PROCESUL MARII TRĂDĂRI NAȚIONALE • The Great National Betrayal Trial

Michael Shafir: "In the main trial - the sixteenth in the series staged by the People’s Tribunal in Bucharest - thirteen of the twenty-four defendants received death sentences, but six of the sentences (including those of Iron Guard commander Horia Sima and Iron Guard Ministers Mihai Sturdza, Ioan Protopopescu, Corneliu Georgescu, Constantin Papanace and Victor Iasinschi) were pronounced in absentia and never carried out. Marshal Antonescu and his foreign minister, Mihai Antonescu, General Inspector of the Gendarmerie Constantin Z. (Piki) Vasiliu and Transnistria Governor Gheorghe Alexianu were executed on June 1 1946.
Crimes committed against Jews occupied a relatively small place in both the indictment act (some 12 out of 125 pages) and the debates at the trial. While admitting that between 150,000 and 170,000 Jews had been deported to Transnistria, Marshal Antonescu claimed in a memorandum refuting the indictment that this act had been intended to save allegedly pro-Communist Jews from the population’s wrath and thath the Iron Guardists were preparing 'a St. Bartholomew' against them in cooperation with the Germans. Unfortunately, he claimed, implementation of the deportation order had been 'destabilized' by the 'then dominant spirit.' By 'destabilization' Antonescu was referring euphemistically to the mass executions, death marches and starvation inflicted by the Romanian police and army while carrying out his orders. The harsh early winter conditions, 'which also claimed many victims among the belligerent armies,' he maintained, had added to the number of casualties among the deported, but 'this was also the reason why the Germans lost the Moscow battle.' The blame for the Jewish casualties, he said, lay with those who were executing orders. He had personally ordered an inquiry 'and the result was known. A general staff colonel and a captain was [sic] demoted and sent to the front line as a private soldier, where he met a heroic death.' Antonescu thus placed responsibility for the crimes on the Germans, as well as on fanatical or terrorist elements in the Iron Guard; but he also blamed his subordinates, as indeed he would attempt to do when the Odessa massacres were discussed during the trial. In the memorandum he wrote that as chief of state he assumed 'responsibility for everything that went wrong' under his governance 'except for abuses and crimes.' He could not 'endorse crimes' and 'I respectfully bow before the victim’s shadows and am begging the pardon of those who had to suffer because of them [sic].' Antonescu further claimed in the memorandum that 'the number of dead from among the population deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina to Transnistria and from the country [i.e., Romania proper], as well as their treatment, is exaggerated … The region ws healthy, picturesque, and very rich. Many of them did not wish to return.'
If Antonescu (and the others accused with him) sought to minimize the dimensions of their crimes, the prosecution itself strove to deflect the focus from Jews to crimes committed against the Romanian nation as a whole. The indictment thus spoke of 'hundreds and thousands of anti-fascists' and of 'political suspects' interned in prisons and suffering 'torture and terrible terror'. This was a clear attempt to exculpate collaborationism. Ostensibly, in countries that had been occupied or in those that collaborated with the Germans both in the West and in the East, the indictments were individual; in practice, the frame of reference in both was politically inspired or condoned collective self-defense. The Romanian indictment act reflected this quite clearly by emphasizing (against all recent memory and evicende) that 'in fact, the country had been under German occupation' and that 'Romanian public opinion received with indignation the German armies' which had entered the country under the September 15, 1940 agreement signed by Berlin and Bucharest. However, no evidence of this alleged indignation was produced. Under a decree passed in early 1950, those convicted of war crimes who had 'demonstrated good behavior, performed their tasks conscientiously, and proved that they had become fit for social cohabitation during their imprisonment' were made eligible for immediate release, irrespective of the severity of the sentence passed. Among those 'socially rehabilitated' were several condemned to life imprisonment for crimes against the Jews. Many of those liberated joined the Communist Party (PCR). Others, however, would have to await amnesties granted between 1962 and 1964, when the regime’s National Communist policies were being implemented and the PCR needed the support of nationalist-minded political prisoners, and in particular the intellectuals among them."

