Most people associate the word Holocaust with the mass murders and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Germans in the territories they occupied during the Second World War. Due to the excessive concentration on the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany, genocides and ethnic cleansings carried out simultaneously by some other countries, mostly allies of Nazi Germany, are less well known. Romania, led by General Ion Antonescu, proved to be Hitler's most important Eastern European ally in the military sense and in the implementation of the policy of ethnic cleansing. During World War II, the General's regime committed its own genocide and ethnic cleansing in three regions that were annexed to Romania during the war, and the crimes were mainly committed against Jews, whose status in Romanian society had been very poor for a long time. Until now, the Holocaust in Romania was not the subject of research in Croatian historiography, and in this work it was approached from different perspectives. Some of the main questions of this paper touch on the motives of the perpetrators of the crime, external and internal factors that influenced the actions of the perpetrators, the interaction between the genocidal intention and the way of its practical implementation, and the decision-making process related to genocide and ethnic cleansing. Through the literature used in the work, the chronological development of different types of anti-Semitism in Romanian society, the origin of genocide in Romanian territories during the Second World War, the different motives of the perpetrators of crimes, the relationship between innate and environmental factors of violence, the issue of personal responsibility of the perpetrators and bureaucratic responsibility for crimes that are analyzed is approached from an intentionalist and functionalist perspective, and the responsibility of the central and local authorities in the implementation of the crime.