University of Bucharest

Faculty of Political Science

Mihnea Falcescu

Moran-Bianca Axinte

Orhan Mammadow

Ema Elena Georgescu

Farid Malikzade

Andrada Bursuc

Ahmed Badaoui

The Fascist Dictatorships; The Holocaust

Politics and Society in the 20th century Europe

Lect. Dr.Dragos Petrescu

2011

Introduction

The Holocaust was the persecution and murder of more than six million Jews and other

minorities such as Roma by the Nazi Germany who sponsored this massacre.

The reason for which this tragedy had happened is the racism and anti-Semitism

promoted by the Nazi Party. The holocaust covers a part of the XX century starting with the

appointment of Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933 and ending with the

liberation of the last ghettos in 1945. This period is split in more stages as it follows:

Racism and Anti-Semitism in Germany

Anti-Semitism existed in Germany and other European countries for many hundreds of

years. The racist doctrines which made their initial appearance in the nineteenth century added

new momentum to the hatred of the Jews. In many countries, racist anti-Semitism was used as an

instrument of political propaganda to gain the support of the masses .However, it was only in the

1930’, with the growth of the National Socialist Party and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in

Germany that racial anti-Semitism was adopted as a policy by a major political party.

Racism added new and substantial dimensions to traditional anti-Semitism. In the past,

hatred of Jews had had specific grounds and certain lines of development. The hatred nurtured by

ancient Christian concepts regarded the Jews as the people of Israel and the people who had

rejected its Redeemer Jesus, and thus had condemned itself to ostracism and the eternal enmity

of the Christian world. The Jews had to be kept in state of servitude, misery and degradation.

Moreover, their eternal wandering among the nations forever at the mercy of the

Christians, seemed to confirm the veracity of Christian teachings. Later, anti-Semitism was

reinforced by a greater stress on economic, social and political factors.

2

Racial anti-Semitism, linked with a misinterpretation of Darwin’s view of society lent a

new validity to traditional Jew-hatred. According to the Nazi theorists, the danger arising from

contact with the evil, perverted Jews, sprang not from their mistaken beliefs of their economic

role, nor even from their tendency to live as a closed social group, but from their very identity,

their tainted Jewish blood.

According to Nazism, the German people constituted the highest stratum of the Nordic-

Aryan race, while the Jews were a sub-human race who perpetually undermined the sound

structure of world affairs and sought to usurp the authority and leadership of the superior race.

Destiny demanded of the Germans that they wage an uncompromising struggle for their heritage,

primacy and power.

Liberalism, democracy, socialism and communism were regarded as destructive Jewish

notions, whose only aim was the eradication of all that was right in the world, the concepts

which glorified strength and beauty and invested the pre-ordinated race with wealth and power,

and accorded it world domination. According to Nazi theory, humanity is not a homogeneous

unit, and the human race has no common denominator. Those who spoke of the unity of the

human race were intent upon falsifying the truth, as they denied the existence of races and

refused to recognize the constant conflicts between them.

Phrases about the common destiny of mankind were ridiculous, as absurd as talk of a

partnership between men and insects.

Marriage between Jews and non-Jews was the equivalent of the Trojan horse, an attempt

to bring about the collapse of the superior race from within.

When the Nazis came to power, the war of the races reached its climax. Should the Aryan

race be defeated and fail to establish its dominion on Earth, the victorious Jews would

undoubtedly carry out their evil designs and the world would be doomed to decline and

deteriorate.

This doctrine, which Hitler repeatedly and loudly affirmed, had its own laws and lines of

development. The mere insistence upon a state of racial war in which there could be no

compromise, helped create the background for the “Final Solution”.

3

Obviously, if the Jews posed such a serious danger to society, then any measures taken

against them, including extermination, were justified.

On the eve of the World War Two, in January 1939, Hitler said: “Today I will once more

be a prophet. If the international financiers inside and outside Europe should again succeed in

plunging the nations into a world war the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth and

thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe”. Thus

Jewry came to be regarded as Enemy Number One, and the murder of Jews became one of the

aims for which the war was being waged.

The economic and political circumstances in Germany between the wars facilitated

Hitler’s rise to power. Many Germans had refused to accept the fact that Germany had been

defeated in World War One. They claimed that the German Army had been “stabbed in the

back” and that disloyalty at home had paralyzed the front and brought about the collapse of the

German Army. A significant portion of the blame for weakening the front was, of course, heaped

upon the Jews. The Weimar Republic which was established after the War was unpopular in

German nationalistic circles. In the eyes of the opposition, the democratic regime had been

imposed upon them, and did not truly represent the German people. The Versailles Peace Treaty,

and especially the clauses which called for the payment of heavy reparations were regarded in

Germany as measures of revenge. Naturally, there were only a few people who recalled that

when Germany appeared in the role of victor at the negotiating table at Brest Litovsk, she had

dictated far harsher peace terms to Russia than those imposed upon her by the Allies at

Versailles. A sense of frustration, a refusal to accept the situation and an ever-growing fear of

Communism created fertile soil for the growth of radical, right-wing groups in Germany. The

Nazi Party was founded during this period. The unstable economic conditions prevailing in

Germany at the end of the war gave additional impetus to the extremists who demanded many

radical changes. In 1923 the National Socialist Party attempted a political coup in Munich. Their

intention had been to set out from the Bavarian capital to conquer the whole of Germany.

The “putsch” failed, and Hitler and several of his associates were arrested. However, the

Court who tried them was unduly lenient in sentencing those responsible for the revolt.

Moreover, Hitler exploited his appearance in court to make propaganda for his party. During the

4

short period he spent in prison, Hitler wrote his well-known book, “Mein Kampf” (“The

Struggle”), in which he outlined the program of his movement.

Hitler and his close associates displayed a remarkable talent for propaganda, organization

and political extremism, but they failed to gain sufficient influence and support to become a real

threat to the Weimar Republic until the crisis of 1929. By then Hitler had learned the lesson of

his attempted coup, and realized that he had to use the legitimate means afforded him by the

democratic institutions in his struggle to gain power.

Anti-Jewish policy and persecutions

When Hitler came to power on January 30 1933, the racist doctrine became an integral

part of the totalitarian regime in which authority was exercised by a leader who regarded himself

as sent by Providence to carry out a mission, one which was to exert a powerful influence upon

future generations.

At first, the persecutions consisted in the boycott of Jewish shops and enterprises but then

the anti-Semitic policy of the Third Reich began to gain momentum. The first step was to

deprive the Jews of their legal and civil rights. The next was to exclude them from economy.

Social barriers between Jews and Germans were set up, and many Jews were expelled from

Germany. This phase led to dismissal of all Jews from public offices and from the German Army

and reached its climax with the promulgation of the “Nurenberg Laws” in 1935. All this

measures in the end lead to “The final solution” which meant the mass extermination.

The Final Solution

The third and the last phase of the Nazi “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” began in

June 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union and ended with the German

capitulation in May 1945. During these four years, Jews were savagely persecuted, subjected to

5

every possible pain and humiliation, and murdered in mass shootings or it gas chambers of

extermination camps and ghettos such as Treblinka, Sobibor, Auchwitz, Lodz, Birkenau.

Throughout Europe, the Nazis set up a system designed to facilitate the pillaging of

Jewish property. This property included not only real estate and goods but also the personal

possessions carried by the victims, and even the gold fillings in the teeth of the corpses. In

addition, the Nazis exploited the labour of camp inmates for their own financial gains.

What is fascism?

The first serious attempt to explain fascism in theoretical terms was undertaken by the Comintern in the 1920s. The Comintern understanding, initially of Italian fascism, was founded on the notion of a close instrumental relationship between capitalism and fascism. Derived from the Leninist theory of imperialism, the theory held that the coming inevitable collapse of capitalism fostered an increased need on the part of the most reactionary and powerful groups within the now highly-concentrated finance capital to secure their imperialist aims by manipulating a mass movement capable of destroying the revolutionary working class and therefore of safeguarding in the short-term capitalist interests and profited to be achieved through expansion and war. Fascism was thus the necessary form and the final stage of bourgeois-capitalist rule. ( Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, Problems and Perspectives of interpretation, 4 Edition. READING OF PETRESCU)

Internationalist historians, such as Eberhard Jäckel, Helmut Krausnick, Gerald Fleming, and Lucy Dawidowicz, have argued that Hitler’s intentions, and therefore his role, in the process leading up to the Holocaust are central because of the godlike position he occupied in the regime, the other Nazis were an indispensable supporting cast. (rethinking the Holocaust, READING OF PETRESCU)

Benito Mussolini

AKA 'Il Duce' (The Leader).

Country: Italy.

Kill tally: Over 400,000 Italians killed during the Second World War. At least 30,000 Ethiopians killed during Italian occupation of Ethiopia.

6

Background: The factious Italian confederation emerges from the First World War on the side of the victorious Allies and with its eastern African colonies in Eritrea and Somalia in tact. But serious economic problems plague the state. Inflation escalates and unemployment climbs. The political climate is also destabilised as left and right groups from around the country resume their struggle for influence.

Mini biography: Born on 29 July 1883 near Predappio in the Forli Province of Romagna, in northeastern Italy, into a working class family. His father is a blacksmith, his mother a school teacher.

1901 - After a difficult childhood during which he is twice expelled from schools for attacking fellow students but easily passes his exams, Mussolini obtains a teaching diploma and works for a year as a schoolteacher at Gaultieri, northeast of Parma, until he is dismissed.

1902 - By now a committed socialist, he emigrates to Switzerland, where he gains a reputation as a journalist, public speaker and political agitator. He is arrested and imprisoned several times.

1904 - He reenters Italy and is drafted into the army for the compulsory two-years of national service.

1906 - When he returns to journalism and political agitation he is again arrested and imprisoned. The arrests continue over the following years as his reputation as a leading Italian socialist begins to rise. He becomes editor of the socialist newspaper 'La Lotta di Classe' (The Class Struggle) in 1909, is appointed secretary of the Socialist Party branch at Forli in his home province in 1910, then in 1912 is appointed editor of the official Socialist newspaper, 'Avanti!' (Forward!) and moves to Milan. Under Mussolini's guidance the paper's circulation soon doubles.

1914 - On the editorial pages of 'Avanti!', Mussolini at first opposes Italy's involvement in the First World War. But, believing that the conflict could bring about the overthrow of capitalism and the opportunity for social renewal, he changes his position and begins to advocate Italian intervention in the war.

At odds with his socialist peers, he resigns from 'Avanti!' and is expelled from the Socialist Party. He assumes the editorship of the pro-war 'Il Popolo d'Italia' (The People of Italy) but does not join the armed forces until he is conscripted. He sees active service and receives a serious wound from a training accident.

1918 - Mussolini returns from the war a confirmed antisocialist. He now believes that only a firm, authoritarian government headed by "a man who is ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep" can overcome the political and economic problems seemingly endemic to Italy.

1919 - At a gathering of war veterans, revolutionary socialists and futurists in Milan in March, Mussolini organises the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Veteran's League), creating a new and powerful force in Italian politics and bringing the word 'fascism' into the public mind. The term is derived from the Italian word 'fascio', meaning 'union' or 'league', and

7

refers to the ancient Roman symbol of discipline and authority, the 'fasces', the standard of rods and an axe borne before Roman officials.

Supporters distinguish themselves by wearing black shirts and by their nationalistic, antiliberal and antisocialist ideals. Working in squads they haunt the countryside, persecuting socialists and unionists, breaking up strikes, burning down union and Socialist Party offices and intimidating local governments.

By late 1921 the fascists control large parts of rural Italy. Mussolini uses his charisma and talent at public speaking to popularise the movement as the bastion of Italian nationalism and a bulkhead against the communist "threat". He receives support from landowners and the urban middle-class.

1921 - At elections for parliament, 35 fascists, including Mussolini, win seats. In November Mussolini organises the movement into a formal political party, the National Fascist Party. The fascists also form their own trade unions, the 'syndicates', to control the labour force.

1922 - When the socialist-led Confederation of Labour calls an antifascist protest strike in the August Mussolini challenges the government to prevent it then sends his fascist squads in as strikebreakers. At a gathering of 40,000 fascists in Naples on 24 October he demands that government be "given to us, or we will seize it by marching on Rome." Four days later the fascist militia begins the march. Mussolini stays in Naples to await the outcome.

On 31 October the king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, summons Mussolini to Rome and asks him to form a new government. Mussolini is appointed prime minister of a coalition government and begins transforming Italy into a fascist regime, where the individual belongs to the state.

He will remain as prime minister, and Italy will be ruled by fascists, for 21 years. The fascist squads are incorporated into an official voluntary militia for national security and the party expands with new recruits.

1924 - At elections held under a corrupted electoral system the fascists win 64% of the vote and 374 seats. When parliament meets, Giacomo Matteotti, the Socialist Party's parliamentary deputy and one of the most effective critics of the regime, denounces the elections as a sham. On 10 June Matteotti is kidnapped and brutally murdered by fascists. The assassins are led by Mussolini's press officer.

1925 - On 3 January, following political and social unrest unleashed by Matteotti's murder, Mussolini seizes dictatorial control and promises to crack down on dissenters. The fascists launch a program to achieve economic and social stability, introducing large-scale public works and a one-party, police state.

Constitutional safeguards against government autocracy are removed. All social, economic and political power is centred on Mussolini. Opposition parties, trade unions, the free press and freedom of speech are banned. The leaders of opposition parties and unions are forced into exile.

8

Public servants are required to swear allegiance to fascism. Mussolini handpicks newspaper editors. A military tribunal is set up to try antifascist "subversives".

In 1928 all executive power is ceded to the Fascist Grand Council, making it the supreme constitutional authority of the state. When the Great Depression devastates the world economy in 1929, Mussolini's policies are able to spare Italy from the full impact of the crisis. His popularity grows and all over the country his speeches draw huge crowds.

1932 - Mussolini grants Croatian fascist Ante Pavelic asylum in Italy and provides his Ustase movement with training camps, protection and financial support. The Ustase soon begin a campaign of terror bombings within Yugoslavia. With Mussolini's backing Pavelic will go on to lead the 'Independent State of Croatia' during the Second World War. Pavelic's reign will be one of the bloodiest of the war and will result in 600,000 to one million deaths.

