It's interesting how what I've talked about so far

actually does spill over into violence

long before the Holocaust.

In fact, I told you about the massacre in York.

There were, in fact, in the Middle Ages,

in the period of the Crusades, much more

serious and widespread massacres of the major North European

Jewish community, which was then in the Rhineland.

And these people, at that time--

the ones who survived the massacres, they all flee

eastwards.

So the reason why there are so many Jews in places like Poland

at the time when we start discussing the Holocaust is

because these are all, in effect, the children,

the grandchildren, the great grandchildren,

the descendants of the great massacres of the Middle Ages.

So in a sense, one could say on one level, what

happens to Jews is nothing new.

It's already there, embedded in their history.

And indeed, if we were to bring ourselves up closer to our time

but still before the Holocaust--

if we were to look at that great swathe of Eastern Europe, which

is so chaotic, so dislocated after the First World War--

a period where it's unclear where borders are,

where international borders are, who's in charge--

there are some horrendous massacres of Jews,

particularly in the Ukraine, which

is an area which is fought over particularly viciously

in what we sometimes call the Russian civil war.

But it's a whole series of wars in this period.

So here, we need to be reminded, I think, of the fact

that other Europeans already carry with them

an animosity towards Jews, which particularly seems

to become very potent in this period

after the First World War.

And I suppose, to move on just a little bit, if we were looking

for European reactions to a moment in time

where, again, they seemed to be back

at crisis point, whole areas of Eastern Europe-- there's

a question mark over their future.

When it comes just before the Second World War,

in 1939, at the time of the Nazi Soviet Pact of August 1939

to divide a great swathe of Eastern

Europe between Nazi control, Hitler's control,

and effectively Stalin's control,

it's interesting that for many nationalists,

they do worry about the Nazis taking over their country.

But if anything, they're more worried

about Stalin and Stalin taking over.

And what's interesting about that thing in their heads,

and in reality, is that, for them, they

make the linkage between Stalin and Jews.

Zydeco moonah.

It is the Jews who are going to take over.

There is, of course, a huge paradox in that.

But at this very time, Stalin's own brand of anti-Semitism

was coming to the fore.

The old Jews, the old Bolsheviks who

had been part and parcel of the revolution back in 1917--

they are all being exterminated by Stalin at this stage.

So we have something quite odd going on here,

and something which is not confined

to any particular state.

If we were to look at countries who participate

in the Holocaust, if we were to take a country like Croatia,

Croatia is a puppet state.

It kills all its Jews.

And one might say it does so at Hitler's behest.

Another country, Slovakia.

Again, partly a satellite state, but thinking of itself

as sovereign.

It's very happy to deport its Jews to Auschwitz.

Another state, as we'll see, France

has an extraordinarily complicated but rather dark

record.

But what I want to talk about in this section

is a state which unambiguously and of its own volition

as a sovereign independent state kills Jews.

Now, Romania and the Holocaust may not mean a lot to you.

But I think it's a significant one we should look at.

Because out of something like 3/4 of a million Jews

under Romanian control, in the period of the Holocaust,

something like 350,000 are killed.

And the majority of them are not killed by the Nazis.

They're killed by the Romanians.

Why is this so?

How do we explain this?

Well, very brief potted history to do with Romania--

Romania had been under Ottoman rule back in the 19th century.

It becomes independent.

It's a very rural state.

It's run primarily by aristocrats.

And it has a peasant base.

And you get quite a lot of refugee Jews coming

in from Russia in this period.

And they start taking over a sort of more middlemen, a more

trading role, particularly in villages.

And it's not liked.

Later on, when we get the First World War,

the Romanians hedge their bets on who they should support--

the Allies or the Central Powers.

And they eventually plump for the Allies,

because the Allies make promises to them

about huge gains they're going to make, territorially,

if they join them.

When they do so, Romania ends up being a much,

much larger state.

And it's a state full of Bulgarians, Hungarians,

Germans, Serbs--

none of whom are liked by the Romanians.

So one could argue, from a nationalist point of view,

it's not just about Jews.

But if we factor in those other things

we've talked about before--

fear of communism, fear of capitalism--

in the very uncertain environment

of the post First World War period,

we do find a virulent anti-Semitism.

It's perhaps best represented by a group which is unequivocally

fascist.

It's called the Iron Guards.

And the Iron Guards hates Jews and wants to kill them.

But we've got a little problem here,

a little historical problem.

When the killing begins of Jews in 1941

by an independent Romania, it's not

carried out by the Iron Guard.

It's carried out by a much more traditional, if right wing,

military-led regime, led by a man called Marshal Antonescu.

Let me explain a little bit why and how this happens.

In 1940, when Britain is busy fighting the Battle of Britain

and trying to stave off invasion, in Eastern Europe,

there is great concern about the future of states.

And it's no different for Romania.

They have some of their territory taken away

by Hungary.

They have some of their territory taken away by Stalin

through the Nazi Soviet Pact.

And so this is a country in crisis.

The king is removed.

