Katana VentraIP

Second Vienna Award

The Second Vienna Award, also known as the Vienna Diktat,[1] 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 Romania to Hungary.[2]

Context

Territorial dispute over Transylvania between Hungary and Romania, spread of Axis influence during World War II

30 August 1940

Belvedere Palace, Vienna, Germany

The . On 9 September, in the village of Treznea (Hungarian: Ördögkút), some Hungarian troops made a 4 km detour from the Zalău–Cluj route of the Hungarian Army and started firing at will on locals of all ages, killed many of them and partially destroyed the Orthodox church. The official Hungarian sources then recorded that 87 Romanians and 6 Jews were killed, including the local Orthodox priest and the Romanian local teacher with his wife, but some Romanian sources give as many as 263 locals who were killed. Some Hungarian historians claim that the killings came in retaliation after the Hungarian troops were fired upon by inhabitants after they had allegedly incited by the local Romanian Orthodox priest, but the claims are not supported by the accounts of several witnesses. The motivation of the 4 km detour of the Hungarian troops from the rest of the Hungarian Army is still a point of contention, but most evidence points towards the local noble Ferenc Bay, who had lost a large part of his estates to peasants in the 1920s, as most of the violence was directed towards the peasants living on his former estate.

Treznea massacre

The . In similar circumstances, 159 local villagers were killed on 13 and 14 September 1940 by Hungarian troops in the village of Ip (Hungarian: Szilágyipp). The commander of the Hungarian troops who perpetrated the massacre of civilians was Lieutenant Zoltán Vasváry. On September 14, on the order of Vasvári, a pit 24 m by 4 m wide was dug in the village cemetery; the corpses of those killed in the massacre were buried head-to-head in two rows, with no religious ceremony.[10]

Ip massacre

The occurred in the village of Nușfalău (Hungarian: Szilágynagyfalu) on 8 September 1940, when a Hungarian soldier with the support of some natives tortured and killed eleven ethnic Romanians (two women and nine men) from a nearby village who were passing through the area.

Nușfalău massacre

The historian Keith Hitchins summarised the situation created by the award in his book "Rumania: 1866-1947 (Oxford History of Modern Europe), Oxford University Press, 1994":


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 Hungarian Army committed massacres against the Romanian population, including the following:


The exact number of casualties is disputed among some historians, but the existence of such events cannot be disputed.


The retreat of the Romanian Army was also not free from incidents, which were mostly damaging infrastructure and destroying public documents.

First Vienna Award

Carpatho-Ukraine

Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

Árpád E. Varga. Erdély magyar népessége 1870-1995 között. Magyar Kisebbség 3–4, 1998, pp. 331–407.

Bodea, Gheorghe I.; Suciu, Vasile T.; Pușcaș, Ilie I. (1988). Administrația militară horthystă în nord-vestul României. Cluj-Napoca: . OCLC 1036519807.

Editura Dacia

Bucur, Maria (April 1, 2002). . Rethinking History. 6 (1): 35–55. doi:10.1080/13642520110112100. S2CID 143005164.

"Treznea: Trauma, nationalism and the memory of World War II in Romania"

(2000). Romania in the Second World War (1939–1945). East European Monographs. Boulder, CO; New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 9780880334433. OCLC 1170535723.

Giurescu, Dinu C.

Țurlea, Petre (1996). Ip și Trăznea: Atrocități maghiare și acțiune diplomatică (in Romanian). București: Editura Enciclopedică.  9789734501816. OCLC 243869011.

ISBN

Alessandro Vagnini. German-Italian Commissions in Transylvania 1940-1943. A crucial key Study for Italian Diplomacy, Studia Universitatis Petru Maior, Historia Volume 9, 2009, pp. 165–187.

(1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4516-4259-9. OCLC 22888118.

Shirer, William

Nolan, Cathal J. (2010). The Concise Encyclopedia of World War II [2 volumes]. Santa Barbara, CA: . ISBN 978-0-313-33050-6. OCLC 1037383584.

Greenwood Press

Text of the Second Vienna Award

Essays on Transylvania's Demographic History Archived 2017-06-09 at the Wayback Machine. (Mainly in Hungarian, but also in English and Romanian.)

Árpád E. Varga

(in Russian) (an article on the Allies and the question of Transylvania)

Проблема Tрансильвании в отношениях СССР с союзниками по антигитлеровской коалиции (июнь 1941 г. — май 1945 г.)