Eventually, under Regent Miklós Horthy, Hungary established close relations with Benito Mussolini's Italy and Adolf Hitler's Germany.

The alliance with Nazi Germany allowed Hungary to regain southern Czechoslovakia in the First Vienna Award of 1938 and Subcarpathia in 1939.

The awards allocated only a fraction of the territories lost by the Treaty of Trianon, and the loss resented the most by the Hungarians was that of Transylvania, which had been ceded to Romania.

In late June 1940, the Romanian government gave in to a Soviet ultimatum and allowed Moscow to take over both Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which had been incorporated into Romania after World War I, as well as the Hertsa region.

The territorial loss was dreadful from Romania's perspective, but its government preferred that to an unwinnable military conflict with the Soviets.

Hungary's government, however, interpreted Romania's cession of land as an admission that it would no longer insist upon its territorial integrity under pressure.

The Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina thus inspired Budapest to escalate its efforts to resolve "the question of Transylvania".

The next day, King Carol II sent a letter to Hitler in which he suggested that Germany dispatch a military mission to Romania and renew the alliance of 1883.

In accordance with German wishes, Romania began negotiations with Hungary at Turnu Severin on 16 August.

[4] The Romanians accepted, and Foreign Ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop of Germany and Galeazzo Ciano of Italy met on 30 August 1940 at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna.

At the meeting, Iuliu Maniu demanded for Carol to abdicate and for the Romanian Army to resist the Hungarian takeover of northern Transylvania.

Some 100,000 had left by February 1941, according to the incomplete registration of North Transylvanian refugees that was carried out by the Romanian government.

By 1941, there have been a total of 919 murders, 1,126 maimings, 4,126 beatings, 15,893 arrests, 124 desecrations, 78 individual and 447 collective home devastations of Romanians by the Hungarian authorities.

Or Sarolta Juhász from Mureșenii de Câmpie, who was killed while trying to protect the family of the Romanian priest Bujor.

In front of the casemates, there were rows of barbed wire, mine fields and one large antitank ditch, which in some places were filled with water.

The role of the fortified line was not to stop incoming attacks but to delay them, to inflict as many losses as possible and to give time for the bulk of the Romanian Army to be mobilized.

The Romanian troops evacuated as much equipment as possible, but the dug-in telephone lines could not be recovered and so were eventually used by the Hungarian Army.