Panel Issues Romania Holocaust Report

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By ALEXANDRU ALEXE, Associated Press Writer

BUCHAREST, Romania - An international panel headed by Nobel-prize winner Elie Wiesel released a report Thursday detailing the responsibility of Romania's pro-Nazi authorities in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Gypsies during World War II.

President Ion Iliescu, who organized the panel last year after making the first official acknowledgment of Romania's role in the Holocaust, said Thursday his country assumes responsibility for actions taken by its wartime leaders. He also pledged to help educate the Romanian public about the findings in the report "so that such tragedies will never happen again."

Most Romanian historians had long denied the country's wartime leaders were responsible for the mass killings of Romanian Jews, blaming it instead on their Nazi German allies or Hungary which annexed a part of country where many Jews lived.

Iliescu's commitment to release the report represents a sharp departure from the decades of denial and demonstrates the extent to which the country is trying to come to grips with the truth about its role in the Holocaust.

"The Holocaust tragedy was possible due to the complicity of leaders of state institutions" who zealously carried out the orders of Romania's pro-Nazi ruler Marshal Ion Antonescu, Iliescu said Thursday.

Iliescu set up a panel with a mission to study the Holocaust in Romania. The 33-member committee presented him Thursday with a 400-page report of its findings.

The experts, from Romania, United States, Israel, France and Germany concluded Romanian authorities were responsible for the deaths of between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews and more than 11,000 Gypsies.

Another 132,000 Romanian Jews were killed by pro-Nazi Hungarian authorities who controlled parts of northern Romania during the war, the report said.

Romania was home to 760,000 Jews before 1940. About 6,000 Jews now live there.

The number of Jews killed had previously been disputed but some Jewish historians had concluded the total was around 420,000 in all of Romania, including the Hungarian controlled sector.

"The atrocities must not and cannot be forgotten," said Wiesel, himself a Holocaust survivor.

He said this investigation was overdue and there was not enough public information detailing the experience of Jews in Romanian-run death camps in Trans-Dniester, a Soviet Union region occupied by Romania during the war.

"I didn't know there was so much brutality, that the anti-Semitism was such a pure anti-Semitism, with nothing to do with racism or economics," said Wiesel, who was deported with his family by Hungarian authorities to different German-run camps.

"Why did it take so long for me to learn that?"

Wiesel praised Iliescu's efforts to bring the facts to light and said such investigations should be replicated in other countries such as France, Germany and the United States.

Under communism, children were taught that Germans were the sole perpetrators of the Holocaust, while Antonescu was considered a war criminal who merely followed Adolf Hitler's orders. After communism fell in 1989, Antonescu became a hero to some Romanians who praise him for having gone to war against the Soviet Union after it invaded parts of Romania in 1940.