Mussolini will also provide funds to the Spanish Falange, a fascist-style organisation that will plot with Spanish nationalists to overthrow Spain's elected government.

Meanwhile, in an article co-written with Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini provides a comprehensive definition of fascism. Titled 'The Doctrine of Fascism', the article states, "Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State . It is opposed to classical liberalism.

"The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian and the Fascist State interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people.

"Fascism is opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number; but it is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one.

"Fascism does not, generally speaking, believe in the possibility or utility of perpetual peace. It therefore discards pacifism as a cloak for cowardly supine renunciation in contradistinction to self-sacrifice. War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it. All other tests are substitutes which never place a man face to face with himself before the alternative of life or death. Therefore all doctrines which postulate peace at all costs are incompatible with Fascism.

"Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human society; it denies the right of numbers to govern by means of periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage. Democratic regimes may be described as those under which the people are, from time to time, deluded into the belief that they exercise sovereignty, while all the time real sovereignty resides in and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret forces."

9

The full copy of the article.

1935 - Seeking to expand the Italian Empire in eastern Africa, Mussolini orders the invasion of Ethiopia on 3 October. During the ensuing seven-month campaign the Italian forces use chemical weapons and air power to defeat the Ethiopians. Mussolini announces the Italian victory to a jubilant crowd of 400,000 in Rome on 9 May. In 1937, following a failed assassination attempt on the Italian colonial governor, 30,000 Ethiopians are executed.

1936 - Mussolini joins with German fascist dictator Adolf Hitler in the Rome-Berlin Axis. In 1937, Italy joins Germany and Japan in the 'Anti-Comintern Pact', an agreement to fight the spread of communism.

The Spanish Civil War begins on 18 July when Spanish Nationalists led by Francisco Franco stage a coup against the country's left-leaning Republican Government. Mussolini provides support to Franco and his Nationalist forces. Franco will go on to win the war.

1938 - Following Hitler's lead, the Italian fascist government passes antisemitic laws discriminating against Jews in all sectors of public and private life and preparing the way for the deportation of thousands of Italian Jews to German death camps during the Second World War. Almost 7,000 Italian Jews will be deported. Of these, 5,910 will be killed.

On 29 September Mussolini is a co-signatory to the 'Munich Agreement' between Britain, France, Germany and Italy. The agreement, which cedes the German-speaking area in the north of Czechoslovakia to Germany, is an ill-fated attempt to avoid the Second World War.

On 11 October Mussolini tells his mistress, Claretta Petacci, "those bloody Jews, they should be destroyed, I'll carry out a massacre like the Turks did. I'll build an island and put them all there. They don't even have any gratitude, recognition, not even a letter of thanks. ... They say we need them, their money, their help."

1939 - When Germany occupies all of Czechoslovakia in March Mussolini decides to complete the slow annexation of Albania begun soon after he came to power. Italy invades on 7 April. The Italian-trained Albanian Army is soon overcome, and on 12 April the Albanian parliament votes to unite the country with Italy.

In May, as Germany prepares for war, Mussolini and Hitler agree to a formal military alliance, the 'Pact of Steel'. German troops invade Poland on 1 September. Britain and France declare war on Germany two days later. The Second World War has begun.

Mussolini delays Italy's entry into the war until it appears that Germany will conquer all of Western Europe without his aid. Finally, on 10 June 1940, he joins the Germans and declares war on the Allies. From the start, Hitler treats Mussolini as a junior ally, withholding details of Germany's military plans and failing to provide notice of major offensives.

10

1940 - Smarting from Hitler's secrecy, Mussolini orders the invasion of Greece on 28 October without informing the Germans. The campaign is a disaster and the Germans are forced to intervene in April 1941.

In Africa the Italians launch an attack on British-occupied Egypt from their colony of Libya in September 1940.

1941 - By the start of the year the Italians have been pushed back into Libya. In February Hitler deploys the Afrika Korps led by General Erwin Rommel to launch a counteroffensive against the British.

Italians sent to support Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June also fail.

The United States enters the war when the Japanese air force bombs the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii on 7 December. Italy and Germany declare war on the US on 11 December.

1942 - The German offensive in North Africa is stopped at the beginning of November when Allied troops led by General Bernard Law Montgomery force the German Afrika Korps into a retreat. By 13 May 1943 275,000 Germans and Italians have surrendered. The war in North Africa is over, signalling the end of Italy's African Empire and causing Joseph Goebbels, Germany's propaganda minister, to comment, "We have the worst allies that could possibly be imagined."

1943 - The Allies prepare to land in Sicily and Italy. In the wake of the Italian defeats, Mussolini's popularity begins to nosedive.

The Allied invasion of Sicily comes in July. Italy also appears ripe to fall. Mussolini's days seem numbered. On 24 July an overwhelming majority of the Fascist Grand Council passes a resolution effectively deposing him. The following day he is arrested. He is imprisoned on the island of Ponza off Naples, moved to a remoter island off the coast of Sardinia, then placed in a supposedly impregnable hotel high in the mountains of Abruzzi, east of Rome. But German SS commandos stage a daring rescue on 12 September and he escapes to Munich.

On Hitler's suggestion, Mussolini establishes a new fascist "government" (the 'Italian Social Republic') at Salò on Lake Garda in German occupied territory in Italy's north. The new "government" is nothing more than Hitler's puppet and, with Allied forces advancing northward, will be short lived.

Meanwhile, the legitimate Italian Government signs an armistice with the Allies on 3 September and declares war on Germany in October. The Allies take Naples in same month but because of strong resistance from the German forces now occupying Italy do not reach Rome until June 1944. Florence is liberated in August and the northern cities in April 1945.

1945 - With Germany's defeat imminent, Mussolini attempts to flee to Switzerland disguised as a German soldier but is recognised by Italian partisans and captured on 27 April. He and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, are shot and killed near Lake Como the following day.

11

Their bodies are then transported to Milan where they are hung by the feet with piano wire in Piazza Loreto for public display and humiliation. All of Italy rejoices at the downfall of the dictator and the end of the conflict.

Mussolini's body is buried in an unmarked grave at the Musocco cemetery outside Milan. On 23 April 1946 it is dug up by a neo-fascist and hidden. Over three months later it is retrieved by the police and secretly interred in the chapel of the Cerro Maggiore convent near Milan. On 31 August 1957 Mussolini's remains are permanently laid to rest at the family plot in Predappio.

Postscript

Over 46 million Europeans have died as a result of the war, including 410,000 Italians. Worldwide, over 60 million have died.

1946 - Following a referendum in June, Italy is declared a republic with a new antifascist constitution.

1948 - The first parliamentary elections of the new republic are held in April. A neofascist party advocating Mussolini's ideals wins only 2% of the vote. Italy has repudiated fascism.

Comment: Benito Mussolini, the father of fascism - in retrospect not exactly the century's greatest claim to fame. In its heyday though Italian fascism's economic achievements were at worst respected and at best admired by the rest of the world, and there was no bigger admirer than German dictator Adolf Hitler. Hitler took Mussolini's tenets and applied Nazi ruthlessness to produce a far more rigorous and pervasive fascist state that finally exposed the sterility of the ideology, but not without a sickening human cost.

