Vienna Awards

The Vienna Awards are two arbitral awards by which arbiters of Germany and Italy sought to enforce peacefully the claims of Hungary on territory it had lost in 1920 when it signed the Treaty of Trianon. The First Vienna Award occurred in 1938 and the Second in 1940.

The awards sanctioned Hungary's annexation of territories in present-day Slovakia, Ukraine and Romania which Hungary had sought to regain in the period between the two World Wars.

They are also known by various such names as the Vienna Arbitration Awards, Vienna Arbitral Awards, Viennese Arbitrals, Viennese Arbitrages, which are all variation of the same and express no different value judgement on its content. There is, however, also the substantially different name Vienna Diktats expressing the point of view of the countries which stood to lose territory as a result.

The awards were overturned following the defeat of Germany in 1945, and Hungary lost again the territory it had gained.

First Vienna Award

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

Second Vienna Award

By this award, Germany and Italy compelled Romania to cede half of Transylvania (an area henceforth known as Northern Transylvania) to Hungary on 30 August 1940. This decision was taken not so much to do justice as to win Hungary for German war aims.Fact|date=February 2007 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.

In addition to the Second Vienna Award, on 7 September 1940 the Cadrilater or "Quadrilateral" (southern Dobrudja) was returned by Romania to Bulgaria under the Treaty of Craiova. It had been been part of Romania since 1913, after Bulgaria's defeat in the Second Balkan War.