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Holocaust-era grave found in Romania

22 October 2012
1 minute read

A mass grave containing approximately 100 Jews has been found in a forest in Romania, according to an Associated Press article featured in topnews360.tmcnet.com.

The discovery was made near the town of Popricani and contains bodies of men, women and children who were shot dead in 1941. It offers evidence of Romania’s involvement in wartime crimes and so questions the country’s official history which taught that Germans were the sole perpetrators of the Holocaust.

The report noted that some 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma were killed during the pro-fascist regime of Marshall Ion Antonescu who was Prime Minister from 1940-1944 and executed by communists in 1946.

Historians have documented pogroms in Romania during World War II, including one in the northeastern city of Iasi, where up to 12,000 people are believed to have died. The country’s role in the Holocaust is said to be a sensitive and highly charged topic. The involvement of Romania’s leaders in wartime crimes was largely ignored during the communist era.

According to the article, “the role in the Holocaust and deportation of Jews were minimized by subsequent governments after communism collapsed in 1989”.

In 2004, following a dispute with Israel over comments about the Holocaust, then President Ion Iliescu assembled an international panel led by Nobel Prize winner Elie Weisel, to investigate the Holocaust in Romania.

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