Hitler's Foreign Executioners (18 page)

But as Sima’s Legionary hordes ran amok, Antonescu had little difficulty reasserting his authority. Hitler backed his ally with force: ‘I don’t need any fanatics. I need a sound Romanian army.’ On Friday 24 January, Sebastian reported that ‘long motorized German columns, with machine guns and rifles at the ready’ rumbled into Bucharest; ‘they certainly made an impression. And it was crystal clear that the German army was on the side of General Antonescu.’
²³
On Thursday 23 January, Sebastian reported, Legionary squads gathered outside Sima’s headquarters on the Strada Roma. With a deafening roar, German motorised units suddenly appeared. The demonstrators greeted them: ‘
Heil Hitler! Duce! Duce! Duce! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
’ But the German troops ignored the crowds. Instead they took up positions at each
of the entrances to the square. More German troops arrived, again to the delight of the Legionaries. ‘But then what a stunning blow!’ Sebastian went on. Once all the exits had been closed, a German officer ordered everyone to leave the square. ‘And everyone left. Just like that.’
²⁴

The Legionary revolt had backfired, bolstering Antonescu’s power and binding Romania closer to the Reich. That bond would endure until Red Army troops smashed Romanian armies at Stalingrad. The news of the fall of Horia Sima was not well received at SS headquarters in Prinz Albrecht Strasse; Himmler’s
Auβenpolitik
(foreign policy) was applied racial hatred, and it was logical to back murderous anti-Semites like Sima. Antonescu, to be sure, shared the legion’s hatred of Jews and Bolshevism but he was Ribbentrop’s man. Himmler hesitated to speak out against Hitler, but he would never forgive the Foreign Minister for the humiliation of ‘his’ Iron Guard. In the aftermath of the revolt, Heydrich’s agents found sanctuary for Sima and other Iron Guard leaders in the home of Romanian ethnic German leader Andreas Schmidt (who it will be recalled was Gottlob Berger’s son-in-law). Shortly afterwards, Sima fled to Italy, while the SS spirited other Legionaries to a special unit at the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar. Many hundreds of lower ranking Iron Guard men found refuge in Germany.
²⁵

Goebbels noted: ‘The Führer is on Antonescu’s side. He wants an agreement with a state not a world view.’ He added: ‘Still, my heart is with them [the Iron Guard]’ and a week later when he heard about Antonescu’s triumph: ‘the Führer … needs Antonescu … for military reasons. One point of view. But it wasn’t necessary to wipe out the Legion.’
²⁶
Hitler had more astute insight than either his SS chief or Propaganda Minister. Antonescu was not only a military strong man. He was, to be sure, a political pragmatist, but he was just as loyal to the murderous spirit of Codreanu as Horia Sima. At the Berghof meeting in January, Hitler and Keitel had informed Antonescu that Germany planned to attack the Soviet Union that spring. In exchange for Romanian military assistance, Hitler promised to return to Romania the lost territories snatched away by Stalin. Scattered across Bukovina and Bessarabia were large Jewish communities. Once the attack on the Soviet Union was under way, these would fall into German and Romanian hands. Both the Germans and Antonescu understood that reclaiming territory would also provide a fresh opportunity to solve the Romanian ‘Jewish problem’. Antonescu’s pact with Hitler was much more than a strategic alliance – it represented a shared understanding about shared ideological objectives.
²⁷

Antonescu was indebted to Hitler for reinforcing his rule and taming the legionary movement, at least for now. In the aftermath of the revolt, Antonescu deported representatives of the SS, the RSHA and the Abwehr who had helped
Sima and other Legionary conspirators escape – and may well have helped stir up the revolt. But in March, according to Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mihai Antonescu, ‘special emissaries of the Reich and of Himmler’ led by SS-Hauptsturmführer Gustav Richter, an expert on ‘Jewish matters’ arrived in Bucharest to discuss the ‘handling of Romania’s Jews’. Plainly, with 680,000 German troops already on Romanian soil, Richter expected that (as Mihai Antonescu reported) ‘responsibility for the handling of Romania’s Jews be handed over to the Germans exclusively’. General Antonescu refused. The dictator had no interest in protecting Jews, but wanted to retain control of strategy.

