Uniformed Murderers

Uniformed Murderers investigates the causes, logistics, motivations, and legal awareness of the Romanian servicemen – both military and gendarmerie – who massacred or otherwise caused the death of more than three thousand Jews, Roma, and others in 1941 and 1942. Vladimir Solonari addresses and revises the framework that Romanian decision makers largely followed in the footsteps of their German counterparts. Solonari describes how Romanian leaders never completely acceded to the project of total annihilation of European Jewry and that although Romanian fascist dictator Ion Antonescu was viscerally antisemitic, he was determined to avoid making his country and his regime be seen as criminal in the eyes of the Western powers. Consequently, he preferred to avoid commanding his servicemen to kill, and when ordering them to do so, he tried to leave no paper trail. While some officers were reluctant to implicate themselves in criminal behavior, others demonstrated eagerness to kill perceived enemies of the Romanian nation. Uniformed Murderers integrates these factors and assumptions to reveal how they led to the bewildering inconsistency of the Romanian record of mass murder, which reached its apex earlier than that of the Germans.