Courtesy: istoriaromaneasca.wordpress.com

MOARTE CRIMINALILOR DE RĂZBOI • Death to the War Criminals

Death to the War Criminals [10.05.1945, p. 3]
In Front of People's Jurisdiction [13.05.1945, p. 1]
The Bill of Indictment Against the First Lot of War Criminals [13.05.1945, p. 5]
The Bill of Indictment [14.05.1945, p. 1]
The Bill of Indictment Against the First Lot of War Criminals [14.05.1945, p. 3]
The Trial Begins [15.05.1945, p. 1]
The Bill of Indictment Against the First Lot of War Criminals [15.05.1945, p. 2, 3]
The People's Tribunal Will Impose Law [15.05.1945, p. 3]
The First Trial Against the War Criminals was Initiated by the People’s Tribunal [16.05.1945, p. 1]
The Nation Does Not Pardon! [16.05.1945, p. 5]
The War Criminals in Front of People’s Jurisdiction [17.05.1945, p. 1, 5]
Revenge for Innocent Blood! [18.05.1945, p. 1]
The Criminals in Front of People’s Judges [18.05.1945, p. 1]
The Debates During the Trial Against the War Criminals [18.05.1945, p. 2]
A Sadistic War Criminal Investigated by the Public Prosecutors [18.05.1945, p. 3]
The Parade of the War Criminals in Front of the People’s Tribunal [18.05.1945, p. 5]
The Enlightening of Humanity [19.05.1945, p. 1]
The Atrocities of the Murderers in the Cage Dis    closed by Eyewitnesses in Front of the People’s Tribunal [19.05.1945, p. 1]
The People Demand Justice [19.05.1945, p. 1]
The Disclosure of the War Atrocities in Front of the People’s Tribunal [19.05.1945, p. 2]
The Workers of the Capital Demand Deserved Sentences to the War Criminals [19.05.1945, p. 3]
The Port of Galati Dock Workers Demand Harsh Sentences to the War Criminals [19.05.1945, p. 3]
The Citizens of Brăila Demand Harsh Sentences to the War Criminals [19.05.1945, p. 3]
The Citizens of Constanța Demand the Death Penalty for the War Criminals [19.05.1945, p. 3]
The Debates During the Trial Against the War Criminals [19.05.1945, p. 5]
The Atrocities and Murders Visualized by the Eyewitnesses [20.05.1945, p. 1]
The Citizens of the Capital Demand the Death Penalty for the War Criminals [20.05.1945, p. 1]
The Dislosure of the Atrocities in Front of the People’s Tribunal [20.05.1945, p. 2]
A New Listing of War Criminals [20.05.1945, p. 4]
The Citizens of the Capital Demand the Death Penalty for the War Criminals [20.05.1945, p. 4]
The Debates During the Trial Against the War Criminals [20.05.1945, p. 4]
The Summation of the People [21.05.1945, p. 1]
Since Nine Months the Nation is Waiting for this Day of Justice [21.05.1945, p. 1]
The Overwhelming Summation by the Chief Prosecutor A. Bunaciu [21.05.1945, p. 2]
The Whole Nation Demands a Harsh Conviction for the War Criminals [21.05.1945, p. 3]
The War Criminals Pursued by the People’s Tribunal [21.05.1945, p. 3]
The Debates During the Trial Against the War Criminals [21.05.1945, p. 4]
The Summation in the Trial Against the War Criminals [21.05.1945, p. 5]
Death to the War Criminals [21.05.1945, p. 5]
People’s Conviction [24.05.1945, p. 1]
The Sentence in the First Trial Against the War Criminals [24.05.1945, p. 1, 2]
Soldiers and Commanders Notice with Satisfaction the Just Sentence to the War Criminals [26.05.1945, p. 1]
The War Criminals and the Military Uniform [26.05.1945, p. 3]
The Appeal Trial Against the War Criminals [30.05.1945, p. 1]
The Grounds of Appeal Raised by the First Lot of War Criminals Were Rejected by the High Court of Cassation [31.05.1945, p. 1]
The High Court of Cassation has Rejected the Appeals of the War Criminals [02.06.1945, p. 1]
The Maximum Sentence to the Main Culprits [03.06.1945, p. 1]

