14: Downfall and Punishment
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When in July 1914 the Monarchy mobilized, hundreds of thousands of men
of military age were called up, regardless of their ethnic origin. The
bellicose enthusiasm of the Hungarians was without parallel in the Empire. The
best informed person, István Tisza, was well aware of their military
unpreparedness and soberly assessing the strength of the enemy opposed the war
-- needles to say, unsuccessfully. He was also concerned about Transylvania,
fearing a Romanian invasion. There was no one who could foresee or sense that
the war, about to begin, would bring nothing but disaster, quite independently
of Transylvania, to the principal ethnic group in the Carpathian Basin, the
Hungarians. Should the war be victorious, the only beneficiaries would be
Austria and Germany. If it's lost? Nobody was prepared to assume Hungary's
burden.
Transylvania was once again the apple of Eris. The Romanian Kingdom was
technically in a triple alliance with Austria and Germany, but Russia had
promised it Transylvania—it did not belong to Russia—and even a part of
Bukovina, if Romania were to form an alliance with Russia or even if it only
were to remain neutral. This was one of the reasons why István Tisza was
so reluctant to enter the war. He saw this ploy very clearly, even though
public opinion did not. It was this fact—and also some rather crude pressure
from Germany—that forced him to make some concessions to Romania. These were
insufficient, however, to satisfy the Transylvanian Romanians or Bucharest.
What it did accomplish was to enrage the Hungarian fundamentalists.
As long as the war appeared to go well for the German and Austro-Hungarian
forces, the king of Romania held back and carefully preserved his armed forces
so much desired by both sides. When the fortunes of war began to turn, he made
a secret pact with the Entente Powers, according to which the West recognized
his right to Transylvania.
The previous paragraph was written intentionally with complete objectivity.
Whoever believes to detect any irony in it, is mistaken. The young Romanian
state, which carried no responsibility for the outbreak of World War I, decided
and acted in the most rational fashion and in the best interest of the Romanian
national and ethnic goals. It accepted and even actively sought whatever was
most advantageous for it. What nation or country would do otherwise?
In keeping with the above, Romania declared war on the Monarchy, and on August
27, 1916 attacked Transylvania with an army of almost 500,000 men. Since it was
opposed only by a few border guard gendarmes—where was the Monarchy's
information service?—considerable territorial gains were made by the
Romanians within a few weeks. It is noteworthy that the Romanian population of
the occupied parts of Transylvania was quite reserved. This came as a surprise
to both Bucharest and Vienna-Budapest. Yet this was hardly a sign of their
attachment to the Habsburg Empire or to the Hungarians, nor was it a lack of
national feeling. It was due more to the fact that they doubted the success of
the campaign. Behold! The rapidly transferred Austro-Hungarian and German
troops counter-attacked and by early fall pushed the attackers back beyond the
Carpathians. It was the result of this victory—Pyrrhic though it may have
proved in the future—that Turkey and Bulgaria joined the Vienna-Berlin axis.
This prevented any renewal of Romanian attacks against Transylvania for the
time being. "After the expulsion of the enemy, spectacular gestures were made
to please and calm the Hungarian and Saxon populations. At the beginning of
November 1916, the Crown Prince and the King of Bavaria visited the area and
during the following fall the Emperor of Germany paid a ceremonial visit to
Transylvania. Official and social assistance programs were initiated. At the
same time the civil, but particularly the military authorities, initiated
inhuman punitive measures against the Romanians—presumably to cover up their
guilt feelings for having left Transylvania defenseless. Internments, arrests
and indictments followed in rapid succession, even though several hundred
thousand Romanians were still fighting bravely under the flags of the Monarchy.
