UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Romanian Orthodox Church During World War II Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wr74725 Author Pearce, William David Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Romanian Orthodox Church During World War II A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by William David Pearce August 2014 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Georg Michels, Chairperson Dr. Ann Goldberg Dr. Kiril Tomoff Copyright by William David Pearce 2014 The Dissertation of William David Pearce is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements I would like to thank first and foremost my wife for supporting me through graduate school. Without her this dissertation never would have happened. I would like to thank the University of California Riverside’s Department of History for taking me on even though I was not necessarily the best fit. Thank you to Dr. Kiril Tomoff and Dr. Randy Head for getting me here in the first place. Thank you to Dr. Ann Goldberg for her help on this project. Thank you to Dr. Tomoff also for his help on this dissertation. Special thanks to Dr. Georg Michels, who took me as a new graduate student and has supported me so much as my advisor these several years. Thank you to all the faculty at UCR who have helped me over the years. Thank you to Dr. Radu Ioanid for opening doors for me even though we have never met. Thank you to everyone in Romania who helped me with the archival research. Special thanks to my great-grandmother, Grandma Faye, who passed away shortly after my return from the archives. I used bonds she had given me in my childhood to help pay for my travels. Thank you to my parents for always supporting me. iv Dedicated to Theresa v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Romanian Orthodox Church During World War II by William David Pearce Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in History University of California, Riverside, August 2014 Dr. Georg Michels, Chairperson This dissertation is an examination of records relating to the Romanian Orthodox Church during the Second World War. Using primarily resources from The Romanian National Archives in Bucharest, the research focuses primarily on the decisions made by the Church’s leaders in the Holy Synod. The Romanian government leading up to the war was a dictatorship led by a king and had a close relationship with the Church. During the war the Church remained close to the central government under Marshall Ion Antonescu, who was an ally to Germany’s Hitler. Publicly the Church was one of Antonescu’s greatest supporters. The Church’s leaders rationalized supporting the Romanian government before and during Antonescu’s regime using popular notions of Romanian nationalism. Antonescu reciprocated the Church’s support with laws and policies that favored the Romanian Orthodox Church legally and financially above other vi confessions. One of these policies was to put restrictions on certain minority religious groups and outlawing them. Their resources were confiscated and often gifted to local Orthodox parishes. Another important law prohibited Jews from becoming Christians. The Orthodox Church’s implementation of this law demonstrates that the Church supported the Romanian government’s anti-Jewish philosophy and policies. The actions of other Christians who ignored the prohibition are used as contrasting examples to the Orthodox Church’s policy. While the Church did not participate with the Romanian government and military in perpetrating the Holocaust, the Church’s strong presence in Transnistria indicates that the Church’s clergy had direct knowledge of the violence there. The failure to take action in this area represents a moral failure by an institution that touted itself as Romania’s moral compass. Based on the Church’s wartime actions it was complicit in the Antonescu regime’s crimes. Following the Antonescu regime’s collapse in August 1944 the Romanian Orthodox Church quickly reversed its stance on many of its wartime policies. vii Table of Contents Preface……………………………………………………………………………ix Introduction………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: The Romanian People’s Church……………………………………...25 Chapter 2: The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Romanian Government…...45 Chapter 3: The Anti-Sectarian Campaign………………………………………...88 Chapter 4: Law 711: The Romanian Orthodox Church and Romanian Jews…….123 Chapter 5: The Church on the Eastern Front……………………………………..164 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..187 Appendix…………………………………………………………………………197 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………205 viii Preface When writing about the Romanian Orthodox Church during the Second World War I refer to the Church generally and not individually, primarily addressing the Church’s leadership and not the Church’s membership. The archival materials I use do not tell the whole story of course. When planning my trip to the archives in winter 2012 I also tried to contact the Romanian Orthodox Church Archives. I emailed the people listed on the Church’s website that I was doing research on the Romanian Orthodox Church and that I would like to know if I could meet with an archivist when I was in Romania. I explained that although I planned on doing my research at the National Archives I thought that going to the Church’s archives would be even more beneficial to historical research about the Church. I justified that my research would be beneficial because there is so little published on the Romanian Orthodox Church in America. I explained I was eager and looking forward to meeting them. No one responded. I thought well maybe they think this is a joke. After all, no one has ever heard of me and why would some guy claiming to be from California go to Romania in the winter? Internet scams are quite common so maybe they thought I was a hoax. So when I arrived in Romania I called the archivist in Bucharest. I left several voicemail messages on what was indeed his phone as he identified himself in his voicemail box. I even purposefully put on an American accent while making several grammatical flubs on purpose in one message while speaking Romanian to make sure he could hear that I was telling the truth. There were no returned calls or messages. When I went to the address listed I was told that they had no idea what I was talking about and ix one person pretended not to understand me. Măi omule, vorbesc româneşte! [Hey man, I speak Romanian!] I should not have expected anything else. When I arrived at the Romanian National Archives, thanks to Dr. Radu Ioanid’s help the director met with me for an hour. We spoke about my project and he told me not to expect any cooperation from the Church. He explained that the National Archives had difficulties working with the Church and that even he found it frustrating. The wonderful ladies who worked in the office and were so helpful also were skeptical I would have success convincing anyone at the Church to let me in the Church’s archive. When speaking to some of the other researchers at the archives they spoke bluntly. Every older professor explained that there was no way the Church would help me. One of the older gentlemen tended to have the same grueling schedule as mine and often talked to me about my project in the coat hall. He told me he hoped that I could publish it because if any Romanian historian published what I was finding it would be career suicide. I cannot say it would be career suicide, but certainly it would ruffle a lot of feathers. Some of what I have written here may seem like a harsh criticism or analysis. I assure you it is not. The fact is that the Romanian Orthodox Church considers itself the direct descendant of the Ancient Church established by Christ’s apostles and that it bases its teachings on those found in the Bible. The Church sees itself as the Kingdom of God on the earth, as do most Christian confessions. And so it is expected to teach certain principles and behave in a certain way based on its own high standards. Should the Romanian Orthodox Church or any other Christian confession fail to meet these x standards then it should expect criticism, even from outsiders. These criticisms are based solely on the events found in the documents used and the Church’s own interpretation of what it means to be Christian. I hope that someday the Romanian Orthodox Church will give full archival access to outside scholars without worrying about its reputation. xi Introduction This dissertation examines the activities of the Romanian Orthodox Church during the Second World War with a special emphasis on the Church’s involvement in the persecution of the Romanian Jewry and religious minorities, and the Church’s close relationship with the Antonescu regime. It focuses on the Church generally as an institution, which necessitates a focus on the Church’s leadership, policies on interactions with other sects or faiths, and church leadership attitudes that affected the situation of Romanian Jews and other religious minorities. This is the first major study to focus solely on the Church during World War II. The historiography for Romania in all cases points to the Church as being adaptively supportive of the Romanian government from the end of World War I to the end of the socialist regime; even in the last days before Ceauşescu’s demise Patriarch Teoctist publicly gave his support to the regime in an attempt to retain the Church’s privileges given by the socialist regime vis-à-vis other confessions.1 But there are no studies that focus only on the Church during World War II.