864.4016/6–1245: Telegram
The Representative in Hungary (Schoenfeld) to the Secretary of State
[Received June 13—4:52 p.m.]
143. I handed Minister of Foreign Affairs today memo17 in sense of your 70, June 4. He read statement carefully and expressed great satisfaction with position of US Govt as therein set forth.18 I intimated subject was under discussion with Allies and he expressed hope agreement among them would lead promptly to concrete action to prevent continued indiscriminate expulsion of Hungarians particularly from Slovakia. Govt’s information though incomplete indicated some 20,000 Hungarian speaking persons had already been expelled in conditions of great destitution while a group perhaps numbering 10,000 was being kept in internment camps in Bratislava. This situation was particularly ironical inasmuch as there had been proportionately more sincere collaborationists among Slovaks than even in Hungary. Hungarian Govt had scrupulously withdrawn all [Page 932] post-1938 Hungarian officials from territories annexed under Vienna award19 but members of Hungarian speaking group continued to be expelled without adequate humanitarian provisions. Sanitary conditions in Bratislava Camp he said are reported extremely bad. He estimates there are about 500,000 Hungarian speaking people in Czechoslovak territory excluding Carpatho-Ukraine.
[For additional documentation dealing inter alia with the question of the transfer of Hungarian populations from Czechoslovakia, see note 7539/II/S/1945 dated July 3, 1945, from the Czechoslovak Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to the Chargé in Czechoslovakia, telegram 144, August 2, 1945, from Praha, note No. C.20.532/45/II dated August 16, 1945, from the Czechoslovak Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to the Ambassador in Czechoslovakia, and telegram 226, September 14, 1945, from Praha, volume II, pages 1261, 1266, 1269, and 1275, respectively.]
- For text of the memorandum of June 12, 1945, see Hungary and the Conference of Paris, vol. ii: Hungary’s International Relations Before the Conference of Paris; Hungaro-Czechoslovak Relations, Papers and Documents Relating to the Preparation of the Peace and to the Exchange of Populations Between Hungary and Czechoslovakia (Budapest, Hungarian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 1947), p. 4.↩
- On June 19, 1945, Foreign Minister Gyöngyösi sent a note to Representative Schoenfeld formally thanking him for the memorandum of June 12 and setting forth the views of the Hungarian Government with respect to the situation of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia. For text of the Hungarian note, see ibid., p. 5.↩
- The arbitral award by the Italian-German Commission regarding the cession of certain territories by Czechoslovakia to Hungary, made at Vienna, November 2, 1938; for text, see Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, series D, vol. iv (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1951), p. 125.↩