Second Vienna Award

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second Vienna Award was signed on the 30th of August 1940 at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, and it transferred Northern Transylvania from Romania to Hungary without either country having any real choice in the matter. Two men with the power to reshape the map of Europe sat across from each other that day: Joachim von Ribbentrop of Germany and Galeazzo Ciano of Italy. What they produced would leave roughly one and a quarter million Romanians living overnight under Hungarian rule, and set off a chain of massacres, deportations, and reprisals that would haunt the region for years. How did two neighboring kingdoms end up surrendering their fates to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy? And what actually happened to the people who woke up in a different country on the morning of the 31st of August?

• 2. The Wound of Trianon

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  The 1920 Treaty of Trianon cut the multiethnic Kingdom of Hungary down to roughly a third of its prewar size. Millions of ethnic Hungarians were left outside the new borders, scattered across territories assigned to neighboring states. The Hungarians considered this a national humiliation and a genuine tragedy. The various non-Hungarian populations who gained their own states tended to see the same treaty as justice for communities that had long been marginalized.

  The weight of Trianon never lifted from Hungarian political life during the interwar years. Governments shifted steadily rightward. Under Regent Miklós Horthy, Hungary drew closer to Benito Mussolini's Italy and Adolf Hitler's Germany. That alignment paid an early dividend in the First Vienna Award of 1938, which returned southern Czechoslovakia to Hungary. In 1939, Hungary also recovered Subcarpathia, and then took Carpathian Ruthenia by military force.

  None of it was enough. The territory Hungarians mourned most was Transylvania, ceded to Romania by the same treaty. That loss, more than any other, kept Hungarian foreign policy aimed at eventual revision of the postwar settlement.

• 3. Romania Under Pressure

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  In late June 1940, Romania gave way to a Soviet ultimatum and surrendered Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the Hertsa region. The Romanian government chose to hand over the territory rather than fight a war it could not win. Budapest drew a very different lesson from the same event: if Romania would yield territory under Soviet pressure, it might yield Transylvania under Axis pressure as well.

  Hungary's initial demand at negotiations held at Turnu Severin, which began on the 16th of August, was for 69,000 square kilometres with a population of 3,803,000 people, almost two-thirds of whom were Romanian. Romania offered only a small sliver. Talks broke off entirely on the 24th of August.

  The Romanian Crown Council minutes from the 29th of August described what came next with striking candor: what Germany and Italy proposed was described as communications with an ultimative character. Romania accepted. The treaty was signed by Hungarian Foreign Minister István Csáky and Romanian Foreign Minister Mihail Manoilescu. Within the overnight Crown Council session, Iuliu Maniu demanded that King Carol abdicate and that the Romanian Army resist the handover. His demands were rejected as impractical.

• 4. The Award Itself

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  Ribbentrop and Ciano did not hand Hungary everything it had asked for. They trimmed the Hungarian claim from 69,000 square kilometres down to 43,492 square kilometres, with a population of 2,667,007. Northern Transylvania, including all of Maramures and part of Crisana, passed from Romania to Hungary.

  The text of the award gave Romania fifteen days to evacuate its troops from the ceded territory. All Romanian subjects living in the ceded area automatically became Hungarian nationals, though they were allowed six months to opt for Romanian nationality and an additional year to leave if they chose to do so. Those who left could take their movable property with them; Hungary was required to compensate anyone unable to liquidate immovable property before departure.

  Southern Transylvania, with 2,274,600 Romanians and 363,200 Hungarians, stayed within Romania. Germany also extracted a separate concession: the Treaty of Craiova on the 7th of September, under which Romania ceded the southern Dobruja region to Bulgaria. In exchange, Germany offered Romania a territorial guarantee, promising to defend what remained of its borders.

• 5. A Population That Did Not Move

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  Historian Keith Hitchins put the problem plainly: the award did not solve the nationality question by separating all Hungarians from all Romanians. The 1930 Romanian census counted 1,176,900 Romanians in the ceded region, or about 49 percent of the population. The 1941 Hungarian census registered 1,029,000. Between roughly 1,150,000 and 1,300,000 Romanians, depending on which figures one uses, remained north of the new border. Meanwhile, about 500,000 Hungarians continued to live in Southern Transylvania, which stayed Romanian.

  The two censuses also told different stories about the same people. In Máramaros and Szatmár Counties, dozens of settlements contained individuals who had identified as Romanian in 1930 but recorded themselves as Hungarian in 1941, even though many of them had not spoken Hungarian even in 1910. Migration contributed to the shift as well: by January 1941, roughly 100,000 Hungarian refugees had arrived in Hungary from South Transylvania. Nearly as many persons moved in the opposite direction.

  Among the Jewish population, the census gap was especially stark. The 1930 count had recorded 138,800 Jewish residents by nationality and 99,600 by Yiddish language. The 1941 Hungarian census recorded only 47,400 by nationality.

• 6. Violence and Occupation

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  Hungarian troops crossed the Trianon borders on the 5th of September 1940. Regent Horthy attended the entry. The troops reached the pre-Trianon border on the 13th of September, completing what the Hungarian government called territorial recovery.

  For the ethnic Hungarian population, the arrival was a liberation. For the Romanians living in the same territory, it was the beginning of something darker. In the village of Treznea, on the 9th of September, a detachment of Hungarian troops made a four-kilometre detour from the main Zalau-Cluj route and opened fire on local residents of all ages. Official Hungarian sources recorded 87 Romanians and 6 Jews killed, including the local Orthodox priest and a Romanian schoolteacher with his wife. Romanian sources cite as many as 263 dead. Evidence points to a local notable, Ferenc Bay, as an instigating figure: Bay had lost much of his estate to peasants in the 1920s, and the killing was concentrated among those living on his former land.

  In the village of Ip, on the 13th and the 14th of September, Lieutenant Zoltán Vasváry ordered the killing of 159 villagers. On Vasváry's orders, a pit measuring 24 metres by 4 metres was dug in the village cemetery; the dead were buried head-to-head in two rows, with no ceremony. In Nusfalau on the 8th of September, eleven ethnic Romanians were tortured and killed by a Hungarian soldier with support from some local residents.

  By 1941, Romanian authorities had documented 919 murders, 1,126 maimings, 4,126 beatings, and 15,893 arrests of Romanians by Hungarian authorities. Some 1,315 North Transylvanian Romanians were deported in late September 1940 to a labor camp at Püspökladány, a number the source notes was well above the camp's maximum capacity.

• 7. Schools, Fortifications, and Jewish Deportations

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  At the time of the award, 1,733 Romanian-language schools operated in the ceded territory. By 1941, only one remained in all of North Transylvania, in the town of Nasaud. Hungarian individuals also appear in the record: József Gáll saved several Romanians during the Treznea massacre. Sarolta Juhász of Omboztelke was killed while attempting to protect the family of a Romanian priest named Bujor.

  Romania's fortified Carol II line had been constructed in the late 1930s at King Carol II's direct order to guard the western border with Hungary. The line ran for 300 kilometres and held 320 reinforced-concrete casemates, of which 80 were built in 1938, 180 in 1939, and the rest in the first half of 1940. After the award placed the entire line within Hungarian-held territory, Romanian troops evacuated as much equipment as they could, though underground telephone cables could not be recovered. The Hungarians salvaged the metal and then demolished the casemates to prevent future use.

  For the Jewish population of North Transylvania, exclusion from the census was a warning of what was coming. Excluding the Szekely area, 127,377 Jews were deported for extermination purposes, overwhelmingly to Auschwitz. Of those, 19,764 returned. 107,613 did not.

• 8. Nullification and Aftermath

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  On the 23rd of August 1944, King Michael's Coup switched Romania from the Axis to the Allied side. Within weeks, on the 12th of September 1944, the Armistice Agreement with Romania voided the Second Vienna Award. Article 19 declared that the Allied Governments regarded the Vienna decision as null and agreed that Transylvania, or the greater part of it, should return to Romania.

  The Romanian Army then fought against Nazi Germany in Romania itself, then through German-occupied Hungary and Slovakia, participating in the Budapest Offensive, the Siege of Budapest, the Bratislava-Brno Offensive, and the Prague Offensive. After the Battle of Carei on the 25th of October 1944, all of Northern Transylvania came under Romanian and Soviet control. The Soviet Union held administrative authority over the region until the 9th of March 1945, when it passed back to Romania.

  The 1947 Paris Peace Treaties settled the question formally, confirming the original Trianon borders between Romania and Hungary. Twenty-seven years after Trianon had carved the map, the same lines were redrawn. Germany's territorial guarantee, offered in exchange for Romania's concessions, had proved more durable than the award itself: in November 1940, when Vyacheslav Molotov asked Hitler to endorse a Soviet annexation of South Bukovina, Hitler refused, a refusal that the Wiesel Commission's Final Report credited with saving the rest of Bukovina from being absorbed permanently into the Soviet Union.