Quoting Grant T. Harward’s Romania’s Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust, chapter 4:

Reports of “red rockets” fired from Jewish neighborhoods in cities as far away as Bucharest flooded in after air raids, but investigations determined these were tracers from antiaircraft guns, not signals by Jewish communists.²³

Soldiers were not immune to panic. On 22–23 June, the 3rd Călărași Regiment in Siret, a border town in Bukovina, reported being fired on by civilians, so a military praetor was assigned to investigate. He ordered gendarmes to look for snipers, investigated reports of local Ukrainian or Lipovan (Russian Orthodox schematics) snipers in other nearby villages, arrested a Romanian lawyer concealing a Jewish family from deportation, and oversaw the evacuation of civilians.

Fortunately, the military praetor concluded that Soviet soldiers had fired the shots, although nervous [Axis] soldiers were likely responsible, and no one was executed.²⁴ Any air victories were celebrated to bolster morale. On 23 June, First Lieutenant Hoira Agarici downed three Soviet bombers over Constanța, and his feat became a popular song, “Agarici has gone to hunt bolșevici.”²⁵ However, a constant flow of warnings from the MCG about saboteurs, spies, and parachutists in the rear kept soldiers, and civilians, on edge.

Soviet counterattacks reduced Axis bridgeheads on the Prut; one Romanian toehold was described as a “nest of projectiles,” and in some places Axis forces were forced to evacuate back over the river, triggering the first mass reprisals against Jews.²⁶ One of the worst massacres occurred after Axis troops evacuated the Sculeni bridgehead. The town had changed hands four times in the previous three days, when Axis troops finally evacuated twenty‐five hundred civilians, including a thousand Jews, also joined the exodus to escape the carnage.

Colonel Ermil Matieș, commanding the 6th Vânători Regiment, ordered his intelligence officer “to arrest and execute all the suspected Jews” blamed for directing Soviet artillery fire onto his men. On 26 June, officers began to “classify” Jews with the help of soldiers and civilians from Sculeni. Soldiers marched Jews who had been fingered as communists into the hills around the village of Stânca Roznovanu and forced them to dig mass graves before being shot.

[Axis] soldiers and […] civilians arrived to watch, sometimes joining in to beat men to turn over valuables, and to rape women. Over the next several days soldiers became increasingly indiscriminate, killing women, children, and the elderly, totaling around six hundred people.²⁷ Shocked civilian authorities reported the soldiers’ atrocities, prompting an investigation, but Matieș justified the crimes as legitimate reprisals, and no one was punished.²⁸

The Stânca Roznovanu massacre shows how mass reprisals quickly turned into genocidal massacres as permissive officers allowed soldiers—joined by civilians—to do whatever they wanted to Jews.

Meanwhile, Soviet troops had even crossed the Danube, establishing bridgeheads near Ismail, which increased [Axis] commanders’ fears of Jewish uprisings in the rear to support Soviet attacks at the front, especially in Iași.²⁹ The city had come under regular air attack because it was an important rail hub on the frontier.

On 26 June, bombs killed two hundred citizens, including thirty‐eight Jews.³⁰ Some people fled to the countryside, but most lacked the means; Jews were not allowed to leave. Some Romanians blamed corrupt or incompetent authorities for inadequate air defenses, but even more told stories about Jewish communists signaling Soviet pilots.³¹ The press contributed to hysteria with stories about Jewish agents.

Iași garrison commander Colonel Constantin Lupu, Prefect Colonel Dumitru Captaru, Police Superintendent Colonel Constantin Chirilovici, and two others formed an emergency committee that ordered a search leading to the arrest of 207 Jews for possessing flashlights or red cloths and the provisional arrest of 317 other Jews. The few women rounded up were immediately released. The men were beaten during interrogations at police headquarters, but many were soon freed, owing to lack of evidence.³²

Certain that police interrogators were blind or bought off, soldiers took matters into their own hands. Sergeant Mircea Manoliu, a former Legionary, first started shooting released Jews instead of escorting them home, then shooting newly detained Jews instead of taking them to police headquarters.³³

Iași city authorities were losing control, in part because of institutional confusion. There was an array of groups within the city operating independently and often at cross purposes, including police, gendarmes, garrison troops, units heading to the front, SSI agents, and [Wehrmacht] soldiers.³⁴

Police lacked authority over soldiers; 14th Infantry Division soldiers were mostly spread out in the countryside; Romanian military police had no control over [Wehrmacht] soldiers; German 198th Infantry Division and Todt Organization troops had their own missions; and SSI agents operated clandestinely.

