Under communism, official history in Romania taught that Germans were the sole perpetrators of the Holocaust, thereby ignoring the role of the Romanian government in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of Romani, from the historical regions of Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and Transnistria, during World War II. After the fall of communism in 1989, wartime leader Ion Antonescu was semi-rehabilitated and hailed as a hero by some Romanians, with some monuments being erected across the country to honor the former dictator.