Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania (review)

The provocative thesis of this innovative and fascinating work is that the persecution of the Jews and the Roma in Romania was not—as frequently asserted by nationalist historians—a response to pressure from Romania's ally Germany, but rather the manifestation of a distinctive, long-standing vision of an ethnically pure Romania. During the 1950s and 1960s the Communist regime maintained near-complete silence on the Holocaust, while the period of nationalistic Communism that followed permitted Holocaust-minimizing and even -denying discourse. This discourse began to change in postcommunist Romania, primarily as a by-product of accession to NATO and the EU. Fortunately Solonari situates his research outside any agenda attributing blame for Romania's prewar and wartime policies to German influence.

Unlike Radu Ioanid in The Holocaust in Romania (2000), Solonari does not limit himself to the Jews and Roma, but considers the government's aim of cleansing the country of all those it considered ethnically non-Romanian: there is, for example, much new and engrossing material on the population exchange with Bulgaria in the fall of 1941, and even regarding the Roma Solonari provides more than twice as much information as does Ioanid.

Solonari does not treat all the massacres that certainly are part of the history of the Holocaust in Romania, but he is concerned rather with Romanian government policy and its implementation. Thus the reader will not find much on the Bucharest and Iaşi pogroms of 1941, as these were not planned by the government; however the massacres in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina later that year, in which the Romanian army, gendarmerie, and police acted on express orders from above, are covered in detail. This important difference in focus, together with the extensive treatment of the intellectual history of Romania in the period 1940-1944 and detailed accounts of the leading protagonists' writings make Solonari's study especially valuable (Maria Bucur's excellent 2002 Eugenics and Modernization in Inter-War Romania treats some of the eugenicists but does not deal with World War II). It should be added that the author has made extensive and skillful use of archival material from both the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and little-researched archives in Bucharest, as the seventy-five pages of substantive endnotes and seventeen-page bibliography amply attest.

The book opens with a stunning scene on the eve of World War II: the Conducator (lit. Führer) Ion Antonescu summoning the director of the Central Statistics Institute, Sabin Manuilă, to lay out the dictator's vision for an ethnically pure Greater Romania within the borders of 1939 (i.e., before the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina); this meant, Antonescu explained, ethnic "purification" by means of population exchange with neighboring countries—or what he called "unilateral transfer" of non-Romanians who did not have their "own" state. According to the most accurate recent census, that of 1930, the number of non-Romanians was about 5 million—28.1 percent of the total. To achieve what Antonescu called his "grand, true national ideal," more than three and a half million people would have to "leave" Romania and more than one and a half million ethnic Romanians from neighboring countries be settled in the country. It is to the understanding of this extraordinary vision that Solonari's book is largely devoted.

Part I charts interwar Romania's steady movement to the right, with an emphasis on leading figures such as King Carol II (whom the historian Nagy-Talavera called "the most corrupt crown [sic] head of twentieth-century Europe" cited on pp. 21-22), Nichifor Crainic, Mihail Manoilescu, Valer Pop, and Iuliu Maniu. It continues with an account of Romania's first attempt at colonization, following the award to Romania of Northern Dobrudja after the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War, pointing out that Article 3 of the 1866 Constitution had already stated that "the...