Romania Since The Second World War

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 Romania since the Second World War is the first book about Romania designed to chart the progress of the nation under the communist regime as well as the transition period that followed, providing detailed analysis of the aspects of continuity and change that can be identified over the period as a whole. The book begins with Romania's involvement in the Second World War, looking at the communist regime in depth. It examines how communism took hold and the elimination of traditional elites took place, before discussing the impact of Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Caeusescu, the two most important leaders of the communist era. The following chapters cover the main social and economic changes during the communist regime. The second part of the book explores the transition period following the end of communism in 1989, with special attention given to international relations and Romania's drive for inclusion in NATO and the EU. Romania since the Second World War assesses socio-demographic trends across the postwar period before concluding with some thoughts on the nation's development during this time. The book includes a useful appendix covering the key figures in Romania's recent history and a helpful bibliography, making this a key text for anyone interested in the modern history of Eastern Europe.

Romania and World War II is a collection of studies, in English and Romanian, by distinguished American, European, and Romanian historians on the situation of Romania during World War II presented at the First International Conference of the Center for Romanian Studies held in Ia?i on 25-26 May 1995, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. This book reveals the results of research by leading specialists from around the world addressing many important aspects of Romania’s involvement in World War II.The papers published in this volume include Charles King, The Moldovan ASSR on the Eve of the War: Cultural Policy in 1930s Transnistria; Kurt W. Treptow, Alegerile din decembrie 1937si instaurarea dictaturii regale; Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, Reminiscences of Iorga’s Murderer: Traian Boeru; Florin Constantiniu, Un episod pu?in cunoscut al rela?iilor româno-sovietice (1941); Larry L. Watts, Incompatible Alliances: Small States of Central Europe during World War II; Mihai Retegan, The End of the War in Europe: Consequences for the States of Central and Eastern Europe, A Comparative Study; Valeriu Florin Dobrinescu, Unele considera?ii privind intrarea României în razboiul na?iunilor unite (1944-1945); Gheorghe Onisoru, Uniunea Sovietica si România: de la 1944 la 1947; Paul E. Michelson, Recent Historiography on Romania and the Second World War; and many others.Edited by Kurt W. Treptow, Romania and World War II will be of interest to students and scholars of twentieth century Romanian history, as well as World War II.

Focusing on the case of a small state engulfed in the worldwide war, this book is a critical analysis from a global comparative perspective of Romania's major developments between 1939-1945. The book explains significant events as recorded in documents and in cross-examination and reenacts the way of thinking, actions, reactions, and motivations of the decision-makers and of the political opposition of the time, as events unfolded beyond their capacity to control them. The author puts events within a historical, geopolitical, perspective, both global and local.

British Clandestine Activities in Romania during the Second World War is the first monograph to examine the activity throughout the entire war of SOE and MI6. It was generally believed in Britain's War Office, after Hitler's occupation of Austria in March 1938, that Germany would seek to impose its will on South-East Europe before turning its attention towards Western Europe. Given Romania's geographical position, there was little Britain could offer her. The brutal fact of British-Romanian relations was that Germany was inconveniently in the way: opportunity, proximity of manufacture and the logistics of supply all told in favour of the Third Reich. This held, of course, for military as well as economic matters. In these circumstances the British concluded that their only weapon against German ambitions in countries which fell into Hitler's orbit were military subversive operations and a concomitant attempt to draw Romania out of her alliance with Germany.

Romania's Holy War rights the widespread myth that Romania was a reluctant member of the Axis during World War II. In correcting this fallacy, Grant T. Harward shows that, of an estimated 300,000 Jews who perished in Romania and Romanian-occupied Ukraine, more than 64,000 were, in fact, killed by Romanian soldiers. Moreover, the Romanian Army conducted a brutal campaign in German-occupied Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, and civilians. Investigating why Romanian soldiers fought and committed such atrocities, Harward argues that strong ideology—a cocktail of nationalism, religion, antisemitism, and anticommunism—undergirded their motivation. Romania's Holy War draws on official military records, wartime periodicals, soldiers' diaries and memoirs, subsequent war crimes investigations, and recent interviews with veterans to tell the full story. Harward integrates the Holocaust into the narrative of military operations to show that most soldiers fully supported the wartime dictator, General Ion Antonescu, and his regime's holy war against "Judeo-Bolshevism." The army perpetrated mass reprisals, targeting Jews in liberated Romanian territory; supported the deportation and concentration of Jews in camps or ghettos in Romanian-occupied Soviet territory; and played a key supporting role in SS efforts to exterminate Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory. Harward proves that Romania became Nazi Germany's most important ally in the war against the USSR because its soldiers were highly motivated, thus overturning much of what we thought we knew about this theater of war. Romania's Holy War provides the first complete history of why Romanian soldiers fought on the Eastern Front.

Since the collapse of Eastern European communism, the Balkans have been more prominent in world affairs than at any time since before the First World War. Crises in the area have led NATO to fire its first ever shots in anger, whilst international forces have been deployed on a scale and in a manner unprecedented in Europe since World War Two.An understanding of why this happened is impossible without some knowledge of the history of the area before the fall of communism, of how the communists came to power and how they used their authority thereafter. Covering the communist states of Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia, and including Greece, Richard Crampton provides a highly readable introduction to that history, one that will be read by journalists, diplomats and anyone interested in the region and its impact on world politics today.

This book is the first complete study in English of Antonescu's part in the Second World War. Antonescu was a major ally of Hitler and Romania fielded the third largest Axis army, joined the Tripartite Pact in November 1940 as a sovereign state and participated in the attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941 as an equal partner of Germany.

A significant contribution to the significance of Romania's joining the war against Germany on August 23,1944, following the overthrow of the Antonescu regime and the liberation of Romania by the Glorious Soviet armies.