There is an attempt by Marhsal Antonescu

to join up with the Iron Guards and to run a crisis

administration with the two of them together.

Marshal Antonescu then decides that the Iron Guards are only

going to destabilize the regime.

And he gets rid of them, not before, of course,

they've carried out their own massive and very, very nasty

pogrom of Jews in the capital city, in Bucharest.

But after that, what's Antonescu's aim?

His aim is to return the lands which have been lost in 1940.

He wants to bring them back under Romania.

He wants to do that by joining Romania

with Nazi Germany in its invasion of Operation

Barbarossa.

And he hopes that, in doing that,

that will actually make Hitler a supporter

of Romanian compensation in the east.

And that's the idea, that as Romanian troops join Operation

Barbarossa, they will be participants

in a liberation of the east, which will give

vast territories to Romania.

So Antonescu decides to join with Hitler

in Operation Barbarossa.

Romanian troops participate in the advance to the east.

Immediately, they start killing Jews.

The idea on paper is that they're simply

going to remove them to the east, as the Romanian troops

advance.

But in the territories which they reconquer,

which had been Romanian, they actually

start killing tens of thousands of their fellow Romanian

citizens who are Jewish.

When they cross the international border

into the Soviet Union, in other words into territory

which had not ever been Romanian,

they continued the process.

Now, it's interesting, because if we're

looking for a single moment where perhaps more Jews are

killed than anywhere else in a single massacre,

we might actually look to the massacre which

Romanians make happen in Odessa, in October, 1941.

It's very interesting, the reasons for this massacre.

This is, in part, revenge.

Soviet secret policemen had booby trapped

some of the hotels, where when they arrive,

the Romanian officer corps park themselves, in Odessa.

And they are blown sky high.

So on the one level, this is revenge

for what has happened to Romanian soldiers.

But it is revenge taken against Jews, specifically.

On another level, I think we can see something else

going on here-- that this idea of Jews

are somehow something which has to be cleared out of territory,

which is going to be Romanian, or so the hope is,

leads to something which is quite horrendous.

The Jews of Odessa are removed on foot to a port area.

They're either covered in gasoline and set alight,

or they're put into a series of warehouses

where they are bombarded by the Romanian artillery.

This is in the most extraordinary event.

And perhaps as many as 40,000 Jews are killed in this event.

That's not the end of the story.

The survivors from Odessa are then

forced to march further eastwards,

where because the conditions are so awful, many of them

start getting very, very ill.

And again, because they can't go any further,

because they would then end up in a war zone--

and the Germans insist on the Romanians,

they can't be deported further eastwards

as the Romanians would like--

the Romanians have to make another decision

on what they are going to do with all these people.

And so you get another series of massacres of Soviet Jews.

Perhaps, this time, over a period of several weeks,

50,000 or 60,000 Soviet Jews from their Odessa area

are massacred by Romanians.

Now, I think what the important thing of what

I'm trying to say here is when we think about the Holocaust,

we think about Einsatzgruppen.

We think about the SS.

We think about particular Nazi groupings,

organizations, and the Wehrmacht, of course--

the Nazi military who are somehow

responsible for the destruction of the Jews.

Here, we've got a series of events

which, though they come under the aegis of a Nazi drive

to the east, are actually undertaken

by an independent state, which decides

to do this because it wants to.

Because it does not want Jews in its midst and wants them

rid of.

The story is more complicated.

And it's more complicated for this reason.

In 1942, at the end of 1942, and into 1943,

the tide of war in the east begins to turn.

We have the battle of Stalingrad.

And for allies of Hitler, like Marshal Antonescu,

they start worrying about the consequences of being involved

in being on Hitler's side.

So they start changing their tune.

They have already brought not just Jews into the area

under their control, but gypsies, as well.

And that's very indicative of how states like this

are thinking.

Where can we dump all the people we don't want?

Jews, today.

Gypsies, tomorrow.

Maybe Hungarians the next day.

That's the sort of thinking.

And it doesn't change.

What does change is how can we somehow do this but

get off the hook if the Allies win the war?

And so you get something quite extraordinary in Romania.

They start, or rather they stop, direct killings of Jews,

as they had been doing.

And they start even finding ways of allowing people

to come and check up on Jews in this huge dumping ground--

Transnistria, it's called-- by, for instance, the International

Red Cross.

But it's very interesting.

When they get to indirectly speaking

through the Red Cross with the Allies,

what do they want to do?

They still want to get rid of the Jews.

They want to sell them to the Allies.

You take the Jews.

You pay us for the joy of it.

And then we can be rid of them, ourselves.

As you can imagine, the Allies give rather short shrift

to this idea.

Now, I think again, what's important about what

I'm saying here is that Romania represents,

if you like, the most extreme example of what a state might

do when it has the opportunity in the context of that bigger

thing we call the Holocaust.

But what I am trying to argue is that while it's

at the extreme end, it's not something which is unique.

If we look at the broader record,

we'll find that it is simply on a spectrum of what

other states, including independent states,

are willing to do in this particular context.