Northern Transylvania
As Northern Transylvania or Nordtranssylvanien ( Romanian : Transilvania de Nord , Hungarian : Észak-Erdély ), the northern half of Transylvania (and the Kreischberg area designated). The term found political use through the Second Vienna Arbitration . With this award the crowded German Reich and Italy , the Kingdom of Romania in 1940 Northern Transylvania to Horthy - Hungary cede. The ceded area extended from the Szeklerland in the east across the Transylvanian Basin to most of the Kreisch area in the west. In the north and east it was bounded by the Eastern Carpathians , in the southwest by the Transylvanian Western Carpathians ( Bihor Mountains and Apuseni Mountains ).
It was obvious to at least annex the Szeklerland in eastern Transylvania, in which the Hungarian Szekler formed a clear majority, to Hungary - the problem was, however, that the Szeklerland was not close to Hungary. In order to have a land connection, the area in between, which was predominantly populated by Romanians, was annexed to Hungary. The area ceded by the arbitral award comprised a total of 43,500 km², with which Hungary got back about 42 percent of the total area ceded to Romania by the Trianon Treaty twenty years earlier . Between 2.5 and 2.6 million people lived in the restored area, of whom - according to Romanian or Hungarian census - a narrow majority (1.3 million) or only 1 million were Romanians .
During the Second World War , Romania was able to recapture northern Transylvania in 1944 with the help of the Soviet Red Army . At the Paris Peace Conference in 1946 , the post-war Hungarian government asked in vain to be able to keep at least part of it. But no sooner had the Kingdom of Romania got the territory back formally through the Paris Peace Accords in 1947 , when the monarchy was overthrown and the People's Republic proclaimed. The henceforth ruling Communists created in the populated by Szeklers eastern part of Northern Transylvania in 1952 a Hungarian Autonomous Region (13,500 sq km, 731,000 inhabitants), which until 1968 should be.