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The events of the Slovak-Hungarian “Little War” are closely connected to the circumstances of Hungary’s re-annexation of Sub-Carpathia in March 1939, which took place under the motto of re-establishing a common Hungarian-Polish border. Corps belonging to the Carpathian section of the Hungarian army advanced into Sub-Carpathia and then proceeded to attack Slovak territories. Hungaryʼs official explanation for its occupation of Sub-Carpathia ran as follows: since Slovakia has become an independent state and thus Czechoslovakia no longer exists as a state, the Viennese arbitration is no longer valid. Hungary has won the right to exercise its claim to Sub-Carpathia. The military conflict between Slovakia and Hungary came to an end when Germany intervened and ordered the two parties to conduct bilateral negotiations with a view to reaching an agreement. At the negotiations on March 28, 1939, the parties agreed to end hostilities and to establish a neutral zone between the two armies. They also agreed that Hungarian troops might remain at their occupied positions. On March 28 the Slovak delegation announced claims on Hungarian territory by way of compensation, but the Hungarian government rejected these claims. Germany offered no support to the Slovaks on the border issue; indeed, on April 7 Slovak troops were even required to withdraw from various settlements on the Slovak side of the demarcation line. On April 3, 1939, the German Ambassador to Budapest, Otto von Erdmannsdorff, paid a visit to the Hungarian foreign minister, István Csáky; in the course of their discussions, the two men touched upon the issue of the border established with Slovakia. The Ambassador informed Csáky that the Slovak government had turned to Germany for support, but that it had been told that under the circumstances any attempt at the full restoration of the old border, which was Slovakia’s wish, would be futile. The German Ambassador then asked Csáky whether the Hungarian government would be willing to make certain territorial concessions. Csáky responded that this would be inconceivable — “where Hungarian soldiers have trodden, they will stay”. Hungary could keep the 60-kilometre long and 20-kilometre wide strip of land that it had taken from Slovakia. The Hungarian authorities attached the area of land Sub-Carpathia, of which it remained a part until 1944. In 1945 the newly re-established Czechoslovakia was obliged to surrender the railway line between Csap and Ungvár as well as the Ung line: the Czechoslovak-Soviet border — today’s frontier between Slovakia and Ukraine — was drawn ten to fifteen kilometres further west. During its engagements with the Slovak armed forces from March 23–28, 1939, the Hungarian army suffered 25 fatal and 56 non-fatal casualties; it captured 360 Slovak and 211 Czech/Moravian soldiers.

The goal of the study is to describe the attitude of Budapest to the election of the President of the Republic in Czechoslovakia in December 1935, electing the successor to Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first President of the Czechoslovak Republic who had been in office long years. The election of the President of the Czechoslovak Republic in late 1935 was the first presidential election with active participation of the opposition and negativistic Hungarian minority legislators of the Czechoslovak National Assembly from both Hungarian minority parliamentary parties, the Land Christian-Socialist Party (OKSzP) and the Hungarian National Party (MNP) who had always cast empty votes in presidential elections until that time, to declare their negativistic attitude to the constitutional limits of the Czech Republic. In 1935, they even supported the presidential candidate Edvard Beneš, the Foreign Minister to whom the Hungarian minority political representation including the very Budapest had a very negative attitude as he had been one of the main architects of the Versailles rearrangement of Central Europe after World War I, refused by the Hungarians, as the Hungarian state had lost two thirds of its territory and about seven hundred and fifty thousand Hungarians landed in Czechoslovakia in position of national and non-state-constituting minority due to it. But in spite of that fact, the Hungarian minority legislators from OKSzP and MNP, with political support of Budapest, sided with Benešʼs candidacy; thus the Hungarian minority was the only one out of the two large negativistic national minorities of the Czechoslovak Republic of that time, besides the minority Germans whose representatives in the Czechoslovak Parliament, on behalf of the opposition and negativistic OKSzP and MNP parties took an activistic attitude, increasing the national-political and the foreign-political prestige of Edvard Benešʼs presidential mandate.