Radu Lecca

Radu D. 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.

Biography

Early life and career

Born in Leca village (part of Ungureni, Bacău County), Radu Lecca was the scion of a landowning family. He was educated in Vienna and Paris, and, according to one eyewitness account, was "the perfect polyglot". Teodor Vintilescu
"Aiud - Spital"
in ''Memoria. Revista Gândirii Arestate'', Nr. 27 Lecca's brother, Sergiu, also had a career in politics, before moving into the diplomatic service.

Radu Lecca 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.Deletant, p.313 During the early interwar years, he worked as a commercial agent in 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 subsidized by France.

Having served his sentence by 1933, Lecca left for Germany, where a Nazi dictatorship was taking its first steps. He began frequenting senior Nazi Party figures, was a friend of Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, and soon after became a correspondent of the party newspaper, ''Völkischer Beobachter''. 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. 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. Around the same time, Sergiu Lecca was involved with an Iron Guard splinter group, the Crusade of Romanianism.

Although funded by the Nazis, Radu Lecca also contacted the SSI, making himself available as a double agent. He was therefore in permanent contact with the German Embassy in Bucharest. His position there was to prove important in 1940–1941, when the Iron Guard produced a fascist-style National Legionary government. Lecca maneuvered alongside the German-endorsed political leader, General Ion Antonescu, subverting the Iron Guard's ministers. Through his contacts, he gathered information on which Nazi officials supported the Guard, and relayed it to Antonescu. According to his own testimonies, Lecca focused his attention on Kurt Geißler, the ''Schutzstaffel''s liaison with the Guard. Lecca watched on as the Guard made preparations to oust Antonescu. He 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 Ștefan Zăvoianu, had influenced Geißler into mistrusting Antonescu. Lecca also claimed that the Jilava Massacre, during which the Guard purged its political enemies, was instigated by Geißler. This account contradicts other reports, according to which the Guard was voluntarily avenging its murdered founder, Captain Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.

These intrigues were a preamble to the Guard's Legionary Rebellion, of January 1941. The attempted coup was crushed by the ''Conducător'', who acted with authorization from Adolf Hitler. The triumphant Antonescu ordered Lecca to contact Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, the new German Ambassador, and inform him about Geißler's dissent.Deletant, p.313; Hausleitner, p.87 Lecca accomplished his task, but did so with noted reluctance. Killinger was pleasantly impressed by what he saw as Lecca's cooperative stance. The two became friends, and Killinger even helped advance Lecca's career.

In short time, Antonescu turned on the Romanian Jews, expanding the antisemitic policies favored by the Iron Guard. Thus, Radu Lecca became entangled in the antisemitic intrigue which sparked the massive Iași pogrom of June 1941. During his 1950s imprisonment and interrogation by the Securitate secret police, Lecca made some unverifiable claims about the massacre. These indicate a first-hand knowledge of the murders, and an attempt to divert the blame onto German units allegedly present in that area, at that time. Also according to Lecca's reports, Antonescu was unaware of the pogrom as it happened, and that swiftly condemned it as it became news.Ancel, p.427 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. Iuniu was probably a relative of Radu Lecca.

Central Jewish Office establishment

In late 1941, Radu Lecca was assigned Jewish Affairs Commissioner and supervisor of the newly created Central Jewish Office. This advancement may have been owed to Killinger's favors. 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.Leni Yahil, ''The Holocaust: The Fate of the European Jewry, 1932-1945'', Oxford University Press, Oxford etc., 1991, p.346. Gustav Richter, the German official directly involved in the negotiations, hoped the Central Jewish Office would function as a ''Judenrat'', to ensure the compliance of senior Jewish community leaders. Lecca was in close contacts with both Richter and Killinger, establishing communication channels leading from Killinger to ''Conducător'' Antonescu and to the Romanian deputy leader, Mihai Antonescu.

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.Deletant, p.122 Lecca's personal selection for CE President was Henric Streitman, a prominent and eclectic journalist of the interwar period. Streitman was an unwitting collaborator, who believed that compliance was a path to survival, and whose assignments were mostly ceremonial. Gingold, who managed the CE bureaucracy, justified his appointment in different terms. 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. Gingold did not facilitate the deportations to Transnistria, but, as British historian Dennis Deletant notes, neither did he object. A "staunch anti-communist", he looked on as the Antonescus branded the deportees as "communist" agents.Deletant, p.123

The CE was originally tasked with mundane chores: producing statistical surveys, organizing special taxation, expropriation, welfare, and the civil conscription of Romanian Jews (as a free labor supply for the Romanian Army on the Eastern Front and behind the lines). The deportation effort itself was still random. In October 1941, Antonescu asked Lecca to look into the matter of deportations from Dorohoi County, and investigate complaints from the deportees' relatives. Lecca looked into the possibility of selective returns, but met resistance from Corneliu Calotescu, the Governor of Bukovina.

