portrayed them as puppets and ordinary Executioners, some of the Romanians continued with the desperate efforts to constantly depart from the Nazi plan, bravely opposing when not cunningly mocking German diplomats and the SS. Understanding the decision-making process, and the strategic logic of the perpetrators, is no less essential than the final outcome, the fortuitous (in many respects) survival of the already targeted victims. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to grasp the set of elements that altogether might provide us with an adequate explanation for Romania's gradual shift from total commitment to outright defiance toward the Nazi Final Solution. My chief interest is with delineating the reasons and motivations behind the decision of the Romanian government not to hand over half of the Jews to the Nazis. Issues that are equally significant and helpful in understanding the process that ultimately led to Romania’s Disengagement from the Nazi Final Solution, most if not all of them already considered and sometimes reconsidered by other historians, will be analyzed in a wider, European context, as the dynamic of the Final Solution at large, the Nazi perspective on the events, their plans, expectation and so on; might help in understanding some inner developments of Romania’s semi-independent genocide.