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]
Results
Ethnic map by county (1941 census)
The ethnic structure of Romania, in its April 1941 borders, was as follows:[1][9]
The ethnic structure of the Transnistria Governorate, which was the last territory Romania annexed in which this census was undertaken in December 1941, was as follows:[2]
^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.
^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.
