Radu Lecca (February 15, 1890–1980) was a Romanian spy, journalist, civil servant and convicted war criminal. A World War I veteran who served a prison term for espionage in France during the early 1930s, he was a noted supporter of antisemitic concepts and, after 1933, an agent of influence for Nazi Germany. While becoming a double agent for Romania's Special Intelligence Service (SSI), Lecca was involved in fascist politics, gained in importance during World War II and the successive dictatorships, and eventually grew close to Conducător Ion Antonescu.
After 1941, Lecca was Commissioner, later Commissioner General, tasked with solving the "Jewish Question" in Romania, sharing Romania's responsibility for the Holocaust. Advised by the special German envoys Manfred Freiherr von Killinger and Gustav Richter and acting with Antonescu's consent, he established the Central Jewish Office (Centrala Evreiască, CE) through which he persecuted, exploited and extorted the Romanian Jewish community, whose existence was threatened by deportations into Transnistria. The system he supervised was notoriously corrupt, with many of the funds extorted being used for the personal benefit of Lecca or his political associates. Commissioner Lecca was also instrumental in negotiating the Final Solution's application in Romania, a plan which was eventually abandoned, while considering mass emigration to Palestine in exchange for payments.
After the August 1944 Coup removed Antonescu and aligned Romania with the Allies, Lecca was among the high-ranking Romanian politicians arrested and transported to the Soviet Union. Upon his 1946 return, Lecca was Antonescu's co-defendant in a People's Tribunal case, and was condemned to death. His sentence was commuted into life imprisonment and later reduced by the communist regime. After his release, Lecca wrote memoirs which make various controversial claims, and which minimize his and Antonescu's participation in Holocaust-related crimes.
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Born in Leca village (part of Ungureni, Bacău County), Radu Lecca was the scion of a landowning family, being educated in Vienna and Paris.[1] He was drafted into the Romanian Army in 1915, and, after Romania's entry into the war the following year, saw action on the local front.[2] During the interwar years, he worked as a commercial agent, returning to France. In 1931, French authorities arrested him and a French court convicted him for espionage, based on revelations that he had provided Romanian King Carol II with sensitive information about prominent politicians in the pay of France.[2]
Having served his sentence by 1933, Lecca left for Germany, where a Nazi regime had just taken hold. He subsequently associated with senior Nazi Party figures, and was close to ideologist Alfred Rosenberg,[2] and soon after became a correspondent of the official Nazi paper, Völkischer Beobachter.[3] Tasked with promoting German interests upon his return to Romania, he transferred clandestine funds from Rosenberg to the fascist and antisemitic National Christian Party.[4] Polish historian Jerzy W. Borejsza describes the "intense contacts" between, on one side, Lecca and National Christian leader Octavian Goga, alongside men from the radically fascist Iron Guard, and, on the other, Rosenberg, concluding that Romania was one of the countries most infiltrated by Rosenberg's agents.[5]
Lecca also contacted the SSI with an offer to become a double agent, and was accepted.[2] He was in permanent contact with the German Embassy in Bucharest, a position which was to prove important in 1940-1941, under the fascist National Legionary regime. At the time, Lecca sided with the German-endorsed political leader, General Ion Antonescu, in opposition to his nominal partner, the Iron Guard. Through his contacts, he gathered information on which Nazi officials supported the Guard and relayed it to Antonescu.[6] According to his own testimonies, Lecca focused his attention on Kurt Geißler, the Schutzstaffel's liaison with the Guard. Lecca maintained that, on Geißler's request, the Guard's Legionary Police was armed with some 5,000 Walther PPs (surplus from the Berlin Police), and suggested that the Bucharest regular police chief, Guardist Ştefan Zăvoianu, had influenced Geißler's negative view of Antonescu's leadership.[7] Lecca also claimed that the Jilava Massacre, during which the Guard purged its political enemies, was instigated by Geißler, rather than a spontaneous retaliation for the 1938 murder of Legionary Captain Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.[8] These events were a preamble to the Legionary Rebellion, crushed by the Conducător with the acquiescence of Adolf Hitler.[9] As a result, Antonescu ordered Lecca to communicate these dealings to Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, the new German Ambassador, a task which Lecca accomplished,[10] reportedly with some reluctance.[2] The revelation is reported to have made an impression on Killinger, who befriended the Romanian agent and offered him much support.[10]
