(This takes four minutes to read.)

I know that I have discussed this before, but it is worth bringing up again but there remain too many people who neglect to bespeak the other Axis powers’ crimes. Implications that solely the German Fascists or specifically their head of state were responsible for the Shoah are quite common but misleading. In reality, all of the Western Axis powers were involved in antisemitic as well as antiziganist atrocities, and usually without orders from Berlin.

It is true that the Third Reich contributed to European antisemitism along with antiziganism. I can’t deny that. Even so, given that these powers (unlike the Eastern Axis) had lengthy histories of both phenomena, external pressure would have been redundant.

Quoting Radu Ioanid’s The Holocaust in Romania: the Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944:

Forced by the national—and international—outcry […] President Iliescu created the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel and composed of scholars from Romania, the United States, Israel, France, and Germany, which presented to President Iliescu its report in October 2004. The report was endorsed by President Ion Iliescu and his successor, President Traian Băsescu, who was elected at the end of the same year.

The Commission summarized through its volume containing the report along with a second volume of documents the history of the Holocaust in Romania, concluding that between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were murdered or died in the territories under Romanian control, and that an additional 135,000 Romanian Jews living under Hungarian jurisdiction were also murdered. The final report also concluded that 25,000 Roma were deported to Transnistria, out of whom about 11,000 perished.

Quoting Grant T. Harward’s Romania’s Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust, chapter 4:

Bartu Buzea recalled one case of summary execution for indiscipline. A sergeant who had been ordered to shoot a Jewish family instead let them go after [he carnally abused] the daughter. After finding out, the 2nd Grăniceri Regiment commander assembled the unit and, after some words about discipline, shot the sergeant.¹⁵² Soldiers still got away with looting under the cover of authorized reprisals.

Cetatea Albă’s few remaining Jews were held in a synagogue, while Jews from nearby towns were imprisoned in another. On 3 August, Major Virgil Drăgan, commander of the city market; Captain Olimpiu Mihailescu, assistant gendarme commander; and Major Horia Olteanu, an SSI officer, met with two SS officers. Einsatzgruppe D now ignored the Commissar Order’s limits and murdered Jews indiscriminately.¹⁵³ The Cetatea Albă garrison commander was absent, but these low-ranking officers went ahead, without orders, with plans to liquidate the Jews in the city.

When Captain Alexandru Ochișor reminded them at dawn of recent orders instructing suspected communists be sent to Chișinău, they woke Colonel Marcela Petala, the Third Army chief praetor who happened to be visiting the city, to obtain permission to shoot the Jews. Petala was angry to be disturbed. “In Chișinău all Jews are imprisoned in a ghetto and in every night they pull out hundreds of Jews f[or] executions!”¹⁵⁴

Under Ochișor’s eye, groups of forty were driven to the maritime railway station, where in two days some one thousand Jews were interrogated, stripped of valuables, and shot in a quarry.¹⁵⁵ A month later, 150 Jews from Chilia Nouă who stopped in Cetatea Albă were murdered for their belongings.¹⁵⁶ Soldiers were almost never punished for crimes against Jews.

While the Fourth Army crossed at Dubossary, gendarmes pushed twenty-five thousand Jews across the Dniester at Mogilev.¹⁵⁷ General von Schobert complained that Jews clogged roads and bridges, threatened telecommunications, consumed rations, spread disease, and should be kept for labor. On 6 August, General Ciupercă issued an order repeating these points and banning gendarmes from pushing Jews over at Dubossary.¹⁵⁸ General Antonescu met Hitler that day too. He received a Knight’s Cross and orders for the Fourth Army to capture Odessa.¹⁵⁹

During the meeting, the crisis at Mogilev worsened. [Wehrmacht] troops pushed three thousand Jews back into northern Bessarabia and shot thousands of others who were too exhausted to move.¹⁶⁰ The following day Romanian gendarmes stopped [Wehrmacht] troops from sending back more Jews; nevertheless, within a week 12,500 Jews, not counting 4,000 dead, had been returned. Antonescu whined that this was “contrary to the guidelines which the Führer had set forth to him in Munich regarding the treatment of eastern Jews.”¹⁶¹

On 15 August, gendarmes guarding twelve hundred Jews at the Tătăraști labor camp in southern Bessarabia shot hundreds when they became “aggressive.”¹⁶² By now soldiers and gendarmes had killed an estimated 43,500 Jews in northern Bukovina and Bessarabia.¹⁶³

(Emphasis added.)

The reasons for these atrocities were profit and making room for White, Gentile colonisers, as we can deduce from this:

As the Fourth Army clawed its way forward, the [Marele Cartier General] made a land grab. A month earlier the conducător had informed the German Military Mission that [the Kingdom of] Romania was interested in annexing part of Ukraine, so when Hitler, as part of another request for the Third Army to advance (this time beyond the Dnieper River), suggested the Romanian Army secure southern Ukraine between the Dniester and the Dnieper Rivers for the German Army, General Antonescu assumed—mistakenly or shrewdly—that the führer offered the whole territory as a prize.

[The Kingdom of] Romania could police the whole area, the conducător responded, but it could only administer and economically exploit the smaller region between the Dniester and the Bug. Antonescu had maneuvered Hitler into giving [the Kingdom of] Romania not just territory to occupy but to govern.¹⁸³

On 30 August, eight days after Mihai I promoted Antonescu to marshal, deputy chief of staff General Nicolae Tătăranu and General Arthur Hauffe (who had replaced General Hansen as commander of the German Military Mission) signed a deal in Tighina. The Tighina Agreement granted the MCG authority over the territory between the Dniester and the Bug, required the Romanian Army to provide rear security between the Bug and the Dnieper, granted the German Army some key concessions, including control over railroads, and clarified that Jews should be held in ghettos and camps west of the Bug until after final victory.¹⁸⁴

Further reading: The History of the Holocaust in Romania