Stalin

Summary

Under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, tens of millions of ordinary individuals were executed or imprisoned in labour camps that were little more than death camps. Perceived political orientation was the key variable in these mass atrocities. But gender played an important role, and in many respects the Purge period of Soviet history can be considered the worst gendercide of the twentieth century.

The background

According to the historian Robert Conquest, Joseph Stalin "gives the impression of a large and crude claylike figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled." He was nonetheless "a man who perhaps more than any other determined the course of the twentieth century."

12

Joseph StalinStalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in the Georgian town of Gori in 1879. In his youth he imbibed both the seminary training and the Great Russian nationalism that many would later link to his tyrannical exercise of power. He was an early activist in the Bolshevik movement, where he first assumed the pseudonym Stalin (which means "man of steel"), and was twice exiled to Siberia by the Tsarist authorities. When the Russian Revolution triumphed in October 1917, Stalin returned from exile, and was named General Secretary in 1922. The post was largely an undistinguished administrative one, but Stalin used it

to fortify his power base and control over the bureaucracy of the ruling Communist Party. When the communist leader, Vladimir Lenin, died in 1924, a struggle for control broke out that pitted Stalin against his nemesis, Leon Trotsky, and a host of lesser party figures. Stalin's victory was slow and hard-fought, but by 1927 he had succeeded in having Trotsky expelled from the party and, in 1929, from the country (Trotsky was tracked down and killed by Stalin's agents in Mexico City in 1940).

By 1928, Stalin was entrenched as supreme Soviet leader, and he wasted little time in launching a series of national campaigns (the so-called Five-Year Plans) aimed at "collectivizing" the peasantry and turning the USSR into a powerful industrial state. Both campaigns featured murder on a massive scale. Collectivization especially targeted Ukraine, "the breadbasket of the Soviet Union," which clung stubbornly to its own national identity and preference for village-level communal landholdings. In 1932-33, Stalin engineered a famine (by massively raising the grain quota that the peasantry had to turn over to the state); this killed between six and seven million people and broke the back of Ukrainian resistance. The Ukrainian famine has only recently been recognized as one of the most destructive genocides of the twentieth century (see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, and the Web resources compiled by The Ukrainian Weekly). The Five-Year Plans for industry, too, were implemented in an extraordinarily brutal fashion, leading to the deaths of millions of convict labourers, overwhelmingly men. These atrocities are described in the corvée (forced) labour case study. The millions of deaths in Stalin's "Gulag Archipelago" (the network of labour camps [gulags] scattered across the length and breath of Russia) are dealt with in the incarceration/death penalty case study.

A leader whose callous disregard for human life was matched only by his consuming paranoia, Stalin next turned his attention to the Communist Party itself. Various factions and networks opposed to his rule had managed to survive into the early 1930s; many in the party were now calling for reconciliation with the peasantry, a de-emphasizing of industrial production, and greater internal democracy. For Stalin, these dissident viewpoints represented an unacceptable

13

threat. Anyone not unquestioningly loyal to him -- and many hundreds of thousands who were -- had to be "weeded out." The Communist Party would be rebuilt in the image of the "Great Leader." This was the origin of the "cult of personality" that permeated Soviet politics and culture, depicting Stalin as infallible, almost deity-like. (The cult lasted until his death in 1953, and provided George Orwell with the fuel for his satire Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a Stalin-like figure appears as "Big Brother.") Stalin's drive for total control, and his pressing need for convict labour to fuel rapid industrialization, next spawned the series of immense internal purges -- beginning in 1935 -- that sent millions of party members and ordinary individuals to their deaths, either through summary executions or in the atrocious conditions of the "Gulag Archipelago."

A hagiographic portrait of Stalin as the "Great Leader."

By the time Stalin's wrath descended on his countrymen and women, the USSR had already suffered a devastating decline in its cohort of younger adult males. World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent civil war that pitted "Reds" against "Whites," had inflicted its "heaviest" losses "in the age group 16-49, particularly in its male contingent," writes Richard Pipes, "of which it had eradicated by August 1920 -- that is, before the famine [of 1922] had done its work -- 29 percent." The monstrous famines of the early 1920s and early 1930s were indiscriminate in their impact on the afflicted populations. But the campaign of mass executions launched against the kulaks -- designated "wealthier" peasants -- also overwhelmingly targeted males. "In Kiev jail they are reported at this time [1929-30] shooting 70-120 men a night," reports Robert Conquest; a typical story "is of the Ukrainian village of Velyki Solontsi where, after 52 men had been removed as kulaks, their women and children were taken, dumped on a sandy stretch along the Vorskla River and left there." (Excerpts from Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow.) The vast majority of "kulaks" imprisoned in the labour/death camps were also male (see the incarceration/death penalty case study). The gendered impact of the Purge period itself on Soviet society we now turn to consider.

The gendercide

Hello Papa I forgot how to write soon in School I will go through the first winter come quickly because it's bad we have no Papa mama says you are away on work or sick and what are you

14

waiting for run away from that hospital here Olyeshenka ran away from hospital just in his shirt mama will sew you new pants and I will give you my belt all the same the boys are all afraid of me, and Olyeshenka is the only one I never beat up he also tells the truth he is also poor and I once lay in fever and wanted to die along with mother and she did not want to and I did not want to, oh, my hand is numb from write thats enough I kiss you lots of times ...       Igoryok 6 and one half years       - Letter to an imprisoned victim of Stalin's Purges, cited by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 654-55.

The most prominent elements of Stalin's Purges, for most researchers, were the intensive campaigns waged within key Soviet institutions and sectors like the Communist Party, the Army, the NKVD (secret police), and scientists and engineers. In December 1934, the popular Leningrad party leader, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated, allegedly on Stalin's orders. This provided the spark for the escalating series of purges that Stalin launched almost immediately, under emergency "security" legislation "stat[ing] that in cases involving people accused of terrorist acts, investing authorities were to speed up their work, judicial authorities were not to allow appeals for clemency or other delays in which the sentence was death, and the NKVD was to execute those sentenced to death immediately." (Frank Smitha, "Terror in the Soviet Union".)

Nikolai Bukharin, Purge victimThe "Old Bolshevik" elite was targeted in three key "show trials" between 1936 and 1938, in which leaders such as Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Grigori Zinoviev were accused of complicity in Kirov's murder and conspiring with Trotskyite and "rightist" elements to undermine communism in the USSR. The evidence presented against the accused was almost nonexistent, convictions relying on confessions extracted through torture and threats against family members. But convictions there were, and most of the Bolshevik "old guard" was sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment. "Dumfounded, the world watched three plays in a row, three wide-ranging and expensive dramatic productions in which the powerful leaders of the fearless Communist Party, who had turned the entire world upside down and

terrified it, now marched forth like doleful, obedient goats and bleated out everything they had been ordered to, vomited all over themselves, cringingly abased themselves and their convictions, and confessed to crimes they could not in any wise have committed." So writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, adding: "This was uprecedented in remembered history." (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, p. 408.)