During the fall of 1917, the Minister of the Interior admitted to 825
internments, while the Romanians knew of more than one thousand. When the Tisza
government was dismissed in the middle of 1917, the new Minister of Religion
and Education, Count Albert Apponyi, began to establish a so-called cultural
zone along the borders facing Romania, where public schools were to replace all
the religious schools and only the 15-18 most famous educational institutions
would remain in the hands of the Romanian Orthodox Church. According to his
plans, 1,600 new state schools and kindergartens would be established within
4-5 years. A permanent government inspector-supervisor was appointed for each
of the Romanian teacher colleges. In June 1918 all state support was withdrawn
in this zone from the 477 teachers employed in the 311 Romanian parochial
schools. The restructuring of the schools in the border zone was brought to a
sudden end by the events of the fall of 1918." (Zoltán Szász)
During this time, and in spite of some regional successes, the war machinery
of the Central Powers increasingly creaked and cracked, casting the shadow of
the final collapse. Yet, on the other side, Russia was also defeated and
eliminated from the war and Romania was forced to acknowledge a military
defeat. At the peace of May 1918 it had to relinquish Dobrudja to Bulgaria,
which at this time was still fighting on the side of the Central Powers. It had
to make some border concessions to Hungary as well. But then the effects of the
1918 military collapse, the ensuing revolutionary period and the destruction of
the central administration on the Romanian political movements in Transylvania
and on the events taking place in this area, need not be related in detail
since every event was immediately superseded by the onrushing developments.
Suffice it to say that the attempts to promptly repatriate the almost half
million Romanian soldiers serving in the disintegrating forces of the Monarchy
failed, and the expected assumption of power that this repatriation was
supposed to accomplish did not take place.
In compensation and after some initial hesitation, the U.S.A., or rather its
"Great Peacemaker" President Wilson, decided that a unified Romania, including
Transylvania, shall be established. This plan was also—and shamefully --
supported by Germany on condition that it may bring home the still armed and
battle-ready Mackensen army from southeastern Romania, where it could have
easily become a hostage in Romanian hands. The Károlyi government in
Budapest, the product of a middle-class revolution and drifting aimlessly, made
a very liberal attempt to consolidate Transylvania with political and legal
concessions, announced in Arad by Oszkár Jászi, which went far
beyond any previous concessions. It was far too late. 1918 was not even over
yet when two parallel events pre-empted any future action. Even though it held
only promises and had no legal mandate, the Romanian Royal Army invaded and
rapidly occupied Transylvania in November-December. It could do this easily,
there was no resistance. (In the northwest, a somewhat earlier Czech invasion
was averted by Hungarian units). On December 1-2, at
Gyulafehérvár, a Romanian Diet-Popular Assembly took place which
has ever since been considered a milestone in Romanian history. Nota
bene: This fateful Romanian historic event was strongly supported by the
still extant Hungarian administration, and its participants were transported to
the meeting by special trains operated by the Hungarian National Railways. It
is this Diet which proclaimed Transylvania's union with Romania. There were
some conditions which were met and which must be mentioned, since lately they
seem to have been forgotten.
The leaders of the Romanian multitude assembled at
Gyulafehérvár, who drafted the resolutions and submitted them for
approval, did not wish to subject the Hungarians, who suddenly became a
minority, nor the Saxons, to the indignities they themselves were exposed to in
the past. They declared: "Complete national freedom for the nationalities
living together." This sounded very good, and continued: "Every nationality has
the right to its own education and governance, in its own language, and its own
administration by individuals elected from among themselves." This was clearly
a declaration not only of individual, but collective nationality rights. It had
been.
It was remarkable that the Transylvanian Romanian left wing did not support
the union, or only gave lukewarm support to it. The reason for this was that at
the time when the union was proclaimed, there was a much more liberal and
increasingly left wing regime in Budapest to which 30 Social Democrats had been
elected. Subsequently the Entente moved substantial military forces into
northern Hungary which made the pressures exerted by the victorious forces
irresistible. The Entente was no longer concerned only with punishing the
Hungarians for their participation in the war, but it satisfied increasing
Romanian demands and promoted the prompt establishment of Romanian
administrations, which in numerous locations and on numerous occasions used
brute force. In exchange, the Entente expected to use Romanian armed forces in
its projected military intervention in Soviet Russia. It is understandable that
the Transylvanian Hungarians were becoming increasingly insecure, and that the
Saxons and southern Svabians were beginning to think about protecting their own
interests in the new Romanian era. They realized much sooner than the
Hungarians that the game was over.
