In June 1940, almost a year into World War II, the Soviet Union staged its occupation of Bessarabia. This was received as a shock in Romania, where an Axis-aligned regime took over, with Ion Antonescu at its helm. Over the following months, the regime, which inherited and enforced antisemitic laws passed in the late 1930s, constructed a conspiracy theory, blaming Jews for the Soviet occupation and for alleged acts of terror. The allegations were immediately disproved by community leaders such as Horia Carp and Wilhelm Filderman, but, as historian Dennis Deletant writes, "these details [...] had little impact on the officers and men of the Romanian army of 1940. The whole anti-Semitic argument rested on a total denial of these facts." According to Landau's later testimony, some of his fellow Chișinău Jews, possibly including members of his own family, were actually deported to the Gulag under Soviet rule.