First Vienna Arbitration

First Vienna Award

The partition of Czechoslovakia. First Vienna Award in red
Signed	November 2, 1938
Location	Belvedere Palace, Vienna
Signatories	Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Italy
Parties	Hungary and Czechoslovakia

The First Vienna Award was a treaty signed on November 2, 1938, as a result of the First Vienna Arbitration. The Arbitration took place at Vienna's Belvedere Palace. The Arbitration and Award were direct consequences of the Munich Agreement the previous month and decided the partitioning of Czechoslovakia.

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sought a non-violent way to enforce the territorial claims of the Kingdom of Hungary and to revise the Treaty of Trianon of 1920. Nazi Germany was by this point well into its own revision of the Versailles Treaty, with the remilitarization of the Rhineland (7 March 1936) and the Anschluss of Austria (March 12, 1938).

The First Vienna Award separated largely Magyar-populated territories in southern Slovakia and southern Carpathian Rus from Czechoslovakia and awarded them to Hungary. Hungary thus regained some of the territories in present-day Slovakia and Ukraine lost in the Treaty of Trianon in the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I.

In mid-March 1939, Adolf Hitler gave Hungary permission to occupy the rest of Carpatho-Ukraine, taking territory further north up to the Polish border, thus creating a common Hungarian-Polish border, as had existed prior to the 18th-century Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Before the end of the First World War and the Treaties of Trianon and Saint Germain, the Carpathian region of the former Kingdom of Hungary (Transleithania) in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had bordered to the north on the province of Galicia, which had been part of the Cisleithanian part of the Dual Monarchy.