The Military Occupation Against Indigenous Elites? Romanian “Hostages” under the German Administration, 1916-1918
The Military Occupation Against Indigenous Elites? Romanian “Hostages” under the German Administration, 1916-1918

Summary/Abstract: When the German administration settled in Bucharest, it retaliated by taking hostages. People were arrested for their position in society, primarily to maintain control and prevent resistance, but also as a means of putting pressure on the Romanian Government – which had retreated to Moldavia – in order to free the interned German civilians. The international Hague Conventions (1899, 1907) prohibited collective penalties – whether pecuniary or of any other nature – imposed on the occupied population for individual acts for which the latter could not be held jointly and severally responsible. The honour of the person, family rights, individual life and private property were also respected according to the regulations. The Germans, however, resorted without restraint to taking Romanian civilians as hostages. Unlike the usual practice of political arrest, they served the interests of the war as they were aimed at freeing the Central Powers’ subjects held in camps by the Romanian state. The reasons for the arrests had to do with political attitudes. Offences of opinion were frequently mentioned. A professor from Bucharest noted in his memoirs that the Germans had a special scrapbook of press articles published during the years of Romanian neutrality in various newspapers in favour of the Entente. This improvised scrapbook contained compromising paragraphs and photographs, used by the occupiers to identify past hostile propagandists and apply the appropriate correction. The internees did not benefit from regular court trials or the status of political prisoners. There were three waves of arrests (hostage-takings) in Romania during the German military occupation. The first occurred in December 1916, when around 100 people – men aged between 16 and 55, many of whom were members of the ruling Liberal Party in Moldavia – were arrested as a means of pressure. The measure was tacitly consented to by the German Foreign Office in agreement with the similar authority in Austria-Hungary. As the Romanian refugee government showed its intransigence, a second wave of arrests in Bucharest came at the end of February 1917. Many of those arrested in the first wave, some released after special interventions, were arrested again and deported. A third wave of arrests took place at the beginning of July 1917, ahead of decisive military battles on the Romanian front. The lists of abusive arrests included local elites, lawyers and journalists, teachers, doctors, architects, and high-ranking officials. Even some Romanian women, ladies of high society, were either victims of internment or faced isolation. My proposal is aimed at reconstructing this little-known episode in the history of the exercise of enemy power in militarily occupied territories. The case is part of the dynamics of the inherent tensions that arise in the course of a military conflict between the civilian population and foreign military authorities. It reveals the limits of military justice and the obstacles that have arisen in the interpretation of the international laws of war in the confrontations of the last century.

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