Grant Harward's monograph offers a provocative and detailed narrative that aims to correct misrepresentations of the actions undertaken by the Romanian army during World War II vis-à-vis the Jewish population they encountered. While the focus is primarily on the eastern campaign, the book stretches the narrative arch into the last year of the war, when the Romanians strategically switched sides to fight with the Soviets against the Nazis. The specific aims of the author can be gleaned from the title and are emphasized consistently throughout the book. He is interested in exploring what motivation the rank and file, rather than just top elite of the army, had in perpetrating atrocities against specific categories of civilians—Jews and Roma. In the final sentence of the introduction, the author further illuminates that “[t]his book finally provides an accurate account of the Romanian Army on the eastern front from the Romanian perspective rather than through the German or Soviet lens” (16).

The book is organized in roughly three sections: an initial section that focuses on the ideological underpinnings of the war, the motivation component for how the military and political discourse shaped the message to the army; a second section that provides a detailed narrative of the various stages of the Eastern military campaign in five chapters; and a third section that provides additional thematic perspectives, focusing on the ways in which propaganda and discipline worked in the army, the participation of women and ethnoreligious minorities in the army, and the participation of the Romanian army on the western front after 23 August 1944.

The book's arguments are best illustrated in the second section. Harward's narrative slows down and provides a blow-by-blow, sometimes day-by-day account of activities undertaken by the army in preparation for the war; as the war got off the ground; and as the Romanian army began to advance into Bessarabia, Transnistria, down to Crimea, and eventually all the way to Stalingrad and Kursk, only to be turned back by the advancing Soviet armies between 1942 and 1944.

The author intersperses descriptions of the military strategy—decision-making at the top—with detailed descriptions of the ways in which soldiers, noncommissioned officers, commissioned officers, gendarmes, and especially the top leadership of the Romanian army engaged with the Jewish civilian populations on the ground. This strategy allows the author to pursue his analysis of soldiers’ motivation in the atrocities they perpetrated throughout the war. Many of these actions have been analyzed by other authors. However, Harward's narrative has a cumulative quality with a powerful impact. It becomes impossible to separate the prescribed military actions (winning the war against the Soviet Union) from the antisemitism that is either dictated by military orders, such as “cleansing the terrain,” or treated as a matter of fact by perpetrators and their superiors. The repetition of such actions month after month, the absence of any counter discourse to the atrocities perpetrated by the Romanian army, and the lack of consistent disciplining of abuses against the Jewish population are all the evidence we need to understand that this was not a war of defense. The Romanian army and many of its soldiers committed war crimes of a genocidal quality: ethnoracial hatred articulated as righteousness was foundational for the military's actions.

While I found this middle section powerful and very convincing, I was less taken with other sections of the book and with the author's insistence on demonstrating the motivation of the soldiers. The most important issue is that of linking the available evidence with the wider claims being made on behalf of the soldiers as a whole community. More than one million men were called to serve in the Romanian army in World War II, and as the author points out toward the end of the book, at least a third of them were illiterate. The motivation of the army is presented in relation to the army propaganda and first-person narratives from commissioned officers, a handful of lower rank NCOs, and one rank-and-file soldier. The officer corps in the army were a tiny proportion of the total fighting forces and cannot be taken to accurately represent the views, much less motivations, of the million plus soldiers serving in the war. For that silent majority, speculating that the propaganda they could not read reached them anyway through others’ narrating it is possible but cannot be verified. The presence of radio propaganda is also unreliable, as the author points out as well, due to the insufficient presence of transmitters in the field. The voice of chaplains in the field strikes me as a more reliable source, given the specific role these priests had and the training they received. But even that source is somewhat speculative, as we do not hear from many such chaplains. In short, the body of historical evidence on which the book is based does not fully support the generalization that “ideology and complicity in the Holocaust kept Romanian soldiers motivated to fight for the Axis” (181). Overall, I found the discussion of motivations to be primarily a series of claims that do not fully engage critically with the specifics of the evidentiary basis or with the problem of ascribing motivation to actions without acknowledging the difficulty, if not impossibility, to capture this unicorn of historical analysis.

I was also taken aback by the differentiation claimed as analytically significant between “cold-blooded” versus “hot-blooded” atrocities, and especially the claim that there are categories of atrocities that can be described as “normal” (93). I am not sure what “normal” is supposed to mean analytically, and I am not sure which of the atrocities depicted in the book qualify as that, except possibly rape. The author never refers to rape as a normal type of atrocity but makes many mentions about rape as a common occurrence during the war. Yet he does not engage in deep analysis of what sort of atrocity rapes represented, except to generalize that “soldiers raped not primarily from lust but from a need to humiliate”(107). How one would reach this conclusion from the available evidence is never a matter of discussion. How this generalization is maybe a reflection of how other scholarship has analyzed sexual violence as wartime atrocity is also never a matter of analysis. How rape relates to antisemitism and the genocidal quality of these atrocities is something that others have written about. Yet none of that analytical apparatus is present in this narrative.

These problematic claims aside, the book is an impressive synthesis of the Romanian army's actions toward the Jewish communities they encountered from Iași to Odessa and beyond. The evidence presented by the author leaves no doubt that antisemitism was a mainstream attitude in the army and that antisemitic propaganda was replete in the army. As such, the book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on this topic, including Vladimir Solonari's exhaustively researched monograph, A Satellite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941–1944 (Ithaca, NY, 2019), and Radu Jude's provocative film, I Don't Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018).