Civil, occupation administration in Transnistria, its structure and personnel collaboration (1941-1944).

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to summarize a wide range of existing knowledge, using a variety of source cases, and to propose a reliable structure of the administrative structure and personnel policy in municipal civil authorities, to determine the relationship between the collaboration of the local population with the Romanian occupation administration in the "Transnistria Governorate" during 1941–1944.

Research methodology. The work is based on the well-known principles of historicism, systematics, quantitative analysis, objectivity, analysis and synthesis, source novelty, and heuristics of historical data.

Scientific novelty. The research is based on primary Romanian-language documents of Romanian origin from a wide range of holdings of archival institutions in Romania, the Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine, which significantly strengthens the scientific product compared to existing research on this issue and provides answers to little-known questions regarding the essence and nature of the civil administration of the Romanian occupation authorities in the southwestern Ukrainian lands and the statistical analysis of the collaboration of the occupied population, in particular officials, employees, and specialists.

Conclusions. Based on a set of documentary materials and statistical data, it is concluded that the Romanian administration in Transnistria was civil in nature, structurally branched and tightly controlled vertically. The top of the administrative system was generated at the expense of Romanian functionaries sent from Romania and Bessarabia, but due to the lack of personnel and attempts to flirt with the occupied population, mainly offended by the communist regime in the pre-war years, the Romanians were forced to involve former Soviet administrators, engineering and technical workers, middle and lower-level officials in cooperation. The ratio of representatives of the local population and Romanian citizens who worked in the Romanian occupation administration system was approximately 4:1. The high level of cooperation of the local population with the occupying Romanian authorities is a characteristic and distinctive feature of the occupation regime in Transnistria, which, compared to the Nazi regime of the German Reich, was significantly more liberal in some respects (entrepreneurship, trade, education, religious and cultural life). It can be confidently stated that among those who collaborated with the Romanian administration, the exception was persons of Jewish and Roma nationality, who were not taken into service in the special services and local authorities, on the contrary – they were subjected to extermination and deportation. Their representatives were completely excluded from the socio-economic, socio-cultural and everyday life of Transnistria. Otherwise, the Romanian authorities did not practice overt ethnic discrimination when hiring local people for work in the state and economic structures of the Transnistrian governorate, although preferences were extended to ethnically related Moldovans and allies in the anti-communist bloc – local Germans. It is very difficult to quantitatively determine the ethnic and social composition of local and involved collaborators, which could become the subject of further research.