Simon Geissbühler (ed.): Romania and the Holocaust. Events - Contexts - Aftermath, Hannover: Ibidem 2016, in: sehepunkte 17 (2017), Nr. 7/8 [15.07.2017], (original) (raw)
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While the Germans quickly repressed Ukrainian nationalist aspirations, they left a valve open for the release of activist energy, first in the form of pogroms and later by creating Ukrainian police units. In the early days, anti-Sovietism linked Nazi propaganda and the German occupation to local fears and hopes, most visibly in Lviv. As Struve points out, German and Ukrainian perpetrators also shared a mindset in which elevated aggressive impulses and a sense of euphoria merged with rational considerations about settling old scores and establishing a new order. Anti-Jewish violence by relatively few Ukrainian men, German soldiers, SS-men, and policemen attracted others, including women, adolescents, and children, to participate in collective rituals that combined public humiliation, assertion of power, and "cleansing" aspirations (pp. 353-76, 675-81). The book's final chapter points to similar dynamics in other parts of the German-occupied Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, especially in Lithuania and Latvia. Where the occupying forces prescribed a more traditional form of order, as in the area under Hungarian occupation, fewer deaths occurred (pp. 630-67).
New Models, New Questions: Historiographical Approaches to the Romanian Holocaust
This essay surveys the historiography on the Romanian Holocaust, focusing in particular on four monographs published by Western historians within the past five years. Earlier research was limited both empirically and theoretically, and these works suggest new research paradigms and raise new questions about the genocide in Romania during the Second World War. Dennis Deletant assesses the rule of General Ion Antonescu in light of his responsibility for the Holocaust and attempts to explain why the General began and ended the Holocaust when he did. Vladimir Solonari argues that the Holocaust should be read in the context of plans for ethnic homogenization which were implemented when the opportunity presented itself in 1941. Jean Ancel examines the expropriation of Jewish property and shows that, among other things, the Romanian perpetrators were motivated by a desire to enrich themselves at the expense of the Jews. Finally, Armin Heinen reads the Holocaust by looking at how different groups of perpetrators used violence and attempts to recreate the logic which shaped their actions. In addition, the essay discusses Holocaust denial, survivor memoirs, primary source collections, and research into Roma victims in Romania.
Sen and Wagner (2009) advance the thesis of the centrality of fundamentalist belief systems in violence. I provide further explication of their thesis by looking at the Romanian case. The explosion of violence around 1940–41, the years when Romania joined the Axis and entered the second world war cannot be understood without taking into account the historical, political, social, and cultural factors that created the radical atmosphere of xenophobia, mass psychosis, and mobilization against Others. Rumors emerge as the most powerful psychological means of spreading the official master narrative of 'domestic Jewish treason'. Reinterpretation of various cultural symbols also played an important role in excluding the Jewish Other from the national community.
Review Essay: New Research on the Holocaust in Romania
Sehepunkte, 2018
Over the last three decades and after many decades of near complete silence, research on the Holocaust in Romania has become a growing and increasingly diverse field. [1] The 1990s and early 2000s saw the publication of a range of ground-breaking works, including a number source collections, the first comprehensive overviews of the topic, and the Final Report on the Holocaust in Romania, assembled by an international team of scholars.
Prelude to assassination. An episode of the Romanian Holocaust
Holocaust. Studii şi cercetări / Holocaust. Study and Research, 2011
The subject of this paper is an episode of the Romanian Holocaust, the Legionary Pogrom in Bucharest, in the winter of 1941, 21-23 of January. My intention in this paper is to bring to the reader a general image of the Jewish victims of those days. I will do this through an empirical research using an S.P.S.S. (statistic program for social sciences) database comprising information from the death files of the victims, files found at the Forensic Institute in Bucharest. Moreover, this paper wants to offer a broader analysis framework of the Pogrom in Bucharest by also focusing on the historic circumstances of the Pogrom, with an accent on the economic, legislative and institutional aspects. I will try to develop this circumstances taking into account the events that preceded and anticipated the Legionary Pogrom, bringing into discussion the economic, legislative and institutional initiatives that were made against the Jewish during the national-legionary state, focusing on the manners in which these initiatives were applied and the consequences.