page_title: Second Vienna Award
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Second Vienna Award / Background
caption_attribution_description: Vienna Diktat - Northern Transylvania (yellow) given to Hungary
context_page_description: The Second Vienna Award, also known as the Vienna Diktat, 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.
context_section_description: 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 claimed that the new state borders did not follow the real ethnic boundaries. The new nation-state of Hungary was about a third the size of prewar Hungary, and millions of ethnic Magyars 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 as well. The various non-Magyar populations of the old kingdom generally saw the treaty as justice for the historically-marginalized nationalities, but 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. Moreover, 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 alliance with Nazi Germany 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 that the Hungarians resented the most was that of Transylvania, which had been ceded to Romania.
  At the end of 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 Hertza region. Though the territorial loss was dreadful from its perspective, the Romanian government preferred it to a military conflict, which it knew it could not win, with the USSR. However, the Hungarian government interpreted the fact that Romania permanently gave up some areas as an admission that it was no longer insisting on keeping its national territory intact 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 that 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 neighbor. On 7 September, under the Treaty of Craiova, the "Cadrilater" (southern Dobruja) was ceded by Romania to Bulgaria.
caption: Romania in 1940, with Northern Transylvania highlighted in yellow
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