Radu Lecca's name surfaced during the large-scale Iaşi pogrom of June 1941. During his 1950s imprisonment and interrogation by the Securitate secret police, Lecca made unverifiable claims, which implied first-hand knowledge of the events, and which placed the blame for the massacres solely on German units present in the area.[11] He also alleged that Antonescu was unaware of the murders, and that he had swiftly condemned them, actions which he claimed to have witnessed first-hand.[12] Iunius (or Junius) Lecca, a subordinate of Eugen Cristescu within the SSI and purportedly Radu Lecca's relative,[13] is believed to have helped in planning the antisemitic crimes.[14]
Radu Lecca was assigned Jewish Affairs Commissioner and supervisor of the newly-created Central Jewish Office in late 1941, a position he is believed to have owed to Killinger's intercession.[15] The latter institution had been suggested to Romanian authorities by Nazi German envoys charged with committing Romania to common Final Solution projects.[16][17] Gustav Richter, the German official directly involved in the negotiations, hoped the Central Jewish Office would function as a Judenrat (ensuring the compliance of Jewish community leaders).[18] Lecca was in close contacts with both Richter and Killinger, establishing a communication channel leading from the latter to Conducător Antonescu and his deputy Mihai Antonescu.[19]
Richter personally suggested to Lecca the selection of Nandor Gingold, a Jewish physician and lapsed Roman Catholic convert, as General Secretary of the CE Central Committee.[20] Lecca's personal selection for CE President was Henric Streitman, a respected journalist of the interwar period, who believed that collaboration offered a path to survival, and whose subsequent assignments were mostly symbolic.[20] The effective leader of the CE, Gingold, justified his appointment in a speech to his peers, arguing that the Office served to procrastinate Nazi objectives, and assessing that Hitler's actual plans involved Jewish eviction to Nazi-occupied Poland and then to lands outside Europe.[20] Although Gingold himself did not participate in the deportations to Transnistria, British historian Dennis Deletant notes, he tacitly accepted the transportation of Jews whom the regime labeled "communists", being himself "a staunch anti-communist".[21]
The CE was initially tasked with statistical surveys, as well as with organizing special taxation, expropriation, welfare and the civil conscription of Romanian Jews as a labor force for the Romanian Army on the Eastern Front and behind the lines.[21] In October 1941, Antonescu asked Lecca to look into the matter of deportations from Dorohoi County, and investigate complaints from the deportees' relatives. Lecca raised the matter with Mihai Antonescu, who replied that the area had since been transferred to the autonomous governorship of newly-attached Bukovina and placed under the authority of General Corneliu Calotescu (Calotescu opposed all Jewish returns from Transnistria).[22] It was as a result of Lecca's proposals that, in January 1942, the Antonescu regime outlawed the Jewish Federation, a traditional representative body and advocacy group presided over by Wilhelm Filderman.[17] Factors such as the CE's failure to gain the Jewish community's respect led the authorities to co-opt former Federation activists, and some advocates of Zionism, on the CE leadership board.[17][23]
In late 1941, Lecca also claimed to have witnessed the deterioration of contacts between Horst Böhme, the new RSHA envoy to Bucharest, and Killinger, reflecting the growing animosity between the RSHA and the German Foreign Office. Böhme, who had arrived into Romania to investigate and speed up the Final Solution project, was described by Lecca as a person of outstanding cruelty, his negative reputation was consolidated in the Bohemia-Moravia Protectorate, where he served under Reinhard Heydrich.[24] Lecca also alleged that both Killinger and the other Schutzstaffel delegate, Richter, were alarmed by Böhme's scrutiny of their dealings with the CE, writing that Böhme reprimanded both men for leniency and incompetence (such arrogance, Lecca suggested, invited doubts about Böhme's sanity).[25] In one of his own RSHA reports, Horst Böhme claimed that Killinger had lost all footing in dealing with Antonescu, and that the ambassador would only confide in Lecca and an independent German agent, Artur Tester.[26] Eventually, Böhme fell out with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and was reassigned.[27]
