Hitler's Foreign Executioners (19 page)

Post-war interrogations of Romanian military officials revealed an intricate web of contacts between the German and Romanian army intelligence units, the gendarmerie and the SSI. At the hub of this web was the mysterious Abwehr Major, Hermann von Stransky. He was a nephew of Ribbentrop who had lived in Romania for many years, spoke fluent Romanian and fed information to head of the SSI’s German section, Colonel Ionescu-Micandru.
³⁹
According to SSI Chief Christescu, SD, Gestapo and Geheime Feldpolizei (Field Police, the secret military police) agents had also arrived in Iaşi.

Four days before the German attack, on 18 June, the SSI Special Echelon comprising 160 men had set off from SSI headquarters in Bucharest in a convoy of automobiles and trucks. They were heavily armed and, like the German Special Task Forces, had been issued with catalogues listing ‘target’ Jews and communists. Before leaving Bucharest, the Special Echelon commanders had printed thousands of posters that showed Jewish caricatures, modelled on the Nazi
Der Stürmer
, as spies and saboteurs.

In Iaşi, a police superintendent reported that a number of Iron Guard Legionaries had begun ‘taking a sort of course under the tutelage of two uniformed officers’.
⁴⁰
These officers were SSI men. At least forty Legionaries, still officially ‘enemies of the state’, assembled for ‘lessons’ in a rented apartment on Florilor Street in the Păcurari district. Their task would be carry out ‘noisy acts of violence’ to test the reaction of any authorities who had not been informed of the pogrom, and to stir up Christian citizens to attack Jews and plunder their houses. By 23 June, ‘Legionary mercenaries’ had been stationed in every city district. They had been issued with side arms, ‘Flaubert’ guns, blank cartridges (to make a noise), as well as lethal weapons.

Romanian military authorities scarcely troubled to conceal what they had in mind for the Jews of Iaşi. Two weeks before the German invasion began, Jewish forced labourers from a nearby camp were marched to the Jewish cemetery, also located in the Păcurari district, where they began digging trenches; each was 100ft in length and 6ft wide and deep.

The tinder had been laid. All that was required was a spark. At sunset on 24 June, Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte woke to the rising scream of air-raid sirens. As he ran into the street, he heard the roar of aircraft engines, the rattle of anti-aircraft guns, then the thud of bombs and the crash of crumbling masonry. In the city the railway station was on fire and German and Romanian soldiers mustered in the streets, weapons cradled in their arms. Between the roar of anti-aircraft fire, Malaparte heard ‘the hoarse voices of German soldiers’. On 26 June, a second raid ratcheted up the tension. This time, Russian pilots scored direct hits on the St Spiridion Hospital, the telephone exchange and the HQ of the Romanian 14th Infantry division. Some 600 people were killed, including thirty-eight Jews.

Soon afterwards, Malaparte heard ‘a confused din, a rattle of machine guns, and the dull thud of grenades’ from the Jewish districts. By then, the SSI Special Echelon (Esalonul I Operativ) had arrived in Iaşi and set to work plastering walls and meeting places with its stock of posters slandering Jews as enemy agents. Iron Guard Legionaries, dispersed all over the city, fuelled rumour and counter-rumour about Jewish saboteurs. Fear stoked hatred – and shrill calls for revenge. Romanian military authorities issued ‘official reports’ claiming that among captured Soviet air crew they had found renegade Romanian Jews from Iaşi. Rumours spread that signal lights had been discovered installed in the chimneys of Jewish households. Malaparte sensed that ‘something was in the air’; a storm was building. He noticed squads of gendarmes waiting, hidden in doorways, and the streets echoed with the
click click click
of military patrols. ‘A strange anguish weighed upon the city. A huge, massive, monstrous disaster, oiled, polished, tuned up like a steel machine.’ One evening a group of rabbis visited Malaparte in his rented room next to the old Orthodox cemetery:
please try to stop the pogrom
, they begged. The Italian journalist could do nothing, of course.