The Germans, and in particular Himmler’s SS, did not give up. On 21 February, Himmler met with the former SD representative in Bucharest, Otto-Albrecht von Bolschwing, and a handful of other SS bureaucrats.
²⁸
At the end of April, RSHA emissary Richter returned to Bucharest and held more meetings with Mihai Antonescu with ‘excellent results’, he reported to Ambassador Manfred von Killinger. At last Himmler had an agreement with Antonescu’s regime that harmonised SS plans with Romanian strategy. Later that year, Mihai Antonescu made a remarkable statement to his Cabinet: ‘I can report to you that I have already conducted intensive negotiations with a high ranking German representative: they understand that the Jewish problem will ultimately require an international solution, and they wish to help us prepare
this international solution
.’ (My italics.)
²⁹
Given that when Mihai Antonescu made this statement many thousands of Jews had already been murdered by Romanians and German squads in Eastern Europe, it implies that the idea of a ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’, i.e. liquidation of Jews on an international scale, was already well advanced by the late summer of 1941 – and not months later as many historians assume.

On 12 June 1941 Hitler met Antonescu again, this time in Munich.
³⁰
Antonescu later informed Ambassador von Killinger that Hitler had presented him with a document titled ‘
Richtlinien für die Behandlung der Judenfrage
’ (Guidelines for the Handling of the Jewish Question – in some versions
Ostjuden
). Killinger reported that ‘there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of General Antonescu’s assertion’.
³¹
The meeting with Hitler had an immediate impact on Romanian anti-Jewish plans, especially with regard to the ‘lost provinces’. Antonescu began promulgating a radical new policy which he called ‘Cleansing the Land’. This would require identifying ‘all
Jidani
[Jews], communist agents or sympathisers … in order to enact whatever orders I may transmit at a given time’.
³²
A few days before 22 June, Antonescu ordered the Romanian
Serviciul Special de Informaţiuni
(the Special Intelligence Service or SSI) to begin forming Escalon Special (Special Echelons) modelled on Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen. On 22 June, the leader of Special Task Force D, Otto Ohlendorf,
arrived at Romanian military HQ at Piatra Neam? in Moldavia – and remained there until the beginning of August, acting as (to borrow an American term) a special advisor. The Romanian Special Echelons were charged with ‘defending the army rear area’ and, like Heydrich’s execution squads, split into teams (
echipe
). These Special Echelons would spearhead the Romanian assault on the ‘Jewish enemy’.
³³

General Antonescu had crushed the revolt led by Codreanu’s successor Horia Sima, but in spirit he was a Legionary. Antonescu absorbed Iron Guard chauvinism and cruelty into his own ‘ethnocratic’ state: he and his ministers firmly believed that ‘the Jews pose a permanent threat to every nation state’. At the end of June, Mihai Antonescu, who had been a professor of international law at Bucharest University, echoed Hitler’s speech to his generals before the Polish campaign: ‘I beg you to be implacable. Saccharine and foggy humanitarianism has no place here. The Roman Empire performed a series of barbarous acts … yet is was the greatest political creation … I take full legal responsibility and tell you there is no law!’
³⁴

And it would be in Iaşi, the birthplace of the Legion of St Michael, that the SSI Special Echelons would launch a campaign that Mihai Antonescu (eschewing saccharine and foggy humanitarianism) called ‘total ethnic liberation’.

At the end of June 1941 Iaşi was a frontier city just 10 miles from the Prut River, which marked the Romanian border with the Soviet Union. Earlier that summer, General Antonescu had pledged to Hitler that Romania would join his crusade ‘against Russian Bolshevism, the arch-enemy of European civilization’. The German 11th Army and the Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies waited on the Prut. Crammed into Iaşi’s barracks and milling about its streets was a flammable mix of Romanian troops, Romanian SSI agents and gendarmerie units, as well as thousands of Iron Guard Legionaries. Stationed here too were German soldiers from the 198th Division of the 30th Army Corps, and the Todt Organisation. Although the Jewish community had endured more than a decade of persecution and harassment by Iron Guard activists and other Romanian anti-Semites, it remained relatively prosperous. Altogether 100,000 people lived in Iaşi – just over 50,000 were Jewish. By the beginning of July, at least 13,266 Jews had been murdered either in the city itself or on the ‘death trains’.
³⁵
This abrupt escalation of violence is firm evidence that Antonescu had fully grasped German intentions with regard to European Jewry – and chose to emulate them.

