In Nazi-occupied Western Europe, numerous local bureaucrats and policemen participated in rounding up Jews and sending them to death camps in the East. And in Eastern Europe, many of the natives aided the Nazis in the murder of Jews—sometimes voluntarily, sometimes for pay, and sometimes under duress. But only Romania, which remained independent under a homegrown fascist regime, pursued a Holocaust of its own. Matt Lebovic reports on recent research on the subject:

When typhus broke out at a Romanian concentration camp 80 years ago, authorities at Bogdanovka decided to murder 40,000 Jewish inmates and burn down the camp. Carried out in Romanian-occupied Ukraine by Romanian soldiers, Ukrainian regular police, and local ethnic Germans, the Bogdanovka massacre has largely been ignored by historians.

In Romania, Hitler’s stalwart ally, the dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu, expanded his borders after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Hitler gave Antonescu a free hand to solve Romania’s own “Jewish question,” and an estimated 420,000 Jews under Antonescu’s control were murdered relatively early in the war.

Much as Germany had its Brownshirts, Romania had a paramilitary group called the Iron Guard, founded in 1927. Also known as the Legionnaires or green-shirts, the organization promised to defeat “rabbinical aggression against the Christian world.”

The first large-scale Holocaust massacre in Romania took place in Iasi, a university city near the border with Moldova, in June 1941. Encouraged by Antonescu, Romanian soldiers partnered with the police and local mobs to murder 13,266 Jews. Iasi’s residents helped arrest Jews and loot their homes, as well as humiliate Jews marched out of town. [Then] the Iron Guard led mobs in murdering Jews on the streets and in their homes, deploying crowbars and knives in addition to guns. After the initial massacre, 5,000 Jews were packed into boxcars for a “death train” journey in which 4,000 of them perished.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.