Romania's Holy War makes a significant contribution to understanding World War II and the Holocaust in Romania. Grant Harward perceptively points out that military history and Holocaust history developed along separate, often conflicting tracks in Romania, and he proposes to integrate the two. He reviews key findings of other scholars and challenges many of them. Finally, and hence the title of his book, he finds that neither military nor Holocaust historians have examined carefully Romanian soldiers’ motivation during the war, and he undertakes to do so. The hypothesis that most shapes Harward's study is that “Romanian soldiers were highly motivated, primarily by ideology, on the eastern front” (2). Each of these aspects of Romania's Holy War merits comment.
The core chapters of the book focus on integrating the Romanian army's military performance with its involvement in atrocities against Jews and others during three years of war alongside Germany and convincingly demonstrate the benefits of bridging the gap between military and Holocaust history. These are chapters in which Harward's citation of hitherto unexplored archival material, in particular from the Romanian National Military Archives, is most intense and revealing. Not every linkage between military events and Holocaust crimes is as direct as Harward sometimes argues, but his effort to integrate the trajectory of military events with the course of Holocaust atrocities is effective and instructive.
Harward is too abrupt in dismissing the work of some other scholars. Not every aspect of this history is as clear as he suggests. It is true, for instance, as Harward argues, that Romania shared certain ideological predispositions and interests with Nazi Germany, but that did not alter the reality that by late 1940, fearing national disintegration, Romania joined the Axis “under duress.” Similarly, while it is true that antisemitism was broad-based in Romania, this does not alter the reality that Ion Antonescu was an antisemite, too, who exercised dictatorial authority and issued governmental decrees and multiple direct orders to the military that resulted in deprivation, deportation, and death for hundreds of thousands of Jews. Romania's Holy War would be an even better book if written with greater tolerance for the possible validity of multiple overlapping interpretations rather than dismissing differing conclusions as mistaken.
In similar manner, the likelihood of multiple causation provides appropriate perspective with which to approach the author's hypothesis that Romanian soldiers were motivated principally by ideology. Harward stresses nationalism, religion, antisemitism, and anticommunism as motivators fueling Romania's “holy war.” These were certainly central themes exploited by the Antonescu regime and the officer corps in their massive propaganda directed at the population in general and rank and file soldiers in particular. Still, Harward identifies multiple additional factors that kept troops fighting: devotion to comrades; lives already lost; discipline violently enforced; exaggeration of Jewish betrayal in Bessarabia; pressure from German SS units; fear of retribution against one's family if a soldier refused to fight; fear of Soviet revenge killing, mass rapes, abuse of children. There were a myriad of factors at work that kept Romanian soldiers fighting.
This multi-causality necessarily raises the question whether the mass of Romanian soldiers were actually ideologically committed. Ideological commitment would imply understanding unusual in a fighting force where one third of soldiers were illiterate and many of the rest had only elementary-level village schooling. The government's propaganda had its impact, for sure. Yet, barraged by propaganda that appealed to patriotism that exploited religious faith with terms like “crusade” and “holy,” that stoked scapegoating and prejudice and threatened harm to one's family, most Romanian soldiers could be expected to comply with what was wanted of them. Christopher Browning, in his foundational Ordinary Men (1992), demonstrated conclusively that ideological commitment was neither present nor necessary for German police and soldiers to perpetrate brutal genocidal crimes. The same truth applies in the Romanian case. For many officers and for Iron Guardists freed from incarceration and sent to the front, ideology undoubtedly mattered. But the hypothesis that ideology “pervaded the ranks from top to bottom” (6) is problematic. The many instances of defeatism and resistance to continued engagement cited by Harward further make the point.
There are details in the author's rendition of Romanian history that will be debated, but they do not detract from the importance of this book. The rich new source material brought to bear; the analysis of army culture and the military's view of Romania's ethnic minorities; the extensive information regarding the propaganda machine through which the regime promoted its “holy war”; and the integration of military, political, and Holocaust perspectives: all of these make Romania's Holy War a book that needs to be read.
