Following the end of the Second World War, Romania was one of the 4 countries to be officially acknowledged as an "ally of Hitlerite Germany" by the 1947 Paris Peace Treaties (along with Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland). The treaty of peace with Romania obliged the country to apprehend and bring to trial people accused of "war crimes and crimes against peace and humanity".
Only 4 Romanian war criminals were executed (Ion Antonescu, Mihai Antonescu, Constantin Z. Vasiliu and Gheorghe Alexianu) and hundreds more were sentenced to prison or forced labor. Only slightly more than 200 Romanians were sentenced by the initial postwar trials, carried out by the "People's Tribunals". Although the two courts - based in Cluj and Bucharest - sentenced 668 people, the vast majority of these were foreigners. The Cluj tribunal sentenced only 26 Romanians, the remainder being Hungarians (370), Germans (83) and Jews (2). The Bucharest tribunal sentenced only 187 people. There were more trials concerning war crimes and "crimes against peace" after the "People's Tribunals" were disbanded, however. Romania was the only country in Eastern Europe to initiate only a small number of court proceedings against accused war criminals and collaborators. This declaration of practically singular responsibility allowed many of those guilty of war crimes and collaboration to escape justice in postwar Romania. In Czechoslovakia and Hungary, for comparison, tens of thousands were convicted and hundreds were executed. In Bulgaria, death sentences alone amounted to 2,618, of which 1,576 were carried out.
The postwar regime "went easy" on the mass of genocidal antisemites, sentencing them to relatively minor punishments. Early amnesties were often granted. For example, on 1 June 1945, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu successfully had 29 death sentences commuted by the King. Although hundreds of high-ranking officials and officers were condemned to life or lengthy prison sentences, all who did not die in prison were released between 1958 and 1962.
Background
Under Ion Antonescu's leadership, Romania joined the Tripartite Pact on 23 November 1940 as a sovereign state, took part in Operation Barbarossa as an equal partner of Germany, and was never occupied by the Wehrmacht. Hitler respected Antonescu, who led the third largest Axis force in Europe: 585,000 Romanian troops served on the Eastern Front during June-October 1941. Although not completely a voluntary partner, Romania was a partner and not a vassal, and the country remained under the control of a native ruler. After the Armistice of Cassibile in September 1943, Romania became the second Axis power in Europe.
Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs praised the August 1944 coup, writing: "In August 1944, the Rumanians executed the most successful coup d'etat during World War II. With an entire German Army in their midst, they turned around within twenty-four hours and proclaimed their alliance with the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States. (Again the comparison with Italy is instructive: compared to this acrobatic feat, the descendants of Machiavelli were mere bunglers.)".
The Holocaust
Romania ranks first among Holocaust perpetrator countries other than Nazi Germany. The Romanian Holocaust was outside the control of the Nazis. Its beginning did not require Nazi intervention, Romania being the only ally of the Third Reich that carried out its genocidal campaign without the intervention of Heinrich Himmler's SS. The "wholesale slaughter of Jews" in Romanian-occupied Soviet territories was "a genocide operationally separate from the Nazi Final Solution". It was by far the greatest extermination of Jews by non-German forces. Romania also rejected Nazi designs on its Jews, ultimately declining to deport Romanian Jews to the Belzec concentration camp. Nevertheless, between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews died in Romanian-controlled territories. Romania even took the lead in the Holocaust for the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa. This was acknowledged by Adolf Hitler on 19 August 1941: "As far as the Jewish Question is concerned, it can now be stated with certainty that a man like Antonescu is pursuing much more radical policies in this area than we have so far.". The regime of Ion Antonescu had been killing Jewish women and children, clearing entire Jewish communities, while Nazi Germany was still massacring only Jewish men. Romania was the only country other than Germany itself that "implemented all the steps of the destruction process, from definitions to killings".
The trials
"People's Tribunals"