Iași pogrom

1941 Holocaust events in Romania

The Iași pogrom (, sometimes anglicized as Jassy) was a series of pogroms launched by governmental forces under Marshal and Conducător Ion Antonescu in the Romanian city of Iași against its Jewish community, which lasted from 29 June to 6 July 1941. According to Romanian authorities, over 13,266 people, or one third of the Jewish population, were massacred in the pogrom itself or in its aftermath, and many were deported. It was one of the worst pogroms during World War II.

During World War II, from 1940 to 1944, Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany, and echoed its anti Semitic policies. During 1941 and 1942, thirty two laws, thirty one decree laws, and seventeen government resolutions, all sharply anti Semitic, were published in the Official Gazette (Monitorul Oficial). Romania also joined Germany in the invasion of the Soviet Union, initially with the purpose of regaining Bessarabia, taken by Soviets in 1940, after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

It was widely believed in interwar Romania that Communism was the work of the Jews, and Romania's coming entry into the war against the Soviet Union – a war billed as a struggle to "annihilate" the forces of "Judeo Bolshevism" – greatly served to increase the anti Semitic paranoia of the Iron Guard regime. Operation Barbarossa, as the invasion of the Soviet Union was code named, was scheduled to begin on 22 June 1941. Iași, a city with a large Jewish population located close to the Soviet border, was considered a problem by the dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu, as he saw the Jews of Iași as a fifth column which would sabotage the Romanian war effort. In mid June 1941, Antonescu ordered that "all the Judeo Communist coffee shops in Moldavia be closed down, all kikes, Communist agents and sympathizers be identified by region ". On 21 June 1941, Antonescu signed a decree calling for all Jews between the ages of 18 and 60 who lived between the Siret and Pruth rivers to be deported to the concentration camp at Târgu Jiu in the south of Romania. Officers of both the Romanian and German armies, poised to invade the Soviet Union, saw the Jews near the Soviet border as a major internal security threat and pressed the Romanian government to remove this alleged threat. Lieutenant Colonel Traian Borcescu of the Special Information Service (ro, SSI), as the Romanian secret service was known, later recalled: "I know for certain that Section II of the Supreme Headquarters was involved with the problem of moving the Jewish population in Moldavia under the auspices of the respective statistics offices, with Colonel Gheorghe Petrescu in charge of this activity". Section II of the Romanian Supreme Headquarters was concerned with monitoring all political parties and all of the ethnic minorities in Romania. The responsibility for organising the pogrom rested with Section II, the SSI, and with the German Abwehr. After the invasion of the Soviet Union began on 22 June 1941, the SSI formed the First Operative Echelon of 160 men who were tasked with crushing any internal security threat that might hamper the war. Colonel Borcescu recalled:

One of the secret and unofficial aims of the expedition of the First Operative Echelon was to do away with the Moldavian Jews by deportation or extermination. For this purpose, SSI department head Florin Becescu Georgescu, when leaving Bucharest, took along the files on the Jews and Communists. From Iași, the Echelon drove to Chișinău, where the Jews were massacred. The same SSI teams that operated in Iași operated in Chișinău as well. The Echelon went also to Tighina and Tiraspol, where it committed robberies and to Odessa, where it committed massacres. On the same day that Operation Barbarossa began, the police force in Iași released imprisoned members of the Iron Guard, who had been held since a failed coup by the Legion in January 1941. The newly freed Legionnaires were placed under police command and provided with weapons. Since the Iron Guard was notorious for its virulent anti semitism, the release of the imprisoned Iron Guard members suggested that the authorities were already planning to strike against the Jews of Iași. On 24 June 1941, Iași was bombed by the Soviet Air Force. The raid did little damage, but it produced a hysterical reaction, with rumors flying fast that the entire Jewish population of Iași were Communist Party members and had lit beacons to guide the Soviet bombers. On 26 June, Iași was again bombed and this time substantial damage was inflicted on the city. The second bombing killed about 600 people, of whom 38 were Jews. Again, the bombing led to rampant rumors of alleged Jewish fifth column activity in the service of the Soviet Union. The same day saw the arrival in Iași of Major Hermann von Stransky of the Abwehr and of Colonel Ionescu Micandru of the SSI – the two men whom witnesses at post war trials consistently described as the main instigators of the pogrom. On June 27, 1941, Ion Antonescu telephoned Col. Constantin Lupu, commander of the Iași garrison, telling him formally to "cleanse Iași of its Jewish population". The plans for the pogrom had been laid even earlier.</blockquote>