Beginning in early 1942, Lecca supervised extortion initiatives, special decrees which required all non-deported Jews to contribute special cash funds for social causes benefiting ethnic Romanians.[17][28] In January of that year, he reported to Ion Antonescu that some 20,000 people affected by this provision lacked the money and had therefore been prosecuted, and successfully proposed instead that the total sum of 100 million lei be collected from more affluent members of the community, through the Central Jewish Office.[29] In August, he drafted a project to levy 1.2 billion lei from those Jews who had received dispensation from "Romanianization" policies, and were thus still employed outside the community, on the pretense that it would help their conscripted coreligionists. The project was endorsed by his superiors, who requested a further 800 million, half of which was diverted to a state-endorsed charity headed by Ion Antonescu's spouse Maria.[30] Lecca was by then also considering the demolition of synagogues left unused in areas subject to Jewish evictions, and approved a plan to reuse the leftover building material for the construction of a Romanian Orthodox church in Bucecea.[31]
Before September 1942, Lecca was contacted by German officials in the matter of planned transports from Romania, specifically southern Transylvania and the Banat, to Nazi extermination camps, and confirmed that both Ion and Mihai Antonescu had approved them on principle; Lecca also communicated this resolution to the Romanian Railways.[32] The agreement between the two sides was reported with satisfaction by the RSHA as early as July, when an RSHA report noted that, from September 10, Romanian Jews would be forcefully transported to Lublin: "those that are fit will be put to work, while the rest undergo special treatment".[33] Preparations were in place when the Romanian leader changed his decision.[34][35] At the time, Lecca reported that the project was on hold "until the right time."[34]
Researchers propose that a reason for this change of attitudes was the Romanian authorities' nationalist sentiment, with Romanian politicians objecting to the Nazi German interventions in the country's internal politics.[33][36] According to American historian Monty Noam Penkower, a decisive factor in canceling the order was Lecca being "snubbed" by Ribbentrop's subordinates.[37] English researcher David Cesarani locates the problem with the RSHA, who "mishandled [Lecca's] stay disastrously"; he writes that the German Foreign Office employees, including Franz Rademacher, who were sidelined in the matter, angrily reported on the RSHA's presumptuousness and breach of protocol.[33] According to other accounts, Lecca himself had failed to obtain the needed credentials for his mission to Germany.[38] Also noted was the action of Baron Neumann of Végvár, a Jewish industrialist who reportedly coaxed and bribed various Romanian officials with the goal of postponing all transports from the region.[34][39] According to historian Victor Neumann, Baron Neumann's intervention was part of a series of intersecting events: the persuasion effort put into motion by the Banat Jewish leaders, the mounting dissatisfaction of railway employees, coupled with Antonescu's own doubts about Germany's ability to win the war and criticism coming from Romanian civil society representatives (Bishop Bălan, Iuliu Maniu).[34]
The early extortion measures were followed in May 1943 by Lecca's designs of collecting 4 billion from Jews who, as his report to the government claimed, "enjoy the freedom to trade and live protected from war".[40] The details of this extortion plan were first outlined by Lecca in a face to face meeting with Chief Rabbi Alexandru Şafran during Hannukah 1942. In 1994, Şafran recalled that Lecca trated him "respectfully", noting: "I would say that, although corrupt and sometimes inebriated, he sometimes had toward me the attitude of a true to life Romanian boyar."[41] Şafran recalled being informed that the Jews were required to pay the full sum because "our soldiers are out on the front dying, and they stay at home"—to the Chief Rabbi's protest that the community could not afford the new tax, Lecca reportedly cited Antonescu as instigator of the plan.[41] Şafran also recalled being convoked, together with Filderman and Zionist Mişu Benvenisti, at the CE, where Lecca again outlined the project, and, although speaking with "great gentleness", threatened all three with immediate arrest.[41] Şafran recalled that, in extremis, he was able to change Lecca's mind.[41] The measure was however supported by the Antonescu executive, who ruled that Jews who failed to contribute were going to be deported into Transnistria.[42] The requirement caused the vocal protests of Filderman, who was consequently deported by Antonescu and brought back by further protests from part-tolerated Romanian opposition forces.[43]