When the "Old Bolsheviks" had been consigned to oblivion, their successors and replacements quickly followed them into the void: "The new generation of Stalinist careerists, who had adapted themselves completely to the new system, still found themselves arrested. ... They were succeeded by younger but similar characters, who again often fell quickly." (Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 224.) The purging of the army, meanwhile, saw about 35,000 military officers shot or imprisoned. The destruction of the officer corps, and in particular the execution of the brilliant chief-of-staff Marshal Tukhachevsky, is considered one of the major

15

reasons for the spectacular Nazi successes in the early months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.)

But the impetus to "cleanse" the social body rapidly spilled beyond these elite boundaries, and the greatest impact of the Purge was felt in the wider society -- where millions of ordinary Soviet citizens assisted in "unmasking" their compatriots. Frank Smitha describes this mass hysteria well, writing that

A society that is intense in its struggle for change has a flip side to its idealism: intolerance. People saw enemies everywhere, enemies who wanted to destroy the revolution and diminish the results of their hard work and accomplishments, enemies who wanted to restore capitalism for selfish reasons against the collective interests of the nation. If those at the top of the Communist Party and an old revolutionary like Trotsky could join the enemy, what about lesser people? In factories and offices, mass meetings were held in which people were urged to be vigilant against sabotage. It was up to common folks to make the distinction between incompetence and intentional wrecking [i.e., sabotage], and any mishap might be blamed on wrecking. Denunciations became common. Neighbors denounced neighbors. Denunciations were a good way of striking against people one did not like, including one's parents, a way of eliminating people blocking one's promotion, and ... a means of proving one's patriotism. Many realized that some innocent people were being victimized, and the saying went around that "when you chop wood the chips fly." As with Lenin, it was believed that some who were innocent would have to be victimized if all of the guilty were to be apprehended.

Stalin, allegedly signing a death warrant. "Blind chance rules a man's life in this country of ours," said one NKVD officer, who found himself suddenly placed under arrest. For ordinary citizens, "Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition." (Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 434.) Solzhenitsyn adds: "Any adult inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up to a member of the Politburo, always knew that it would take only one careless word or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss." (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 633.)

Much has been written about the absurdly minor infractions for which individuals were sentenced to ten

years in labour camps -- standardly a death sentence. "A tailor laying aside his needle stuck it into a newspaper on the wall so it wouldn't get lost and happened to stick it in the eye of a portrait of Kaganovich [a member of the Soviet Politburo]. A customer observed this. Article 58, ten years (terrorism). A saleswoman accepting merchandise from a forwarder noted it down on a sheet of newspaper. There was no other paper. The number of pieces of soap happened to fall on the forehead of Comrade Stalin. Article 58, ten years." (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 293.)

16

The gendering of the witch-hunt was cast into particularly sharp relief in those cases where most, sometimes almost all, adult males among a given population were rounded up for mass arrest and probable death. Writes Robert W. Thurston: "According to some reports, entire groups of men were taken in one swoop by the NKVD. 'Almost all the male inhabitants of the little Greek community where I lived [in the lower Ukraine] had been arrested,' recalled one émigré. Another reported that the NKVD took all males between the ages of seventeen and seventy from his village of German-Russians. ... In some stories, the police clearly knew they were arresting innocent people. For example, an order reportedly arrived in Tashkent to 'Send 200 [prisoners]!' The local NKVD was at its wits' end about who else to arrest, having exhausted all the obvious possibilities, until it learned that a band of 'gypsies' (Romany) had just camped in town. Police surrounded them and charged every male from seventeen to sixty with sabotage." In the city of Zherinka, "'Ivan Ivanovich' ... had his wife sew rubles [Soviet currency] into his coat because the NKVD was taking all the men in his town." (Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996], pp. 79-80, 150.)

Nikolai Yezhov crushes the traitors ina Soviet propaganda cartoon.As the above examples suggest, the campaigns were further fuelled by the "denunciation quotas" established under the authority of Nikolai Yezhov, who took over as head of the NKVD in September 1936 and immediately widened the scope of secret-police persecutions. (Soviet citizens often referred to the Great Terror as the Yezhovshchina, "the times of Yezhov.") Relatives of those accused and arrested, including wives and children down to the age of twelve, were themselves often condemned under the "counter-terrorism" legislation: "Wives of enemies of the people" was one of four categories of those sentenced to execution or long prison terms. Women accounted

for only a small minority of those executed and incarcerated on political grounds (perhaps 2 percent of the former and 5 percent of the latter). Conquest notes that "Women on the whole seem to have survived [incarceration] much better than men," although "in the mixed[-sex] camps, noncriminal [i.e., political-prisoner] women were frequently mass-raped by urkas [male criminals], or had to sell themselves for bread, or to get protection from camp officials.") But wives spared arrest or state-sanctioned murder nonetheless encountered extreme hardship. "For the wives ... life was very bad," writes Conquest. "... All reports agree that the women lost their jobs, their rooms, and their permits, had to sell possessions, and had to live on occasional work or on the few relatives who might help them. Ignorant of their husbands' fate, they faced a worsening future." (The Great Terror: A Reassessment, pp. 235, 264, 315) As Solzhenitsyn puts it:

There in that stinking damp world in which only executioners and the most blatant of betrayers flourished, where those who remained honest became drunkards, since they had no strength of will for anything else ... in which every night the gray-green hand reached out and collared

17

someone in order to pop him into a box -- in that world millions of women wandered about lost and blinded, whose husbands, sons, or fathers had been torn from them and dispatched to the Archipelago. They were the most scared of all. They feared shiny nameplates, office doors, telephone rings, knocks on the door, the postman, the milkwoman, and the plumber. And everyone in whose path they stood drove them from their apartments, from their work, and from the city. ... And these women had children who grew up, and for each one there came a time of extreme need when they absolutely had to have their father back, before it was too late, but he never came. (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 664.)

By 1938, Conquest estimates that about 7 million Purge victims were in the labour/death camps, on top of the hundreds of thousands who had been slaughtered outright. In the worst camps, such as those of the Kolyma gold-mining region in the Arctic, the survival rate was just 2 or 3 percent (see the incarceration/death penalty case study). Alexander Solzhenitsyn calls the prison colonies in the Solovetsky Islands "the Arctic Auschwitz," and cites the edict of their commander, Naftaly Frenkel, which "became the supreme law of the Archipelago: 'We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months -- after that we don't need him anymore.'" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 49.)

Robert Conquest The main evidence for the gendercidal impact of the "Great Terror" lies in the Soviet census of 1959. In a fascinating addendum to the original edition of his work on the Purge period, The Great Terror, Robert Conquest uses the census figures to argue that the Soviet population "was some 20 million lower than Western observers had expected after making allowance for war losses." "But the main point," he notes, "arises from a consideration of the figures for males and females in the different age groups." He then unveils a striking table indicating that whereas age cohorts up to 25-29 displayed the usual 51-to-49 percent split of women to men, from 30-34 the gap widened to 55 to 45 percent. Thereafter, the disparity became massive, reflecting the generations of males caught up in the purges and the Great Patriotic War.

