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The Wiesel Commission was the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania […]. The report assessed that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered

• adrian_b 5y ago
  The conclusions of the Wiesel report are somewhat doubtful, because its authors had the interest to blame the Romanian authorities as much as possible and there was nobody to check if the report truly matches the facts. I assume that the total number of deaths must be correct, but I doubt that most of them are due to "deliberate policies" of the authorities. It is likely that many might have been caused by things like the camp administrators stealing from the food intended for the detainees. Of course those are crimes, but not really indicative of "deliberate policies". Anecdotally, where my mother grew up, in Eastern Romania, a large part of her colleagues and friends, maybe a quarter of them, were Jews. Where I grew up, in Southern Romania, there were fewer Jews, but even so, in all the schools through which I have been, there was no class in which there was not at least one Jew. All the families of these Jew colleagues lived usually significantly better than the median of the Romanian families, so they did not resemble survivors of a persecuted community. I do not doubt that all of them must have had relatives who suffered during the war for being Jews, like also me or any other colleagues had relatives who also suffered during the war only for being Romanian or whatever other nationality, but one must not take the Wiesel report as documenting the extermination of the Jews in Romania. The number of Jews in Romania decreased dramatically only when Ceausescu sold them to Israel.
  • wizzwizz4 5y ago
    > It is likely that many might have been caused by things like the camp administrators stealing from the food intended for the detainees. > Of course those are crimes, but not really indicative of "deliberate policies". I'd argue that “camp administrators stealing resources” is such a common thing in these kinds of situations that not preventing it is effectively causing it. While it is still definitely on the administrators, blame also falls to those who designed the system that enabled this situation.
    • adrian_b 5y ago
      I completely agree with you. Actually, after replying to the post above, I have searched the Wiesel report. While I did not have the time to study it now, the causes of death among those sent to concentration camps are listed as "typhus, hunger and cold". It is also said that most of these occurred during the first year, after which there was an increased supervision of the camps, which caused an improvement in the living conditions. Of course this is criminal negligence and it should have been predictable and preventable. However, it is not really a case of "deliberate policies", because the primary purpose of the criminals was not to kill the deportees, but to become rich, regardless whether this required making other humans to suffer or even causing their death.