The Unspeakable Things That Happened During The Romanian Holocaust In WW2

One of the seemingly endless tragedies of the Holocaust was that the rise of the Nazis encouraged anti-Semitic movements and violent actions by other nations. One government allied to Hitler during WWII was Romania. Romania had allied itself with Hitler as protection against the Soviet Union, with which it shares a long border. For that protection, Hitler received the bulk of the sizable Romanian oil production and a government friendly to his anti-Semitic policies.

Before we begin, we ask that you take a look at our recent video “The History of anti-Semitism”, which will provide a bit more background and understanding of the horrible phenomenon of the prejudice that led to the Holocaust. We also would like you to know that we at “A Day in History” understand that modern Romania in no way resembles the fascist Romanian state of WWII, despite unhinged outbursts from the small number of Romanian ultra-nationalists who deny the Holocaust or Romania's part in it.

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Romania before WWII

In 1877-78, Romania won its independence from the Ottoman Empire, which had controlled it since the mid-1500s. In 1908, the neighboring Bulgarians also achieved independence from the Ottomans.
In 1918, with the end of WWI, other countries became independent in central and southeast Europe: Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

One of the good things about both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires was that both had kept a lid on the ethnic and religious hatreds that had existed in the area for hundreds of years. While there were numerous incidents of ethnic violence while these nations were ruled by other more powerful states, they did not come close to the level of violence which occurred with independence and the coming of Nazism and WWII.

At the time of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Romania was ruled by Marshal Ion Antonescu, a WWI Romanian hero. By the time WWII began Antonescu had been a well-known extreme right-wing politician and army officer for thirty-years, having taken part in a brutal suppression of a peasants' revolt in 1907.

Antonescu's anti-Semitism was a product both of time, place, position, combined with personal history. As a child, Antonescu's father had taken the rare step, for that time and place, of divorcing the future leaders' mother for a Jewish woman he had been having an affair with. Despite the fact that Antonescu's dad forced the woman to convert to Orthodox Christianity, to Antonescu she was always “an evil Jewish woman” who had broken up his happy childhood home.

#holocaust #romania #history #romanianholocaust #ww2

Scriptwriter: Matthew Gaskill

Video Editor & Motion Graphics: Naman Meena

Voice-over Artist: Stephen Vox

Music: Motionarray.com

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