From 35-39, women outnumbered men by 61 to 39 percent; from 40-54, the figure was 62 to 38 percent; in the 55-59 age group, 67 to 33 percent; from 60-69, 65 to 35 percent; and 70 or older, 68 to 32 percent. Conquest summarizes the findings as follows:

Many women died as a result of the war and the purges. But in both cases the great bulk of the victims was certainly male. From neither cause should there be much distinction in the figures for the sexes for the under-30 age groups in 1959. Nor is there. For the 30-34 block the[re] ... is a comparatively small difference, presumably indicating the losses of the young Army men in their late teens during the war. In the 35-39 group, which could have been expected to take the major war losses, we find figures of 391 to 609 women. One would have thought that these men, in their early twenties in the war, would have had the highest losses. But the proportion then gets worse still, and for the 40-44, 45-49 and 50-54 [cohorts] remains a set 384 to 616. Even more striking, the worst proportion of all comes for the 55-59 age group (334 to 666: in fact in this group alone there are almost exactly twice as many women as men). The figures for the 60-69 group (349 to 691) and for the 70 and over group (319 to 681) are also much worse than the soldiers' groups. Now all authorities agree that the Purge struck in the main at people "between

18

thirty and fifty-five"; "generally, arrested people are all thirty or over. That's the dangerous age: you can remember things." There were few young or old, most of them being "in the prime of life." Add twenty years for the 1959 position.

Precise deductions are not possible. Older men died as soldiers in the war. But on the other hand, the mass dispatch to labour camps of prisoners of war returned from Nazi hands in 1945 must have led to an extra, and non-military, death rate among the younger males. So must the guerrilla fighting in the Baltic States and the Western Ukraine, which lasted for years after the war; and so must the deportations from the Caucasus and the general renewal of Purge activities in the post-war period. But in any case, the general effect of the figures is clear enough. The wastage of millions of males in the older age groups is too great to be masked, whatever saving assumptions we may make. We here have, frozen into the census figures, a striking indication of the magnitude of the losses inflicted in the Purge. (Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968], pp. 711-12. Emphasis added.)

A key analytical question is to what extent this gendered slaughter should be considered an actual gendercide -- that is, by our definition, a gender-selective killing. As noted in the "Summary" section above, it was imputed political orientation and alleged "wrecking" activities that generally governed the selection of victims, and many innocent women were swept up in the holocaust. But other variables always figure in gendercides, and are especially prominent in the case of men. In Bosnia-Herzegovina or Bangladesh in 1971, for example, it was not all men who were targeted, but those belonging to the targeted ethnic/political grouping. In the opinion of Gendercide Watch, the sheer overwhelming proportion of (innocent) males among the politically-targeted victims indeed qualifies Stalin's Purges as a gendercide.

The "gendering" of the slaughter may be extended further still. In a passage from her provocative study of the witch-hunts in early-modern England, Malevolent Nurture -- it is in fact the concluding passage of the book -- Deborah Willis develops her sophisticated gendering of the hunts with an important digression on "some of the most virulent of the twentieth-century 'witch-hunts,'" in which "violence has been directed against symbolic 'fathers' or other figures of authority." The trend is especially prominent "in countries where newly emergent but precarious ruling elites needed 'others' to blame for the serious economic or other problems they faced." The example she chooses is Stalin's Purges:

... During the 1930s and 1940s in Stalin's Soviet Union, leadership fractured at all levels, not only within Stalin's "inner circle" but also within local and regional party machines (paralleling in some ways the neighborly quarrels and religious controversies that divided early modern communities). As power oscillated between different factions, purges were carried out in the name of Stalin, "Father of the Country," "the Great and Wise Teacher," "the Friend of Mankind," against the antifathers and betraying sons who had perverted the socialist program, the "enemies with party cards." Underlying the psychology of the purges may have been, among other things, the magical beliefs of the Russian peasantry, still lively in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, translated after the Revolution into the language of "scientific socialism." Rather than the female witch, however, it was the male possessed by evil spirits who anticipated the typical target of persecutory violence -- the "evil spirits" of foreign, class-alien, or counterrevolutionary ideas. Demystified, secularized, stripped of his supernatural power, the great demonic adversary

19

no longer needed to seduce a weaker [female] vessel but could walk among the elect as one of their own. (Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995], pp. 244-45; see also the discussion of Willis's findings in the European witch-hunt case study.)

Willis's comments are a rare treatment of the gendering of modern "witch-hunts," of which Stalin's Purges stand as the most prominent and destructive example. (Indonesia in 1965-66, East Pakistan/Bangladesh in 1971, Punjab/Kashmir, the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, and the Balkans wars of the 1990s [see also the Srebrenica and Kosovo case studies] are just a few of the contemporary gendercides that could be added to the list.) Willis's analysis also draws out a number of the key variables (social class, political affiliation) that typically combine with gender to produce gendercidal outcomes.

How many died?

In the original version of his book The Great Terror, Robert Conquest gave the following estimates of those arrested, executed, and incarcerated during the height of the Purge:

Arrests, 1937-1938 - about 7 millionExecuted - about 1 millionDied in camps - about 2 millionIn prison, late 1938 - about 1 millionIn camps, late 1938 - about 8 million

Conquest concluded that "not more than 10 percent of those then in camp survived." Updating his figures in the late 1980s based on recently-released archival sources, he increased the number of "arrests" to 8 million, but reduced the number in camps to "7 million, or even a little less." This would give a total death toll for the main Purge period of just under ten million people. About 98 percent of the dead (Gendercide Watch's calculation) were male.

The estimates are "only approximations," Conquest notes, and "anything like complete accuracy on the casualty figures is probably unattainable." But "it now seems that further examination of the data will not go far from the estimates we now have except, perhaps, to show them to be understated"; and "in any case, the sheer magnitudes of the Stalin holocaust are now beyond doubt." He cites Joseph Berger's remark that the atrocities of Stalin's rule "left the Soviet Union in the condition of 'a country devastated by nuclear warfare.'" (All figures and quotes from Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, pp. 485-88.)

Who was responsible?

One of the enduring debates over this era of Soviet history is whether Stalin's despotism marked a decisive break with previous Bolshevik practice, or whether it was merely a continuation of the brutal and dictatorial system installed under his predecessor, Lenin. Scholarship has increasingly favoured the "continuity" thesis, articulated by Richard Pipes in his book

20

Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime: "Stalin was a true Leninist in that he faithfully followed his patron's political philosophy and practices. Every ingredient of what has come to be known as Stalinism save one -- murdering fellow Communists -- he had learned from Lenin, and that includes the two actions for which he is most severely condemned: collectivization and mass terror. Stalin's megalomania, his vindictiveness, his morbid paranoia, and other odious personal qualities should not obscure the fact that his ideology and modus operandi were Lenin's. A man of meager education, he had no other source of ideas." (See the excerpts from Pipes' book.)

As is always the case with mass atrocities, the Purge provided an opportunity for many career-minded individuals, overwhelmingly men, to move up the ladder and experience a taste of absolute power. "To know what it meant to be a bluecap [interrogator] one had to experience it!" writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "Anything you saw was yours! Any apartment you looked at was yours! Any woman was yours! Any enemy was struck from your path! The earth beneath your feet was yours! The heaven above you was yours -- it was, after all, like your cap, sky blue!" (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1 [New York: Harper & Row, 1973], pp. 151-52.) Solzhenitsyn likens the commanders of the death camps, meanwhile, to feudal lords: "Like the estate owner, the chief of the camp could take any slave to be his lackey, cook, barber, or jester (and he could also assemble a serf theater if he wished); he could take any slave woman as a housekeeper, a concubine, or a servant." (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 150.)

