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Saturday 14 June 2003
Romania denies Holocaust
By Shamillia
Sivathambu
THE Romanian government issued a blunt denial yesterday that the
Holocaust hit the country during the
Second World War, defying historical accounts of a campaign of anti-Semitic persecution orchestrated by its pro-Nazi wartime regime.
The statement, issued by the Public
Information Ministry, startled Jewish leaders in Romania, where 250,000 Jews were killed or deported to concentration camps under the rule of Marshal Ion
Antonescu. “We firmly claim that within the borders of Romania between 1940
and 1945 there was no Holocaust,” the ministry said.
The statement
came a day after Romanian authorities
released wartime archives to the
Holocaust War Memorial Museum in
Washington. Jewish leaders questioned
the assertion and criticised the
Romanian government for failing to
reflect the truth.
“You cannot say there weren’t victims,” said Ernest Neuman, a Jewish community leader in Timisoara.
Historians have documented numerous accounts detailing the deportation and execution of Jews in Romania. Most died in camps in the former
Soviet Union. But several pogroms spilled Jewish blood on Romanian soil. In
June 1941 up to 12,000 people in the north-eastern city of Iasi are believed to have died as Romanian and German soldiers swept from house to house killing
Jews.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group
Limited 2003.
Our dossier on the origins of anti-Semitism
David Irving: a Radical’s
Diary, describing an exchange with
Daniel Goldhagen after his lecture in a New Orleans Synagogue (November 1997):Jews must ask themselves Why they were so hated everywhere, not Who pulled the trigger.