On Thursday 26 June, the day of the second raid, Abwehr Major von Stransky arrived in Iaşi accompanied by Colonel Ionescu Micandru, the chief Romanian liaison officer with the Wehrmacht. That afternoon, police superintendant ‘Chestor’ Constantin Chirilovici ordered Jewish community leaders to attend a meeting at the central police headquarters. He accused them of collaborating with the Soviet air force and ordered them to surrender flashlights, binoculars and cameras within forty-eight hours. Elsewhere in the city, soldiers of the 14th Division arrested three
Jews accused of providing information to the Soviets about the location of military buildings. Although all three men were released after interrogation, a Legionary squad hauled them off to the garrison firing range and shot them. They botched the job – two men escaped.

Back at police headquarters, Chirilovici organised detachments of gendarmes to begin house-to-house searches to find ‘saboteurs’. Already, Christian houses had been marked with a C or a cross. This meant that, on the evening of the 26 June, gendarmes swiftly located Jewish ‘suspects’ and, in the Jewish quarter, arrested anyone who owned a flashlight or a ‘suspicious’ article of red clothing. That evening the father of Dr Marcu Caufman was shot by a Romanian artillery officer as he walked through the Nicolina quarter. Gendarmes began shooting Jewish ‘suspects’ arrested the day before.

On 27 June, General Antonescu telephoned Colonel Constantin Lupu, commander of the Iaşi garrison, and ordered him to ‘cleanse Iaşi of its Jewish population’. Two days later, at 11 p.m., Antonescu called again. According to Lupu, he made clear that ‘The evacuation of the Jewish population from Iaşi is essential, and shall be carried out in full, including women and children. The evacuation shall be implemented
pachete pachete
[batch by batch], first to Roman and later to Târgu Ji … Suitable preparations must be made.’
⁴¹

The final cataclysmic eruption of violence came on Saturday morning. As soon as it was light, Romanian soldiers from the 13th and 24th Artillery regiments began attacking and robbing Jews. In the vicinity of the slaughterhouse, German soldiers went on the rampage. Malaparte tells us what a pogrom sounds like: the frenzied barking of dogs, banging of doors, shattering of glass and china, smothered screams, imploring voices calling
mama mama
, beseeching cries of
nu nu nu
. Everywhere in the city, he heard ‘strident, frightful German voices’. In the central Unirii Square, SS men set up a machine gun and fired on a crowd of women huddled by the statue of a Romanian prince. Soldiers threw hand grenades through the windows of Jewish homes. The streets became slick with blood. The night filled the sounds of with weeping, terrible screams – and laughter.
⁴²

That evening, Police Inspector Gheorghe Leahu issued orders that no one must interfere with ‘what the army is carrying out’.
⁴³
An unidentifiable aircraft flew low above the city and fired a number of blue flares. Below, Romanian soldiers had begun marching out from their barracks to begin their journey to the front line. Panic erupted. All over Iaşi volleys of gunfire erupted as armed Legionaries ran amok. Ordinary Romanian citizens brandishing shotguns and metal pipes joined in. One eyewitness described what unfolded in the slaughterhouse district as German soldiers and a ‘group of young Christians’ smashed down doors and
plundered Jewish houses. At 9 p.m. the banshee wail of air-raid sirens added to the mayhem – and soldiers accompanied by ‘paramilitary reservists’ (almost certainly Legionaries) shot the owner of a textile store. At the Binder Hotel, owned by the Jewish Blau family, Legionaries broke down the door and, after a perfunctory search, announced that they had discovered a machine gun in the attic. They dragged Mr Blau, together with his wife, baby daughter, sister-in-law and mother-in-law, from the hotel and shot them all in the street. The discovery of the weapon was, of course, a put-up job.

That night, a violent storm broke over Iaşi. All over the city, the shootings continued, illuminated by flashes of lightning. On Sunday morning, Malaparte reports, human forms lay scattered in awkward positions about the streets. Yet more had been heaped in gutters, one on top of the other. The police organised work parties of Jews so that the piles of bodies would not block the flow of traffic. Many hundreds of corpses had been dragged into the churchyard close to Lapusneanu Street. Dogs sniffed the air and began gnawing at the dead. German and Romanian trucks rumbled past. A murdered child sat bolt upright on the pavement. Laughing German soldiers and Romanian gendarmes, as well as chattering civilians, set to work mutilating the bodies and stealing clothes and shoes. They discarded the dead where they lay – twisted, naked.

