The contributions of German scholars to our understanding of the Holocaust in Romania remain less appreciated than those of their American, Israeli, and Romanian counterparts. The work of Hildrun Glass, Marianne Hausleitner, and Brigitte Mihok, for example, deserves a broader audience. Armin Heinen remains the exception to this rule. Since the publication of his 1996 study of the Iron Guard, Heinen's reputation as an authority on the subject of Romanian Fascism has gone unchallenged, though later authors (Radu Ioanid, Constantin Iordache) have modified or corrected some of his views. Indeed, prior to the opening of Romania's archives to serious research on the subject of the Holocaust, studies of the Legionary Movement and Fascism dominated the field, and within it Heinen's work remained a classic text.

Now that restrictions on access have been relaxed, the study of the Holocaust in Romania has experienced a veritable renaissance, as a new generation of scholars, especially in Romania itself, attempts to grapple with the thorny issues surrounding the deportation and murder of Romania's Jews and Roma. Heinen's latest study in part serves as a synthesis, the first chapter succinctly introducing the contours of recent research, including the findings of the 2003 International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania. The novel aspect to Heinen's study, however, lies in the framework he employs throughout the remaining text, in which he analyzes the “logic of violence” enacted by a variety of actors against Jews and Roma actors during discrete phases of the Holocaust in Romania: Ion Antonescu's dictatorial regime, the Iron Guard, the military, and ordinary police and soldiers.

The role of the Iron Guard in perpetrating genocidal acts still remains a difficult subject for some Romanians to accept, for the Legionary Movement enjoys an almost mythical status as enemies of Communism and protectors of quintessential Romanian values. One of this book's contributions is to highlight the process by which the Iron Guardists themselves created this mythology. The Iron Guard proved very effective in co-opting various religious and folk symbols as justification for their actions. Heinen further argues that the Iron Guard turned its murderous attention to Jews only after first dealing with its political rivals. This is debatable. Without being deterministic, one need only refer to the earliest writings and actions of Corneliu Codreanu, Horia Sima, and other luminaries of the Iron Guard movement to see that virulent anti-Semitism, including inciting violence against Jews, formed one of the cornerstones of their movement.

Another controversial area where Heinen weighs in regards who holds ultimate responsibility for the infamous pogroms committed in 1940 and 1941 targeting the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina. In the wake of the Soviet Army's reconquest of these territories, retreating Romanian soldiers killed thousands of Jews in revenge for their supposed disloyalty, the worst of these massacres occurring in Dorohoi and Iaşi. In his chapter on military violence, which focuses on the anti-Jewish riots of the Romanian army and the Einsatzgruppen, Heinen emphasizes the influence of the Einsatzgruppen on Romanian soldiers and gendarmes. This, combined with the milieu of a dictatorial state that had chipped away at the social brakes that ordinarily makes violence against civilians reprehensible, made the mass murder of Jews possible. Here, the absence of Jean Ancel's crucial study Preludiu la asasinat: Pogromul de la Iaşi, 29 iunie 1941 (Iaşi, Romania: Polirom, 2005) from Heinen's bibliography is most keenly felt, for Ancel convincingly argues that Romanian forces bear sole responsibility for the massacre, an event which actually preceded the greater mass killings of the Einsatzgruppen. Perhaps the most important contribution of Heinen's study is the subject of his fifth chapter, on the role of police. Here he underscores the complicity of police and gendarme forces at every stage of Romania's Holocaust, from the deportations to the ghettoes in Transnistria. Of particular note is Heinen's observation that many police units chose to adopt a maximalist interpretation of their orders, at times contradicting the express wishes of Bucharest.

This is a slim book, and certainly the events discussed herein merit more thorough analysis. As an introduction to current research on the Holocaust in Romania, it provides an engaging, crisp survey. In the end, however, the value of its contributions must be judged by the success of its analytical framework, and the answer is somewhat ambiguous. As noted above, it provides some important insights, yet I am not sure that it is the most useful. To take but two of many pertinent questions one might ask of any study concerning the Romanian Holocaust: (1) Does such an approach help us to better understand the motivations of perpetrators? and (2) Does it help to illuminate how and why the Holocaust unfolded so differently in Romania than in other Axis-allied states? Such questions are best answered, in my opinion by (on the one hand) investigating the particular dynamics of Jewish-Gentile and Romanian-Roma relations before and during the advent of Fascism, and (on the other) a careful explication of Romania's relationship with Germany, Hungary, and other states.