The Odessa massacre

Early in the evening of 22 October 1941, six days after Romanian troops had occupied Odessa, a huge explosion destroyed part of the building on Marazlievskaya Street that housed the city’s military command and the headquarters of the Romanian 10th Infantry Division. Several dozen people died beneath the rubble, among them the city commandant, Brigadier General Ion Glogojanu. The building had previously been the seat of the NKVD, and the charge had been laid by Soviet sappers before the evacuation. That same evening Marshal Ion Antonescu ordered “severe reprisals”. Over the next three days Romanian soldiers, gendarmes and policemen hanged and shot Jews in the streets of the city, and drove tens of thousands to the suburb of Dalnyk, where they locked them in warehouses, raked them with machine-gun fire and burned them. According to historians’ various estimates, between 25,000 and 34,000 people were killed, the overwhelming majority of them Jews.

Popular war chronologies describe the events briefly and broadly accurately, but their account needs several clarifications. The killings did not last two days: they began on the evening of 22 October, and the last of the warehouses at Dalnyk was blown up on 25 October. Glogojanu was not “the Romanian commander” in general, but a division commander and the military commandant of the city. The figure of 67 killed in the building comes from documents cited by the international commission of historians that investigated the Holocaust in Romania; according to other Romanian calculations, 79 people died. Finally, driving the Jews into Slobodka after the massacre did not yet amount to creating a ghetto, which was formally established there only in January 1942, and the sources differ on the number of people crowded into it in October.

Odessa under siege

Before the war Odessa was one of the largest centres of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. According to the Soviet census of 1939, about 200,000 Jews lived there, roughly a third of the city’s population. When Germany and its allies attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, refugees began to pour into Odessa, among them Jews from Bessarabia, which Romania had lost in June 1940 and was now recovering. They knew what they were fleeing from: at the end of June more than 13,000 Jews, according to later Romanian figures, died in the pogrom in Iași and on the “death trains”, and in Bessarabia and Bukovina the Romanian army and gendarmerie, together with the German Einsatzgruppe D, were murdering entire communities. At a cabinet meeting on 8 July 1941 the deputy prime minister, Mihai Antonescu, spoke of “cleansing” the country of Jews and added: “I don’t care if history remembers us as barbarians.”

Romania’s part in Operation Barbarossa initially had a single aim: to recover Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Antonescu, however, led the army further, beyond the Dniester. At the beginning of August the Romanian Fourth Army of General Nicolae Ciupercă cut Odessa off by land, and on 8 August the siege began that Soviet tradition calls the defence of Odessa. The city was defended by the Independent Coastal Army, commanded in the final weeks of the defence by Major General Ivan Petrov and supplied by sea by the Black Sea Fleet. The Romanians stormed the fortifications head-on with infantry and suffered enormous losses: by mid-October the Fourth Army had lost, according to Romanian figures, more than 90,000 killed, wounded and missing. In his orders and speeches Antonescu blamed these defeats on the Red Army’s “Jewish commissars”.

On 30 August 1941 at Tighina (Bender), representatives of the Romanian and German commands signed an agreement placing the area between the Dniester and the Southern Bug under Romanian administration. It was named Transnistria, and its governor was the law professor Gheorghe Alexianu, a friend of Mihai Antonescu. The same agreement provided that the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina, whom the Romanians wanted to drive across the Bug, were for the time being to be held in labour camps. Transnistria thus became the place to which the Romanian authorities deported Jews and where they killed them.

After the defeat of the Soviet Southwestern Front at Kiev, and in the face of the German advance on the Crimea, the Stavka decided at the end of September to evacuate Odessa. Between 1 and 16 October the Black Sea Fleet took about 86,000 soldiers out of the city, according to Russian accounts, together with artillery and supplies, as well as many civilians. On the morning of 16 October Romanian patrols entered the city, and in the afternoon the army occupied the port. When the Romanians marched in, between 70,000 and 120,000 Jews, according to various estimates, remained in Odessa: local people who had been unable or unwilling to leave, and refugees from Bessarabia.

The first days of the occupation

The 10th Infantry Division took over security in the city, and its commander, Glogojanu, became the military commandant of Odessa. The division was ordered to detain all Jewish men aged 15 to 50 and all Jews who had fled from Bessarabia. In the very first hours there were killings near the port, where people who had failed to get aboard the last ships died. On 17 October the military authorities ordered the registration of Jews. On 18 October the prison on the road to Bolshoi Fontan and the surrounding streets were turned into a place of internment, referred to in documents sometimes as a ghetto and sometimes as a camp; people dragged from their homes and detained at the registration points were taken there. The Romanians also took hostages, especially among the Jews. According to some accounts and later Soviet investigations, mass killings had already begun on 19 October.

From 17 October the German Sonderkommando 11b of Einsatzgruppe D was also operating in the city. Until mid-November it hunted down and shot Jews, including, on 23 October, inmates of the prison near Bolshoi Fontan. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) estimates its victims in Odessa at 1,000–5,000. The main burden of the crime that was to follow, however, lay with the Romanian army. According to the report of the commission of historians, the Germans offered to send an SS battalion to “de-mine” the city and “cleanse” it “of Jews and Bolsheviks”, but the Romanians decided to act on their own.