By then, Radu Lecca was involved in dealings to have Jews from Romanian-controlled territories transferred into Palestine. He was initially approached by Apostolic Nuncio Andrea Cassulo, who asked him to intervene and allow Jewish orphans in Transnistria safe passage. At their first meeting in spring 1941, Lecca reportedly agreed, but no further measure of this kind had been taken by September, when Cassulo decided to intervene directly with the Conducător, who refused his request on the grounds that no "desired guarantees" were presented.[44] In the context of Nazi pressures to have Romanian Jews exterminated in Poland, Lecca made provisions for some 3,000 Jews to be saved and sent to Palestine in exchange for 2 million lei.[45] In 1943, Richter warned Lecca not to approve of Filderman's proposal to have some 4,000 to 5,000 orphaned children transported out of Transnistria and into Palestine, and whom the Allies had agreed to accept.[46] Ion Antonescu himself only allowed sporadic transports of orphans in 1944, at a time when it became clear that the Axis was losing the war.[47] In late 1942, Lecca had also begun negotiating with smugglers and Zionists organizing the Aliyah Bet transit, as well as with Filderman, Benvenisti and other local Jewish activists. This form of emigration was supposed to be carried out in exchange for 200,000 lei per person saved.[48] Claiming Antonescu's acquiescence, Lecca even informed Killinger about them, causing German alarm[49] and a warning that those passing through Bulgaria would be arrested.[50]
Documents and testimonies of the period record Lecca's ongoing corruption. His supervision benefited influential civilian administrators and soldiers, who made fortunes trafficking dispensations from compulsory labor.[51] Lecca himself claimed that he collected money not just for Maria Antonescu, but also for Mihai Antonescu and Killinger.[52] Emil Ghilezan, a businessman and member of the semi-clandestine National Peasants' Party, also recounted having periodically paid off the Commissioner in order to protect the livelihoods of his Jewish employees at Ardeleana Bank.[53] The Commissioner is said to have deposited his extortion funds in Switzerland, with Schweizerische Volksbank (later incorporated into Credit Suisse).[54] According to other accounts, he intended to keep some of the money extorted from Jews willing to leave for Palestine,[55] and had received 20 million lei from the surviving Jewish community in Iaşi, in exchange for revisiting some of the measures he had initiated.[56] In July 1943, he called for postponing the confiscation of Iaşi's Jewish Cemetery, but his decision was ignored by the city's antisemitic mayor, Constantin Ifrim, whose only revision on the initial order was accepting that exhumation could be performed by persons of the Judaic faith.[57] In September of the same year, Lecca was promoted to the position of Commissioner General by the Antonescu executive, and his department was integrated into a Secretariat for Labor.[58] The same month, Ifrim sent Lecca a report in which he called for the deportation of Iaşi Jews into Transnistria and the German-held Reichskommissariat Ukraine.[59]
Eventually, in November 1943, following the turn of tides on the Eastern Front, Radu Lecca became involved in Antonescu's project to ensure the survival, and a humane detainment at a new camp in Vyzhnytsia, of the Transnistria deportees (except for those whom Antonescu defined as "communist Jews").[60] He took part in a government meeting presided upon by Antonescu, during which the Conducător instructed Lecca to obtain funds and food for the deported Jews, whom he acknowledged were dying "at a fast rate", and worrying about being perceived as the sole perpetrator of such crimes.[60] Soon after receiving his orders to collect food and clothes from the Old Kingdom's Jewish community (which, as he reported, had already contributed 160 million lei for this new purpose), Lecca translated the annotated transcript of this encounter into German, and presented it to Killinger (in this version, the document was confiscated by the United States Army upon the end of the war).[60] His personal notes on the margin of the document place the number of survivors at 80,000 (contrary to the other officials' estimates of 50,000 to 60,000).[60]
During the same month, Lecca agreed to hand the control over 15% of all Jewish taxation back to the CE, to be used for aiding Jewish deportees and labor conscripts.[61] Also then, allegedly with Killinger's consent, Lecca managed to obtain the reassignment of Gustav Richter from his post in Jewish affairs to a regular police assignment, assessing that: "Richter no longer has anything to direct within the Central Jewish Office."[62] Lecca himself argued that, even though Richter still had informers within the Jewish affairs administration, he would not pressure the CE into another extermination project: "He was a young man, he had a wife and child, and he knew that if he lost his position in the legation [because of a diplomatic protest] he would have to leave straight for the front."[63] However, both Lecca and SSI director Eugen Cristescu recalled that, in his new capacity, Richter obtained the January 1944 arrest of several Zionist leaders (Filderman, Benvenisti etc.), whom he denounced as conspirators against Germany; all were however freed the next month, when the International Red Cross pleaded in their favor.[64]
