In every country the Germans found people who were willing to deliver Jews to them, knowing fully well the consequences of their actions. Yet, except for Romania, no country murdered its Jews unless it came under direct German occupation. Bulgaria, for example, was a German ally but was not occupied, and its Jewry survived.

Aside from Germany no nation took such an active role in the murder of its Jews as Romania. The story of the Romanian Holocaust therefore should be understood not simply as a part of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewry, but as a parallel event: The Romanian government carried out mass murder on its own. Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Poles might have been just as antisemitic as Romanians, and indeed their citizens did murder Jews in a particularly brutal fashion when they had the opportunity to do so, but these countries had no sovereign governments that could take an active role in mass murder. Therefore the number of their victims was much smaller than that in Romania. Of course, without German inspiration and the Nazi example, the Romanian massacres would not have happened. Nevertheless, although other German satellite governments contributed to the Holocaust by delivering Jews to the German killing machine, it was only Romanians who, on their own and following orders from the highest authorities in their government, did the killing themselves. (Paradoxically, of all countries of Eastern Europe with the exception of Bulgaria it was in Romania that the largest percentage of Jews survived.)