The Holocaust

Volcineti, Romania, June 10, 1942, Deportation of Jews to Transnistria across the Nistru (Dniester) River
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Romania, a dutiful ally of Nazi Germany, had a Jewish population of about 757,000 before World War II. Extreme antisemitic tendencies, long evident in the country, escalated on the eve of the war.

With the German invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941, Romanian soldiers, police and civilians slaughtered 15,000 Jews in the city of Iasi. The Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu ordered the murder of the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina in Northern Romania. The killings were carried out by the army, gendarmerie and local Romanian population, with the cooperation of the Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppe D. The Jews that remained alive in these areas were brutally deported to Transnistria – a largely unsettled area between the Dniester and Bug rivers that Hitler gave to Romania. There the Romanians continued their mass murder of the Jews, and approximately 150,000 additional Jews died of hypothermia, starvation and epidemics.

Later on, after the Romanian government recognized that the outcome of the war had essentially been decided and as a result of stern warnings from the Allies, the Romanians halted the murder of the Jews. In all, some 400,000 Jews were murdered in the regions under Romanian rule, including the Jews of Transnistria.