The aftermath

The impetus of the Purge waned at the end of 1938, by which time "the snowball system [of accusations] had reached a stage where half the urban population were down on the NKVD lists," and the proportion of the entire Soviet population arrested had reached one in every twenty. "One can virtually say that every other family in the country on average must have had one of its members in jail," proportions that were "far higher among the educated classes.Even from Stalin's point of view, the whole thing had become impossible.To have gone on would have been impossible economically, politically, and even physically, in that interrogators, prisons, and camps, already grotesquely overloaded, could not have managed it. And meanwhile, the work of the mass Purge had been done. The country was crushed." Stalin now eased the pressure, dismissing Yezhov from his post (he would subsequently be executed) and declaring that "grave mistakes" had occurred, though on balance the results of the Purge "were beneficial." (Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, pp. 289-290, 440.)

But "terror was ... by no means abandoned as an instrument of political rule; indeed, four of the six executed members of Stalin's Politburo perished between 1939 and 1941." (Gerhard Rempel, "The Purge".) And overall, instead of subsiding, the Great Terror simply changed its choice of targets. After the Germans and Soviets divided up Poland between them in September 1939, nearly half a million Poles (almost exclusively male) and 200,000 Polish prisoners-of-war were sent to camps, where the vast majority died. When the tables turned and the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin pulled back, releasing many surviving prisoners to serve in the armed forces. But those hoping that the end of the Second World War, in which the USSR played the major role in defeating the Nazis and their allies, would mean a liberalization of society were sadly disillusioned. Instead, Stalin allowed his old paranoia to surface anew. Returning Soviet prisoners-of-war were sent to the labour camps as suspected "traitors," and

21

fresh "plots" were discovered that swelled the camps' population to some 12 million people by the time Stalin finally died in March 1953.

The man who emerged as Soviet leader after a brief interregnum following Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev, acted swiftly to dismantle much of Stalin's legacy. Most of the camp inmates were released, and after Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, many of the prominent victims of the Purge were posthumously rehabilitated. But the Khrushchev "thaw" ended even before his fall from power in 1964, and the subsequent regime of Leonid Brezhnev staged a limited rehabiliation of Stalin himself. The Nobel Prize-winning writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose massive work The Gulag Archipelago (published abroad) did so much to bring the horrors of Stalinism to light, was exiled for his pains in the 1970s. Only with the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 did Stalin's legacy begin to be seriously investigated and re-examined -- a process that led to a spiralling series of revelations, each more horrific than the last. With the fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet scholars like Edvard Radzinsky and Dmitri Volkogonov have published prominent exposés of Stalinist rule, based on newly-opened archives (see "Further Reading"). And the estimates of the death toll arrived at by Robert Conquest and others, long denounced as craven exaggerations, have been shown instead to be, if anything, understated.

The Holocaust in Romania

Anti-Semitism had a very strong popular and intellectual basin in Romania comparable to

other countries; the Jewish minority was a comparatively large and diverse (4.4% of the total

population of Romania in 1930). They were present in all social layers, and were deeply resented

in this area more than in any other European country. This started to change soon after World

War I, discriminatory policies being instituted in Romanian universities1.

Beside the moderately authoritarian Neoliberals and LANC (an anti-Semitic group - Liga

Apărării Naţional-Creştine ), The National Socialist Party of Romania (PSNR), founded by

Colonel Ştefan Tătărescu in 1932, was imitating Nazism. An important actor in romanian anti-

Semitism was held by Legion of the Archangel Michael, whose founder was Corneliu Zelea

Codreanu, who was emphasizing that “everything is possible” and, in typical revolutionary and

fascist manner, that “everything depends on will”2.

1 Stanley Payne, “Four Major Variants of Fascism-Romania” in Idem, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 277.2 Stanley Payne, “Four Major Variants of Fascism-Romania” in Idem, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 279-309.

22

Legion’s immediate targets were the corrupt leaders of the system of the time, but Jews

were the actual arch-enemy in Codreanu’s mystical vision of Romanian future. Payne states that

“the Legion was possibly the only other fascist movement as vehemently anti-Semitic as German

Nazis. Building on preexisting trends that were already powerful in Romania, the Legion

encouraged the most extreme policies, to the extent that General Zizi Cantacuzino, one of

Codreanu’s leading collaborators, declared that the only way to solve the Jewish problem in

Romania was simply to kill the Jews”3.

During Antonescu’s regime almost 330.000 Jews were murdered in the territories of

Basarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria. Even though it is said that much of the killings were

committed by Romanian troops, substantial murders happened behind the front line.

Antonescu’s aim was “national totalitarian state”, along the conceptuallines of nazi New

Order. As Carol II. in the past, in my opinion he had to consider a cooperation with the

Legionnaires, due to their strong provincial and local administrative positions. “Legion also

controled the propaganda and organized an endless series of public ceremonies and marches. A

wave of terror was launched against Jews and political enemies, the local case verzi all over

Romania becoming interrogation and torture chambers, with the party alliance with the regular

police”4. Deadly pogroms were organized by local populations during the Second World War.

These pogroms included the one from Iaşi where approximately 14.000 Jews were killed by

Romanian residents and police.

Half of the 320,000 Jews living in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Dorohoi district in

Romania were murdered within months of the entry of the country into the war during 1941.

Even after the initial killings, Jews in Moldavia, Bukovina and Bessarabia were subject to

frequent pogroms, and were concentrated into ghettos from which they were sent

to concentration camps, including camps built and run by Romanians. The number of deaths in

this area is not certain, but the lowest respectable estimates run to about 250,000 Jews (and

25,000 Roma) in these eastern regions, while 120,000 of Transylvania's 150,000 Jews died at the

hands of the Germans later in the war5.

3Stanley Payne, “Four Major Variants of Fascism-Romania” in Idem, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 394.4 Stanley Payne, “Four Major Variants of Fascism-Romania” in Idem, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 394.5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania_during_World_War_II., consulted on November 10th 2010.

23

One of the secrets which Antonescu shared with Hitler was concerning the Jews.

Antonescu agreed to Hitler’s plan of mass extermination and therefore the began to take actions

against them.

At first, Antonescu complained to the German Ambassador Killinger declaring that the

returning of the Romanian Jews from Ukraine to Basarabia is in contradiction with the general

guidelines regarding the treatment of the Eastern Jews which the Fuhrer had exposed at

Munchen6.

After that, massacres begun ordered by Antonescu. Examples of mass killings are the

pogroms (Iaşi), Odessa massacre and the murderes from Transnistria and Bukovina. A common

assessment ranks Antonescu's Romania as second only to Nazi Germany in its anti-semitic

extermination policies. Jews weren’t the only ones persecuted by Antonescu’s regime. Roma

people suffered the same treatment.

It is commonly accepted by the historians, that Romania’s war effort in terms of actual

fighting was much better in the World War II, compared to World War I. Antonescu’s

competence as a military comander and his personal qualities, particullarly shown later during

his trial and even execution, are vastly overshadowed by “the wholesale slaughter of Jews in the

newly occupied territories - a genocide operationally separate from the Nazi Final Solution.