Michael Shafir: "Based on the Nuremberg model, People's Tribunals were set up in Romania by a decree issued by King Michael I on April 21, 1945. [...] There were two tribunals, one in Bucharest and the other in Cluj. The Bucharest tribunal sentenced only 187 people, the rest were dealt with by the Cluj one, set up on June 22, 1945, which in general pronounced harsher sentences (thirty people condemned to death and fifty-two to hard labor for life). [...] The first trial held by the Bucharest People's Tribunal ended on May 22, 1945. General Nicolae Macici and Constantin Trestorianu as well as Corneliu Calotescu and others, were found guilty of the massacres perpetrated in occupied Odessa and in nearby Dalnic on October 21-22, 1941 and sentenced to death; other members of the Romanian forces received varying prison sentences. On July 1, 1945, King Michael commuted Macici's sentence to life imprisonment; Macici would eventually die in Aiud prison in 1950. [General Corneliu Calotescu, formerly plenipotentiary Governor of Bukovina, was among this group of 29 officers sentenced to death for war crimes on 22 May 1945. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment but he was released in an amnesty in 1955.] Altogether, fourty-eight death sentences were pronounced by 'Old Kingdom' and southern Transylvania-based People's Tribunal, but only four were actually carried out, the others being either commuted to hard labor for life or decreed in absentia. None of the sentences handed down in northern Transylvania were implemented, and the leading people charged there had anyway left the region together with the Hungarian authorities. Although the People's Tribunals were liquidated in 1946, trials associated with 'crimes against peace' and other war-related charges would continue in the following years on the basis of law No. 291 of 1947, which stipulated sentences of between fifteen years and life imprisonment for such offences."

[Michael  Shafir “Romania’s Tortuous Road to Facing Collaboration”, in Roni Stauber (ed.), Collaboration with the Nazis: Public Discourse After the Holocaust, London and New York, Routledge, 2011, pp. 245 -278.6]


Courtesy: Biblioteca Digitală a Bucureștilor

Du sollst nicht vergessen! • Never Forget!

 

 

 

• Motto • Epigraph [1]
• Du sollst nicht vergessen! • Never Forget! [2]
• In einem Kolchoz, 1942 • In a Kolkhoz, 1942 [5]
• Der Tod hält Ernte, Kolchoz, Dezember 1941 • Reaping a Bloody Harvest, Kolkhoz, December 1941 [6]
• Steinbruch, Juli 1942 • Stone Quarry, July 1942 [10]
• Wer ist Itzkowitz? • Who is Itzkowitz? [12]
• Die Approvisionierung, Cariera bei Ladejin (Ukraina), Juli 1942 • The Provisions, Stone Quarry near Ladyzhyn (Ukraine), July 1942 [16]
• Cariera de Piatra, August 1942 • Stone Quarry, August 1942 [18]
• Auf dem Plateau, Herbst 1942 • On the Plateau, Fall 1942 [24]
• Eine Episode, Steinbruch 1942 • An Episode, Stone Quarry 1942 [27]
• Czetvertinovka • Chetvertynivka [31]
• Berschad, März-April 1942 • Bershad, March/April 1942 [33]
• Eine Feiertagsepisode, Berschad 1943 • A Holiday Episode, Bershad 1943 [35]
• Eine Begegnung, Berschad, November 1943 • An Encounter Bershad, November 1943 [37]
• Eine Episode aus Berschad, Januar 1944 • An Episode from Bershad, January 1944 [39]
• Berschad, Februar 1944 • Bershad, February 1944 [42]
• Wer ist ein Partizan? Berschad, Februar 1944 • Who is a Partisan? Bershad, February 1944 [44]
• In der "Heimat", Mai 1944 • Back "Home", May 1944 [46]
• Eidesstattliche Erklärung, Tel Aviv, November 1960 • Affidavit, Tel Aviv, November 1960

