How Lazăr Comănescu built Hitler a mausoleum in Băișoara
The long arm of the German diplomatic corps, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, chose 27 January, International (sic!) Holocaust Remembrance Day, as the day on which to support an event in Bucharest to commemorate the Germans who were deported from Romania to the USSR. That was the date on which the largest Nazi extermination camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by the Soviet army. The false portrayal of perpetrators as victims, with the help of Romanian professional mourners who were more interested in the funeral feast – since food was all that was available – was an act in the worst possible taste which was carefully orchestrated by Berlin in no man’s land. Its purpose? To offload responsibility for genocide by distorting the historical truth about victims who were by no means collateral in nature. Talking about victims on both sides is the first step towards misrepresenting history, as the Romanians were not so unfeeling, as organisers of the event, to deny them their right to pay homage to their dead. Instead of burying the victims and perpetrators together in a mass grave, it would have been more respectful on that day, or at least more decorous, to have said that the Russian pogrom against the Jews was no worse than the German one. But it was a very carefully considered event. This year, Romania took over the chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – the perfect opportunity for Berlin to shut us up and use us as a mouthpiece for German revisionism by staging a “documentary” exhibition at the Athenaeum about the suffering of the perpetrators, in an arbitrary and evocative interpretation of the war reparations bill that the Germans quite rightly had to pay to the Soviet Union by agreement with the Allies. But take note! “With their faces behind the barbed wire. The deportation of ethnic Germans to the USSR” was a historical reality that resulted from the commitment of the ethnic Germans in Romania to the service of Hitler. Thanks to the Führer, they were transformed from Saxons and Swabians to Germans. Naturally, they then got their come-uppance. Having been convicted during the Nuremberg Trials for war crimes and banned by the Armistice Agreement between Romania and the Allies, the former German Ethnic Group, in the shape of its successor, the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania, now considers itself entitled to lament the fate of its oppressed forefathers who paid for their voluntary enrolment into German Nazism. Russia has criticised the confusion that Germany has sowed in Bucharest, relying on the unprincipled technocrats in charge of the Romanian diplomatic corps to respond and throw down Moscow’s gauntlet with absurd statements of position. Nothing could be more helpful to Russia than a run-of-the-mill reaction! In the eternal rush to commemorate other people’s victims, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest is throwing a tantrum and patting itself on the back for having paid tribute to the victims of the German pogrom with historical accuracy. And this is how the Russians and the Germans are playing out their games at our expense, in perfect alignment with Romania’s desire to act as a professional ancient chorus in a world of great powers. With Lazăr Comănescu, a foreign minister who spent years training in Berlin, Romania is not far away from declaring that the Holocaust was not of German origin but born in a laboratory in Lehliu, and that Hitler was born in Băișoara rather than Braunau. Let us return to history. The Ethnic German Group in Romania, which is regarded by German historians themselves as the Reich’s fifth column, was a criminal war movement. The forced labour in the mines of the USSR was a means approved by the USA and Great Britain of paying the war reparations that Germany owed them. This measure did, of course, result in human victims, but the losses were no worse than those suffered by Romania. Through the SovRoms, at the expense of all of its people, Romania paid compensation to the Soviet Union not for losses that we ourselves caused to our enemy, but in order to pay off Germany’s reparations bill. Neglectfully and indulgently, we have also handed back assets worth billions of lei to the German Ethnic Group, granting them concessions above the levels laid down in international treaties, allowing a former war criminal to regain his former assets which were confiscated as a punishment. What is more, we have elected their former head as our president. So it seems only natural that we also should also organise, in a deaf nation, a shameless get-together at the Athenaeum together with the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra and other recipients of colivă or German cozonac. Let us remember that music and genocide went hand in hand at Auschwitz, too! In the relationship between Russia and Germany, Romania must not become a tennis court and Comănescu must not become a ballboy for these unfeeling hegemons. Romania’s fate is a cruel one: it is we who have suffered the most as a result of the ambitions of these two great powers, paying a heavy price to both for their claims to supremacy in the Carpathian-Danube basin. And Berlin’s hypocrisy will be more readily apparent and tasted by a wider audience once an exhibition about the assets that were not recovered by Romania has been held at the Athenaeum: treasure from the Russians and debts from Germany. Or an exhibition about how the Ethnic German Group got rich with assets that were seized by Romania from the Jews, for which we also paid. Or a get-together to commemorate the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Germans to Romania, on Hitler’s orders, in order to meet ethnic homogeneity criteria after Berlin forced us to give up Transylvania and did a deal with the Russians over Bessararabia and Bucovina. Of course, it would be uplifting if, by then, Germany could at the very least say “thank you, Romania, for what you are putting up with for our sake”! Except that in reality, no one is forcing us to do so. Or to play on both sides of the net, of course…