The explosion on Marazlievskaya Street

Glogojanu set up the command and the divisional staff in the building of the former NKVD administration, even though for weeks there had been warnings that the retreating Soviet units had mined many buildings and even everyday objects. According to accounts cited in Romanian literature, the then mayor of the city, Gherman Pântea, passed on to the army a warning that this very building was mined, but the commandant ignored it. On 22 October, at about 5.45 p.m. according to Romanian documents, an explosive charge destroyed the central and right-hand parts of the building. According to Soviet and Russian accounts, it was a mine laid by Red Army sappers before the evacuation and detonated by radio. The USHMM notes that the perpetrators were never conclusively identified, but no source links the explosion to the local Jews.

According to figures cited by the commission of historians, 16 Romanian officers were killed, among them Glogojanu, along with four German naval officers, 46 soldiers and NCOs and several civilians. The general’s body was not recovered from the rubble until the following day. He was posthumously promoted to major general. Antonescu – who, according to the same accounts, later said over his grave that Glogojanu had fought for Odessa like a hero and died in it like a fool – blamed the Jews and the communists for the explosion from the very first moment.

The order for reprisals

Immediately on receiving the report, Antonescu ordered General Iosif Iacobici, Chief of the General Staff and commander of the Fourth Army, to take “drastic punitive measures”. That same night Iacobici reported to the Marshal’s military cabinet: “As a reprisal and as an example to the population, I have taken steps to hang a number of suspect Jews and communists in the city squares.” He sent the commander of II Corps, General Nicolae Macici, to Odessa, where he took over the garrison. On 23 October Colonel Stănculescu, deputy to General Nicolae Tătăranu at army headquarters, passed on to the command in the city Antonescu’s Order No. 302 826, which demanded “immediate reprisals, including the liquidation of 18,000 Jews in the ghettos and the hanging of at least one hundred Jews in the squares of each regimental sector”.

Notices from the military command appeared on the walls, stating that 200 “Bolsheviks” had been shot for every German or Romanian officer and official killed, and a hundred for every soldier. All communists were to be taken as hostages and executed with their families if such an attack were repeated. In the language of the orders “Bolshevik” and “Jew” meant almost the same thing: throughout the campaign Romanian propaganda, like German propaganda, identified the Jews with communism.

On 24 October the head of Antonescu’s military cabinet, Colonel Davidescu, sent General Macici coded Order No. 563. In it the Marshal ordered that all Jews from Bessarabia who had taken refuge in Odessa be executed, and that all those covered by the order of 23 October who had not yet been killed be locked in a mined building and blown up on the day of the funeral of the Romanian victims. The order was to be destroyed after reading.

Gallows in the streets

The hangings began on the evening of 22 October. Soldiers broke into flats near the destroyed building and killed the occupants, and seized people in the streets and markets. Gallows were put up along the tram lines leading out of the city, and people were also hanged from balconies and lamp posts along the main streets. No one was tried. According to accounts cited by historians, about a hundred men were shot at Bolshoi Fontan, about two hundred by the market in Slobodka and more than 250 in Moldavanka. On the morning of 23 October hundreds of bodies were hanging in the city’s squares and at crossroads. The USHMM estimates that by the end of that day about 5,000 people, mainly Jews, had been hanged or shot. On the same day, according to some studies, mass killings began in the artillery depots on the road to Lustdorf on the edge of the city, where the victims were shot or burned alive. The number killed there is uncertain; some studies speak of more than ten thousand.

Dalnyk

At the same time gendarmes and soldiers began marching Jews out of the prison and out of the city towards the village of Dalnyk, a few kilometres west of Odessa. According to the commission’s report, at least 25,000 people were driven into the fields; one of the few survivors, then sixteen, recalled that the column was so long that she could see neither its head nor its tail. Those who could not keep up were shot along the way. At Dalnyk the first few dozen people, tied together in groups, were pushed into an anti-tank ditch and shot; according to testimony at the trials, the first group was shot personally by the commander of the 10th Machine Gun Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Nicolae Deleanu. Because killing in this way took too long, the rest were crammed into large sheds and warehouses. The sources differ on how many there were: witnesses usually speak of four, the commission’s report of nine.

Holes for machine guns were knocked through the walls. The buildings were raked with fire one after another, doused with petrol and paraffin from tankers parked alongside, and set alight. Soldiers formed a cordon round the site with orders to shoot anyone who tried to escape. A Romanian officer who was present later testified that people jumped out of the windows of the burning buildings and climbed out through the roofs, and that some signalled to the soldiers to shoot them in the head or the heart; women threw their children out of the windows. The killing went on all night and through the next day. Some officers and soldiers, shaken by what they saw, hid or deliberately fired wide; their commanders threatened them with punishment for it.

The last warehouse, full of people, was blown up on 25 October at 5.45 p.m., at exactly the hour at which the mine had exploded in the command building three days earlier. In this way Antonescu’s order was carried out: he had wanted the reprisal to be a symbolic repetition of the attack. The exact number of those killed at Dalnyk is not known. The USHMM puts it at about 20,000. At the end of November the Romanians brought in prisoners of war to dig pits and bury the bodies, and after the liberation of Odessa a Soviet commission found more than 22,000 bodies in nine pits, among them those of children who had been suffocated.

