Hungary occupies Carpatho-Ukraine

On 15 March 1939, as German troops were entering Prague, the diet of Carpatho-Ukraine met for the first and last time in Khust, a small town on the Tisza. The deputies voted for the independence of Carpatho-Ukraine (PL), adopted a constitution and elected as president the Greek Catholic priest Avgustyn Voloshyn. No one recognised the new state. That same day the troops of the Kingdom of Hungary, which had crossed the border near Mukachevo the day before, launched a general offensive. Within three days they had crushed the poorly armed Carpathian Sich and reached the crest of the Carpathians. Hungary regained a land it had lost after the First World War, and Poland gained a common border with Hungary for the first time since the Partitions.

Ruthenia below the Carpathians

For centuries the mountainous land on the southern slopes of the Eastern Carpathians had belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary. It was inhabited mainly by Rusyns, alongside Hungarians, numerous Jews, Romanians and Germans. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary the local national councils declared for union with Czechoslovakia, and the Treaty of Saint-Germain and the Treaty of Trianon confirmed that Subcarpathian Ruthenia, as it was called in Prague, would become the easternmost part of the new state. Prague promised it broad autonomy and its own diet, but for twenty years failed to keep that promise. The region was the poorest part of the republic, governed by officials sent from the Czech lands, and the locals argued over whether they were Rusyns, Ukrainians or Russians. Part of the elite preferred a return to Hungary, part thought of union with Ukraine, and the Communists won as much as a quarter of the vote in elections.

For Miklós Horthy’s Hungary, Ruthenia was one of the lands taken away at Trianon that it had been claiming since 1920. For Poland it was a problem of a different kind. The government in Warsaw feared that an autonomous, Ukrainian-minded land below the Carpathians would become a “Ukrainian Piedmont”, a magnet for the several million Ukrainians of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, and that the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists would build a base there with German help. From the autumn of 1938 the Foreign Minister, Józef Beck, therefore supported the annexation of the whole of Ruthenia by Hungary. A common Polish–Hungarian border was, in his design, to strengthen a bloc of states between Germany and the USSR and to deny Adolf Hitler the opportunity to exploit the Ukrainian question.

From autonomy to the Vienna Award

After the Munich Agreement a weakened Czechoslovakia could no longer refuse. On 11 October 1938 the first autonomous government of Ruthenia was formed, with Andriy Brodiy (PL) as prime minister. When it emerged that Brodiy was pressing for a plebiscite that might hand the region to Hungary, the authorities arrested him, and on 26 October Voloshyn, the leader of the Ukrainian orientation, became prime minister. On 2 November 1938 the First Vienna Award, announced by Joachim von Ribbentrop and Galeazzo Ciano, gave Hungary a strip of southern Slovakia and Ruthenia. The region lost its two largest towns, Uzhhorod and Mukachevo, and almost all of its fertile lowland. Voloshyn’s government moved to Khust. This was not enough for Budapest, which wanted the whole of Ruthenia, but Hitler, displeased by the rapprochement between Hungary and Poland, would not allow it. A Hungarian plan for an armed occupation of the region, set for 20 November, was called off under pressure from Berlin and Rome.

Poland and Hungary then tried to settle the matter another way. From 22 October to the end of November Polish intelligence ran Operation Łom (PL) (“Crowbar”) in Ruthenia: sabotage groups, made up mainly of volunteers who had earlier been active in Zaolzie, blew up bridges, cut telephone lines and attacked Czechoslovak gendarmerie posts. In the south Hungarian irregulars of the Rongyos Gárda did much the same. The operation was meant to show the world that the region was not viable on its own, but it was badly prepared, cost the saboteurs casualties and failed to achieve its political aim.

In response, on 9 November 1938 the government in Khust set up the National Defence Organisation “Carpathian Sich”. It was formally commanded by a local activist, Dmytro Klympush (PL), but the real role in it was played by members of the OUN, many of them newcomers from Polish Galicia, among them the future UPA commander Roman Shukhevych. The Sich numbered between two and several thousand men, but was poorly armed. On 22 November the parliament in Prague passed a constitutional law on the autonomy of Subcarpathian Ruthenia, and on 30 December Voloshyn’s government began using the name Carpatho-Ukraine. Over the winter it ruled in an authoritarian manner: the parties were dissolved and replaced by the Ukrainian National Union, which in the elections to the diet on 12 February 1939, with a single list, won more than 92 per cent of the vote. Voloshyn was counting on Germany. He signed economic agreements with it, a German consulate was opened in Khust, and there was speculation in Europe that Hitler would make Ruthenia the nucleus of a “Greater Ukraine” directed against Poland and the USSR.

