Iași pogrom

The Iași pogrom or Jassy pogrom (pronounced:Yash) of June 29, 1941 was a series of pogroms launched by governmental forces in the Romanian city of Iaşi (Jassy) against its Jewish population, resulting in the murder of at least 13,266 Jews, according to Romanian authorities.

During World War II, from 1940 to 1944, Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany, and echoed its anti-Semitic policies. During 1941 and 1942, thirty-two laws, thirty-one decree-laws, and seventeen government resolutions, all sharply anti-Semitic, were published in the Official Gazette (Monitorul Oficial). Romania also joined Germany in the invasion of the Soviet Union, initially with the purpose of regaining Bessarabia, taken by Soviets in 1940, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

It was widely believed in interwar Romania that Communism was the work of the Jews, and Romania's coming entry into the war against the Soviet Union - a war billed as a struggle to "annihilate" the forces of "Judo-Bolshevism"- greatly served to increase the anti-Semitic paranoia of the Romanian government. Operation Barbarossa as the invasion of the Soviet Union was code-named was scheduled to begin on 22 June 1941. Iași, a city with a large Jewish population close to the Soviet border was considered a problem by the extremely anti-Semitic Romanian dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu as he saw the Jews of Iași as a fifth column that would sabotage the Romanian war effort. In mid-June 1941, Antonescu ordered that "all the Judeo-Communist coffee shops in Moldavia be closed down, all kikes, Communist agents and sympathizers be identified by region...". On 21 June 1941, Antonescu signed a degree calling for all Jews between the ages of 18-60 who lived between the Siret and Pruth rivers to be deported to the concentration camp at Tirgu Jiu in the south of Romania. Officers of both the Romanian and German armies about to invade the Soviet Union saw the Jews near the Soviet border as a major internal security threat, and pressed the Romanian government to remove this alleged threat. Lieutenant-Colonel Traian Borcescu of the Special Information Service (SSI) later recalled: "I know for certain that Section II of the Supreme Headquarters was involved with the problem of moving the Jewish population in Moldavia under the auspices of the respective statistics offices, with Colonel Gheorghe Petrescu in charge of this activity". Section II of the Romanian Supreme Headquarters was concerned with monitoring all political parties and all of the ethnic minorities in Romania. The responsibility for organising the pogrom rested with Section II, the SSI (Serviciul Special de Informaţii-Special Information Service) as the Romanian secret service was known and with the Abwehr. After the invasion of the Soviet Union began on 22 June 1941, the Special Information Service formed the First Operative Echelon of 160 men who were tasked with crushing any internal security threat that might hamper the war. Colonel Borcescu recalled:

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