Browsing by Author "Muraru, Andrei"

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Justice behind the Iron Curtain: Nazis on Trial in Communist Poland
(Institutul National pentru Studierea Holocaustului din Romania ”Elie Wiesel”, 2020-12) Muraru, Andrei
Gabriel N. Finder and the late Alexander V. Prusin examine the war crimes trials conducted by the Communist government of Poland from 1944 to 1959. They argue that the prosecutions of this period reflected Polish society’s desire for revenge and occurred within the political context of the emerging Cold War. Nor were these merely show trials: the Poles modeled them after the major trials at Nuremberg and strove for a reasonable degree of due process. But the authors also elucidate how the Polish judicial system addressed the Nazi occupation from within the context of Soviet control. Based on solid archival research, Justice behind the Iron Curtain is a must-read for anyone interested in the subject. Chapter one details the trials held from 1944 to 1947. The authors argue that pursuing Nazi criminals proved important for both the London-based Government-in-Exile and the Soviet-sponsored Polish Committee for National Liberation. The common hatred for the Germans united the two groups and made establishment of special penal courts easier. Both governments realized that such trials would garner political support. Poles appreciated swift justice, but the Government-in-Exile was forced to watch from afar as the Soviet-installed Communists rebuilt Polish justice.
Outrageous rehabilitations : justice and memory in the attempts to restore the war criminals’ remembrance in post-Holocaust Romania : the recent case of General Nicolae Macici (I)
(Institutul National pentru Studierea Holocaustului din Romania “Elie Wiesel”, 2020-12) Muraru, Andrei
Starting from the most recent rehabilitation request in Romanian justice (General Nicolae Macici, one of the coordinators of the 1941 Odessa massacre), this study examines the case of the rehabilitation of war criminals during the communist regime and after the 1989 Revolution. In 1945, the post-war trials, in which many members of the Antonescu regime were tried, disappeared as subjects from the public sphere, though the trials went on. The series of rehabilitations began in the mid-1960s, when the communist regime put in practice a thaw and the release of political prisoners. Analyzing concrete cases of Romanian military, intellectuals, and dignitaries who obtained legal and social rehabilitation during communism, the present study shows that those rehabilitations were made with the tacit consent of the Romanian authorities. However, the trials were not retried and the convicts were not considered not guilty. The collapse of communism paved the way for the legal rehabilitation of many war criminals by the justice system through retrying the trials and acquitting those guilty of war crimes and genocide. In general, the legal rehabilitations were aimed either at honoring the memory and restoring the honor of those considered to have been victims of the Soviet occupation, or at allowing their heirs to reclaim the confiscated property of the convicts. The study shows that these posthumous post-communist rehabilitations were made possible due to the general current within Romanian society in the 1990s. This trend, maintained by a political and historiographical agenda, was stopped in the 2000s, with Romania's access to NATO and the European Union. Although public campaigns to rehabilitate war criminals have continued, the justice system has not allowed any rehabilitation of those convicted of war crimes and genocide after 2000.
Romanian political justice : Holocaust and the trials of war criminals : the case of Transnistria
(Institutul Național pentru Studierea Holocaustului din România “Elie Wiesel”, 2018-12) Muraru, Andrei
During the communist period, the history of the Romanian occupation of Transnistria has been falsified, perverted and distorted. At the same time, in the historiography of Romanian Holocaust, the topic of punishing war crimes has been neglected for a long time. With minor exceptions, even after 1989, the subject did not benefitted from a professional perspective because of the lack of sources and also because of the disputes over the traumatic memory from the period 1940-1989. The attempt to rehabilitate some important figures of war criminals revealed the contradiction between the competitive martyrology and the professional manner in which history should be written. Over the last decades, in the Western historiography the concept of "political trial" received various interpretations. The organization of the trials of war criminals by totalitarian states or by states where dictatorial regimes were about to come to power gave birth to the idea that a "surgical" approach to each judiciary action could offer a balanced way for approaching the topic. The special courts in Romania - People's Tribunals created in 1945, functioned in a complicated context and the collective trials organised under their patronage were accompanied by multiple controversies. Given the fact that Romania administered Transnistria, the special tribunals had to deal with the crimes and atrocities committed, during Romanian occupation, against Romanian deported Jews, Ukrainian Jews and Roma. In the three trials that took place between May and July 1945 and which are being analysed in this article, I tried to thoroughly investigate the manner in which the tribunal administered justice. I tried to examine the trials in detail referring to the way in which judicial actors played their role before the court in order to find the truth about de crimes and abuses committed in the districts of Odessa, Golta, Berezovka, Rabnita, Oceakov, Jugastru. In the end, the goal was to offer a broad picture about Romania and its political justice in the postwar period.