The First Vienna Award was the result of the First Vienna Arbitration, which took place at Vienna's Belvedere Palace on November 2, 1938. The Arbitration and Award were direct consequences of the Munich Agreement (September 30, 1938). It entailed the partitioning of Czechoslovakia.
By the First Vienna Award, arbiters from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sought a non-violent way to enforce the territorial claims of Hungary, in revision of the Treaty of Trianon of 1920. Nazi Germany was by then well into her own revision of the Versailles Treaty, with her remilitarization of the Rhineland (7 March 1936) and Anschluss of Austria (12 March 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 that she had lost by the Treaty of Trianon in the post-World War I dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In mid-March 1939, Adolf Hitler gave Hungary permission to occupy the rest of Carpathian Rus, 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 since the 18th-century Partitions of Poland had been part of Cisleithania, the Imperial-Austrian- or Hapsburg-controlled part of the Dual Monarchy.
Six months after Hungary had occupied the rest of Carpathian Rus, north up to the Polish border, in September 1939, the Polish government and part of its military would escape to Hungary and Romania, and from there to France and French-mandated Syria to carry on the war against Hitler's Germany.
After World War II, the 1947 Treaty of Paris declared the Vienna Award null and void.
Read more about First Vienna Award: Consequences, Nullification
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