On 23 August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Allies. The presentation will explore the hopes, struggles, and disappointments of Jewish survivors in Romania seeking to rebuild their lives and communities after the Holocaust and obtain a sense of justice. Focusing on the efforts of survivors to obtain reparatory justice (by recuperating rights and property) and criminal justice (by punishing perpetrators and collaborators), Ionescu will demonstrate how the early transitional governments enabled short-term restitution and delivered limited criminal justice (through the People's Tribunal). However, especially from 1948, the consolidated communist regime implemented nationalizations that dispossessed many citizens. Jewish communities were disproportionality affected, and real estate and businesses were lost once again. People's Tribunal ended its activity in 1946 and from 1947 on the war crimes trials continued at the regular Military Tribunals and the Appeals Courts and increasingly focused on political adversaries.
Drawing on archival sources ranging from government documentation to diaries and newspaper reports, this presentation explores both the early success and later reversal of restitution policies as well as the early war crimes trials and their transformation. In doing so, it sheds light on the postwar treatment of Romanian Jewish survivors and the reasons so many survivors emigrated from Romania.
Vortrag in englischer Sprache von Stefan Ionescu (Leon and Sophie Weinstein Associate Professor in Holocaust History and Interim Director of the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, History Department, Chapman University). Begrüßung: Michaela Raggam-Blesch (Institut für Zeitgeschichte). Moderation: Máté Rigó (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität).
Das Kolloquium „The Holocaust and its Contexts“ findet in Kooperation mit dem Oberseminar Zeitgeschichte der LMU sowie den Professuren für Südosteuropäische Geschichte an der LMU (Marie-Janine Calic und Máté Rigó) statt.
ORT
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Historicum, Raum K 201
Amalienstraße 52
80799 München
ANMELDUNG
Eine Anmeldung ist bis zum 18.5.2026 per Email erforderlich: zfhs[at]ifz-muenchen.de
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