Worse horrors were still to come. At police headquarters on the Saturday evening a decision was made to reinforce patrols and bring in ‘suspects’. The following day, Romanian soldiers backed by gangs of Legionary vigilantes began ordering terrified Jewish families to begin assembling in the streets outside their homes. Many still wore their pyjamas. As Iaşi’s church bells rang out, Romanian and German soldiers began to herd terrified Jewish families, including very young children, through the streets to the centre of the city. Legionaries and ordinary citizens lined the streets to spit and hurl rocks and bottles. They battered the Jews with iron bars and rifle butts; anyone who fell was shot and the road became lined with the dead. As Mihai Antonescu had demanded, there was no ‘foggy humanitarianism’ – on one street a small child was killed in front of a Jewish store, then disembowelled. A few Romanians did what they could to rescue Jews, frequently suffering the same fate as those they tried to assist.

Soon more than a thousand Jewish families been incarcerated inside the courtyard of the central police headquarters. By noon, Chirilovic testified, numbers had reached more than 3,000 – by sunset, 5,000. Given that General Antonescu had ordered that ‘The evacuation of the Jewish population from Iaşi is essential, and shall be carried out in full, including women and children’, what took place at the Iaşi police headquarters is hard to comprehend, especially since Romanian army
commanders like General Gheorge Stavrescu made several visits to monitor progress. In official terms, the Jews held at the police headquarters were suspects. Romanian police went through the motions of assessing individuals and in some cases issuing tickets of release bearing the word ‘Free’. Many of those set free were women – but very few reached their homes. Legionary patrols remained at large, arbitrarily executing anyone they encountered that they suspected or knew to be Jewish.

As this charade played out, many more Jews arrived at the police headquarters hoping to acquire a ticket of release. At noon, the vice tightened. According to witnesses, SS troops and German soldiers attached to the Organisation-Todt Einsatzgruppe Südost appeared outside the police headquarters. A German professor of Ottoman history at Iaşi University, Dr Franz Babinger, testified after the war that he observed a German infantry unit shooting Jews outside the police headquarters. He protested, but was informed by a German officer that it was the Jews’ own fault; later he noticed several more German officers arriving at the police headquarters.
⁴⁴
As Jews continued to arrive in the courtyard in large numbers, the Germans formed a cordon, apparently to control access. This grey wall was soon reinforced by Romanian gendarmes and Legionaries armed with iron bars or wooden staves. The real purpose of the cordon now became clear. As desperate and bloodied men and women struggled to reach the illusory refuge of the courtyard, the Germans and their Romanian accomplices rained down blows without mercy. Then inside the courtyard at about 2 p.m., as panic spread among the Jews trapped inside, policemen and soldiers suddenly opened fire with machine guns.

Leizer Finkelstein, an eyewitness, recalled these terrible moments:

As this dreadful ‘cleansing’ continued, a train clanked slowly into Iaşi station hauling a long line of more than thirty closed freight wagons. Soon afterwards, trucks pulled up outside the police headquarters and anyone still alive was crammed inside. Led by two German tanks with motorcyclist outriders, the convoys set off at about 8 p.m. At the station, Romanian troops conducted a head count, forcing their captives to lie face down on the station platform. Travellers stepped, without looking down, between the prone men and women. When the count was finally completed,
the Romanians herded the Jews towards the wagons, manhandled them inside then hauled shut the doors. Early the following morning another convoy arrived from police headquarters and a second train steamed into the station.

The loading took all night. The wagons had recently been used for transporting carbide and the rough planks that made up the floors were thickly smeared with an evil-smelling waste. Soon 3,000 men, women and children, many of whom had been terribly injured, were crushed inside thirty-three wagons. Night became a hot summer’s day and hundreds of kilometres from Iaşi on the German front line, temperatures reached 40°C. Exultant German soldiers marched forward, bare-chested and tanned by the fierce Russian sun. They cooled off in streams and rivers. But in Iaşi, no water or food had been provided to the families in the freight wagons held at Iaşi station. Bored Romanian soldiers waiting for orders to move occupied their time daubing the sides of the cars with slogans ‘killers of German and Romanian soldiers’. They poked bayonets between the wooden slats, laughing if they scored a hit and someone inside screamed. Hours later, the trains let out shrill yelps and unhurriedly began to grind forward. Many had already died inside the wagons. Leizer Finkelstein reported: