Bessarabia Governorate (Romania)

In 1812, the region of Bessarabia, lying between the Prut and Dniester rivers and historically part of the principality of Moldavia, was annexed by the Russian Empire.

Later, in 1917, during World War I to which Romania had joined in order to gain several Romanian-populated regions, the Russian Revolution sparked, and this allowed Bessarabia to declare itself as independent, forming the Moldavian Democratic Republic.

[3] The new Bessarabia Governorate was organized in nine counties, which were Bălți, Cetatea Albă, Cahul, Chilia, Ismail, Lăpușna, Orhei, Soroca and Tighina.

On 11 July 1941, the Einsatzgruppen D started its own extermination campaign in Bălți, and by mid-August, the unit had murdered 4,425 Jews in the northern part of Bessarabia.

As the Romanians left corpses unburied whenever they plundered, raped or fired shots in the streets and received bribes from Jews, the Nazis issued letters, protests and orders decrying the lack of organization and planning.

The convoys of deportees were not provided with food or water and had to sleep in improvised camps surrounded by barbed wire in the middle of a plowed field.

25,000 of them would die in these camps, characterized by forced labor, corruption, hunger, plunder, suffering, rapes, executions and epidemics; before death marches across the Dniester were resumed after an agreement with Nazi Germany on 30 August 1941.

Furthermore, until 15 November 1943, between 104,522 and 120,810 Romanian citizens of Jewish ethnicity or descent originating in Bessarabia, Bukovina and the Old Kingdom died in Transnistria as a result of typhus, hunger, cold or straightforward murder.