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156 • Dennis Deletant IV Transnistria and the Romanian Solution to the “Jewish Problem” Dennis Deletant In recent years, a number of studies of Transnistria have appeared in Romania, among the most notable being Jean Ancel’s three-volume work Transnistria, published in Romanian in 1998, which painstakingly reconstructs the fate of the Jews deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina and that of the indigenous Jews of Transnistria.1 For the English -reading public, Marshal Ion Antonescu’s treatment of the Jews and Roma (Gypsies) has been elucidated in works such as Matatias Carp’s Holocaust in Rumania: Facts and Documents on the Annihilation of Rumania ’s Jews, 1940–1944,2 translated from the Romanian in 1994. One of the more important titles is Alexander Dallin’s Odessa, 1941–1944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory Under Foreign Rule, originally written as a RAND report in 1957 and reissued in 1998. As pioneering as Dallin’s work was at the time, he did not enjoy the cooperation of the Soviet or Romanian authorities, nor was he able to consult the thousands of pages of Romanian and Soviet documentation now available to researchers. The collection of Romanian records housed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum formed the basis of Radu Ioanid’s recent history, The Holocaust in Romania. The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944. This work provides a groundbreaking synthesis, cataloging and describing Antonescu’s systematic Transnistria and the Romanian Solution to the “Jewish Problem” • 157 measures to expel and eliminate Romania’s Jews and Roma (Gypsies). In addition to Ioanid, other eminent scholars such as Randolph Braham have taken a regional approach to Romania’s Holocaust history, examining the fate of Jews from Bukovina and Bessarabia.3 And since most of the Jews from these regions were deported to Transnistria, these local studies also shed light on the history of Transnistria itself. This chapter reviews the deportation of the Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria and argues that deportation was part of a broader policy of “ethnic purification,” conceived and carried out by Marshal Ion Antonescu, Romania’s pro-German military dictator. It seeks to show that Transnistria was originally intended by Antonescu to be not the final destination of the Jews but merely a “holding station” for their expulsion across Transnistria’s eastern border, the Southern Buh River, into Russia. Transnistria was the name given by the Antonescu regime to the region of Ukraine between the Dniestr and the Southern Buh, which Romania occupied following the joint German-Romanian attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The region became the graveyard of some 250,000 Jews and more than 12,000 Roma. Many of these were victims of the deportations of Jews ordered by Antonescu in August 1941 from Romanian-controlled Bukovina and Bessarabia, and of Roma from Romania proper in May 1942. Of the 147,000 Jews who were deported from these two areas between 1941 and 1943 to Transnistria, at least 90,000 died in makeshift camps and ghettos, the majority from typhus and starvation.4 During the same period, between 130,000 and 170,000 local Ukrainian Jews are also estimated to have been murdered or left to die of disease in the same province.5 A large number of these were shot by the Romanians. Romanian forces killed 15,000–20,000 Jews in Odessa in October 1941 in reprisal for the blowing up of Romanian Army headquarters in the city; according to records from a Romanian war-crimes trial, between 43,000 and 48,000 Jews were massacred on orders from local Romanian officials in the district of Bohdanivka at the end of December 1941, while several thousand other Jews were handed over the following spring to ethnic Germans in Transnistria, who in turn murdered them (especially in Berezivka County). The Creation of Transnistria No doubt aware of his Romanian ally’s wishes regarding northern Transylvania , Hitler on July 27, 1941, for the first time dangled the prospect of Ukrainian territory southwest of the Southern Buh before Antonescu . As Romanian troops marched on Odessa, on August 14 Hitler again wrote to Antonescu proposing that the Romanian leader take over the entire area between the Dniestr and the Dniepr. Three days later, Antonescu explained that, since he lacked “the means and trained staff,” he could only assume responsibility for the administration of the territory between the Dniestr and the Buh; for the remaining area—that [18.224...

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