The full extent of German responsibility for inciting and managing the Romanian pogroms of 1941 has only very recently come to light. In 1996 an
affidavit written by Captain Ioan Mihail, who took a leading role in the events in Iaşi, revealed that German soldiers stationed in Iaşi collaborated with the Romanian army and robbed, beat and murdered Jews. Although Einsatzgruppe D men did not directly participate in the Iaşi massacre, Himmler still exerted his baleful influence through the Special Echelons modelled directly on the Heydrich’s murder squads. This point can be reinforced by scores of eyewitness accounts that refer to the activities of German troops in Iaşi. SSI Chief Eugen Christescu testified that SS and SD agents had arrived in the city, as well as an Abwehr major, Hermann von Stransky. Although details about the precise role of the SS agents are scant, we know that the SSI Special Echelons went on to collaborate with Einsatzgruppe D elsewhere in Romania. Further evidence of this intertwining of German and Romanian interests comes from their military communications. Both German and Romanian military commanders reported their unease about Jews in the army rear areas and demanded their removal. As German and Romanian troops advanced into Bessarabia later in July, according to historian Matatias Carp, they executed ‘almost the entire Jewish population living in villages’.
³⁶

Carp himself argued that this was a Romanian Holocaust – the culmination of decades of fervent nationalist bigotry and what he called the ‘rotting system of Romanian pseudo-democracy’. But would the destruction of Romania’s Jews have taken place at all if Hitler had not launched his attack on the Soviet Union? Would the Iron Guard and its Legionary militias have wielded such deadly power had they not been promoted by Himmler and Goebbels? And would the Romanian Holocaust have taken place at all had Hitler not levered Ion Antonescu into power? None of these questions is likely to have a simple answer. Nevertheless, we should hold them in mind as we try to piece together the events that took place in Iaşi at the end of June 1941.

Iaşi was under military jurisdiction and fell within range of Soviet artillery and bombers. Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte arrived in the city not long after 22 June and recorded his experience in his remarkable semi-fictionalised work
Kaputt
. He rented a small room in a building next to an ‘abandoned orchard’, which was in fact, as he soon discovered, an ancient Orthodox cemetery.
³⁷
He recalled ‘The Soviet bombers were hammering hard’. The planes flew back and forth at about 900ft, some approaching low enough to clip roof tops. A Soviet bomber crashed in a field near the city. When Malaparte arrived on the scene, Romanian soldiers were tormenting the female crew – ‘two brave girls’, one a ‘sturdy blonde with a freckled face’. Everywhere in the city, the atmosphere was tense. Rifle fire was frequent and nervous Romanian soldiers sometimes let loose without warning. By 25 June, Soviet forces, dug in along the Sculeni ridge overlooking the Prut
River still stood firm against the German assault. For a while, it seemed as if they might push Axis troops back across the river. As news of this unexpected setback spread, the mood of Romanians darkened. A whispering campaign accused Jews of acting as Soviet agents. No one could be trusted.

General Antonescu stoked the furnace: he proclaimed that ‘[Barbarossa] is not a struggle with the Slavs but one with the Jews. It is a fight to the death. Either we will win and the world will purify itself, or they will win and we will become their slaves.’
³⁸
Shortly before 22 June, in Bucharest General C.Z. Vasiliu, the general inspector of Romania’s gendarmerie, called a meeting with his officers to discuss how the ‘Cleansing of the Land’ orders would be enacted once Romania’s lost provinces had been recaptured. He pointed out that the operation could not begin until Soviets had been pushed out of Bessarabia and Bukovina. So at the end of June, Vasiliu’s brigades were transferred to Iaşi where they waited tensely for the signal to move across the border.