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121 C h a p t e r 1 0 Perpetrators In 1990 I asked Dr. Caufman, at the time president of the Jewish community in Iaşi, to help me set up interviews with survivors of the pogrom. He graciously accepted but warned me that each survivor would give a different account of what happened. True enough. Had I been further along in my research I could have told him that, by contrast, nearly every Romanian police officer and military official who was investigated after the war for crimes related to the pogrom told pretty much the same story, that Germans and their local Nazi toadies were responsible for the killings.1 Those directly responsible for the Iaşi pogrom range from the highest government officials to common citizens. The principal instigators of this and the many other massacres that together constitute the Romanian Holocaust were Ion Antonescu, president of the Council of Ministers and commander of Romania’s military forces, and his vice president, Mihai Antonescu . Men in the service of these leaders, assisted by local recruits, ignited the Iaşi pogrom on the night of June 28, 1941, by simulating an attack on German and Romanian troops in the city. These provocateurs were members of Romania’s intelligence services: SSI (Serviciul Special de Informaţii) and Section II of the Supreme General Staff (military intelligence). Some SSI agents, although assigned only to ignite the pogrom, also joined soldiers, policemen, and civilians in the killing. Top city and district police officials likely had some forewarning of the government’s plan; at the very least they failed to protect citizens from being attacked, even murdered, in some cases by men under their command. The same can be said about German and Romanian commanders of military units stationed in the area. They had troops 122 C H A P T E R 1 0 enough to curtail the mayhem; instead, their soldiers were a major force in moving the destruction along. Private citizens who joined in the action were not just social scum but also persons of some wealth and station who saw in the desperate plight of Jewish neighbors an opportunity to do them violence and steal their property. The Iaşi pogrom and overall policy of extermination were fueled by a campaign of vilification. As the country moved toward war with the Soviet Union, Romanian Jews, already victimized by draconian laws, were increasingly the target of surveillance by the interior ministry and of propaganda representing them as Bolshevists and enemy partisans. At the same time, in their speeches, Ion and Mihai Antonescu began advocating the violent “ethnic cleansing” of Romanian territory and putting into practice a policy of isolating and concentrating Romanian Jews, making them particularly vulnerable targets for wholesale “cleansing” operations. Mihai Antonescu explained to the Council of Ministers (on June 17, 1941) that purification of Bessarabia and Northern Bucovina, territories about to be taken from the Soviet Union and reincorporated into Romania, required a “total and violent elimination of foreign elements.”2 What the Antonescus contemplated, however, was a comprehensive cleansing, eliminating all Jews under their power, not just those living in conquered territory. This is made clear by the fact that the first concentrations and massacres occurred in the Romanian heartland. As many as 150 “suspicious Jews” of Dorohoi were deported to prisons at Tîrgu Jiu in late May 1941. Some three weeks later, on June 21, Ion Antonescu ordered the wholesale concentration of Moldavian Jews (ages eighteen to sixty). Those living in the countryside were to be removed to nearby cities or deported to prison camps. Moving expenses were to be borne by the deportees and those who tried to destroy or somehow recover their evacuated property were to be “punished with death.”3 The execution of 311 Sculeni Jews at Stânca Rosnovanu took place six days later, on June 27, and the Iaşi pogrom and death trains immediately followed. What links these murders to the general “cleansing” operation carried out during the invasion of the Soviet Union is the fact that the same government agencies, even the same units, responsible for executing the Sculeni Jews (Romanian 6th Cavalry Regiment) and Iaşi pogrom (SSI’s Echelon 1 and military intelligence) moved on to other mass killings in the conquered territories. Agencies assigned to take the lead in ethnic cleansing operations were, besides SSI, the army (combat, intelligence, and praetorial or judicial services ), and...

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