Dr. Hermann Sternberg on the occasion of his graduation "promotio sub auspiciis imperatoris", i. e. "under the auspices of the Austrian Emperor", wearing the diamond ring with the initials of the Emperor, Czernowitz 1912

Read more from Dr. Hermann Sternberg at the "History of the Jews in the Bukovina" by Hugo Gold, published in Tel Aviv 1958/1962, translated by Jerome Silverbush:

• The Public Instruction System of the Jews in Bukovina
• History of the J.N.A. "Emunah" in Czernowitz 
• On the History of the Jews in Czernowitz 
• The Tragedy of the Bukowinian Jews 
• The Stone Quarry - Der Steinbruch (Cariera de piatra) 1942-1943 
• Dorna-Watra 
• Jewish Middle School

 Courtesy: Yoram Almadon [Grandson of Dr. Hermann Sternberg]

Memoria Cimitirelor Evreiești • Remembering the Jewish Cemeteries

• A Reason to Remember the Jewish Cemeteries [7]
• The Jewish Cemeteries - A Look Upon Reality - Photos [18]
• The Jewish Communities in Romania - Listing [31]
• The Jewish Cemeteries in Romania - Listing [38]
• Every Person Has a Name - Photos [49]
• Remember! - The Respect and Duty for Those Who Passed Away [52]
• Tomb Stones - Explanations of the Inscriptions [60]
• Tomb Stones - Photos [72]
• Prayers - Kadish tatom, El male rahamim, Izkor [79]
• Glossary - Romanian [84]
• Responsability and Duty - Thinking the Future [94]
• FEDROM Appeal [102]

Courtesy: FEDROM Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania

Der Wucher in der Bukowina • Usury in Bukovina

 

Excerpt from the tractates "A Jew to Jews" and "Why Only Yiddish?" by Chaim Zhitlowsky: "One would not find a relatively accurate description of the material life of Bukovinian and Galician Jews in the pages of local Jewish newspapers. These papers are occupied with supposedly higher callings, such as describing rabbinic jubilees, praising the charitable work of ladies’ committees, polemicizing against antisemitism, and debating the question of which language should be used for conducting Sabbath services. Jewish poverty simply does not exist for these representatives of the satisfied bourgeoisie. The issue therefore seems all the more pronounced when it appears in any serious economic studies of eastern Austria. To give just a few examples of the scale of Jewish poverty - examples that at times surpass even the usual things we are accustomed to hearing about the blessed Jewish Pale, we offer a short passage from the work of Professor Platter, 'Sociale Studien in der Bukovina.' He discusses the Jewish population in Czernowitz, the largest city in the Bukovina region. We have selected this particular region and city because Bukovina has for ages been known as the 'Jewish Eldorado', while Czernowitz, with 50 percent of its population comprised of Jews, 'can rightfully be called of Jewish city.'

Professor Platter notes that the vast majority of Jews in Czernowitz are extremely poor, and that most parts of the city are filled with 'wretched, dirty, stinking hovels.' He then provides us with a description of street scenes that he himself witnessed:

The ideal filthy, ragged man, whose image can be conjured by the average Western European only in his wildest fantasies, really exists here and is visible at every step. You see pants made from twenty or thirty different scraps of material but that still consist mainly of holes; you see frock coats that lack the entire back side and whose owners, unfortunately, are wearing neither waistcoats nor undershirts. I saw completely naked little girls between four and six years of age playing with half-naked boys in the dust of the capital’s streets. But the main fashion one sees are large hordes of men in kaftans, and the sight of these garments alone can ruin even the heartiest appetite.

This is a picture of the streets, but it is not difficult to guess what kind of image of filth and poverty he would have drawn for us had he looked inside the 'wretched, dirty, stinking hovels.' Platter’s book was published fifteen years ago, in 1878, and perhaps the people of Czernowitz have become better dressed and more fashionable since then, out of concern that such 'jolly landscapes' not offened the sensibilities of enlightened Western Europeans. But we have every reason to doubt that they have managed to escape from Jewish poverty, given that we have factual and relatively articulate descriptions of the impoverished, destitute condition of the Jewish masses not just from Czernowitz but also from nearly every town in Galicia and Polish Prussia (such as Poznan).

