That’s the subject of my weekend’s RealClearHistory column. An excerpt:

7. Romania and the Iron Guard. Sandwiched between the communist Soviet Union and the fascist Axis powers of central Europe, Romanian society struggled to find its footing after a comparatively wonderful campaign during World War I, but Bucharest eventually chose to side with Berlin and Rome instead of Moscow. Romanian fascism was known for including the Orthodox Church into its anti-communist, anti-Semitic, and anti-capitalist rhetoric. Romania’s fascists almost made the Nazis look like boy scouts, especially when the Iron Guard organized and implemented one of Europe’s bloodiest pogroms, ever: the Iași pogrom. Just over 13,000 Jews, along with their liberal and Orthodox defenders in the city of Iași, were butchered on the streets where they once plied their trades. Romania, a member of the Axis for most of the war, was second only to Germany in the number of Jews it killed during World War II.

Please, read the rest.

Oh, and I wrote about America’s greatest maritime disaster on Tuesday for RCH‘s blog, the Historiat.