The Fate of Western Hungary 1918-1921 - Corvinus Library ...

territory and 16.1% of the population awarded to Austria by the Saint-Germain
and Trianon treaties. 519 Adding the numbers reclaimed by the successful Sopron
plebiscite, Hungary realized a gain of 370.5 km 2 and 55,403 Hungarians from
its former ally and rapacious territorial claimant, Austria. This was, we must
note, the first victory over the onerous terms dictated in Trianon.
Today, it is virtually unknown that, after the end of WWII, Austria again
came forward with a claim for Austrian-Hungarian border adjustment, mainly
for Sopron and vicinity. The new claim was championed by the Socialist Party
of Austria in early October of 1945. The new, and former, Socialist chancellor
was Karl Renner. 520 The other proponent of the annexation of Sopron and its
vicinity to Austria was Ludwig Leser, governor of Burgenland from 1945 to
1950. 521 He was hopeful that Austria would be able to bring up the issue at the
Paris Peace Conference.
The question of the border revision with Hungary was brought up openly by
the paper of the Austrian Socialist Party, the Viennese Arbeiter Zeitung, in an
article titled ‘Das Burgenland wieder selbständig’ (Burgenland independent
again) 522 which was reported to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry by the Vienna
embassy’s Miklós Tóth. The article dealt with the fact that Burgenland became
free on October 1945, after having lost its independent status as part of the
Third Reich’s Anschluss of 1938, and was once more a full fledged province of
the Austrian federated state, the Bundesstaat. The author of the piece goes into
great detail of one of the fundamental questions of the irredentist movement,
Western Hungary. The writer goes on to state: “The Sopron plebiscite (…) took
place under the terror of the reactionary Hungarian civil servants, by then allied
to the Italians. The people of Sopron wanted to be a part of Austria – and want
it today, too.”
The embassy’s Deputy Secretary, Tóth, had a meeting with ambassadorial
counsel Seemann, head of the political department of the Austrian Foreign
Ministry, also the official in charge of Hungarian issues. Seemann replied that,
since the freedom of the press regulations came into effect on October 1, 1945,
the government is not empowered to influence the editorial direction of certain
newspapers. He assured Tóth that the Austrian government “disapproved to the
greatest extent the position of the Arbeiter Zeitung.” The Deputy Secretary
finally remarked in his report: “The circumstance should be noted that the
article in question happened to appear in the paper of the socialist party, the
party whose leading personage is Chancellor Renner, and so it is hardly
519 Villani, 1923, op. cit., p. 87.
520 The Austrian People’s Party won the 1945 November elections. Karl Renner was
elected at President of the Austrian Republic, a post he held until his death in 1950.
521 Környei, 1981, op. cit., p. 222. Even in 1924, Leser voiced that the natural center for
Burgenland was Sopron. On the 10 th anniversary of the province, he wrote in one of his
articles: “Out with everything that is still Hungarian.”
522 Arbeiter Zeitung, 1945, October 2, p. 2. The author of the article – O.H. – was
possibly Oskar Helmer, later Minister of the Interior and a leading figure in the
Austrian Socialist Party.
203