Vienna Awards

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Hungary before and after the Vienna Awards

Vienna Awards or Vienna Arbitration Awards or Vienna Arbitral Awards or Vienna Diktats or Viennese Arbitrals are various names for two arbitral awards (1938 and 1940) by which arbiters of National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy sought to enforce peacefully the territorial claims of Revisionist Hungary, ruled by Regent Admiral Miklós Horthy. The awards sanctioned Hungary's annexation of territories in present-day Slovakia, Ukraine and Romania which Hungary had lost by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon at the end of World War I, and which Hungary had always sought to regain.

First Vienna Award

By this award, on November 2, 1938, Germany and Italy compelled Czechoslovakia to give/return southern Slovakia and southern Subcarpathia (now in Ukraine) to Hungary.

Romania, with Northern Transylvania highlighted in yellow.

Second Vienna Award

By this award, on August 30, 1940, Germany and Italy compelled Romania to give/return half of Transylvania (an area henceforth known as "North Transylvania") to Hungary. This decision was taken not so much to do justice, as to win Hungary for German war aims. In reversing a major element of the Treaty of Trianon, it, like Trianon, granted a multiethnic area to another country, caused massive migration of populations from both sides, and sundered old socioeconomic units.

Besides the Second Vienna Award as such, on September 7, under the Treaty of Craiova, the Cadrilater or "Quadrilateral" (southern Dobrudja) was returned by Romania to Bulgaria. This territory had been part of Bulgaria from 1878 to 1913, at which time it had become part of Romania after Bulgaria's defeat in the Second Balkan War.

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