ROMANIA AND THE NAZI-SOVIET WAR, 1941-1944
 
Led by Antonescu, Romania participated fully in the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Within days of the invasion, Romanian authorities staged a pogrom against the Jewish population in the city of Iasi, the regional capital of Moldavia. Romanian police officials shot hundreds of Jews in the courtyard of police headquarters. Hundreds more were killed on the streets or in their homes. In all, at least 4,000 Jews were murdered in Iasi during the pogrom. Thousands more were arrested, packed into freight cars, and deported by train to Calarasi and Podul Iloaei, towns located southwest of Iasi. Many of these deportees died en route from starvation or dehydration.

Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Romania reannexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which had been seized by the Soviets a year earlier. After the conquest of the Ukraine by German and Romanian troops in July and August 1941, Romania was given the territory between the Dniester and Bug Rivers. Romanian authorities established a military administration there and dubbed the region "Transnistria."

Both in support of German SS and police units and on their own initiative, Romanian army and gendarmerie (police) personnel massacred thousands of Jews in Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and Transnistria. Romanian and German units began systematic shootings of the Jewish residents of Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia, shortly after occupying the city in July 1941. Survivors of the initial massacres, about 11,000 people, were herded into a ghetto and conscripted to perform forced labor under harsh conditions. In October, those left alive were deported to camps and ghettos in Transnistria, as were most of the surviving Jews in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Many Jews died of exposure, starvation, or disease during the deportations to Transnistria or after arrival. Others were murdered by Romanian or German units, either in Transnistria or after being driven across the Bug River into the German-occupied Ukraine.

Romanian authorities established several de facto ghettos and two concentration camps in Transnistria. Among the most notorious of these ghettos (which the Romanians referred to as "colonies") was Bogdanovka, on the west bank of the Bug River, where thousands of Jews were interned. In December 1941, Romanian troops, together with Ukrainian auxiliaries, massacred almost all the Jews in Bogdanovka; shootings continued for more than a week. The Romanians also massacred Jews in the Domanevka and Akhmetchetkha camps. Typhus-devastated Jews were crowded into the "colony" in Mogilev. Romanian authorities established concentration camps at Pechora and Vapniarka in Transnistria in the winter of 1941-1942. Vapniarka was reserved for Jewish political prisoners deported from Romania proper. Of its several thousand prisoners, very few were able to survive.

The Soviet army overran most of Transnistria in the spring of 1944. Bessarabia was conquered in the first weeks of the summer offensive. As Soviet troops massed on the Prut River, which separates Moldavia from Bessarabia, a group of opposition politicians, supported by King Michael, overthrew Antonescu and signed an armistice with the Soviet Union on August 23, 1944. Romanian troops then fought alongside Soviet troops through Hungary and into Germany.

Between 1941 and 1944, German and Romanian authorities murdered or caused the deaths of between 150,000 and 250,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews in Transnistria. At least 270,000 Romanian Jews were killed or died from mistreatment during the Holocaust.

Antonescu and several other officials of the Romanian wartime regime were tried after the war. Antonescu was convicted and executed. However, most Romanian perpetrators were never brought to justice.