Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944

Dallas Michelbacher

Description

Between Romania's entry into World War II in 1941 and the ouster of dictator Ion Antonescu three years later, over 105,000 Jews were forced to work in internment and labor camps, labor battalions, government institutions, and private industry. Particularly for those in the labor battalions, this period was characterized by extraordinary physical and psychological suffering, hunger, inadequate shelter, and dangerous or even deadly working conditions. And yet the situation that arose from the combination of Antonescu's paranoias and the peculiarities of the Romanian system of forced-labor organization meant that most Jewish laborers survived. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania explores the ideological and legal background of this system of forced labor, its purpose, and its evolution. Author Dallas Michelbacher examines the relationship between the system of forced labor and the Romanian government's plans for the "solution to the Jewish question." In doing so, Michelbacher highlights the key differences between the Romanian system of forced labor and the well-documented use of forced labor in Nazi Germany and neighboring Hungary. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania explores the internal logic of the Antonescu regime and how it balanced its ideological imperative for antisemitic persecution with the economic needs of a state engaged in total war whose economy was still heavily dependent on the skills of its Jewish population.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. "Work in the Community Interest"

2. Trial and Error

3. The "Review of the Working Jews"

4. In the Shadow of Belzec

5. The Apogee

6. Travails Ended, Justice Averted

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Judaïsme
• Judaïsme
• Judaïsme
• Europe
• Seconde Guerre mondiale
• Holocauste
• HIStory
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Nazisme
• General
• Eastern
• Work
• History of Europe
• World War II
• 20th century
• Ideology
• General officer
• Internment
• Prisoner
• Cold War
• Labor camp
• Modern history
• Jewish studies
• The Holocaust
• Nazism
• Jews
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Nazismo
• POLITICAL SCIENCE

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 05 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253047441
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