Tension was also growing between Khust and Prague. In January 1939 President Emil Hácha appointed the Czech general Lev Prchala as Minister of the Interior of Carpatho-Ukraine, which Voloshyn refused to accept. There were clashes on the Hungarian border, and on 6 January 1939 Czechoslovak units fought Hungarian border guards and police for several hours at Mukachevo.

Hitler’s consent

At the beginning of March 1939 Hitler decided to complete the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. The hopes of the Ukrainian nationalists proved illusory: for Berlin, Ruthenia was merely a bargaining chip that could be handed to Hungary in return for its loyalty. As early as January Budapest had given the Germans to understand that if the Reich took the Czech lands and Slovakia declared independence, the Hungarian army would march into Ruthenia even without Berlin’s consent. On 24 February Hungary joined the Anti-Comintern Pact. On 11 March the German minister in Budapest set out the conditions on which the Reich would agree to the occupation of the region: Hungary was to respect German economic interests and the rights of the local Germans, and not to persecute members of Voloshyn’s government. On 13 March Hitler gave Hungary a free hand. In a letter that day Horthy assured him that he would never forget this proof of friendship.

Events unfolded within a few dozen hours. On the night of 13–14 March there was fighting in Khust between Sich men and the Czechoslovak army, which on Prchala’s orders was trying to disarm the Sich. The number of dead is disputed: Czech sources speak of around forty killed on the Ukrainian side, Ukrainian sources of more than a hundred. On the morning of 14 March Hungarian border guards from Mukachevo attacked Czechoslovak positions near Pidhoriany, and the government in Budapest demanded that Prague withdraw its army from Ruthenia. That same day the diet in Bratislava proclaimed Slovak independence, and on the night of 14–15 March in Berlin Hácha placed Bohemia and Moravia under the “protection” of the Reich. On the evening of 14 March Voloshyn proclaimed the independence of Carpatho-Ukraine over the radio and asked Hitler by telegram to take it under German protection. The reply from Berlin was: do not resist the Hungarians.

Three days of fighting

On the morning of 15 March, as Germany was occupying Bohemia and Moravia, the diet in Khust confirmed independence, adopted a constitution with a blue-and-yellow flag and Ukrainian as the state language, and elected Voloshyn president, with Julian Revay (PL) as prime minister. A Hungarian envoy demanded that they lay down their arms. Voloshyn refused, and mobilisation was declared. Hungary, governed since February by Prime Minister Pál Teleki, sent into action units hastily assembled by General Ferenc Szombathelyi, commander of VIII Corps in Košice: infantry, cavalry, bicycle and motorised battalions, border guards, artillery, two armoured trains and a squadron of Fiat CR.32 fighters. They were accompanied by irregular Rongyos Gárda units. The Chief of the General Staff had asked for a week to prepare and was given less than a day.

The Hungarians attacked in three directions: from Mukachevo up the Latorica valley towards Svaliava, from Uzhhorod towards Perechyn and the Uzhok Pass, and from the south, from around Sevlush (today Vynohradiv), towards Khust. The Czechoslovak units, several thousand strong, resisted for the first twenty-four hours and halted the advance on Svaliava at Chynadiyovo. But the news from Prague of Hácha’s capitulation robbed the fighting of its purpose. General Prchala ordered a retreat into Romania and Slovakia. According to the Military History Institute in Prague, some forty Czechoslovak soldiers were killed in those days.

The Sich remained in the field, reinforced by volunteers, often untrained – secondary-school pupils and seminarians. At Horonda one of its companies (sotnias) held the road to Svaliava for more than ten hours. The biggest battle was fought on 15 and 16 March at Krasne Pole, a plain between Sevlush and Khust. According to Hungarian documents some 230 Sich men were killed there, and the Hungarian side also suffered considerable losses. On the morning of 16 March the government of Carpatho-Ukraine left Khust and made its way via Tiachiv to Romania. A few hours later the Hungarians took the town. That same day the government in Budapest announced the annexation of the region to Hungary.

On 16 and 17 March Hungarian units reached the Verecke Pass and the Uzhok Pass, and Yasinia and Rakhiv. On the crest of the Carpathians Hungarian soldiers met Polish ones, and both sides celebrated the occasion ceremonially. On 18 March the Hungarian staff declared the operation complete. Isolated groups of Sich men fought on in the mountains for several more weeks – according to some sources until the end of April or even May. The Hungarians reported 72 killed and 163 wounded, although later research points to higher losses. Ukrainian casualties cannot be established precisely. Historians give figures ranging from several hundred killed in action to several thousand victims, including those killed after the fighting. The higher figures, drawn from Ukrainian accounts, are not confirmed by documents.

Executions and purges

The fighting was accompanied by atrocities. Hungarian units and local militias shot captured Sich men and, according to Czech historians, also finished off wounded Czechoslovak soldiers. Mykhailo Kolodzinsky, the Sich chief of staff, and his adjutant Zenon Kossak were captured and killed on 19 March. In Khust, according to Czech and Ukrainian researchers, many detainees were shot on the night of 16–17 March. Sich men from Galicia – Polish citizens – were taken by the Hungarians to the Polish border and handed over to the Polish Border Guard.

This matter is one of the most disputed episodes in Polish–Ukrainian history. Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły ordered units of the Border Protection Corps (KOP) not to let armed Sich men into Poland. Ukrainian historiography has an established account of the shooting of several hundred prisoners on 18 March near the Verecke Pass, on the Transcarpathian side. Archival research confirms at least several dozen victims, and exhumations in 2008–2011 found the remains of a dozen or more people. The figure of 500–600 killed rests on eyewitness accounts and has not been proven. That prisoners were killed in the vicinity of the pass, however, is not in doubt among the researchers who have studied the matter.

Voloshyn travelled from Romania via Yugoslavia to Prague, where he lectured at the Ukrainian Free University throughout the war. In 1945 he was arrested by SMERSH. He died in a Moscow prison.

Poland celebrates

Poland greeted the events with enthusiasm, as if they were a Polish conquest. There was talk of the restoration of the old, centuries-long border with the brotherly Hungarians. The common border was indeed a success for Beck, but it came in the very days when Germany was occupying the Czech lands and Slovakia was becoming a state dependent on the Reich. Poland found itself in German pincers from the west, the north and now also the south. The border with Hungary did not change this balance of power. Hungary, though friendly, was tying itself ever more closely to Hitler, to whom it owed its gains of 1938–1939.

In the region occupied by Hungary military rule was imposed, followed from the summer of 1939 by the administration of a Regent’s commissioner. Ukrainian organisations and the Ukrainian press were suppressed. In the following years thousands of young people fled across the mountains to the USSR, where many of them ended up in the Gulag. Hungary’s anti-Jewish laws were extended to Ruthenia’s roughly one hundred thousand Jews, and in May 1939 came the second, even harsher one.

The consequences

The occupation of Carpatho-Ukraine was part of the March dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and had a sequel from the start. The Hungarian troops did not stop at Ruthenia’s former administrative border. Within a few days Budapest decided that the border with Slovakia ran too close to Uzhhorod and the railway to Poland, which led to a new conflict, this time with the Slovak State.

The common Polish–Hungarian border lasted only six months, but it played an important role. In September 1939 Teleki’s government refused to let German troops pass through Ruthenia to attack Poland, and tens of thousands of Polish soldiers and refugees crossed the Carpathian passes into Hungary. Many of them later made their way to France and to the Polish army being formed there. Ruthenia remained part of Hungary until the autumn of 1944. In August 1941 the Hungarian authorities expelled thousands of Jews, many of them from Ruthenia, to German-occupied Ukraine, where they were murdered in the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre. In the spring of 1944, after Germany occupied Hungary, the Jews of Ruthenia were deported to Auschwitz in the first transports.

In the autumn of 1944 the Red Army occupied the region. Formally it was to return to Czechoslovakia, but under Soviet supervision a “congress” was organised that demanded union with the Ukrainian SSR, and on 29 June 1945 Prague signed an agreement ceding Ruthenia to the Soviet Union. Today it is Ukraine’s Zakarpattia Oblast, and the one-day Carpatho-Ukraine and the Battle of Krasne Pole are important places of Ukrainian national memory. In 2002 Voloshyn was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine.