NAZI SCAPEGOAT OR WEAK LINK? RE-EVALUATING THE ROMANIAN ARMY

History is usually written by the victors, however the narrative of the Eastern Front, at least in the English-speaking world has for decades been unusual in that it has been dominated by the version of events given by the defeated side. There are many reasons for this – when the first accounts began to appear in the 1950s, the Soviet Union was widely regarded as a hostile power. Soviet historiography dictated that former Red Army veterans produced stereotyped accounts of the fighting, in which all Germans were routinely portrayed as Nazis or ‘Hitlerites’ and all Soviet soldiers were great champions of the socialist cause. The memoirs of German combatants of all ranks painted a very different picture. The Wehrmacht was portrayed as a technically superior force, led with superlative expertise, and was ultimately defeated by sheer weight of numbers. Its involvement in atrocities was minimal, and the entire conflict was increasingly described as a great crusade to defend Europe from Bolshevism.

One of the few areas where Soviet and German accounts tended to agree was the performance of the Romanian Army on the Eastern Front. The Germans regarded their allies as poorly trained, poorly motivated and poorly equipped; several German officers wrote in their memoirs that they routinely had to attach German units to Romanian formations in order to make them more effective. The orthodox Soviet view after the war was that Romanian soldiers had been forced to fight for the Axis by their Fascist leadership and were only too willing to surrender or desert. Both of these viewpoints had some basis in truth, but both were also incorrect in many respects. It is only since the end of Communist rule in Romania and the appearance of a distinct Romanian narrative that there has been an alternative point of view to that of German and Soviet sources.

In order to assess