Carried out by Romanian soldiers and police, this nonautomated holocaust killed between two

hundred thousand and three hundred thousand Jews and was by far the greatest liquidation of

Jews by non-German forces”7.

Books

1. 1. I wanted to kill Hitler – Walkyria operation , the last survivor of the conspiracy from from the 20th July 1944, – autor : Philipp freiherr von Boeselager, ‘ Philipp von Boeselager is one of those rare beings who knew how to make from experience and from their entire life a precious testimony for our age. There is something which proposes you to discover this book. If it weren`t those scars from the injuries suffered during the confrontations , nothing from the being of this old men , which gives you feeling of inner peace , you wouldn`t have known that he met the endless nightmare of the second World War . Not even a chase that he met that state of Inner tension due to the participation to the conspiracies against Hitler. Being a conspirator means to think of a crime. For the german allies , this was equivalent with the

6Jean ANCEL, Holochaust in Romania, archive sources. 7 Stanley Payne, “Four Major Variants of Fascism-Romania” in Idem, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 396.

24

betrayal of the home and speeding its final destruction. After all , this meant to live a double life , a very difficult exercise for someone who received chivalric education. Evocation of Philipp von Boeselauger and ignoring Georg would have been with no sense. Inseparable Brothers , both in childhood games and in hardness war , the shared the burden of the secret of conspiracy. Undoubdtedly , from a sense of duty , a way of being and of living , the illustrared thing from an anecdotal episode, scale reported history , will be related in the afterword. Philipp von Boeslauger accepted to participate to long debates about this period , which provided the necessary material for this book . He doesn`t speak with pleasure about those times. Each evocation rummages cruel memories and many sufferings. The participation to the conspiracy against Hitler was hard to be kept , mostly after war. Not even his wife knew about this secret imediately . But he is the only actor alive . He doesn`t believe in hazard so he knows that if he managed to survive, the life offered him this gift for telling , as well. . – Florence si Jerome Fehrenbach , Saint-Chaffrey, august 16 2007 , pag . 7-8

The “ diplomatic “ action , the nonaggression pact Germanic –sovietic with the secret additional protocol, Hitler- Stalin pact from 23 August 1939- was followed immediately by the military action , the pact served only as a preparation for the war and paved the way for Hitler for the attack against Poland, reducing the risks at the same time. Stalin followed Hitler and facilitated the german extension to the east by the corresponding extension of the Soviet Union to the West. . ( To be seen Hermann Graml, ‘ Europe Weg in den Krieg.Hitler und die Machte’, 1990, as well as Horst Moller, ‘Europa zwischen den Weltkriegen’, second edition , Munchen, 2000)

3. Letters to Hitler – one people is writing to its Fuhrer. Secret documents from the Moscow`s aschieves , published for the first time . author : Henrik Eberle.

4. Holocaust in the periphery – The prosecution and the destruction of the jews in Romania and Transnistria during 1940-1944 , , authors : Wolfgang Benz, Brigitte Mihok

5.The black book. The sufferings of the jews in Romania 1940-1944 . Authors : Matatias Carp, in English : Andrew L.Simion (Ed.), Matatias Carp, Holocaust in Romania, Safety Harbor (FI), 2000.

6. Fascism in its ages , author : Ernst Nolte Even after 30 years from its first appearance - 1963 – Ernst Nolte`s book is absolutely indispensable to each debate regarding fascism. The author added to the ninth edition a “ Retrospective after 30 years “ positioning in the general framework of his work dedicated to the history of the modern ideologies.

Kurt sontheimer (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung): Nolte's

book enriches in an entirelyexceptional understanding of fascism as a general phenomenon. A book with a clearsuicidal, style and impressive history in full control of the substrate.

Journal of Modern History: The study of fascism, Ernst Nolte is the work of HannahArendt 'elements and origins of totalitarianism' so far, the

25

most important attempt toinvade that philosophical thinking in a historical analysis of the recent past.

Hans-Ulrich wehler (Journal of Sociology and sociallypsychological of Cologne): Nolte'ssuccess to unite these two disciplines - philosophy and historiography - what makes thiswork, in my opinion, and it actually is: the most important work of historiography ofrecent decades.

Conclusion

Over six million Jews of all ages, social strata and affiliations were murdered in the

Holocaust. The hundreds of thousands who escaped, whether by hiding or by joining the

underground or partisan units and the few who survived the camps refused to return to their

former homes.

Those lands had become graveyards to them, and they could not face the prospect of

resuming life in those countries. The very few who had survived the period of darkness,

suffering and death and who had returned to their native cities and villages in eastern Europe,

were received with anger and hostility.

The Holocaust happened to a particular people for particular reasons at a particular time. We

all are possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders. The Holocaust is a warning. It

adds 3 commandments to the ten of the Jewish-Christian tradition: Thus shalt not be a

perpetrator; Thou shalt not be a passive victim; and thou most certainly shalt not be a bystander.

The Ideological totalitarian regimes are neither right nor left, right and left assuming the

democratic references that refer to the Western liberal political regimes. The common feature of

the totalitarian regimes is that, coming to power, they seek to destroy the democratic

organization. The difference between them is that the Nazi regime explicitly expresses goals

(extermination), while the Leninist hided them permanently. Moreover, the Bolshevism is

annexing the universal ideals of humanity, freedom and justice, while is doing exactly the

26

opposite, which makes it much more dangerous than Nazism. In addition, if the Nazi regime

didn’t resist more than 12 years, ending in losing the war that it started in the first place, the

communist regime ended in the winning side, which made it even stronger.

The totalitarian regimes have had a great impact on world’s history, an impact that was still felt

in countries such as China or Russia. They relied on force, violence and dictatorship.

Totalitarianism was the heyday in the interwar period when all countries were confused by the

First World War and the economy did not enter in the defeated states to normal.

Being ruled by one man, the political totalitarianism indoctrinated the masses, reducing the

freedom of the citizen to near zero. In the countries affected by this plague, fear and suspicion

overtook the people who begun to spill the beans onto each other, even as a family.

Totalitarianism has reached maturity in Russia, Germany and Italy. In these countries, individual

freedom was almost completely reduced. This absolute control of the state was in opposition to

liberalism and democracy. If liberalism sought to limit state power, and protect the sacred rights

of the individual, based on respect, the totalitarianism was based on respect imposed by force. At

the base of the totalitarian state stays the almighty leader and the unique party.

(rethinking the holocaust, reading of Petrescu)

Bibliography

ANCEL, Jean, Holocaust in Romania, archive sources.

GIURESCU, Dinu C., “Romania During the Second World War,” in Dinu C. Giurescu and

Stephen Fischer-Galaţi, eds., Romania: A Historic Perspective (Boulder, Colorado: East

European Monographs, 1998), pp. 321-389.

27

PAYNE, Stanley, “Four Major Variants of Fascism-Romania” in Idem, A History of Fascism,

1914-1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 277-289, and 391-397.

The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143, consulted on November 10th 2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania_during_World_War_II., consulted on November 10th 2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Ghettos_.281940.E2.80.931945.29, consulted on November 12th 2010.

28