Romania and the Holocaust

From summer 1941 onwards, Romania actively pursued at its own initiative the mass killing of Jews in the territories it controlled. 1941 saw 13,000 Jewish residents of the Romanian city of Iai killed, the extermination of thousands of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia by Romanian armed forces and local people, large-scale deportations of Jews to the camps and ghettos of Transnistria, and massacres in and around Odessa. Overall, more than 300,000 Jews of Romanian and Soviet or Ukrainian origin were murdered in Romanian- controlled territories during the Second World War. In this volume, a number of renowned experts shed light on the events, the contexts, and the aftermath of this under-researched and lesser-known dimension of the Holocaust. 75 years on, this book gives much-needed impetus to research on the Holocaust in Romania and Romanian-controlled territories.



Simon Geissbühler is a Swiss historian, political scientist, and diplomat. He has published extensively on Romania and the Holocaust, Eastern European Jewish history, and Jewish heritage.



“Other than Germany, Romania was directly responsible for the murder of more Jews than any country during World War II. This transnational collection brings together the findings of leading specialists on this little-known but very important part of the Holocaust.” –Karel C. Berkhoff, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam