Romania
For many decades Romania, under the communist regime as well as later, denied or greatly downplayed its role in the Holocaust.[14] There were about eight hundred thousand Jews in prewar Romania, almost 5 percent of the general population. About half of the Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust. As Romanian-born historian Radu Ioanid explained:
World War II transformed what might otherwise have remained a period of severe anti-Semitic outbreaks into a true Romanian Holocaust that, while part of the broader German-European Holocaust, remained at the same time a specifically Romanian story. As in Germany, the immediate background to Romania's Holocaust tapped archaic anti-Semitic traditions and was crafted by militant agitation of anti-Semitic parties, itself followed by State legislation and then compounded by wartime circumstances. Bloody mob violence was the result, but now drawing in government elements, the riots took on the character of a social enterprise and thus invited takeover by the State.
This transition phase, when mass robbery and mass murder evolved from a societal to a governmental enterprise, took place in the months immediately preceding and immediately following Romania's entrance into the war. The tempering of the Romanian-German diplomatic alliance into one of wartime fraternity augured more deliberate and more systematic ill for Romania's Jews. Finally, during this time, the Antonescu regime became more directly involved in encouraging the violence, though still more in the sense of indirect inspiration. Soon, however, it would openly take things over.[15]
One typical example of an atrocity in which Romania's Legionnaires were heavily involved was the pogrom in Iasi in June 1941. This pogrom was undertaken by a combination of the local authorities, the Romanian army, the Legionnaires, as well as the SS. The number of Jews who were killed was estimated at eight to twelve thousand. Another almost three thousand died of thirst or asphyxiation while traveling for days in sealed cattle cars of trains. For decades communist historians blamed the pogrom largely on the German SS and reduced the number of victims.[16]
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Questioning the Holocaust
In mid-2001, a symposium was held in Bucharest that had the questionable title "Has There Been a Holocaust in Romania?" Its final resolution stated that Jews had "suffered almost everywhere in the Europe of those years, but not in Romania [sic!]," and it added that "the testimony of trustworthy Jews" demonstrates that "the Romanian people had in those years a behavior honoring the human dignity [sic!]."[17]
When asked in 2003 to clarify a Romanian government declaration that "within the borders of Romania between 1940 and 1945 there was no Holocaust," then-Romanian president Ion Iliescu asserted: "The Holocaust was not unique to the Jewish population in Europe. Many others, including Poles, died in the same way.... Jews and Communists were treated equally.... However it is impossible to accuse the Romanian people and the Romanian society of this [massacre of Jews]."[18]
The deflection process in Romania was undermined when the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel, released a report in November 2004 that unequivocally points to Romanian culpability. It declares: "Of all the allies of Nazi Germany, Romania bears responsibility for the deaths of more Jews than any country other than Germany itself."[19] The report recognizes the isolated examples of Romanian individuals and institutions who have struggled to correct the record, and whose influence on the general population had been marginal thus far.
Laurence Weinbaum writes:
Iliescu praised the commission's findings and was himself praised in Jewish circles for convening it and accepting the results. However, in one of his last acts as president, he conferred the state's prize for Faithful Service on Holocaust-denier [Gheorghe] Buzatu. He also awarded the state's highest decoration, the Order of the Star of Romania, to Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the [far-Right party] Romania Mare leader long known for his virulent anti-Semitism. It was a fitting end to the Iliescu regime, one that epitomized its clumsy attempts to comply with international pressure while pandering to Romanian nationalist sentiment seemingly oblivious to the evident contradictions in such a policy.[20]
Louis vs. Cronos ( a historical debate)
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