Liberation of northern Transylvania (25 October 1944)

The territory of northern Transylvania occupied by Hungary on 30 August 1940, following the Second Vienna Award, was liberated by the Romanian army on 25 October 1944. Northern Transylvania was brought back under Romanian government on 13 March 1945. During the Paris Peace Conference (29 July-15 October 1946) and the Paris Peace Treaties (10 February 1947), the Allied and Axis powers voided the Second Vienna Award, restoring Romania’s sovereignty over northern Transylvania and reaffirming the borders between Romania and Hungary from the interwar period.

The People’s Tribunal of Cluj and the war criminals’ trial

At the same time that Germany’s most prominent Nazi war criminals were being tried by the International Military Tribunal, during the first trial in Nuremberg (20 November 1945-1 October 1946), similar trials were conducted in Germany’s allied countries which prosecuted war criminals who had deported and exterminated the Jewish population. In line with the provisions of Law no. 256/1945, two people’s tribunals were set up in Romania on 10 July 1945: one in Bucharest and one in Cluj. The people’s tribunals held specific types of authority which enabled them to try war criminals, including those who had acted against the Jews, from Hungarian-occupied northern Transylvania.

The President of the People’s Tribunal of Cluj was Judge Nicolae Matei, appointed by the Ministry of Justice through Decision no. 21.788/1946. During the first part of 1946, two mass trials were held at the People’s Tribunal of Cluj, which dealt with the prosecution of those accused of crimes against Romanians and Jews during the Hungarian occupation. The first trial handled the prosecution of those accused of committing crimes against Romanians and Jews in September 1940, in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vienna Award. The second one tried and sentenced those convicted of carrying out the extermination of the Jews in northern Transylvania in the spring of 1944.

The People’s Tribunal of Cluj investigated governmental, ministerial, civilian, gendarmerie and military documents, which were then held as evidence in the trials of 201 individuals, including government officials, army officers, police and gendarmes. The accused were separated according to the camps and ghettos where they had been engaged, with each defendant receiving a specific sentence depending on the severity of their crimes. The tribunal held hearings with a number of survivors of the Transylvanian Holocaust, as witnesses to the prosecution. By sentence no. 8 of 31 May 1946, the tribunal established the individual criminal responsibility of those accused of participating in the deportation and extermination of the Transylvanian Jews. Of the 201 convictions, 38 (19.1%) were death sentences, 75 to life imprisonment (37.6%), while the rest were differentiated sentences. The death sentences were not carried out. Only 45 (22.7%) of the defendants were present at the trial, the rest being tried in absentia (76.7%).

The People’s Tribunals operated for a limited period of time, and were dissolved on 28 June 1946.