Hitler's Foreign Executioners (15 page)

At about the same time, another act of barbarism began to unfold in the grim Romanian city of Iaşi, situated close to the Soviet border. As the German armies unleashed a storm of destruction on the astonished Russian defenders, paramilitary bands hustled young Jews to the city’s Jewish cemetery and ordered them to excavate a long, deep pit. In the city, crucifixes appeared on the walls or doors of Christian houses, marking them off from the homes of their Jewish neighbours. On 27 June, Romanian dictator Marshall Ion Antonescu telephoned the commander of
the Iaşi garrison and instructed him to begin ‘cleansing Iaşi of its Jewish population’. On the evening of 28 June, as German forces punched ever deeper into Soviet territory, an unidentified aircraft flew over Iaşi and released a blue flare. Immediately afterwards, sporadic gunfire was heard all over the city. Romanian militias and civilians armed with hatchets and firearms laid siege to Jewish homes and businesses. Backed by German military units, the Romanians began marching the city’s Jews to the central police station. In the courtyard, Romanians and Germans began beating their captives to death. Others they marched to the railway station and loaded them on board sealed train wagons. By the end of the month, 14,850 Jews had been killed, both in the city and on locked and sealed death trains. It was the first major pogrom of the Second World War – and the beginning of a campaign of violence in which 270,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews would perish.
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In the 1930s, Himmler had cultivated the Romanian ‘Legion of St Michael’ and its militia the Iron Guard. He admired the legion’s founder Cornelius Zelea Codreanu and, following his murder, backed the new Iron Guard leader Horia Sim. But early in 1941, Marshall Antonescu expelled SS agents from Romania – and most historians have concluded that the SS was not involved in the Iaşi massacre and its aftermath. This terrible event would seem to be an open and shut case of autochthonous anti-Semitic mass murder. The Romanian regime had long ago abandoned any pretence of democracy and was dominated by some of the most vicious anti-Semitic demagogues outside of Germany. Deeply ingrained Romanian bigotry would seem to provide a ready and logical explanation for the mass murder of Romanian Jews that began in January 1941 and reached a hideous climax in Iaşi in June. By the end of the war, the Romanian ‘Legionary’ state had killed or deported well over half of its Jewish citizens. Antonescu and his henchman called this ‘Romanianisation’, a polite term that disguised a disease that afflicted all the new nation states thrown up by the tidal wave of autonomist fervour that engulfed Europe in the nineteenth century. In the case of Romania, the strain of chauvinism that infected every state apparatus was especially virulent and was most forcefully directed at Romania’s Jews, who had played a dynamic role in the new nation’s rapid industrialisation. In Romania, anti-Semitism transcended social class and educational status. Its principal spokesmen emerged from the universities and a powerful intelligentsia wrapped the crude emotions of race hatred in the trappings of high culture.

There had been speakers of the Romanian language in south-eastern Europe for many centuries, but the nation of Romania was the surly child of fanatical nationalism. The first autonomous Romanian state, the so-called
Vechiul Regat
(Old Kingdom), was recognised by the Great Powers in 1881; but since it was hemmed
in by the three great empires of Russia, Austro-Hungary and Turkey, it could never satisfy the most fervent nationalists. In the period between 1881 and the First World War, the
Regat
was steadily enlarged and was proclaimed
România Mare
(Greater Romania) in 1912. At the end of the war, with the disintegration of the old empires, Romania became positively bloated with the acquisition of Transylvania, Bukovina and, most importantly, Bessarabia, which extended its reach along the Black Sea coast. Such rapid expansion led to indigestion and chronic discontent. Territorial aggrandisement had inevitably enlarged Romania’s pool of ethnic minorities which now included Hungarians, Bulgarians, Germans, Ukrainians, Serbs, Greeks, Russians, Roma and Jews. So-called ‘Regateni’ Romanians regarded themselves as a Latin not a Slavic people, the descendants of Roman settlers. They resented and feared their new Magyar and Jewish neighbours. Romanian academics began to promote a language of exclusion and cleansing. The powerful Romanian Orthodox Church had traditionally deprecated Jews as Christ killers. Between 1867 and 1918, Hungarian Jews enjoyed a golden age of tolerance and prosperity, but in Romania, official documents record no less that 196 violent anti-Jewish incidents during the same period. In Romanian universities, anti-Semitism was fashionable, even glamorous. Radical, chauvinist professors had a stranglehold on Romanian academic life, and their shrill and venomous voices shaped the hearts and minds of generation after generation of young men and women. The intelligentsia was in thrall to the most radical brand of Romanian nationalism. There was nothing civilised about their crude message. Only violence could solve Romania’s ‘Jewish problem’.
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By the 1930s, two violent anti-Semitic factions dominated Romanian political culture: the League of National Christian Defence (
Liga Apararii National Crestine
) and Legion of St Michael (
Legiunea Arhanghelelui Mihail
). The latter is often referred to as the Iron Guard, which was, strictly speaking, its military wing. Neither was a minority faction. Both wielded enormous influence. The legion’s aggressive agitation strategies led directly to the election of an openly anti-Semitic government in 1937 and propelled the rise to power of Ion Antonescu, whose ‘National Legionary State’ would pass forty-one anti-Jewish decrees between 11 September 1940 and 21 January 1941.

A conclusion might easily be drawn that the mass murder of Romanian Jews, which began in Bessarabia at the end of June 1940 but climaxed the following summer, was simply the expression of indigenous Romanian chauvinism. But this ‘Romanian’ explanation fails to account for an important factor: timing. Why did the Romanian state unleash this murderous assault on its Jewish citizens in late 1940 and not earlier? Why did the terrible blow of Romanian anti-Semitic violence fall on the Jews of Iaşi at the precise moment German armies roared across
the Soviet border? Might the climactic radicalisation of Romanian chauvinism have been somehow entangled with Nazi aggression? This clearly was the case in Croatia – but the NDH was a puppet entity manufactured by the German Foreign Office. Though it was allied to Germany, Romania was an independent nation state. To answer this question we must dig a deeper into the story of the Legion of St Michael and its malevolent founder Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.

According to historian Jean Ancel, ‘Hatred of Jews was [the legion’s] true faith, a dogma of their Christianity’. Unlike the neo-pagan NSDAP in Germany, the legion made a direct appeal to traditional Orthodox religiosity and enjoyed the backing of the influential and reactionary Patriach Miron Christea. Like one of its most celebrated ideologues, the philosopher Mircea Eliade, the legion despised modernity and exploited the darker rhetoric of the mythical, the primitive and instinctive. Legionaries detested so-called ‘Judaic’ values such as logic and materialism. It offered both liberation to Romanian peasants and a semi-licit thrill for students and intelligentsia. The Legion was modelled on the notorious ‘Black Hundreds’, the Russian anti-Semitic terrorist movement that first co-opted the cult of St Michael. But it forged close links with Hitler’s agnostic Reich and Himmler’s modernist SS. Legion rank and file would be dominated by vigilantes, who proudly rejoiced in practising ‘righteous violence’ – a decades long orgy of political murder.

