Ion Antonescu

Ion Antonescu (June 15 1882, Piteşti - June 1 1946 near Jilava) was prime minister and dictator of Romania during World War II from September 4, 1940 until his dismissal by King Michael on August 23, 1944.

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Ion Antonescu

Early life

Ion Antonescu received his education in French military schools and pursued a career in the army. By 1907 he had risen to the rank of lieutenant, when he participated in the suppression of a peasant revolt in and around the city of Galati, about 180 km northeast of Bucharest, gaining the attention of his superiors for his initiative and ruthlessness. In 1911, he graduated from the military academy. In 1913, Antonescu participated in the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria, winning Romania's highest military decoration.

Political power

After his appointment in 1940 Antonescu tried to gain the friendship of Nazi Germany. In order to avoid an invasion of Soviet troops into Romania, he allowed the Wehrmacht to enter Romanian territory.

In 1941 the Iron Guard, a Romanian anti-Semitic movement that had helped Antonescu gain power, rebelled against the regime. Antonescu was able to defeat the rebellion with help from German troops. After this event he ruled as a dictator. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Romanian troops joined this aggression in order to regain lands that formerly had to be ceded to the USSR.

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Antonescu and Hitler

Anti-semitism

It has been held that Antonescu did not agree with Hitler's racist doctrines about the "master race" and that his anti-semitism was largely fueled by economical nationalism. This seems to be confirmed by his policy toward the Jews that differed from region to region, making a distinction between the Jews in the Old Kingdom (pre-WWI Romania) and the Jews from Bessarabia. While most of former where spared, most of the latter were annihilated. However, a careful study of Antonescu's speeches and other documents proves that he strongly held an anti-semitism that had not just economical, but metaphysical and thus ultimately racist grounds. Antonescu believed, just like Hitler, that the world was engaged in a dualistic struggle between the forces of Darkness (the Jews/Bolsheviks) and those of Light (the Christians, Aryans), and that it was up to the forces of Light to destroy the enemy. The ultimate logical conclusion of this mindset was of course annihilation of all Jews, perceived as the ultimate enemy of Mankind.

While in the Old Kingdom there were only 'sporadic' acts of violence (an important and horrendous exception being the massacre of Iasi, where over 10,000 Jews where systematically killed by the Romanian army in June 1941--that is before Hitler's actual Holocaust had started), in 1941, following the advancing Romanian Army and alleged attacks by Jewish "Resistance groups", Antonescu ordered "the deportation of all Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina" (between 80,000 and 150,000), who were considered "communist agents", to Transnistria. "Deportation" however was an euphemism, as part of the process was to kill as many Jews as possible before deporting the rest in the so-called "trains of death" to the East. Of those who escaped the initial ethnic cleansing in Bukovina Bessarabia only very few managed to survive trains and the concentration camps set up up the Romanians in Transnistria. These survivors returned to Romanian after the war. Further killings perpetrated by Antonescu's death squads (documents prove his direct orders and involvement) targeted the Jewish population the Romanian army managed to round up when occupying Transnistria. Several ten thousands of these were murdered in massacres staged in such places as Odessa, Bogdanovka, Akmecetka in 1941 and 1942. To be sure, Antonescu's troops did not proceed with the Germans' precision. As Raul Hilberg writes: "There were also instances when the Germans actually had to step in to restrain and slow down the pace of the Romanian measures.  At such times the Romanians were moving too fast for the German bureaucracy.” (Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p. 759).

Also, Antonescu was less consequential in his anti-semitism. This is what really explains why the Jews in the Old Kingdom were mostly spared from deportation and destruction. When the Axis, of which Antonescu was a willing ally, began to lose the war against the Soviet Union, it was decided to halt any anti-Jewish policy so as to be able to have a better bargaining power against the Allies. It does not mean that Antonescu would have spared the Jews from the Old Kingdom in case the Axis had won the war. On the contrary: his government had already prepared plans for the deportation of the remaining Jews to Poland's death camps.

There were other ambivalencies about Antonescu's handling of the 'Jewish question'. Until 1942, he allowed and even encouraged the Zionist movement, thinking of solving the "Jewish problem" by allowing Jews to emigrate; that's how many ships sailed from Constanta towards British-controlled Palestine. This policy was canceled due to the German pressure and the British refusal to receive Jews from an enemy country in its territory.

Trial and death

Ion Antonescu was tried and executed by the country's subsequent communist-dominated government for war crimes relating to his acceptance of German occupation (October 1940) and war against the Soviet Union.