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Romania's Homegrown Holocaust: The Bogdanovka Massacre
(Times of Israel) Matt Lebovic - In Romania, Hitler's ally, Marshal Ion Antonescu, expanded his borders after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. An estimated 420,000 Jews under Antonescu's control were murdered relatively early in the war by the Romanian army. When typhus broke out at a Romanian concentration camp, authorities at Bogdanovka in Romanian-occupied Ukraine decided to murder 40,000 Jewish inmates and burn down the camp. On Dec. 21, 1941, Romanian soldiers and collaborators - including local ethnic Germans under Ukrainian police command - forced thousands of disabled and elderly Jews into two locked stables. The structures were doused with kerosene and set on fire, killing everyone inside. After that, groups of 300 to 400 Jews were led into the forest where they were shot in the neck. "The rest [of Bogdanovka's Jews] were left freezing in the cold, waiting on the banks of the river....Thousands of them froze to death," according to Yad Vashem. In Iasi, a university city near the border with Moldova, in June 1941 Romanian soldiers partnered with police and local mobs to murder 13,266 Jews. Iasi's residents helped arrest Jews and loot their homes.