The Károlyi government couldn't carry the burden. The Entente and the
Successor States separated from the Monarchy made increasingly impossible
demands. The extreme left saw its chance and the Communists began to exert
enormous pressure. The Károlyi government fell and the second,
short-lived Soviet state, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, was established.
(There will be a third one: in Bavaria...) If there were any illusions that the
international Communists would be able to accomplish what the Social Democrats
were unable to achieve before, during or after the war, in spite of their
internationalism, these were rapidly dispelled. National awakening and
separation became irresistible following the collapse of the Central European
structure, severely weakened by four years of war. The Reds could make only
pronouncements—possibly in good faith; they could create no new arrangements
either between nations or between nationalities. Furthermore, when the Czechs
intervened from the north and the Romanians from the east, the Hungarian Red
Army, led mostly by officers of the former regime and composed of bled out
peasants and workers, went from defense to attack and fought very bravely to
prevent the increasingly constricting lines of demarcation which left less and
less of the Carpathian Basin to the Hungarians, from becoming fixed borders. In
vain; it was ordained otherwise.
In some of the Transylvanian cities the Soviet Republic, under Béla
Kun, which originated in Kolozsvár, had some attraction, although it had
little if any in the rural areas. The behavior of the Romanians was very much
affected by the fact that the Hungarian Red Army included a Székely
Division which openly wished to interfere in the determination of
Transylvania's future. In fact, this division was rapidly broken up, and laid
down its arms. In this it may have been a factor that the family members of the
soldiers of this division were living in Székelyfõld, under
Romanian occupation ,and as possible hostages.
The Kun regime that followed the Károlyi regime was also broken up and
fled to Vienna. Royal Romania took advantage of the opportunities granted by
the vacuum in power and its troops entered Budapest on August 4. They remained
here until the middle of November, and then retired only to the Tisza, greedily
expecting that this river would become the western border of Greater Romania.
When on June 4, 1920 the peace treaty was signed in the Palace of Trianon
outside Paris, almost one third of the former Hungary, 32% of its territory,
slightly more than 100 thousand square kilometers, were given to Romania. (The
mutilated Hungary retained only a total of 93 thousand square kilometers). Of
the 5.25 million inhabitants of this region—some sources, erroneously gave
this number as 3.5 million—1.7 million were Hungarians and more than half a
million were of German nationality. The great numerical superiority of the
Romanians was evident. Yet, for instance, across from the city of Gyula and
along the northern part of the common border, a significant area of purely
Hungarian inhabitants came under Romanian control. At the same time --
bilaterally—a number of cities were completely separated from their primary
catchment areas. This resulted in enormous economic difficulties which have
remained unresolved until this day.
Let us look at the demographic picture in somewhat greater detail according to
the figures collected by András Rónai. The period in question,
1920, was not suitable for data collection, but valid conclusions can be drawn
from the study of the 1910 and 1930 census results, both of which were obtained
in peacetime. In the following, we present the data pertaining only to the
territory ceded by the Trianon peace treaty.
1910:
population percentage
Romanian 2,829,454 53.8
Hungarian 1,661,805 3l.6
German 564,789 10.8
Serbo-Croatian 54,055 1.0
Czech-Slovakian 31,028 0.6
Russian-Ruthenian 20,482 0.4
Other 95,854 1.8
Total 5,257,467 100
1930:
lélekszám százalék
Romanian 3,237,000 58.3
Hungarian 1,483,000 26.7
German 543,000 9.8
Jewish 111,000 2.0
Gypsy 46,000 0,8
Other 130,000 2.4
Total 5,550,000 100
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