On 27 June, after hearing gunfire, Colonel Chirilovici found a group of Romanians in a Jewish cemetery singing Legionary songs while receiving rifles from two men who said they had orders from army intelligence to arm volunteers in case of a Jewish–communist uprising. He discovered later they were SSI officers.³⁵

German patrols prowled the streets as well. Colonel Lupu began preparations to deport “suspect” Jewish men to prevent “rebellious actions in Iași on the part of the Jews” that army intelligence had been predicting for a year.³⁶

Hundreds of Jewish men from towns in the evacuation zone had already been deported, and now the conducător wanted to do the same thing on a far grander scale in Iași, since by now nearly half the city’s population was Jewish after having been swollen by ten thousand Jews—refugees from Bessarabia the year before and deportees from surrounding towns in recent weeks.³⁷

Colonel Captaru requested the 6th Vânători and 13th Dorobanți Regiments to organize patrols to help the overstretched municipal police after reports of looting during the blackout. Unintentionally, these orders destabilized Iași even further and set the stage for a pogrom.

On 28 June, the situation in the city deteriorated, and inflammatory army propaganda did not help. An article in Soldatul reminded soldiers it had been a year since Soviet troops entered northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, calling the day a “black page in the calendar of the Romanian nation,” but rejoiced that soon Romania would be “reborn in all its ancient virtues, under the correct leadership of a great soldier and Romanian, General Ion Antonescu.”³⁸

At 10 a.m. soldiers from the 13th Dorobanți and 24th Artillery Regiments, including Sergeant Manoliu, entered the Tătărași neighborhood to search for radios but quickly began ransacking Jewish homes. Police arrived to find soldiers holding Jews, many beaten and bleeding, at gunpoint as civilians shouted encouragement. When the police tried to intercede, those on the scene “screamed that [the police] belonged to the Jews and had been bribed by them.”³⁹

Manoliu told a passing German patrol “the police were protecting the Jews.”⁴⁰ The [Wehrmacht] let the Romanian soldiers continue searching for radios and did nothing to stop the abuses. Only when Colonel Lupu and a military praetor came with gendarmes was the looting stopped and Manoliu temporarily detained.⁴¹

Calm was not restored for very long. An air raid alarm at 9 p.m. put the city on edge, then antiaircraft gunfire was misidentified as blue or green “flares” (actually different‐colored tracers indicating different antiaircraft guns), and by 10 p.m. [Axis] patrols reported being fired upon. The patrols shot back and searched homes but never found any snipers.⁴² German patrols reported casualties; it took days for Romanian authorities to confirm that this was false.⁴³

At 11 p.m. General Antonescu phoned Lupu, ordering him to restore order and deport all Jewish men in the city at once.⁴⁴ Soon afterward, two [Axis] columns passing through Iași on the way to the front reported being fired at by snipers. By 3 a.m. soldiers across the city were grabbing Jews from buildings they thought were the sources of fire and summarily executing them. A report recorded three hundred dead and fifty wounded during the night.⁴⁵ As the sun rose, civilians joined soldiers, turning reprisals into a pogrom.

“That Sunday,” as locals subsequently referred to 29 June, soldiers, gendarmes, civilians, and some Germans killed thousands of Jews, mostly men, but women and children too. At dawn city authorities realized that, despite all the gunfire, not a single soldier had been killed; nonetheless, soldiers and gendarmes pulled Jews into the streets, sorting out military‐age men, to be arrested. Anyone who resisted was shot. [Axis] patrols marched “convoys” of Jews to various collection points or directly to police headquarters.⁴⁶

Those who fell behind or lowered hands from over their heads were shot, and streets were quickly littered with bodies. The cells at police headquarters were already crammed, so its courtyard was used as overflow, and by 9 a.m. it contained perhaps two thousand Jews.⁴⁷ Civilians began looting Jewish properties. City authorities believed Jewish communists and “very weak Romanian communist elements” had attacked to hinder troop movements by purposefully triggering a pogrom to spread disorder, so commanders made feeble attempts to restore order.⁴⁸

(Emphasis added.)