JEWISH FORCED LABOR IN ROMANIA, 1940-1944
JEWISH FORCED LABOR IN ROMANIA, 1940-1944
Dallas Michelbacher
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2020 by Dallas Michelbacher
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Michelbacher, Dallas, author.
Title: Jewish forced labor in Romania, 1940-1944 / Dallas Michelbacher.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019052306 (print) | LCCN 2019052307 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253047380 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253047434 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253047458 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Forced labor-Romania-History-20th century. | Jews-Romania-History-20th century. | World War, 1939-1945-Jews-Romania.
Classification: LCC HD4875.R6 M53 2020 (print) | LCC HD4875.R6 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/1813409498-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052306
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052307
1 2 3 4 5 26 24 23 22 21 20
For my parents, Leonard and Kathie
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Work in the Community Interest
2 Trial and Error
3 The Review of the Working Jews
4 In the Shadow of Belzec
5 The Apogee
6 Travails Ended, Justice Averted
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I OWE DEBTS of gratitude to several people and organizations for this book. First, I would like to thank my mentor, Eric A. Johnson, for his guidance during my research, as well as Doina Harsanyi, Tim O Neil, Joachim von Puttkamer, and Vladimir Solonari, who provided important feedback on my work. I also wish to express my appreciation to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Nazi Germany, which provided funding that was essential for the completion of this project. I also must thank the reference staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for its assistance in my research process. In addition, I would like to thank Steve Feldman for his assistance with the publication process. And last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my parents, Leonard and Kathie, and my wife, Michelle, for their invaluable support at every stage of this project.
JEWISH FORCED LABOR IN ROMANIA, 1940-1944
Introduction
E VERYBODY WAS - THE wives, the mothers [were] crying, William Farkas recalled of the day in the summer of 1941 when he was called up for work in a labor battalion. What will happen with my husband? What will happen with my child? What with . . . or something like this. So everybody was crying, crying. [It] was a terrible situation. Farkas was sent to work on a railway tunnel in the Carpathian Mountains more than three hundred kilometers from his home. The work was very dangerous, with untrained men using dynamite to blast through the rocky terrain. My best friend [died] there, Farkas remembered, because when [the dynamite] was exploding . . . one rock [hit him] in his head, and he [died] immediately there. One of my best friends, he [died] there, yes. 1
Between August 1941 and August 1944, more than seventy-five thousand Romanian Jews like William Farkas were conscripted into forced labor by the Romanian military. Most worked in labor camps and detachments on projects related to the war effort, including construction and repair of roads, railroads, fortifications, and waterways; mining and quarrying; and agriculture. Others worked on jobs of local significance, such as repairing government buildings and city streets. During the winter, they were assigned to menial tasks like clearing snow from streets and railroad tracks. Jews with academic qualifications or specialized skills were requisitioned for use in private businesses and industry. The forced labor system was both poorly managed, leading to tragedies like the death of Farkas s friend, and rife with corruption. Those who could pay the requisite bribes could purchase an exemption from forced labor that allowed them to continue working in their regular jobs. Despite several reorganizations of the system and revisions of the regulations on the use of forced labor, problems such as poor management and supervision of workers; inadequate housing, food, and medical supplies; laborers inaptitude for the tasks they were asked to perform; and rampant corruption were never solved, leading to frustration for the military and civilian leadership and hardship for the Jewish laborers. Nonetheless, forced labor continued until Ion Antonescu s government collapsed and the new government invalidated his regime s antisemitic legislation.
The historical literature on forced labor in Romania is not well developed. However, there is a much larger body of research on forced labor in Nazi Germany and Hungary. In the popular imagination, Jewish forced labor is often associated with the idea of extermination through labor, mitigated only by heroic figures like Oskar Schindler, who used forced labor as a ruse to rescue Jews. However, recent works, particularly those on Germany, have challenged the rather simplistic paradigm of extermination through labor and provided a more nuanced analysis of forced labor that reflects the complicated economic and political considerations that determined its course. This improved analytical framework better describes the decision-making process regarding the use of Jewish labor and its role in the progression from legal persecution to mass murder and enables a more complete understanding of how forced labor fits within the broader narrative of the Holocaust.
As Wolf Gruner notes in his seminal work on Jewish forced labor in Nazi Germany, many early historians of the Holocaust treated forced labor as an intermediate step between early discriminatory measures and the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (the Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews of Europe) or simply as an early stage of the extermination process. He argues, however, that forced labor was a separate component of Nazi policy that originated independently from the Final Solution, observing that Jews began to be used as forced laborers prior to the start of the Second World War. The first form of Jewish forced labor, which began in 1938, was what Gruner termed the segregated labor deployment system ( geschlossene Arbeitseinsatz ), in which Jews-initially only those who were unemployed or on public assistance but later most Jewish men-were recruited into labor units to perform work such as street cleaning, construction, and harvesting crops. By April 1939, twenty thousand Jews were working in this system, and at its peak, in the spring of 1941, it employed more than fifty thousand men. 2
After the Second World War began, Germany faced substantial labor shortages. Even as early as 1938, the recovery of the German economy had begun to tighten the labor market, and the mobilization of large numbers of men for war led to a widespread lack of manpower in important industries. German leaders responsible for economic affairs, such as Hermann G ring, saw the Jews of Germany and the occupied territories as an ideal source of cheap labor. 3 In occupied Poland, both the Reich Labor Office and the SS established labor camps for Jews, while thousands more were recruited to work in war-related industrial concerns operated by the Wehrmacht. These policies were based on both the desire to force Jews left unemployed by discriminatory legislation to contribute to the economy and to fill the ever-increasing need for labor to fuel the German war machine. Gruner argues that, as a result, forced labor was a key element in Nazi Jewish policy from 1939 onward, rather than an interim solution. 4
However, as Christopher Browning has noted, there was no general consensus among the Nazi leadership regarding Jewish forced labor despite the economic utility it provided. In fact, he argues, some within the Nazi bureaucracy, foremost among them Heinrich Himmler, were outright hostile to the idea of widespread exploitation of Jewish labor, fearing that it would impede the Final Solution. 5 While some administrators in occupied Poland-such as Friedrich-Wilhelm Kr ger, the higher SS and police leader in the General Government-recognized the irrationality of simply deporting the Jews without exploiting their labor fully, officials in Berlin, like Reinhard Heydrich, saw forced labor as an opportunity for employers to protect Jews from deportation by claiming that they were of vital economic importance. Although Himmler allowed some Jewish concentration camp prisoners to be used as laborers for the Wehrmacht, Browning argues that this was a temporary concession designed to placate the Wehrmacht rather than a long-term strategic plan. 6
Because of the primacy given to the extermination process after the Final Solution began, German officials had only limited leeway to carry out policies they viewed as rational, such as the use of Jewish laborers who were slated for deportation. Ulrich Herbert frames the balancing act between economic needs and racial policy as a search for compromises that could recon