Cornell University Press Uniformed Murderers: Romanian Army and Gendarmerie As Tools of Genocide

Uniformed Murderers investigates the causes, logistics, motivations, and legal awareness of the Romanian servicemen – both military and gendarmerie – who massacred or otherwise caused the death of more than three thousand Jews, Roma, and others in 1941 and 1942. Over time, there have been significant assumptions about the Holocaust in Romania and, in particular, how Romanian decision makers largely followed in the footsteps of their German counterparts. As a result, the interpretative framework developed for "the German Holocaust" was applied to the Romanian case. Vladimir Solonari addresses and revises this framework. Solonari describes how Romanian leaders never completely acceded to the project of total annihilation of European Jewry and that although Romanian fascist dictator Ion Antonescu was viscerally antisemitic and not averse to killing civilians, he was determined to avoid making his country and his regime be seen as criminal in the eyes of the Western powers. For that reason, he preferred to avoid implicating his servicemen in the acts of killing, and when ordering them to do so, he tried to leave no paper trail. While the Romanian military possessed deep antisemitic convictions, some officers were reluctant to implicate themselves in criminal behavior, while others demonstrated eagerness to kill perceived enemies of the Romanian nation. Uniformed Murderers integrates these factors and assumptions to reveal how they led to the bewildering inconsistency of the Romanian record of mass murder, which reached its apex earlier than that of the Germans, namely in the late summer of 1941 through early 1942, as opposed to summer 1942 through 1943.