Romanian Troops Carried Out 1941 Massacre of Jews
Forensic scientists from Bucharest concluded that 36 bodies found at a mass grave near Iasi belonged to Jews who were murdered by Romanian troops.
The investigation into the mass grave at Vulturi Forest ended last month and determined that soldiers of the Romanian army’s Regiment 6 perpetrated the murders in June 1941, the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania announced Wednesday.
The institute’s director, Alexandru Florian, said the finding was “a legal document proving the Holocaust in Romania.”
The probe, which began after the grave’s discovery in 2010, revealed that 12 of the people buried there were children, including a toddler younger than two. Nine women were also buried at the mass grave along with 15 men, a researcher for the Elie Wiesel institute said at a press conference Wednesday in Bucharest. The probe was conducted by military prosecutors.
Vulturi is the second place in Romania where a mass grave has been discovered since the war. In 1945, 311 bodies from three mass graves were exhumed in Stanca Roznovanu in Iasi.
Gheorghe Stavrescu, the general who comanded the regiment, died in prison in 1951 of tuberculosis. He was imprisoned by Romania’s communist rulers for war crimes, according to the archives of the Romanian Ministry of National Defense. Two of his subordinate officers responsible for the Vulturi massacre died in the front during World War II, according to the news site gandul.info.
Approximately 380,000 Jews were murdered in Romania-controlled areas during the Holocaust, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.
In 2003, Romania officially recognized the complicity of its pro-Nazi government during the Holocaust. Romania set up the Elie Wiesel National Institute in 2004, and proceeded to teach the Holocaust in over 100 schools. It also erected several national monuments in memory of the Holocaust and designated an national memorial day.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO