Ion Antonescu

Ion Antonescu (Romanian: [iˈon antoˈnesku] ; 14 June [O.S. 2 June] 1882 – 1 June 1946) was a Romanian military officer and marshal who presided over two successive wartime dictatorships as Prime Minister and Conducător during most of World War II. Having been responsible for facilitating the Holocaust in Romania, he was overthrown in 1944, before being tried for war crimes and executed two years later in 1946.

A Romanian Army career officer who made his name during the 1907 peasants' revolt and the World War I Romanian campaign, the antisemitic Antonescu sympathised with far-right and fascist politics. He was a military attaché to France and later Chief of the General Staff, briefly serving as Defence Minister in the National Christian cabinet of Octavian Goga as well as the subsequent First Cristea cabinet, in which he also served as Air and Marine Minister. During the late 1930s, his political stance brought him into conflict with King Carol II and led to his detainment. Antonescu rose to political prominence during the political crisis of 1940, and established the National Legionary State, an uneasy partnership with Horia Sima of the Iron Guard. After entering Romania into an alliance with Nazi Germany, he eliminated the Guard following their Legionary Rebellion of 1941. In addition to being Prime Minister, he served as his own Foreign Minister and Defence Minister. Soon after Romania joined the Axis in Operation Barbarossa, recovering Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region, which had been occupied one year earlier by the Soviet Union, Antonescu also became Marshal of Romania.

An atypical figure among Holocaust perpetrators, Antonescu enforced policies independently responsible for the deaths of as many as 400,000 people, most of them Bessarabian, Ukrainian and Romanian Jews, as well as Romanian Romani. The regime's complicity in the Holocaust combined pogroms and mass murders such as the Odessa massacre with ethnic cleansing and systematic deportations to occupied Transnistria. The system in place was nevertheless characterized by singular inconsistencies, prioritizing plunder over killing, showing leniency toward most Jews in the Old Kingdom, and ultimately refusing to adopt the Final Solution. This was made possible by the fact that Romania, as an ally of Nazi Germany, was not occupied by the Wehrmacht and preserved a degree of political autonomy.