The Hungarian–Slovak border agreement

On 4 April 1939 Hungarian and Slovak delegations in Budapest signed a protocol on a new border line in eastern Slovakia. In it Slovakia recognised what Hungary had taken by force two weeks earlier, in the “Little War”: a narrow but long strip of land between the former border of Subcarpathian Ruthenia and the area around Sobrance, Stakčín and Ulič. It received nothing in return. The agreement formally closed the first armed conflict in Europe after the break-up of Czechoslovakia and marked a further stage in Hungary’s revision of the Treaty of Trianon. For the Slovaks it became lasting proof that the guarantees the Reich had given them a few days earlier were not worth the paper they were written on.

From war to negotiations

In March 1939 the map of Central Europe changed from one day to the next. On 14 March Slovakia’s independence was proclaimed; on 15 March the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia; and within a few days Hungary had overrun Carpatho-Ukraine and reached the border with Poland. Budapest, however, wanted more. The boundary between Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia – merely an administrative line within Czechoslovakia – ran a few kilometres from Uzhhorod and from the railway that followed the valley of the Uzh through the Uzhok Pass into Poland. The Hungarians persuaded Berlin that it needed to be “corrected”, and on 23 March, without a declaration of war, they marched into eastern Slovakia. The Slovak army, which was only just being formed, counter-attacked on 24 March but failed to recover the lost ground. Under German pressure the fighting was halted that same evening, and by 31 March the last skirmishes had died down too.

Talks began in Budapest on 27 March. The Hungarian Foreign Minister was István Csáky, and since February the government had been headed by Count Pál Teleki, a geographer who had personally worked on the ethnic maps of historical Hungary. Budapest presented the matter as a local dispute over the course of a border that no international document defined – not even the First Vienna Award of November 1938. The Hungarian delegation treated the line reached by the army as a minimum and refused to discuss it. The government of Jozef Tiso, whose foreign affairs were run by Ferdinand Ďurčanský, was prepared to accept the loss if it received compensation elsewhere, for example in the south, but the Hungarians rejected the idea of an exchange as well. The negotiations broke down.

Germany washes its hands

Bratislava then turned to Berlin. It had grounds for doing so: in the Treaty of Protection, finally signed on 23 March, the Reich had taken Slovakia under its protection and undertaken to defend its independence and territorial integrity. In return Slovakia had handed Germany control of its foreign and military policy and agreed to a German protection zone in the west of the country. Now it turned out that the obligation worked only one way. Hitler had no intention of spoiling relations with Hungary – which had joined the Anti-Comintern Pact in February and which he needed for the coming showdown with Poland and Romania – for the sake of a piece of the Slovak borderland. It was Berlin that had given Budapest its consent to the “correction”, and on 31 March it advised the Slovaks not to insist on the inviolability of the border. Germany gave Slovakia neither military help during the fighting nor diplomatic support at the negotiating table.

The Slovak government, unwilling to drag a barely formed state into a longer war without allies, gave way. On 4 April the two sides signed the protocol on the new border line in Budapest. Hungary kept the whole of the occupied area.

What Slovakia lost

The new border moved a dozen or more kilometres westward along the whole stretch from the area of Stakčín in the north, near the Polish border, to Sobrance in the south, where it met the line drawn in Vienna in 1938. Among the places that passed to Hungary were Sobrance, Ulič and the area around Stakčín. The exact figures vary considerably from source to source. According to the most frequently repeated numbers, which come from Hungarian tallies, Slovakia lost 1,697 square kilometres, 78 localities and 69,930 inhabitants. Slovak historians usually give lower figures: 74 municipalities and just over 40,000 people, with estimates of the area ranging from about 1,050 to about 1,700 square kilometres; the Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute (ÚPN) speaks of 1,168 square kilometres. Whatever the count, all agree on the make-up of the population: almost exclusively Slovaks and Rusyns, with fewer than four thousand Hungarians according to Czech estimates. The ethnic argument on which Hungary had based its claims to southern Slovakia in 1938 did not apply here; what counted were strategic considerations – cover for Uzhhorod and for the railway to Poland.

Hungarian propaganda presented the seizure of the strip as the “liberation” of the Rusyns, whom Budapest wished to regard as a people historically bound to Hungary. The Slovaks saw the agreement as a dictate. Relations between the two states, although formally both allies of Germany, remained hostile until the end of the war, and for years afterwards Bratislava pressed Berlin, without success, for a revision of the borders of 1938 and 1939.

Poland and the new border

For Poland the outcome of the spring changes looked favourable at first sight. Since the autumn of 1938 the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, had sought a common Polish–Hungarian border, which was to bar Germany’s way east through Subcarpathian Ruthenia and become part of a bloc of states between Germany and the Soviet Union. In March 1939 Hungary reached the crest of the Carpathians, and the agreement of 4 April secured the railway in the Uzh valley leading to the Uzhok Pass. Warsaw sided with Budapest in the dispute, something Bratislava remembered alongside Poland’s efforts to obtain fragments of Spiš and Orava in November 1938.

Yet the same month showed how fragile Poland’s position was. Slovakia, with a German protection zone and an army under German supervision, became the Reich’s forward area on Poland’s southern border, and the Wehrmacht could now outflank Poland all the way from Silesia to the Bieszczady Mountains. On the very day the agreement was signed in Budapest, Beck was in London discussing the conversion of the British guarantee announced on 31 March into a mutual commitment, and the day before, in Berlin, the first directives for the plan to attack Poland had been issued.

What followed

In September 1939 Slovak divisions advanced alongside the Wehrmacht into Podhale and the Beskids, and as a reward Slovakia recovered the lands that had been joined to Poland in 1920, 1924 and 1938. Teleki’s Hungary, by contrast, refused to allow German troops to pass through its territory, and the Polish–Hungarian border – the very one Beck had striven for – became an escape route for tens of thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians. In August 1940 the Second Vienna Award gave Hungary northern Transylvania; in November 1940 Hungary and Slovakia joined the Tripartite Pact; and in 1941 both sent troops against the Soviet Union. The strip of land ceded on 4 April 1939 was taken by the Red Army in the autumn of 1944. The 1947 peace treaty with Hungary restored the borders of 1 January 1938, annulling both the Vienna Award and the Budapest protocol, and Sobrance and Stakčín returned to Czechoslovakia.