 Territorial expansion of Hungary 1938–1941. First Vienna Award highlighted in violet. | |
| Signed | 2 November 1938 |
|---|---|
| Location | Belvedere Palace, Vienna |
| Signatories | Non-signatories involved: |
| Parties | |
The First Vienna Award was a treaty signed on 2 November 1938 pursuant to the Vienna Arbitration, which took place at Vienna's Belvedere Palace. The arbitration and award were direct consequences of the previous month's Munich Agreement, which resulted in the partitioning of Czechoslovakia.
Though some from the government called for military action, Hungarian revisionism primarily aimed to restore the historical boundaries peacefully.[1][2][3][4] In the interwar period, Hungary was weaker economically and militarily than the neighbours against which it had territorial claims.[1] Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had supported the territorial claims of the Kingdom of Hungary, and revision of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. Nazi Germany had already violated the Versailles Treaty by the remilitarization of the Rhineland (7 March 1936) and the Anschluss of Austria (12 March 1938).
The First Vienna Award separated, from Czechoslovakia, territories in southern Slovakia and southern Carpathian Rus' which were mostly Hungarian-populated and returned them to Hungary. Hungary thus regained some of the territories (now parts of Slovakia and Ukraine) which Hungary had lost after World War I under the Treaty of Trianon. Czechoslovakia also ceded to Poland small patches of land in Spiš and Orava regions.
In mid-March 1939 Adolf Hitler gave Hungary permission to occupy the remainder of Carpathian Rus' (officially known as Carpatho-Ukraine since December 1938). This advanced Hungary's territory northward, up to the Polish border, thereby restoring a common Hungarian–Polish border, which had existed before the 1772 First Partition of Poland-Lithuania. Before the end of World War I and the Treaties of Trianon and Saint Germain, the Carpathian region of the former Kingdom of Hungary (Transleithania) in Austria-Hungary had, to the north, bordered the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a constituent part of Austria's Cisleithania.
Six months after Hungary occupied the remainder of Carpathian Rus', in September 1939, after the German invasion of Poland, the Polish government and tens of thousands of Polish soldiers (including airmen and ground crews) including Stanisław Maczek's 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade as well as volunteers (collectively known as "Sikorski's tourists" by reference to an official statement by Joseph Goebbels) evacuated to internment Hungary and Romania, from where (thanks partly to the tacit acceptance local governments) were able to go on to on to France and to French-mandated Syria to fight in the Polish Armed Forces in the West.
After World War II, the 1947 Treaty of Paris declared the Vienna Award null and void.
- ^ a b Sadecki, Andrzej (2020). The Long Shadow of the Treaty of Trianon – Hungary's Struggles With the Past (PDF). Warsaw: Centre for Eastern Studies. ISBN 978-83-65827-53-1.
- ^ Szarka, László; Sallai, Gergely; Fedinec, Csilla (2017). Az első bécsi döntés okmánytára – Diplomáciai iratok: 1938. augusztus – 1939. június [Archive of the First Vienna Decision – Diplomatic documents: August 1938 – June 1939] (PDF) (in Hungarian). Budapest: MTA Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont – Történettudományi Intézet (The Hungarian Academy of Sciences – Research Centre of the Humanities – Institute of History). p. 17.
- ^ Szepesi, Gábor; Danyi, Gábor; Lo Bello, Maya J. (2016). Hungary's territory is revised after the First Vienna Award (November 2, 1938) (PDF). Warsaw: Institute of European Network Remembrance and Solidarity.
- ^ "ITALY SUPPORTS HUNGARY Urges Peaceful Revision but Laval Reiterates Borders Must Stand". The New York Times. December 9, 1934.