On 10 November 1926 a group of Jewish students appeared in a Bucharest court accused of demonstrating against one of their professors who was in the habit of making insulting remarks about Jews. As the students left the court, a young man stepped forward and shot one of the students, David Falik, three times in the stomach. He died in agony forty-eight hours later. The culprit, who had carried out his crime in front of a small crowd that had come to jeer the students, was arrested and brought to trial. He was defended by Paul Iliescu – a member of the Romanian parliament who denounced the victim thus: ‘so will die all the country’s enemies. By innumerable bullets which will be fired against the filthy beasts.’The jury found the accused not guilty and he was escorted from the courtroom on the shoulders of his supporters. His name was Nicolae Totu and he had travelled all the way from his home city to kill at least one of those insolent Jewish students. That city was Iaşi; it has been said that this rather grim, heavily industrialised northern metropolis was to Romanian anti-Semitism what Munich was to Nazi Jew hatred. It was, in other words, the source,‘steeped in anti-Semitism’. The city was above all the Mecca of the Legion of the Archangel Michael.
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The movement’s founder was Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, who named the legion to honour the patron saint of Romania’s wars against the Turks. The Archangel Michael, he claimed, had visited him while he waited in prison to be tried for murder. This self-proclaimed myth tells us quite a lot about Codreanu. He cultivated a political persona as a charismatic mystic who disdained doctrine. He talked of saving Romanian souls and restoring the nation. One of Codreanu’s most fervent admirers, professor Nae Ionescu, explained why cast-iron doctrine was anathema: ‘Ideology is the invention of the liberals and the democrats. No one among the theoreticians of totalitarian nationalism creates a doctrine. Doctrine takes shape through the everyday acts of the legion as it evolves out of the decisions of him [Codreanu] whom God placed where he orders.’
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Codreanu exploited redemptive nationalist rhetoric to tap deep into the national psyche.‘The spiritual resurrection!’ he proclaimed.‘The resurrection of nations in the name of Jesus Christ!’ He was born in the small Moldavian village of Husi in 1899. At the time, this part of northern Romania was still under Hapsburg rule. His father Ion Zelinski had travelled here from Bucovina and married Elizabeth Brunner, a young German woman. Corneliu was their first son. When he was 2, Ion changed the family name from the dubious sounding Zelinski to its Romanian form Codreanu. To say that Ion Zelea Codreanu was a violent bigot would not do his memory justice. He liked to strut around Husi dressed in national Romanian costume and brandishing a wooden club, worn smooth, it was said, by frequent use.

By the time Ion’s son completed a perfunctory period of military training, Corneliu had matured into a tall, striking young man who had thoroughly absorbed his father’s fierce hatreds. Soon after the war ended, he left home to study law at Iaşi University. Like Munich or Berlin, Iaşi, the old capital of Moravia, was in those febrile times a bubbling cauldron of bigotry. Since the mid-nineteenth century rapid industrialisation had transformed a city once dominated by its university into a sprawling version of Manchester. New factories sprang up belching smoke and undermining old certainties and relationships. Students and their powerful professors still dominated the old centre of the city. After classes at noon and then in the evening, young men and women spilled into cafes like the Fundatia or Ceasocornicaria Goldstein, where the odours of strong coffee and
Brenza
, the pungent local cheese blended with
ciorba de pui
, a greasy chicken broth made with vinegar. Since the 1960s, we have become accustomed to associating university students with left-wing radicalism. In Germany and Romania in the 1920s, students formed the vanguard of the ultranationalist right. In the cafes of Iaşi, students talked of little else but Romania’s ‘Jewish problem’ and the menace of that associated political religion, Bolshevism.

From the balcony of the neo-classical Jockey Club, plump and complacent Romanian aristocrats languidly watched little dramas unfolding in the street below where the main thoroughfares the Strada Brocuraru and Strada Carol met. Here a wealthy new middle class, many of them Jewish, rubbed shoulders with peasants who had come in search of work and a new life, and angry-eyed students. Romanian soldiers begged on street corners, bewildered and resentful. Romania was in turmoil.

Iaşi was a city of faith too – it boasted over a hundred Orthodox churches and scores of synagogues. For despite the bitter vinegar of anti-Semitism, Iaşi was one of the most important European centres of Jewish enterprise and learning, where the first ever Yiddish newspaper had been published more than half a century earlier in 1855. By 1900, close to half of Iaşi’s population was Jewish. But the confidence and prosperity of many Romanian Jews was intolerable to young chauvinists like Corneliu Codreanu and his fanatical followers. Anti-Semitism bonded gentile factory worker and peasant, student and bureaucrat, soldier and professor. The crucible of reaction was the university. Codreanu fitted well into this reactionary cesspool and soon settled on a mentor: Professor A.C. Cuzu, the university’s political godfather and veteran of numerous anti-Semitic parties and campaigns.