Vladimir Solonari. 2010. Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania.

Mennie, Holly

Vladimir Solonari. 2010. Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Hardcover, 451 pp. ISBN 0801894085. CDN$75.00.

In September 1940, Romanian King Carol II abdicated his throne and handed power over to Marshal Ion Antonescu, who pursued policies that Antonescu hoped would lead to an "ethnically pure" Romania. As Romania entered the war against Russia alongside the Nazis in 1940, the provinces of Bukovina and Bessarbia became the "proving ground" for the ethnic cleansing that Antonescu hoped to effect within all of Romania at some opportune moment following the war. Romania's part in the Holocaust largely played out here, with Romanian soldiers working alongside Nazi death squads to murder thousands of Jews and deport thousands more.

In Purifying the Nation, an extensive study of Romania's role in the Holocaust, historian Vladimir Solonari argues that Romania was not a Nazi puppet state pressured into conducting the mass murder and deportation of its Jews, but instead a partner that pursued such policies of its own accord. Moreover, persecution of ethnic minorities (especially Jews) was not an unpopular policy of the Antonescu regime; it was supported by the majority of the Romanian intelligentsia, who also supported the alliance with Hitler. Additionally, the general populace preferred to remain ignorant of what was happening to the Jews.

By providing a brief history of Romania and Romanian nationalism from before the First World War into the inter-war period, Solonari shows how racism and the idea of an "ethnically pure" Romania existed before the Nazis rose to power in Germany. Solonari provides portraits of Romanian eugenicists such as Iuliu Moldovan and his disciples. Moldovan and his students admired the Nazis, but they did not subscribe part and parcel to Nazi racial ideology because Romanians believed they were descended from Roman legionaries and Dacian women and were thus a "mixed" race. Since "racial purity" was of chief importance in Nazi doctrine, the Romanian eugenicists modified it to serve their own agenda. Ovidiu Comsia, a Moldovan disciple and member of the nationalist Iron Guard, replaced the Nazi "race" idea with the Romanian concept of neam, or "ethnicity"; hence the Antonescu regime's desire to create a country composed entirely of"ethnically pure" Romanians. Solonari also provides a brief history of the Romanian army's pre-existing anti-Semitism and how its leaders rationalized the mass killings.

The book does not leave out the achievements of those few Romanians who tried to save Jews. Most notable among them is Traian Popovici, the mayor of Cernauti in Bukovina. Counted among Yad Vashem's "Righteous among the Nations," he used his position as mayor to keep many Jews in the city from being deported until he was eventually dismissed from his job. With regard to the Romanian soldiers who became killers, Salonari also draws a suitable comparison to Christopher Browning's excellent book Ordinary Men, a study of a similar situation in Poland wherein ordinary Germans were co-opted to kill Jews and before long became hardened murderers. However, as in Browning's book, there are some rare examples of men who refused to take part in the killings or sometimes even tried to keep Jews from being killed. Unfortunately, it is not hard to believe that those brave enough to risk their lives saving Jews were in the minority.

Solonari explains in detail how the Romanians eventually defied the Nazis and stopped deporting Jews. This was not motivated by compassionate or humanitarian concerns, but rather by the realization that Germany was losing the war. After the Germans lost at Stalingrad, Antonescu realized that the Allies would not be wholly defeated. Instead he imagined that the Nazis, along with the Romanians, would attend a peace conference at the end of the war with the Allies, and both sides would decide the future of Europe. Therefore, when things began to look bad for Germany, Antonescu started to fear that the Allies would seek retribution for his government's murderous actions against the Jews. It was this fear that resulted in the halting of deportations. If Antonescu and his country had been mere Nazi puppets, they could not have exercised enough independence to effect this policy change.

By relying on a plethora of archival sources, both German and Romanian, Vladimir Solonari sheds light on the Romanian part of the destruction of the European Jews. This is Solonari's first book, and clearly an extension of the previous articles he has written on the Holocaust in Bukovina and Bessarabia, as well as the Romanian part in it. Purifying the Nation is an excellent and thorough study of this dark chapter in history and a worthy addition to the library of Holocaust Studies.

Holly Mennie

University of Waterloo