Treaty
1940 border agreement
The Second Vienna Award was the second of two territorial disputes that were arbitrated by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. On 30 August 1940, they assigned the territory of Northern Transylvania, including all of Maramureș and part of Crișana, from the Kingdom of Romania to the Kingdom of Hungary.
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Text from the Wikipedia article “Second Vienna Award”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Second Vienna Award was the second of two territorial disputes that were arbitrated by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. On 30 August 1940, they assigned the territory of Northern Transylvania, including all of Maramureș and part of Crișana, from the Kingdom of Romania to the Kingdom of Hungary.
After World War I, the multiethnic Kingdom of Hungary was divided by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon to form several new nation states, but Hungary noted that the new state borders did not follow ethnic boundaries. The new nation state of Hungary was about a third the size of prewar Hungary, and millions of ethnic Hungarians were left outside the new Hungarian borders. Many historically important areas of Hungary were assigned to other countries, and the distribution of natural resources was uneven. The various non-Hungarian populations generally saw the treaty as justice for their historically marginalised nationalities, but the Hungarians considered the treaty to have been deeply unjust, a national humiliation and a real tragedy.
The treaty and its consequences dominated Hungarian public life and political culture in the interwar period, and the Hungarian government swung more and more to the right. Eventually, under Regent Miklós Horthy, Hungary established close relations with Benito Mussolini's Italy and Adolf Hitler's Germany.
The good relations with Germany and Italy allowed Hungary to regain southern Czechoslovakia in the First Vienna Award of 1938 and Subcarpathia in 1939. However, neither that nor the subsequent military conquest of Carpathian Ruthenia in 1939 satisfied Hungarian political ambitions. The awards allocated only a fraction of the territories lost by the Treaty of Trianon, and the loss resented the most by the Hungarians was that of Transylvania, which had been ceded to Romania.
In late June 1940, the Romanian government gave in to a Soviet ultimatum and allowed Moscow to take over both Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which had been incorporated into Romania after World War I, as well as the Hertsa region. The territorial loss was dreadful from Romania's perspective, but its government preferred that to an unwinnable military conflict with the Soviets. Hungary's government, however, interpreted Romania's cession of land as an admission that it would no longer insist upon its territorial integrity under pressure. The Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina thus inspired Budapest to escalate its efforts to resolve "the question of Transylvania". Hungary hoped to gain as much of Transylvania as possible, but the Romanians would have none of it and submitted only a small region for consideration. Eventually, Hungarian-Romanian negotiations fell through entirely. As a result, Romania and Hungary were "browbeaten" into accepting Axis arbitration.
Meanwhile, the Romanian government had acceded to Italy's request for territorial cessions to Bulgaria, another German-aligned neighbour. On 7 September, under the Treaty of Craiova, the "Cadrilater" (southern Dobruja) was ceded by Romania to Bulgaria.
On 1 July 1940, Romania repudiated the Anglo-French guarantee of 13 April 1939, which had become worthless following the fall of France. The next day, King Carol II of Romania suggested to Hitler that Germany dispatch a military mission to Romania and renew the alliance of 1883. Germany used Romania's new desperation to force a revision of the territorial settlement produced by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 in favour of Germany's old allies: Hungary and Bulgaria. In an exchange of letters between Carol and Hitler (5–15 July), Carol insisted that no territorial exchange occur without a population exchange, and Hitler conditioned German goodwill towards Romania on Romania's having good relations with Hungary and Bulgaria. The Romanian foreign minister was Mihail Manoilescu; the German minister plenipotentiary in Bucharest was Wilhelm Fabricius.
In accordance with German wishes, Romania began negotiations with Hungary at Turnu Severin on 16 August. The initial Hungarian claim was 69,000 km2 (27,000 sq mi) of territory with 3,803,000 inhabitants, almost two-thirds of whom were Romanian. Talks were broken off on 24 August. The German and Italian governments then proposed an arbitration, which was characterised in the minutes of the Romanian Crown Council of 29 August as "communications with an ultimative character made by the German and Italian governments".
The Romanians accepted, and Foreign Ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop of Germany and Galeazzo Ciano of Italy met on 30 August 1940 at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. They reduced the Hungarian demands to 43,492 km2 (16,792 sq mi), with a population of 2,667,007. The treaty was signed by Hungarian Foreign Minister István Csáky and Romanian Foreign Minister Mihail Manoilescu. The Romanian Crown Council met overnight on 30–31 August to accept the arbitration. At the meeting, Iuliu Maniu demanded that Carol abdicate and that the Romanian Army to resist the Hungarian takeover of northern Transylvania. His demands were pragmatically rejected.
Population statistics in Northern Transylvania and the changes after the award are presented in detail in the next section. Southern Transylvania, with 2,274,600 Romanians and 363,200 Hungarians, remained part of Romania.
The territory in question covered an area of 43,104 square kilometres (16,643 sq mi). The 1930 Romanian census registered for the region a population of 2,393,300. In 1941, the Hungarian authorities conducted a new census, which registered a total population of 2,578,100. Both censuses asked language and nationality separately. The results of both censuses are summarised in this table:
Historian Keith Hitchins summarised the situation created by the award:
Apart from natural population growth, the differences between the censuses were caused by other complex reasons like migration, the assimilation of Jews and bilingual speakers. According to Hungarian registrations, 100,000 Hungarian refugees had arrived in North Transylvania from South Transylvania by January 1941. And almost as many Hungarians arrived from Trianon Hungary in North Transylvania.
On the other hand, nearly the same number of Romanians left to Southern Transylvania by February 1941, according to the incomplete registration of North Transylvanian refugees that was carried out by the Romanian government. Also, a further fall in the total population suggests that a further 40,000 to 50,000 Romanians moved from North Transylvania to South Transylvania, including refugees who were omitted from the official registration for various reasons.
Hungarian gains by assimilation were also balanced by losses for other groups of native speakers, such as Jews. The shift of languages was most typical among bilingual Romanians and Hungarians, however, in Máramaros and Szatmár Counties, dozens of settlements had many people who had declared themselves as Romanian in 1930 but now identified themselves as Hungarian in 1941 although they had not spoken any Hungarian even in 1910.
Romania had 14 days to evacuate the concerned territories and to assign them to Hungary. The Hungarian troops stepped across the Trianon borders on 5 September. The Regent of Hungary, Miklós Horthy, also attended in the entry. The troops reached the pre-Trianon border, which completed the territorial recovery process, on 13 September.
Generally, the ethnic Hungarian population welcomed the troops and regarded the separation from Romania as a liberation. The large ethnic Romanian community that found itself under the Hungarian occupation had nothing to celebrate, as it considered the Second Vienna Award a return to the long Hungarian rule. Upon entering the awarded territory, the Royal Hungarian Army committed massacres against the Romanian population, including the following:
Text from the Wikipedia article “Second Vienna Award”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.