In late 1944, soon after the August 23 Coup overturned the Ion Antonescu regime, Radu Lecca was arrested and taken into custody by the Soviet occupation forces and transported into Soviet territory.[65] During his time there, he was questioned by agents of the SMERSH, offering them details about the Nazi network in Romania.[66] He was returned into Romanian custody together with Ion Antonescu, Cristescu, Governor of Transnistria Gheorghe Alexianu, General Constantin Pantazi and General Constantin Vasiliu.[67] He was subsequently a co-defendant in Antonescu's 1946 trial by the People's Tribunal, on counts of war crimes, crimes against the peace and treason, and sentenced to death on May 17.[68] During the trial itself, Lecca was the target of an especially negative portrayal in the Romanian Communist Party mouthpiece, Scînteia, which described him as having a "black-bluish face", noting: "A hideous man, with bloated and vice-consumed cheeks, Lecca hides his rapacity under the mask of obduration."[69] Nonetheless, on May 31, his sentence, like those of Cristescu and Vasiliu, was commuted to forced labor for life, through a special decree issued by King Michael I;[70] the sovereign thus answered specific requests from the Communist Party-led Petru Groza cabinet, made in the name of "national interest".[71]
While in Securitate custody, Radu Lecca was subjected to several inquiries, producing written statements which were kept in special files.[72] Romanian-born Israeli historian Jean Ancel presumes that the Securitate had vested interest in allowing Lecca to produce a personal version of Romania's World War II history, because it shared his goal of shifting focus from Romania's participation in the Holocaust.[73] Lecca was notably held in the Jilava prison, where he was detained together with, among others, lawyer Aurelian Bentoiu and literary critic Nicolae Steinhardt (the latter's Jewish and left-wing background is said to have been a stress factor for Lecca).[74] Having had his sentence reduced to 18 years and 6 months, Lecca was ultimately released from prison in 1963, and soon after began writing his controversial memoirs.[75] Probably with Securitate instructions, Lecca reportedly sought to repatriate his Swiss wealth; Schweizerische Volksbank is believed to have refused his request, motivating that the record of accounts had since been destroyed.[54] The lead was picked up by the World Jewish Congress. In 1996, it reportedly accused the Swiss Bankers Association of intending to hide data concerning the money that Radu Lecca had extorted from Romania's Jews.[54]
After the 1989 Revolution, which succeeded in toppling communism, Lecca's memoirs saw print with Editura Roza Vânturilor, a newly-founded nationalist publishing house, under the title Eu i-am salvat pe evreii din România ("It Is I Who Saved Romania's Jews").[76] The edition is also based on his Securitate testimonies, and, according to Ancel, the post-communist Social Democratic and nationalist authorities took special care in making the book available.[12] Among the specific unilateral claims found in the book is one according to which racist sociologist Sabin Manuilă was spying in favor of the United States.[77] Lecca also alleged that Yannos Pandelis and Constantin Bursan, who represented the Zionist side in discussions about transfers to Palestine, were double agents of the United Kingdom and Germany.[78] Historian Ottmar Traşcă referred to Lecca's book as "extremely controversial when it comes to scientific truth", but noted that it could prove accurate in describing the hierarchy of Nazi envoys in Romania, their early 1940s contacts with the Iron Guard, and in particular the scope of Kurt Geißler's activity in Bucharest.[79]
Some of Lecca's claims about Antonescu's behavior regarding the Romanian Jews were passed into Steinhardt's book Jurnalul fericirii ("Happiness Diary"), mainly a recollection of communist imprisonment. Historian and Steinhardt biographer George Ardelean describes this as a problematic aspect, since the liberal, Europeanist and part-Jewish Steinhardt was revising his earlier stance on wartime antisemitism (of which he too had been a victim), and basing his new-found admiration for Antonescu on dubious evidence.[80] Ardeleanu stated: "To only quote Radu Lecca means to emerge with a vulnerable [research] bibliography."[80] Additional controversy erupted in 2003, when some of Lecca's judgments were uncritically used as sources for a Romanian manual on Holocaust history (called "disinformation textbook" and "extremely vulgar" by researcher Alexandru Florian).[81]