Continuing the topic of Romania and Moldavia, we present a translation of an article by Maxim Kemerrer, which was published in RuBaltic on July 17, 2022.
The atrocities of the Romanians shocked even the Germans: what was the Nazi occupation of Moldavia like
81 years have passed since the entry of Romanian troops into the capital of the Moldavian SSR, Chisinau. Today’s leaders in Chisinau and Bucharest call the events of the initial stage of the Great Patriotic War for another reunification of Romania and Moldavia. In fact, it was another occupation of Moldavia by Romania, which resulted in the terror of the civilian population and the destruction of the peoples of the multinational Moldavian SSR by the Romanian occupiers.
The state of Romania arose largely due to the support of Britain and France, who sought to create their own vassal near the southern borders of the Russian Empire, which could be used against Russia. (BATS note: yet, as we saw from the publication How Russia created Romania, it was done at the expense of Russia, and with Russian arms.) From the very beginning of its existence, Romania began to fulfil precisely this task, making territorial claims to Bessarabia.
However, it never wanted to go to war with Russia, and therefore, at that time, limited itself to cultural and ideological expansion, declaring that one people lived on the two banks of the Prut.
At the same time, the fact that the population of Bessarabia has always been multinational, with a certain dominance of Moldavians, was completely ignored.
Besides them, Malorossians lived compactly in the north and east of this territory, a significant part of the south of Bessarabia was compactly populated by Gagauz and Bulgarians, and the introduction of the pale of settlement in the Russian Empire led to a large number of Jews coming to Bessarabia. Thus, according to the census results of the late 19th century, Jews made up up to a third of the population of Chisinau, and many county centers of the country were simply large Jewish townships.
Romania’s desire to seise Bessarabia came true only in 1918, when the Moldavian People’s Republic was established after the Great October Socialist Revolution. On December 7, 1917, under the pretext of purchasing food, two regiments of the Romanian army crossed the Prut River, occupied Leovo and several border villages. Soon, on March 27, 1918, the parliament, called the Sfatul Tserii (Council of the Country), surrounded by Romanian soldiers with machine guns, voted for the “annexation” of Bessarabia to Romania; representatives of the Romanian military command were also present in the voting hall. After that, the parliament was dispersed by the Romanian military.
A commentary
A commentary from Moldavian parliament deputy from Beltsy, Alexander Nesterovsky, published in Bloknot Moldova. The commentary was made in 2018 with regard to the initiative from the Moladvian “Party of National Unity” to organise the so-caleld “Day of unity” in Beltsy:
“In the very first days after the Romanian troops entered the territory of the Moldavian Democratic Republic, the punishers shot 45 peasant delegates of the 3rd Bessarabian Provincial Peasant Congress, held in Chisinau. Then 58 members of the Sfatul Tserii, who opposed the annexation of Bessarabia to Romania, were arrested. Some of them were shot. Their place in the hall was taken by supporters of the Romanian authorities. The decision of Sfatul Tserii to join Romania on April 9, 1918, was made at gunpoint, but even after that, almost half of the delegates – 47% – voted against joining.”
As a result, Bessarabia was under Romanian occupation until June 28, 1940; throughout this period, the territory between the Dniester and the Prut remained in fact in the status of a colony and was the region of Romania with the lowest standard of living.
During the 22 years of the Romanian occupation, Bessarabia took the first place in Europe in terms of population mortality, over 500,000 people left it, tens of thousands of local residents who opposed the occupation were shot, and about 200,000 died of starvation.
The Romanian occupation ended in 1940, when Soviet troops occupied Bessarabia. By this time, the Moldavian Autonomous Republic (MASSR) had already existed in the USSR for 16 years, established on the lands of the Ukrainian SSR and the Left Bank of the Dniester (modern Transnistria).
Unfortunately, the period after the liberation of Bessarabia was short — less than a year later, on June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War began, in which Romania became an ally of Hitler, and on July 16, Romanian occupation forces again entered the territory of Bessarabia.
Considering that Nazi anti-Jewish laws were passed in Romania in the 1930s, the large Jewish population of Bessarabia was doomed to extermination.
Marshal Ion Antonescu, the de facto ruler of Romania, who bore the title of “conduketor” — leader, ordered the beginning of ethnic cleansing of the “wrong” population in Bessarabia, in other words, the genocide of Jews.
“I don’t care if we go down in history as barbarians… if necessary, shoot with machine guns,” Antonescu said. According to the directive of the “leader”, in just a few days in July, 18,000 Jews were killed in Dubossary, Rybnitsa and other areas of Bessarabia. Concentration camps were set up in the country for the deportation and extermination of Jews.
Those who survived in the camps, were used for heavy work. In the Rybnitsa camp, for example, prisoners were building a monument to Antonescu. In October 1941, in Odessa alone, 30,000 Jews were exterminated by Romanians in one week.
Already in November 1941, the Romanian governor of Bessarabia reported that the “Jewish problem has been solved” in the territory under his jurisdiction. According to various sources, over 350,000 Jews (about 90% of the total Jewish population of the republic) were killed during the Romanian occupation of Bessarabia. The atrocities of the Romanian punishers against Jews caused bewilderment even among the Germans.
However, these atrocities were not only directed against Jews. The positions of Antonescu and Hitler turned out to be close on the “Slavic question.” (BATS note: Read our past translated article The text of Hitler’s statement on the extermination of Slavic peoples has been published in Russia for the first time.) Antonescu stated that “the numerous and primitive Slavic race presents (…) not a political or spiritual, but a complex biological problem for the European birth rate”.
Already in February 1942, Antonescu ordered the practice of ethnic cleansing of Jews to be extended to other nationalities — “we need to get rid of other minorities – Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Bulgarians, Gagauz, all these scoundrels who settled in the north and south of Bessarabia”.
The documents in the archives — protocols of interrogations of witnesses after the liberation of Moldavia from Romanian occupation in August 1944 (Moldavian peasants, Russian residents of Chisinau, captured Romanian soldiers) – confirm the facts of the monstrous atrocities of the Romanian occupation forces, robberies and shootings of civilians, torture in the Romanian secret service “Siguranza”, physical and sexual violence.
This terrible reality of the Romanian occupation of Moldova is the “inconvenient truth” that the Moldavian authorities of today turn a blind eye to “for political reasons” and seek to completely destroy it. Their argument is that Romanians were allegedly “forcibly dragged into the war” and used by Nazi Germany “not of their own free will”. The facts tell a completely different story: throughout the war against the USSR, Marshal Ion Antonescu himself repeatedly insisted on expanding the participation of Romanian troops in military operations.
In December 1941, Ion Antonescu assured the German Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler that “the more difficulties there are at the front, the more he can rely on him, on the Romanian army and the Romanian people”.
“Death to Romanian cannibals!”
Today, Moldavia is being covered by another wave of Romanian occupation, a hidden and creeping wave.
Although it can be said that this process is increasingly “unmasking” itself. Moldavia is already openly led by Romanian citizens — the president, the Speaker of Parliament, the Prime Minister, the head of the Constitutional Court, deputies and members of the government. The parliaments and governments of Moldavia and Romania hold joint meetings, and the actions of the Moldavian leadership are largely determined by the directives from Bucharest.
Romania doesn’t even have to send its troops into Moldavia today — the marionette officials, who swore allegiance to Bucharest upon receiving a Romanian passport, will do everything necessary. And the finishing touch: the current president of Moldavia, Maia Sandu, stated on one of the television broadcasts that Ion Antonescu, yes, the one who “cleansed” Bessarabia of Jews, Gagauz and “inferior Slavs”, is “a man about whom one can say both good and bad”.