Lecca's other proposal was for the CE to replace all Jewish political bodies. As a result, in January 1942, Antonescu outlawed the traditional Jewish Federation, which had been founded by activist Wilhelm Filderman. Antonescu's order also hindered the growing Zionist movement, who had Mișu Benvenisti for its animator. According to Benvenisti's own reports, Richter and the CE were directly interested in destroying Romania's Zionist organizations. In practice, the CE was unable to earn the respect of most Romanian Jews, and Lecca resorted to co-opting Federation activists, and even some committed Zionists, on the CE leadership board. When the Zionists threatened to convert into an anti-German resistance movement, Lecca reluctantly overturned some of Richter's anti-Zionist measures.

Lecca's new missions did not alienate him from the German circles, and he witnessed first-hand the Germans' growing involvement in Romania's antisemitic policies. He was caught in the middle as Horst Böhme, who headed the RSHA branch in Bucharest, began investigating Killinger's bureaucratic work. This was a local facet of the violent conflict opposing the RSHA and the German Foreign Office. 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. Lecca alleged that both Killinger and the senior ''Schutzstaffel'' delegate, Richter, were alarmed by Böhme's scrutiny of their dealings with the CE. He writes that Böhme accused both colleagues for leniency and incompetence, displaying such arrogance as to invite in speculation that he was mentally ill. In one of his own RSHA reports, Böhme worried that Killinger had lost Antonescu's respect, and that, among Romanians, Lecca was the only one still interested in what the German Ambassador had to say. Eventually, Böhme's notes angered the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who obtained his reassignment, freeing Killinger of a nuisance.

Extortion mechanisms and extermination proposals

Beginning in early 1942, Lecca spearheaded extortion initiatives. He produced the special decrees requiring all non-deported Jews to contribute special cash funds for social causes benefiting ethnic Romanians. As early as January, he reported to Ion Antonescu that some 20,000 people targeted by this provision lacked the money and had therefore been prosecuted. Lecca informed that such blind severity defeated the economic purpose. He therefore proposed (successfully so) that a grand total of 100 million lei be collected from more affluent members of the community, and go directly through the Central Jewish Office. 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. Lecca was by then also considering the demolition of synagogues left unused in areas subject to Jewish evictions. He countersigned a plan to recycle the resulting debris, as materials for the Romanian Orthodox church in Bucecea.

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. He confirmed that both Ion and Mihai Antonescu had given approvals, and proceeded to instruct the Romanian Railways administration. The agreement between the two states was announced by a satisfied RSHA in July 1943. 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". Preparations were well under way when Ion Antonescu withdrew his approval. Victor Neumann
''Evreii din Banat și Transilvania de Sud în anii celui de-al doilea război mondial''
at th
Erdélyi Magyar Adatbank
retrieved September 25, 2011 In Lecca's own words, the project was left on hold "until the right time."

Researchers note that a paradoxical reason for this abrupt change was the Romanians' nationalist agenda: Romanian politicians felt alienated by the Nazi German micromanagement of Romania's internal affairs.David Cesarani, ''Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a "Desk Murderer"'', Da Capo Press, Cambridge, 2006, p.152. Moreover, according to American historian Monty Noam Penkower, Lecca felt "snubbed" by Ribbentrop's subordinates while visiting Germany. Contrarily, English researcher David Cesarani locates the problem with the RSHA, who "mishandled ecca'sstay disastrously". Cesarani republishes angry comments made by Ribbentrop aide Franz Rademacher, accusing the RSHA of presumptuousness and breach of protocol. According to other accounts, Lecca was also a careless guest, who claimed to speak for the Romanian government, but had never obtained proper credentials for his supposed mission.

The extermination project lacked secrecy, and was therefore sabotaged from the outside. 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. According to historian Victor Neumann, the Baron's intervention was only part of a series of intersecting events. These include a propaganda and passive resistance effort mounted by other Jewish community leaders of the Banat, the discontent of Romanian railway employees, topical criticism coming from Romanian civil society

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