La Shoah en Roumanie, une barbarie indescriptible (Rees, Kaplan, Hilberg)

Alors qu'on se focalise sur l'extermination de la population juive en Pologne, celle perpétrée en Roumanie est rarement évoquée.

Lawrence Rees, historien britannique:

"À la suite de l'invasion de l'URSS, les Roumains tuèrent plus de 100.000 Juifs sur le territoire de la Bessarabie et de la Bucovine du Nord.  La brutalité des Roumains était telle que même les Allemands se plaignirent de leur comportement.  Le général von Schobert déplorera que les Roumains n'enterrent pas les cadavres de ceux qu'ils tuaient et l'Einsatzkommando leur reprocha de ne pas organiser correctement leurs massacres." 

Robert D. Kaplan, journaliste et écrivain américain:

"In 1941 and 1942, Antonescu oversaw the deportation of 185,000 Jews from Bessarabia and the northern tip of Moldavia (also recently liberated from the Russians) to Transdniestra, were forward units of the Romanian army were setting up the only non-German-run extermination camps in Europe.  From late 1941 until the middle of 1942, in this obscure and remote theatre of the war, the Romanian army murdered every one of these people, stripping them naked, and shooting them in subzero temperatures.  On a few occasions, when soldiers were low on bullets, they shot only the adults and buried the children alive.

It was too much even for Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of carrying out the extermination of European Jewry.  In early 1942, Eichmann pleaded with Antonescu to halt the killings temporarily so that the job could be done more cleanly by Einsatzgruppen (special mobile SS murder squads) after the Nazis completed the conquest of Ukraine, which Eichmann assumed would take only a few more months.  But the Romanians were in a killing frenzy."

"The historian Raul Hilberg, who documented the Holocaust in Romania in his 1961 book, The Destruction of the European Jews, asserted that in no other country during World War II, except Germany itself, did national character play such a role in determining the fate of the Jews as in Romania."

Lawrence Rees, Holocauste, Albin Michel (voir l'article de Paul François Paoli: Holocauste, de Laurence Rees: au cœur des ténèbres @ Le Figaro Littéraire qui cite le passage ci-dessus).

Robert D. Kaplan,  Balkan Ghosts,A Journey Through History, 2005, Picador, p.p. 128-129.