On 16 October 1941, Romanian forces took over Odessa, when 70,000–120,000 Jews were trapped in the city, some of whom were Jewish refugees from Bessarabia.[10] The massacre was preceded by escalating violence towards Jews by the antisemitic[11] Romanian troops.[1][3] On 22 October 1941, the Romanian military headquarters in Odessa was blown up mysteriously. Jews were blamed together with communists[11] by Antonescu, who ordered the massacre.[1][3]
General Ion Antonescu,[2] the Prime Minister and de facto leader of the Romanian regime allied with Nazi Germany until 1944. Photocopy of the portrait.
Massacre
Within two days, at least 5,000 Jews had been hanged, while another few thousand were deported to the nearby village of Dalnyk. The victims were confined to barns, sheds and warehouses, which were later sprayed with machine gunfire and set ablaze. Jews who tried to escape met their fate immediately, while some buildings with Jews were blown up by Romanian troops, causing thousands to perish instantly. Thousands more were slain in mass shootings, some of whom were also burned alive in artillery warehouses.[1][3]
Around 25,000 Jews who had not been killed were deported to a ghetto in Odessa's neighborhood Slobidka, where they endured cold and hunger for the remainder of the war. Holocaust experts estimated the death toll at Dalnyk alone was at least 20,000.[1][3]
Death march
By the end of October 1941, 25,000–30,000 Jewish deportees were forced on a death march to the Bogdanovka concentration camp, where the deportees were crowded in pigsties. Almost all of them were also slain in subsequent mass shootings or burned alive[12][13] by the end of January 1942, when the Soviets pushed back the Axis invaders from the outskirts of Moscow. Meanwhile, Romanian forces burned the Jewish corpses to destroy evidence of the genocidal massacre. By autumn 1942, over 90% of pre-war Odessa's Jews had already perished.[1][3]
Nazi German involvement
Despite Romanian forces having carried out most of the atrocities in Odessa, they were backed up by the Nazi German SSEinsatzgruppe D, who shot some Jews from the Fontans'ka Street prison and were hunting down Jews until November 1941, whose inflicted death toll numbered in thousands.[10] It is recorded that ethnic Germans in Odessa formed the militias Selbstschutze to facilitate the Holocaust in the area.[1][3]
Aftermath
Aftermath of the Odesa Massacre: Jewish deportees killed outside Birzula.[14]
Survivors
Around 1,000 Karaite Jews survived the war as Hitler designated them as "Turks" and spared them from death. A handful of other Jews, who were either forced laborers or hiding under false identities, also survived. Vera Bakhmutskaia, an Odessan Jew who survived the war by hiding in the house of a gentile friend, said,
There were very few of us left [. ...] If they [locals] knew [of me being Jewish], they would have denounced me immediately.
The Soviets retook Odessa on 10 April 1944 and conducted a census within two months, finding that Jews in Odessa had fallen from the pre-war level of 200,000 to 2,640, a 98.7% drop.[1][15]
A memorial to the Odessa massacre in Prokhorovsky Square, Odessa.[16]A Holocaust Memorial in Odessa.
Trial
Together with Ion Antonescu, other instigators including Gheorghe Alexianu,[17] were sentenced to death in 1946.[1][18]
Historical revisionism in post-communist age (1989– )
Since the fall of Ceaușescu's communist tyranny,[20][21] a systematic effort to whitewash the war criminals, especially Ion Antonescu, has been observed by scholars. Antonescu is praised by some so-called historians as a hero who waged a "holy war against Bolshevism".[22] Acts of Holocaust denial[24] by politicians occurred from time to time, notable of whom include Ion Iliescu, the former President of Romania (2000–2004). He made similar claims to those of Ceaușescu that there was "no Holocaust within Romania" and that the Poles, Jews and communists "were treated equally", while denying the Romanian role in the Holocaust and the verified Romanian Jewish death toll.[22]
Countermeasures to historical revisionism
An international inquiry, led by Romanian-American Jewish writer Elie Wiesel, identified all the evidence of Romania's role in the Holocaust. The Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania (Romanian: Institutul Național pentru Studierea Holocaustului din România „Elie Wiesel”, INSHR), a state-funded Holocaust research center, was also founded in 2005.[25]
In November 2021, the Romanian parliament passed a law, by a large majority, to require the teaching of the Holocaust and Jewish history from 2023. The only group opposing it was the nationalist party Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). The AUR was condemned by the INSHR.[26] Since September 2023, the Holocaust and Jewish history have become part of the high school curriculum in Romania.[27][28]
International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania. Final Report. President of the commission: Elie Wiesel. Edited by Tuvia Friling, Radu Ioanid, and Mihail E. Ionescu. Iași: Polirom, 2004.
Ioanid, Radu. The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Roma under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944. Second edition. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.
Kruglov, Aleksander, and Kiril Feferman. “Bloody Snow: The Mass Slaughter of Odessa Jews in Berezovka Uezd in the First Half of 1941.” Yad Vashem Studies 47, no. 2 (2019): 15.
Solonari, Vladimir. A Satellite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941–1944. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.
Zipperstein, Steven J. The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985.
Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
Ancel, J. 2003. Transnistria. 1941–1942. The Romanian Mass Murder Campaigns. Tel-Aviv: Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center.
Achim, V. 2009. “Die Deportation der Juden nach Transnistrien im Kontext der Bevölkerungspolitik der Antonescu-Regierung.” In Holocaust an der Peripherie. Judenpolitik und Judenmord in Rumänien und Transnistrien 1940 – 1944, edited by W. Benz, and B. Mihok, 151–61. Berlin: Metropol.
Desbois, P. 2018. Broad Daylight. The Secret Procedures behind the Holocaust by Bullets. La Vergne: Arcade Publishing.
↑Ukrainian description: Голокост у Подільському районі, Одеська область, Україна.
↑Inscription: לזכור למען העתיד! ממקום זה התחילה דרך המוות של עשרות אלפי יהודי אודסה אשר גורשו וחוסלו ע"י הנאצים בחדש דצמבר 1941 במחנה השמדה "בוגדנובקה" במחוז ניקולאיב. אוקראינה
[Remember for the future! From here began the path of death of tens of thousands of Odessa Jews who were deported and exterminated by the Nazis in December 1941 in the Bogdanovka extermination camp in Nikolaev Oblast. Ukraine] Помнить во имя будущего! С этого места началась дорога смерти для десятков тысяч евреев г.Одессы угнанных и уничтоженных нацистами в декабре 1941 г. на территории лагеря "Богдановка" в Николаевской области.
Intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany
Gross minimization of the number of the victims of the Holocaust in contradiction to reliable sources
Attempts to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide
Statements that cast the Holocaust as a positive historical event. Those statements are not Holocaust denial but are closely connected to it as a radical form of antisemitism. They may suggest that the Holocaust did not go far enough in accomplishing its goal of "the Final Solution of the Jewish Question"
Attempts to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups
