Foreign minister: Romania morally bound to teach the young about Holocaust

Romanian foreign minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu has said that his country was morally bound to teach younger generations about the country's role in the Shoah, a chapter in Romanian history which had been suppressed for decades by Communist governments. At a visit to Israel, Ungureanu, said it had only been in the 1990s, after the overthrow of Communist dictator Ceaucescu, that young Romanian historians started to take an interest in the Holocaust, during which the regime of Marshal Antonescu was responsible for the deaths of between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews and more than 11,000 Gypsies. The previous Romanian government officially took responsibility last year for the wartime actions of Romanian authorities, the first such official admission, and promised to educate the public about the Holocaust. During Communist times, official history taught that Germans were the sole perpetrators of the Holocaust, ignoring the involvement of Romania's wartime leaders.