1941 Romanian census

1941 Romanian census
← 1930 1941 1942 →
General information
CountryRomania
AuthorityNational Institute of Statistics

The 1941 Romanian census (Romanian: Recensământul General al României din 1941) was conducted on 6 April 1941 in all territories still remaining in the Kingdom of Romania, following the loss of land to Hungary (Northern Transylvania), Bulgaria (Southern Dobruja), and the Soviet Union (Bessarabia, Hertsa, and Northern Bukovina).[1] After the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, Romania retook control of its lands that the Soviet Union had invaded, in which it conducted the census separately in the autumn of 1941. Later, Romania also annexed the Transnistria Governorate, finishing the census by conducting it there in December 1941.[2][3][4]

The census-taking process was overseen by Friedrich Burgdörfer [de], the chairman of the Bavarian Statistical Office of Nazi Germany. After a six-day trip across multi-ethnic Romanian regions, he reported to Sabin Manuilă and Ion Antonescu (then the leader of Romania), praising the methods of the census and predicting that it would offer an accurate count.[5] Hungarian statistician Varga E. Árpád [hu] has stated that the data, specifically with reference to ethnic Hungarians in Southern Transylvania, is quite correct.[6] Despite this, several other Hungarian ethnographers and demographers continue to dispute the numbers found by the census.[7] The provisional results of the census were first publicly released in 1944 by the National Institute of Statistics.[5]

Notably, it was the first Romanian census to include ethnic origin as a separate category.[7] The census, on Manuilă's direction, also included a special section cataloguing all Jewish-owned property, a summary of which was sent to the German Main Security Office.[8]

  1. ^ "Recensămintele României: 1899–1992". Enciclopedia de istorie a României (in Romanian). Editura Meronia. 2002. p. 358.
  2. ^ Publikationstelle Wien, Die Bevölkerungzählung in Rumänien, 1941, Vienna, 1943 (in German)
  3. ^ Golopenția, Anton (2006). Românii de la est de Bug [Romanians from the east of Bug] (in Romanian). Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică. ISBN 9789734505470 – via Google Books.
  4. ^ Fondul Conferința de Pace de la Paris [Paris Peace Conference Holdings] (in Romanian). Vol. 125. Paris: Arhivele MAE. 1946. p. 472.
  5. ^ a b Fahlbusch, Haar (2005). German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945. Berghahn Books. p. 145. ISBN 978-1-57181-435-7 – via Google Books.
  6. ^ Árpád, Varga E. (1998). Orbell, Rachel (ed.). "Hungarians in Transylvania between 1870 and 1995" (PDF). Magyar Kisebbség [hu]. 4. 3 (4). Translated by Tamás Sályi. Budapest: Teleki László Foundation: 331–407. Retrieved 20 May 2022 – via The Cultural Innovation Foundation's Library. The 1941 Romanian census data with respect to Hungarians in South Transylvania are quite correct, since most ethnic groups whose identity was debated were found north of the border and were thus recorded by the Hungarian census.
  7. ^ a b Davis, R. Chris (8 January 2019). Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority's Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945. University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 184–185. ISBN 978-0-299-31640-2 – via Google Books.
  8. ^ Wedekind, Michael (2010). "The Mathematization of the Human Being. Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Romania in the Late 1930s and Early 1940s". New Zealand Slavonic Journal. 44: 62.