Living next door to this poverty are the notorious Jewish trading and banking firms and wealthy Jewish landowners who have begun the process of displacing Polish magnates from their inherited estates. The 'Jewish landowner' is a new concept that the Jews have introduced into the sphere of finance and fortune after emancipation. The means by which a Jew can become a landowner will become apparent once we turn to examining the second question raised above concerning Jewich occupations and the sources of livelihood.

The existence of poverty among the Jewish masses provides sufficient evidence that emancipation opened up very few new opportunities for them. The fact is that the life of the masses has remained as it was before. The basic mode of economic existence for the overwhelming majority - the petit- and middle-trader, moneychanger, business agent, tavernkeeper, craftsman, mechanic, teacher, butcher, and spiritual proletarian - is that in the morning they have no idea how they will satisfy the hunger of their large families that night. How do the upper 10,000 employ themselves, then? They are traders en grand, as the so-called liberal professions refer to them … and … they lend money on interest! Galicia and Bukovin aare almost exclusively agrarian regions. Peasants supply the main source of labor power, and Polish landowners supply the main source of exploitation. Agrarian culture is characterized almost entirely by abject peasant poverty and by the frivolous carefree incompetence of the landowners. The rotten foundation of economic life on which Jews found one of the primary sources of their material existence, usury, was produced by the easy and loose lifestyle of the undisciplined magnates combined with the wretched drunkenness of the poor and ignorant peasantry."

Hersch Dovid Nomberg, Chaim Zhitlowsky, Sholem Asch, I. L. Peretz, Avrom Reyzen 
(Czernowitz Conference, 1908)

Courtesy: Internet Archive

Державний архів Чернівецької області • Chernivtsi Oblast Archives Inventory

 

• Index [3]
• Preface [5]
• Part I: Institutions during the Austrian Period (since 1867 Austro-Hungary) 1775-1918 [19]
• Part II: Institutions of the Khotyn County, Bessarabia Governorate, Russian Empire (1812-1918) [88]
• Part III: Institutions of the Czernowitz Governorate during WW1 and the Russian Provisional Government [113]
• Part IV: Institutions during the Incorporation of Bukovina into Romania (1918-1940) [132]
• Part V: Institutions during WW2 [351]
• Part VI: Particular Archival Fonds and Document Collections [360]
• Appendices [365]
• Listing of the Fonds [366]
  

FamilySearch on Organization of Records in Ukrainian Archives: Most of the records of genealogical interest are organized into Central State Historical Archives for each province (oblast) of Ukraine. Additional records may still exist in smaller local archives. As in other archives of the former Soviet Union, all Ukrainian archive materials are assigned a record group (fond), inventory (opis), and item (delo).

A record group (fond) contains the records of a specific organization, portion of an organization, or individual. Archives also create collections as opposed to record groups, in which records of different organizations or individuals are filed together on some logical or thematic basis. Thus, in some archives, vital records of different religions can be filed together.

An inventory (opis) is a list of items in a record group or collection. While filing by record group reflects authorship, description by inventory reflects content, equivalent to a table of contents in a book. The inventory identifies title assigned to each item, the sequential number, and information on inclusive dates and number of pages. The inventory is the key to finding records in an archive. It usually is not available outside of the archive, although microfilmed records often include a microfilm copy of the inventory. There may be more than one inventory for a record group. These sometimes reflect different types of material or different accessions of records for the same institution. The decision as to what to include in an inventory will vary significantly from archive to archive. 

An item (delo) can be a single volume, file, or even a single sheet of paper. Each item is given a title based upon the record type and contents. Items are usually filed chronologically by the earliest year of information found in that item. Within a particular year, the items are supposed to be filed by degree of significance.

Courtesy: State Archives of Czernowitz Oblast

From the Deeps... • Folk Songs from Camps and Ghettos in Poland

Courtesy: Berti Glaubach