When typhus broke out in a Romanian concentration camp 80 years ago, authorities in Bogdanovka decided to assassinate 40,000 Jewish detainees and set the camp on fire.

Carried out in Romania-occupied Ukraine by Romanian soldiers, the regular Ukrainian police and local Germans, the Bogdanovka massacre has been largely ignored by historians, as has Romania’s “distinct” role in the genocide. Jews from Europe.

“I am embarrassed to say that I had no knowledge of this atrocity,” Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Times of Israel in reference to Bogdanovka.

“The question is not how horrible it was, because many atrocities of the Holocaust were incredibly horrific, but it is a question of ‘cover’, for lack of a better word,” said Zuroff.

The Romanian military was responsible for most of the Holocaust massacres in the country, in contrast to the later pattern of death camps built by the Germans in occupied Poland. Most of the Jews murdered by the Romanians came from occupied Ukraine, as opposed to so-called “old Romania”.

To complicate the story further, some Romanian Jews came under the control of Hungary after the “Vienna Diktat” of 1940. These Jews remained relatively safe until the spring of 1944, about three years after the Romanian army took over. “Cleansed” the occupied lands of the Jews.

“In general, crimes committed by Nazi collaborators outside their country are less ‘covered’ than those committed in their home territory,” said Zuroff, who cited the related example of the Holocaust in Belarus, in which Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians participated in the murder of tens of thousands of local Jews.

In Romania, Hitler’s staunch ally dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, expanded his borders after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Hitler gave Antonescu carte blanche to resolve the “Jewish question” from Romania and about 420,000 Jews under Antonescu’s control were murdered relatively early. in the war.

Before World War II, more than 750,000 Jews lived in Greater Romania. Anti-Semitism was a hallmark of Romanian life for decades before the Holocaust, but the rise of fascism included a virulent strain of “racial” anti-Semitism. From 1940, some 32 laws and 31 decrees were issued against Jews in Romania.

The Bucharest pogrom of January 23, 1941, initiated by the Romanian Iron Guard (public domain)

Like the Brown Shirts in Germany, Romania had a paramilitary group called the Iron Guard, founded in 1927. Also known as the Legionaries or Green Shirts, the organization pledged to defeat “rabbinical aggression against the Christian world.” .

Following a failed coup attempt in January 1941, the Iron Guard led a pogrom against the Jews in Bucharest. At least 125 Jews were murdered before Antonescu put an end to the violence, but the genocide of Jews – and Roma – accelerated that summer on the lands newly acquired by Romania.

“The Jewish people have hijacked and impoverished, speculated and hindered the development of the Romanian people for several centuries,” Antonescu said. “The need to free ourselves from this scourge is obvious. “

Iasi’s “Death Train”

The first large-scale Holocaust massacre in Romania took place in Iasi, a university town near the border with Moldova, in June 1941.

Encouraged by Antonescu, Romanian soldiers joined forces with police and local mobs to assassinate 13,266 Jews. Residents of Iasi helped arrest Jews and loot their homes, as well as humiliate Jews who left the city.

Jews arrested during the Iasi pogrom in Romania, June 1941 (Yad Vashem)

As in Bucharest, the Iron Guard led mobs to murder Jews in the streets and in their homes, deploying pliers and knives in addition to guns. After the initial massacre, 5,000 Jews were crammed into boxcars on a “death train” journey in which 4,000 of them perished.

Unlike the Holocaust in Germany, there were no “black-ops” in Romania. The genocide was carried out “in broad daylight” under the leadership of the Romanian authorities. False newspaper articles about Jews reporting Allied planes helped “justify” the massacres and incite collaborators, but these story placements were not intended to deceive Jews.

“The massacres were largely uncoordinated, and although the cruelty with which the Romanian army slaughtered Ukrainian and Romanian Jews won Hitler’s approval, they nonetheless deserved the contempt of many SS officials, who denigrated the primitive techniques employed by the Romanians, ”wrote historian Christopher. J. Kshyk.

Romanian military medics examine Jews on Iasi ‘death train’ in 1941 (public domain)

As primitive as Romania’s methods are, the country’s army, police and civilian collaborators have laid out a “plan” for the Holocaust massacres elsewhere, including in Kiev.