The total number of victims of 22–25 October remains disputed, because the sources define the time and place of the massacre differently and do not always separate it from the killings of the first days of the occupation. The range most often given is 25,000–34,000 killed; the USHMM speaks of at least 25,000–30,000. The international commission of historians established that between 18 October 1941 and mid-March 1942 the Romanian army, supported by the gendarmerie and police, murdered up to 25,000 Jews in Odessa alone and deported more than 35,000. At a cabinet meeting on 13 November Antonescu asked Governor Alexianu whether the reprisals against the Jews of Odessa had been severe enough. Alexianu replied that many had been killed and hanged in the streets.

Slobodka and the march to Bogdanovka

Those who had survived Dalnyk or had never reached it were declared “pardoned”. Some were sent to army and gendarmerie posts for “registration” and held there for varying lengths of time. Many were driven into Slobodka, a poor district on the edge of the city, largely destroyed during the siege. Some tallies speak of 35,000 people and some accounts of 35,000–40,000, while the USHMM estimates the number crowded in there on 25 October at about 25,000. For roughly ten days, until the beginning of November, these people stayed in ruined houses and on the streets, without food, in the cold and the autumn rain; many died. Later some of them were allowed to return to their homes, which they usually found occupied and looted. The worst frosts, however, came only in January 1942, and it was then, in temperatures of –20 to –35 degrees, that hundreds of people froze to death in the Slobodka ghetto and on the way to the railway station.

From 27 October gendarmes drove further columns of Jews from Odessa north-east, via Berezovka, to the camp at Bogdanovka on the Bug, some 160–200 kilometres from the city. According to the USHMM, 25,000–30,000 people were sent on this march. They walked for two weeks, in rain and frost, without food or water, robbed and raped by the gendarmes and the local militia; those who could not get up in the morning were shot. Those who arrived were put in the pigsties and barns of a large state farm at Bogdanovka, in Golta county, which was known as “the kingdom of death”.

Perpetrators and reckoning

The Odessa massacre was carried out by the Romanian army on the orders of its own country’s dictator, with the help of gendarmerie and police sent from Romania. The German Sonderkommando operated in the city at the same time, and a German Abwehr officer who investigated the explosion at the end of October confirmed the scale of the Romanian operation in a report of 4 November, although he emphasised the guilt of Soviet agents for the attack itself. Odessa showed that the Holocaust in the east was not solely a German undertaking: an ally of Hitler, not subject to any German orders in the matter, was capable of organising of its own accord a massacre on a scale comparable to Babi Yar, carried out three weeks earlier.

After the war, in May 1946, the People’s Tribunal in Bucharest sentenced Ion Antonescu, Mihai Antonescu and Gheorghe Alexianu, among others, to death. The charges included organising repression against the civilian population of Odessa in the autumn of 1941. All three were shot on 1 June 1946 in Jilava (PL) prison. General Macici was also sentenced to death, but King Michael I commuted his sentence to life imprisonment; he died in prison in 1950. Romanian courts rejected attempts to rehabilitate those convicted in 2006 and 2008.

For decades the crime was passed over in silence in Romania, while in the Soviet Union it was remembered as the murder of “peaceful Soviet citizens”, without singling out the Jewish victims. Only in 2004 did an international commission chaired by Elie Wiesel, appointed by the Romanian government, describe it in detail on the basis of Romanian documents. In the same year a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was unveiled in Odessa on Prokhorovsky Square, from which the columns set out for the camps in 1941. The Romanian director Radu Jude made the massacre the subject of a 2018 film whose title, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, repeats Mihai Antonescu’s words.

Place in the war

The massacre of October 1941 opened the way to the destruction of almost the entire Jewish community of Odessa. Between 21 December 1941 and mid-January 1942, tens of thousands of Jews from Odessa, Bessarabia and Transnistria were shot at Bogdanovka, and several thousand of the sick and elderly were burned alive in the barracks; the killers were Romanian gendarmes, Ukrainian auxiliary police and self-defence units of local ethnic Germans. Similar massacres took place in the camps at Domanevka and Akhmechetka. On 10 January 1942 the Romanians ordered all Jews still in the city to report to the Slobodka ghetto, and from 12 January until February they deported more than 31,000 people by train to Berezovka county, where most of them were killed by German self-defence formations. When the Red Army retook Odessa on 10 April 1944, 2,640 Jews were registered there.

Odessa was also the place where Romania most clearly overstepped the bounds of a war to recover Bessarabia. The capture of the city and the creation of Transnistria, territory that had never belonged to Romania, worsened its international position; at the beginning of December 1941 Britain declared war on it. According to the findings of the Wiesel commission, between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews died under Antonescu’s rule, and Transnistria, with Odessa and Bogdanovka, was the main site of that crime. Antonescu, who ordered the massacre, remained one of Hitler’s most important allies until 1944, and his armies later fought on the Don and at Stalingrad.