Preludiu la asasinat: Pogromul de la Iași, 29 iunie 1941 (review)

Jean Ancel is the foremost scholar of the Holocaust in Romania, and it is therefore no surprise that this study of the pogrom in the Romanian city of Iaşi at the end of June 1941 should cast fresh light on some of the most appalling acts perpetrated against the Jews by the Romanian authorities during the Second World War. By convention, the term "pogrom" has come to refer to the full succession of events—including deportations of Jews by train—that took place in Iaşi from 29 June to 6 July 1941, even though, strictly speaking, the actual pogrom spanned only the days 29 and 30 June. Ancel follows convention and examines the broader period.

Reconstructing these events is no simple matter. Scholars have given estimates ranging from 1,000 to 14,000 for the number of Jews massacred in Iaşi and a further 2,713 who died during deportation by train southward. The numbers of those shot in the city are the subject of particular dispute. The self-serving nature of official reports—which sometimes contradict one another in essential details—and the absence of an accurate record of the number of victims are impediments to providing a clear account of the murderous behavior of the German and Romanian forces and of the criminal incompetence of the Romanian military authorities. Ancel puts the figure of Jews murdered at "around a third of the Jews in the city, more than 14,000" (p. 11) but does not clearly explain how he reached this figure.

Since 1989, ultranationalists in Romania have been exalting Romania's wartime pro-German leader Marshal Ion Antonescu and minimizing his responsibility for the death of more than 250,000 Jews. Ancel, who rejects this historical whitewashing, should have gone out of his way to explain the context in which the events of late June 1941 occurred. In particular, he should have noted that in preparation for the German-Romanian attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the three armies in the "General Antonescu Army Group" took up a position along the river Prut. The city of Iaşi came within the area of deployment of the German Eleventh Army, and consequently Antonescu declared it a German military zone on the understanding that Romanian civil authorities would continue to administer it. On 21 June 1941, General Hans von Salmuth, commander of the German 30th Corps, issued an order establishing his command over all the Romanian forces in Iaşi. German patrols took to the streets, in effect establishing a rival authority to that of the Romanian police. At the same time, Antonescu, at the request of the Romanian Fourth Army, took steps to secure the Prut and the area behind it.

The Jews in Moldova were targeted by Antonescu because the army harbored strong doubts about the Jews' loyalty to the Romanian state. On 21 June 1941, the Romanian Army General Staff sent the army, police, gendarmerie, and prefects a telegram from Antonescu ordering that all able-bodied Jews aged 18 to 60 should be moved immediately from the villages in the frontier area between the Siret and the Prut to the camp in Târgu-Jiu in the south and to the surrounding villages. The remaining Jews from the area, as well as Jews from other villages in Moldova, were to be deported with their necessary belongings within 48 hours to towns in the province.

Ancel excels in recounting the events in Iaşi during the period 26–30 June. He has an impressive command of detail and has meticulously examined archival material recently made available in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States. He harbors no doubts about Ion Antonescu's responsibility for the Iaşi pogrom: "The Iaşi pogrom took place following a decision of the Antonescu regime to liquidate the majority of Jews in a city that, in the eyes of Romanian nationalists and anti-Semites, symbolized (for more than a...