Abstract
According to the 1930 census, there were 745,421 ethnic Germans in Romania. The majority was located in the former Habsburg provinces of Transylvania, Banat, and Bukovina, in communities that gradually radicalized under the influences of the local “Nationalist Self-Help Movement” and Nazi Germany’s foreign policy.1 These local Germans’ lives changed significantly in 1940. After the territorial shifts that summer only 300,000 still lived in Romania. Many ethnic German men went to Nazi Germany during the war to serve in the Waffen SS units, which created tensions with Ion Antonescu.2 The number of Germans diminished further in the autumn of 1940, as a result of the Romanian-German convention (22 October 1940): while few ethnic Germans from the Banat and Transylvania were repatriated to the Reich, some 76,500 from Southern Bukovina and Dobrogea were repatriated to Germany.3
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Notes
See Tudor Georgescu, “Pursuing the Fascist Promise: The Transylvanian Saxons ‘Sell-Help’ from Genesis to Empowerment, 1922–1935,” In Pyrah and Turda (eds.), Re-Contextualizing East Central European History, 55–73; Vasile Ciobanu, Contribuţii la cunoaşterea istoriei saşilor transilvăneni (Sibiu: Hora, 2001), 159–264.
After several interventions from Nazi leaders requesting Antonescu to allow local ethnic Germans to enroll in Wermacht and Wallen SS Antonescu agreed, and in May 1943 Romania and Germany signed a convention. As a result, more than 60,000 ethnic Germans from Romania joined various Nazi military units and Germany’s war industry. Dumitru Şandru, Reforma agrară din 1945 şi ţărănimea germană din România (Bucureşti: Institutul Naţional pentru Studiul Totalitarismului, 2009), 28–31.
These former German properties were, lor the most part, distributed to ethnic Romanian refugees from Bulgaria who could not be accommodated with the properties of ethnic Bulgarians expelled from Romania alter the Bulgarian-Romanian population exchange agreement. See Solonari, Purifying the Nation, 110–111; Dumitra Şandru, Mişcări de populaţie in România 1940–1944 (Bucureşti: Editura Enciclopedică, 2003); Bancoş, Social şi Naţional, 107–117; 189–214.
See Hillgruber, Hitler, Regele Carol si Mareşalul Antonescu; Florian Banu, Asalt asupra economiei României. De la Solagra la Sovrom: 1936–1956 (Bucureşti: Nemira, 2004); Hitchins, România, 453–454; ANR, SSRCI-DC, 23/1942, 24/1942
for the expansion of German corporation IG Farben into Romanian industry and agriculture, see Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 255, 298–315; Ciobanu, Contribuţii, 134–7, 156–8.
Traşcă and Deletant (eds.), Al Ill-lea Reich, 385–387. See also Cristian Scarlat (ed.), Diplomaţi Germani la Bucureşti 1937–1944: Din memoriile dr. Rolf Pusch şi Gerhard Stelzer (Bucureşti: ALL, 2001).
Calafeteanu (ed.), Iuliu Maniu-Ion Antonescu, 55; see also the comments (and the satisfaction: “That is an excellent measure, because [Germans] were about to buy everything from us, and especially from the Jews”) of Constantin Argetoianu, a former politician, after the government limited German expansion in Romanian economy. Constantin Argetoianu, Însemnări zilnice, vol. IX (Bucureşti: Machiavelli, 2009), 484; Idem, vol. X, pp. 312–313.
Besides the military collaboration in the war against the Soviet Union (which increased tensions between the two partners along with the growing number of Romanian casualties on the Eastern front), the economic privileges enjoyed by Germans located in Romania were a major source of anti-German hostility. Thus, according to the Gendarmerie’s reports, the poor inhabitants of Bucharest blamed German soldiers for the rise in prices, for having better accommodation and food compared with Romanian soldiers, dating beautiful local women, and so on. AMB, LJB 20/1938, p. 89; 61/1941, p. 101; 66/1941, pp. 7–8; 77/1942, p. 175; for other reports on anti-German hostility based mainly on economic grounds see also Ioan Hudiţă, Jurnal politic: 22 iunie 1941–28 februarie 1942 (Bucureşti: Lucman, 2005), 81–82; idem, Jurnal Politic: 1 februarie 1943–31 decembrie 1943 (Bucureşti, Comunicare.ro, 2010), 170–171, 412; Martinescu, Uraganul istoriei. … anul 1940 (Constanta: Ex Ponto, 2005), 169–171; idem, Uraganul istoriei: pagini de jurnal intim 1941–1945 (Constanţa: Ex Ponto, 2007), 264–265.
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© 2015 Ştefan Cristian Ionescu
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Ionescu, Ş.C. (2015). Romanianization versus Germanization. In: Jewish Resistance to “Romanianization,” 1940–44. Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484598_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484598_5
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