Cross, which he received from Hitler at their 6 August meeting in the Ukrainian city of Berdychiv, Ion Antonescu was promoted to Marshal of Romania by royal decree on 22 August, in recognition for his role in restoring the eastern frontiers of Greater Romania. In a report to Berlin, a German diplomat wrote that Marshal Antonescu had syphilis and that "among [Romanian] cavalry officers this disease is as widespread as a common cold is among German officers. The Marshal suffers from severe attacks of it every several months." Antonescu took one of his most debated decisions when, with Bessarabia's conquest almost complete, he committed Romania to Hitler's war effort beyond the Dniester—that is, beyond territory that had been part of Romania between the wars—and thrust deeper into Soviet territory, thus waging a war of aggression. On 30 August, Romania occupied a territory it deemed "Transnistria", formerly a part of the Ukrainian SSR (including the entire Moldavian ASSR and further territories). Like the decision to continue the war beyond Bessarabia, this earned Antonescu much criticism from the semi-clandestine PNL and PNȚ. Insofar as the war against the Soviet Union was a war to recover Bessarabia and northern Bukovina – both regions that been a part of Romania until June 1940 and that had Romanian majorities – the conflict had been very popular with the Romanian public opinion. But the idea of conquering Transnistria was not as that region had never been part of Romania, and a minority of the people were ethnic Romanian. Soon after the takeover, the area was assigned to a civil administration apparatus headed by Gheorghe Alexianu and became the site for the main component of the Holocaust in Romania: a mass deportation of the Bessarabian and Ukrainian Jews, followed later by transports of Romani Romanians and Jews from Moldavia proper (that is, the portions of Moldavia west of the Prut). The accord over Transnistria's administration, signed in Tighina, also placed areas between the Dniester and the Dnieper under Romanian military occupation, while granting control over all resources to Germany. In September 1941, Antonescu ordered Romanian forces to take Odessa, a prize he badly wanted for reasons of prestige. Russians had traditionally been seen in Romania as brutal aggressors, and for Romanian forces to take a major Soviet city and one of the largest Black Sea ports like Odessa would be a sign of how far Romania had