Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (30 page)

Romanian soldiers quickly regained these prewar Romanian territories and occupied a good deal of the south of Soviet Ukraine. Like German soldiers, they were followed by special units whose initial assignment was to provoke pogroms. On July 6, 1941, an order from Romanian counterintelligence specified that pogroms were to be organized and given the appearance of spontaneity. In several cases, local populations, Romanians or Ukrainians, killed Jews before the arrival of Romanian troops. As elsewhere, however, most people watched passively. Romanian forces, like German ones in these same weeks, were frustrated that pogroms were not more widespread. After the initial pogroms came a general deportation of Jews from the recovered territories of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina further east to Romanian-occupied territories of the Soviet Union, known as “Transnistria.” Some Jews were deported from one part of Transnistria to another. During these deportations, local Romanians and others took advantage of the obvious exclusion of Jews from legal protection. Some raped Jewish women. Others bribed gendarmes for the right to pick prosperous-looking Jews from the columns in order to murder them for their clothing. Nearly two hundred thousand Jews were assembled in makeshift camps created from pigpens, barns, and open fields, where they began to die almost immediately. Those who survived these camps recalled that they were helped by local people, especially women, who gave them food and water at risk to themselves. Romanian troops, meanwhile, carried out mass shootings of Jews as revenge for combat losses to the Red Army. After seventy thousand Romanian troops were lost in the battle for Odessa in October 1941, Romanian soldiers shot twenty-six thousand Jews beyond the city. All in all, this Romanian campaign of comprehensive deportation and sporadic massacre resembled the contemporary German idea of shipping the Jews to Siberia.

From the perspective of Bucharest, however, this anti-Jewish campaign was an attempt at the ethnic cleansing of one of several enemies of the Romanian state. It was carried out in zones where state territory had changed hands twice in two years, and where Jews could be blamed for defeat, scapegoated for collaboration, and eliminated under the cover of war. Romanian authorities also planned to deport Jews from the central part of the country untouched by war, but this proved difficult and in the end did not take place. Romanian Jews in central Romania had never lost their citizenship; there was no cover of war, nor any blame for communism to allocate. Of the 280,000 or so Jews killed as a result of
Romanian policy, some 15,000 had lived in prewar Romania on territories that had not changed hands during the war. This was, of course, a significant number, but only about six percent of the total. Just as 97 percent of the Jews killed by Germany had lived beyond prewar Germany, so 94 percent of the Jews killed by Romania lived on territories Romania had lost to the USSR or had gained from the USSR.

In 1942, Romanian policy towards Jews, previously quite cooperative with the Germans, drifted in the other direction. Berlin wanted the remaining Jews under Romanian control sent to Auschwitz, but none were. Bucharest’s refusal had to do with calculations of sovereignty. Romania was deporting and murdering Jews on the basis of its own reasoning and for its own purposes. Romanian leaders were annoyed by the high-handedness of the Germans sent to Bucharest to negotiate and vexed that they were asked to deport their Jews while Hungarian Jews and Italian Jews, citizens of other allies of Germany, remained at home. They worried that the removal of Jews would benefit the German ethnic minorities in towns in Transylvania and thus increase German influence in Romania. Above all, Romanians were displeased that their contribution to the war on the eastern front had not led to the return of northern Transylvania from Hungary.

Romanian policy was to murder Jews as a minority that could be removed during the war without larger political consequences. When this calculation changed, so did policy. Romanian policy had also been to deport and murder Gypsies under cover of war; since this policy was coordinated with Jewish policy, it was halted by a kind of accident. In October 1942, the Romanians halted their own deportations and ceased their own killing policies. They also ended discussions of sending Jews to Auschwitz. In 1943, Hitler tried and failed to change Antonescu’s mind. Hitler’s argument was that Romania’s place in a future German Europe depended upon its current attitude towards Jews; Antonescu was of the opinion that the masses of Romanian corpses around Stalingrad were sacrifice enough. Rather than send Jews to Auschwitz in 1943, Bucharest once again extended its protection to Romanian Jews living abroad. The following year Romania reversed its alliances, and its armies finished the war fighting not alongside but against the Germans. All in all, about two-thirds of Romania’s Jews survived.

The Romanian Holocaust began with the trauma of lost territory and an associated change not just of government but of regime, from monarchy to military dictatorship. It took place chiefly on the lands that the new regime believed it could win back by force from the Soviet Union. Romanian Jews in places where state territory did not change hands usually saw the end of the war. Romanian Jews at the site of a double regime change—where the Soviet Union destroyed Romanian state structures and then Romania did the same to Soviet structures—usually did not. The logic of the Romanian Holocaust was similar to that of the German Holocaust, with one major exception: Antonescu, unlike Hitler, saw his own state as worth protecting and thus considered the Jewish question, antisemite though he was, to be one issue among others. When the survival of the state was in question, Antonescu slowed the persecution of Jews. Hitler, who actually believed in a world of races rather than a world of states, did the opposite.

