Mariana Hausleitner
Jewish-Communist Gangs in Czernowitz?
The Origin and Impact of a Constructed Enemy Stereotype[1]
On the dissemination of
the enemy stereotype of “Jewish gangs”
The image of Jewish-Communist gangs was omnipresent in northeastern Romania in the summer of 1940 and was time and again revived even decades later. When Romania was forced to retreat from Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia following the Soviet ultimatum, the Romanian press was full of reports of attacks. The high-circulation Bucharest newspaper Universul, for example, repeatedly published articles about armed Jewish gangs allegedly attacking soldiers and officers.[2] The Jewish writer Emil Dorian immediately understood that a scapegoat was wanted to be blamed for the chaotic retreat of the Romanian army and administration. On June 30, 1940, he noted in his diary that he doubted if the Jews had attacked the retreating armed Romanian soldiers by throwing stones at them.[3] The president of the Bucharest Jewish community, Wilhelm Filderman, cast doubts on reports that the mostly Jewish-owned shops in the center of Czernowitz were plundered by Jews. He assumed that the plunderers were rather Ukrainians or Communists.[4]
The eyewitness Fritz Schellhorn who was the German consul in Czernowitz confidentially reported to the legation in Bucharest that the tense situation was mainly due to the catastrophic organization and implementation of the withdrawal. The withdrawing units were overrun by the quick arrival of the first Soviet forces. But Schellhorn also sent reports about “Jewish gangs” making trouble in the towns of the Bukovina. According to the German consul, they plundered shops and attacked men and women. Some Romanian units shot on Jews, for example, in Ciudei where they were said to be waiting along the road with red flags to greet the Soviets only to have realized too late that the troops were in fact retreating Romanians.[5]
Due to censorship, the Romanian press reported little about the chaos of the retreat. Only insiders got to know that a great many soldiers had deserted in these days.[6] Nothing at all was published about the attacks of Soviet advance troops on Romanian units in order not to complicate the negotiating position of the Romanian general in Odessa. Until October 1940, a Soviet-Romanian commission held meetings in Odessa. While the Soviet negotiators were mainly concerned about the return of locomotives the Romanians had confiscated, the Romanians wanted to ensure the departure of as many compatriots as possible.
Even though the Soviet Union was barely criticized publicly, the Romanian leader Ion Antonescu claimed that the Romanian people were thinking day and night of fighting the Soviets and were yearning for revenge. That is how he justified vis-à-vis Hitler on June 12, 1941, the readiness of his army to join the German attack against the Soviet Union.[7] Immediately after the beginning of the war, Romanian military units often reported about the defense of so-called Communist spies who were allegedly supported by the Jewish population. The massacre in Iaşi at the end of June 1941, with 14,850 victims, was presented as an attempt of insurrection by Communist Jews.[8] In October 1941, Antonescu justified the deportation of all Jews from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina on account of their allegedly disloyal behavior in 1940. When Wilhelm Filderman protested, Antonescu, his former school colleague, answered as follows: “What did you do last year when you heard how the Jews in Bessarabia and in the Bukovina behaved who pulled of the badges of rank of our officers, who teared apart the soldiers’ uniforms, who killed soldiers by beating them up?”[9] This letter was published in several newspapers.
In the following, I analyze the role of Jewish Communists in the Bukovina during the days of the Soviet ultimatum. The enemy stereotype of Judeo-Communists appeared much later in Romania than in Germany where the Communists were already an important political factor in 1933. In Romania, the Communist Party was banned in 1924. Very few people supported the Communists in view of the drastic punishment for doing so. Furthermore, the population consisted overwhelmingly of peasants for whom the Soviet model with collective ownership of land was not attractive.
In Romania, the disenfranchisement of the Jews was mainly justified because of the high percentage of Jews in leading economic and social positions in the country. Only when the propaganda began to declare that the separation of the two eastern provinces was the wish of the Jews did the stereotype of Judeo-Communism become more important. Because of the Soviet occupation in 1940, tens of thousands of Romanians had to flee the eastern provinces. They linked their distress with the Jews. The despair of having lost their homes was expressed in feelings of revenge against the Jews.
This enemy stereotype of the Communist Jews was revived in 1990 when politicians from different parties wanted to rehabilitate Ion Antonescu. In the 1990s many pamphlets and booklets were published in which the stereotype of Jewish gangs was mentioned.
I will also analyze this kind of information about the activities of Communist Jews in 1940 in Northern Bukovina. As Northern Bukovina is a much smaller territory than Bessarabia with only a handful of towns, the analysis of existing information is easier. Furthermore, the most important activities were concentrated in the provincial capital Czernowitz. Most persons branded in contemporary documents as masterminds can therefore be identified easily on the basis of other documents. Finally, there are other useful contemporary witness accounts in Northern Bukovina.[10]
The most important sources for this contribution are those of the Romanian historian Vitalie Văratic who intensively researched the events in Northern Bukovina in the summer of 1940 and published a 555-page volume with 160 documents in 2001. Most of these documents were published by members of the Romanian army and security forces,[11] many containing the stereotype of “terror gangs.” The author presents these documents as realistic appraisals of the events during the retreat of the Romanian army. For me, these documents were useful to gain an overview of the enemy stereotype of Jewish Communists.
Further evidence can be found in the reports of the aforementioned German consul in Czernowitz, which have not been analyzed so far and which can be checked in the Political Archive of the Auswärtige Amt (Foreign Offci...
