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.

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.

[5] Tasked with promoting German interests in Romania, he transferred clandestine funds from Rosenberg to the country's own fascist and antisemitic force, the National Christian Party.

[15] However, documents of the pogrom show that Iuniu (Iunius, Junius) Lecca, who worked under Eugen Cristescu at the SSI, had a major role to play in plotting the series of murders.

[18] Establishing the CE was a measure suggested to Lecca by special Nazi envoys, who wanted to involve Romania in their pan-European Final Solution project.

[22] It was also Richter who suggested to Lecca that Nandor Gingold, a Jewish physician and lapsed Roman Catholic convert, be made General Secretary of the CE Central Committee.

He believed the Office could serve to postpone other pogroms, and that Hitler simply wanted to evict Jews into Nazi-occupied Poland and then to areas located outside Europe.

Böhme, who wanted to speed up the Final Solution project, was described by Lecca as a person of outstanding cruelty, promoted as kudos for his earlier rule of terror in Bohemia-Moravia.

[32] Eventually, Böhme's notes angered the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who obtained his reassignment, freeing Killinger of a nuisance.

[35] In August, he drafted a project to levy 1.2 billion lei from those Jewish business owners who had been spared "Romanianization", on the pretense that it would help their conscripted coreligionists.

The project was endorsed by Lecca's superiors, who raised the bar by a further 800 million lei, half of it diverted to a state-endorsed charity headed by Ion Antonescu's spouse, Maria.

[37] 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.

RSHA bureaucrats informed that, beginning September 10, Romanian Jews were to be forcefully embarked for Lublin (Majdanek): "those that are fit will be put to work, while the rest undergo special treatment".

Baron Neumann of Végvár, a Banat Jewish industrialist, is credited with having coaxed and bribed some Romanian officials, focusing his effort on postponing all transports to Lublin for as long as was possible.

[59] Emil Ghilezan [ro], 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.

[61] According to other accounts, he made efforts to embezzle the money he had extorted from would-be emigrants to Palestine,[62] and received 20 million lei from the Iași survivors, pledging them his leniency.

This was a last-minute effort to ensure the survival, and a humane detainment at a new camp in Vyzhnytsia, of the Transnistria deportees (excepting those whom Antonescu still called "communist Jews").

"[71] 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.

Romania's new government pushed the Germans out of Bucharest, and Aurel Aldea, the Interior Minister, agreed to have the "Antonescu Lot" transferred into Soviet custody.

According to an article in the Communist Party's Scînteia, "the gangster Radu Lecca" duped his police escort on November 18, and lost himself in the Bucharest crowd.

[84] 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.

[86] 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.

[61] 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").

[87] 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.

[88] Historian Ottmar Trașcă 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.

[89] Some of Lecca's claims about Antonescu's stance on the Romanian Jewry were passed into Steinhardt's book Jurnalul fericirii ("Happiness Diary"), mainly a recollection of communist imprisonment.

Historian Laurențiu Constantiniu argues that the book made Romanian officials negate the existence of the Holocaust throughout the 1990s, giving rise to "absurd confabulations" regarding Antonescu.

[91] 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).