Under their longtime ruler, Regent Miklós Horthy, Hungarian leaders set a course towards an alliance with Germany, always keeping an eye on neighbor and rival Romania. Bucharest gained considerable territories after the First World War; its gains then were a part of Budapest’s losses. Hungary, treated as a defeated power, lost most of its territory and population by the terms of the Treaty of Trianon of 1920. It recouped some of these losses thanks to Germany twenty years later. As a result of the destruction of Czechoslovakia, it was awarded southern Slovakia as well as Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Romania’s loss of northern Transylvania in summer 1940 was Hungary’s gain. All of these annexations, achieved without military effort, bound Hungary to Germany. If Hitler could award territory, he could also take it away. Romania fought alongside Germany against the USSR to regain territory; Hungary joined that invasion so as not to lose that same territory. Their war in the East was largely a contest for German favor in the Transylvanian Question.

Budapest passed anti-Jewish legislation on the German model as a signal of its loyalty to Berlin, but this did not, in itself, lead to mass killing. The Jews in greatest danger were the ones who inhabited territories newly acquired by the Hungarian state. Hungarian authorities deported Jews from Subcarpathian Ruthenia across the Soviet border just as Germany was invading the Soviet Union. These Jews were then the victims of the first large-scale shooting of the Holocaust, at Kamianets’ Podils’kyi in August 1941. Hungary joined its German ally in the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, and Hungarian forces shot a certain number of Jews there. The army also forced Jews into labor battalions, which then worked in dreadful conditions in the occupied Soviet Union. Some forty thousand Hungarian Jews perished in these units. All the same, the Hungarian leadership never showed any interest in deporting its Jewish citizens to Auschwitz. The government’s general attitude was that a purge of national minorities could follow a victorious war.

As a result, some eight hundred thousand Jews were still alive on Hungarian territory in 1944. Since the vast majority of the three million or so Polish Jews had already by this point been murdered, Hungary’s was now the most significant Jewish community of central and eastern Europe. In January and February 1943, the Hungarian army suffered huge losses as the Red Army retook the city of Voronezh. The Hungarian government began some clumsy attempts to make contact with the western powers. Learning of this, Hitler blamed the Jews of Hungary. On March 19, 1944, German troops entered Hungary; a few days later Döme Sztójay, who had been serving in Berlin as Hungarian ambassador, was named prime minister. It was this government, created in the unusual circumstances of German occupation and constrained in its freedom of action, which undertook to deport Hungarian Jews to German death facilities.

The German invasion of Hungary was a strange operation, since its purpose was to keep an allied state, and an allied army, in the war on the German side. The point was not to force Hungary to carry out the Final Solution, but rather to swing the balance of Hungarian politics sufficiently so that it might be carried out. The government that the Germans introduced in March 1944 was ideologically more antisemitic. The calculation of the new government, perhaps more important than its ideology, was that the deportation of Hungary’s Jews was the price to be paid for the preservation of a Hungarian state. The German occupation was not meant to exploit Hungarians economically, but to divert economic calculations in such a way as to endanger Jews. Nazi ideology presented the murder of Jews as an end in itself. But the strategic calculation was that a Hungary culpable of murdering its Jews would be unable to switch sides.

The expropriation of Jews, as both the German occupiers and the Hungarian government understood, was an opportunity to gain a certain amount of support from the majority population in the strange new situation. That spring the Hungarian government announced a series of reforms that depended, as everyone could tell, on the robbery, and thus indirectly on the disappearance, of the Jews. The property of more than four million dead European Jews having changed hands by this point in time, the connection between expropriation and murder was clear to everyone; and if businesses and apartments were to be transferred, the government wanted to make the arrangements and get the credit. German state destroyers entered Hungary: a Higher SS and Police Leader alongside an
Einsatzgruppe
, the forces that organized the Final Solution in the East, as well as Adolf Eichmann, the SS deportation specialist. In practice, however, the work of deportation depended upon the records of the Hungarian interior ministry and the work of Hungarian local policemen. What this all meant was hardly a secret: On May 10 a
New York Times
headline read “Hungarian Jews Fear Annihilation.” Between May and July 1944, some 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz, of whom about 320,000 were murdered.

Like all of Germany’s allies, regardless of their actual policies towards Jews, Budapest considered the treatment of its own citizens to be a matter of its own sovereign choices. This was true even of the Hungarian rulers that the Germans chose in spring 1944, when Hungarian sovereignty had been compromised but not eliminated by the German invasion. In summer 1944, as circumstances changed, calculations changed as well. That June, the western allies landed in Normandy and the Red Army routed Germany’s Army Group Center in Belarus. The Americans, after a series of warnings about Hungary’s treatment of Jews, bombed Budapest on July 2. Horthy had remained head of state despite the German intervention and the change of government. He now halted the deportations, thereby sparing most of the Jews of Budapest. He tried again and failed again in October 1944 to change sides. Even as Budapest itself was besieged by the Red Army, the Germans wanted the city’s Jews deported. A new fascist Arrow Cross government marked Jewish houses in the capital and created a ghetto; the advance of the Soviets made further transports to Auschwitz impossible. About a hundred thousand Jews were forced to leave Budapest, thousands of whom died in labor battalions. The Arrow Cross murdered about fifty Jews a day by the Danube River.

In the end, about half of the Hungarian Jewish population survived. Most of those killed had inhabited territories that changed hands during the war. The vast majority perished after the German intervention that compromised Hungarian sovereignty.