Northern Transylvania

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Romania in 1940 with Northern Transylvania highlighted in yellow

Northern Transylvania is a region of Transylvania. In 2006, it lies within the territory of Romania. The population is largely comprised of both ethnic Romanians and Hungarians, and the region was ruled by both Romania and Hungary at different points during the Twentieth Century.

Prior to World War I, all of Transylvania was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which dissolved after the war. In December, 1918, Transylvanian political organizations of ethnic Romanians and ethnic Hungarians each expressed loyalty to their respective homelands. The treaties of Saint Germain (1919) and Trianon (1920) reflected the victory of the Romanian army, granting Transylvania to Romania.

After Romania settled a claim to Soviet Union over Bessarabian territories, in June 1940, Hungary attempted to regain Transylvania, it had lost in WWI. Germany and Italy pressured both Hungary and Romania to resolve the situation in a bilateral agreement. The two delagation met in Turnu Severin but the negotiations failed due to a demand for a 60,000 skm territory on Hungarian side and and only a population exchange on Romanian side. To impede a Hungarian-Romanian war in their "hinterland" the Axis powers pressured both governments to accept their arbitration: the Second Vienna Award.

Historian Keith Hitchins (Hitchins 1994) summarizes the situation created by the award:

Far from settling matters, the Vienna Award had exacerbated relations between Rumania and Hungary. It did not solve the nationality problem by separating all Magyars from all Rumanians. Some 1,150,000 to 1,300,000 Rumanians, or 48 per cent to over 50 per cent of the population of the ceded territory, depending upon whose statistics are used, remained north of the new frontier, while about 500,000 Magyars (other Hungarian estimates go as high as 800,000, Rumanian as low as 363,000) continued to reside in the south.

Hungary held Northern Transylvania only from 1940 to 1944. Ethnic disturbances between Hungarians and Romanians continued during this period, with some Hungarians pursuing discrimination, harassment, or extreme violence against Romanians. Records of the time attribute just under 1,000 Romanian deaths to ethnic violence.^{[citation needed]} The situation was reversed when Romanian troops entered Transylvania in 1944, committing acts of violence against ethnic Hungarian civilians.^{[citation needed]} The violence continued until the Soviet military administration declared martial law.

Like Jews living in Hungary, most of the Jews in Northern Transylvania (about 150,000) were sent to concentration camps during World War II. Some of the Romanian population in this region fled or was expelled, and the same happened with many Hungarians in Southern Transylvania. There was a mass exodus; over 100,000 people on both sides of the ethnic and political borders relocated.

Northern Transylvania reverted to Romanian rule in 1947, when the Treaty of Paris reaffirmed the borders between Romania and Hungary originally defined in Treaty of Trianon, 27 years earlier.