The massacre of 33,771 Jews in September 1941 in Babyn Yar, a Kyiv ravine, was also catalyzed by false news articles reporting Jewish sabotage. At the site of the massacre, German SS units “Einsatzgruppen” teamed up with Ukrainians, echoing the Romanian military’s use of local collaborators earlier that summer.

Five months after the Iasi pogrom, the Holocaust in Romania would reach a frenzied – but largely forgotten – climax at the Bogdanovka concentration camp.

“Death train” sent by the Romanian authorities with 5,000 Jews from Iasi (public domain)

“With bare hands”

Located in today’s Ukraine, Bogdanovka was a series of camps – called “settlements” in Romanian – set up near a former Jewish collective farm on the southern Bug River. In November 1941, the camp housed 54,000 Jews from Odessa under Romanian control and from the Bessarabia region of Moldova.

In December 1941, a few cases of typhus were reported in Bogdanovka. In response, the German district councilor and Romanian administrators decided to assassinate 40,000 of the detainees and burn the facilities.

From December 21, Romanian soldiers and collaborators – including local Germans under Ukrainian police command – forced thousands of disabled and elderly Jews into two locked stables. The structures were sprayed with kerosene and set on fire, killing everyone inside.

Site of the Bogdanovka massacre in today’s Ukraine, under Romanian control during the Holocaust (Yad Vashem)

After this hell, the perpetrators led groups of 300 to 400 Jews into the forest where they were shot in the neck at a site that Romanian soldiers called “the great valley”.

The technology of the German death camps was still far from materializing, so Romanian soldiers watched thousands of Jews freeze to death along the riverbank in the last days of 1941.

“The rest [of Bogdanovka’s Jews] were left frozen in the cold, waiting on the banks of the river for their turn to die, ”said Yad Vashem. “With their bare hands, they dug holes in the ground, filling them with frozen corpses and thus trying to protect themselves from the cold. Nevertheless, thousands of them froze to death.

Jews on the west bank of the Dniester River before deportation to Transnistria (public domain)

Taking a break for Christmas, the massacre resumed three days later. Between December 21 and the last day of 1941, at least 40,000 Jews were murdered in Bogdanovka.

“A separate chapter”

During the second half of 1941, Antonescu succeeded in overtaking Nazi Germany in the genocide of the Jews of Europe.

“Antonescu’s ethnic cleansing policies were carried out independently, albeit with the approval, of Hitler’s Third Reich, making Romania’s persecution of Jews a separate chapter in Holocaust history.” , wrote historian Kshyk.

German troops march through Bucharest, Romania, December 27, 1940 (public domain)

In the fall of 1941, Antonescu tentatively agreed to deport the rest of the Jews from Romania to death camps, but these plans were canceled in 1942. Partly for economic reasons, Antonescu decided to spare around 290,000 Jews in “old Romania” and he almost facilitated the emigration of 5,000 Jews to Palestine for a substantial sum.

In overturning the genocide of the Jews under his control, Antonescu envisioned Romania’s negotiating position at a post-war peace conference. As early as the spring of 1942, the astute dictator reconstituted that Germany would lose the war. After Soviet forces entered Romania in 1944, Antonescu was arrested and, two years later, executed outside Bucharest.

Although many of Romania’s Nazi collaborators were prosecuted and punished in the immediate post-war period, many Holocaust perpetrators managed to evade justice. To date, said Zuroff, only four people have been convicted of involvement in Holocaust atrocities in post-Communist Eastern Europe, and only two of the four have been punished.

Execution of Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu outside Bucharest (public domain)

“We have received potentially valuable information in at least one case of a person who allegedly participated in the mass murder of Jews in Odessa,” said Zuroff, referring to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “Operation Last Chance” effort for bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice.

“Sadly, he passed away before he could be sued,” said Zuroff.

In 2003, the Romanian government recognized the country’s role in the genocide. However, there has been a “flashback” to this recognition and tensions over the nascent Holocaust museum in Bucharest. A memorial in Bogdanovka has been vandalized several times in recent years.

A vandalized monument to Holocaust victims in Bogdanovka, Ukraine, September 15, 2020 (Eduard Dolinsky)

“When it comes to Holocaust denial and distortion, Romania has had a large share of both, as is typical in all post-communist ‘new democracies’ in Eastern Europe,” he said. said Zuroff.