All events · The World Wars
The New Borders of Central Europe: Refugees after Trianon, Versailles and Neuilly
1918–1926 · Europe & Northern Eurasia
Displacement
Territory Seized
Displaced
1 million
Miklos Zeidler, writing in 1914-1918-Online, records that over 400,000 Hungarian refugees fled the neighbouring states into the new frontiers of Hungary between 1918 and 1924, out of about 3 million Hungarians left outside them. Comparable movements included roughly 100,000-150,000 Germans leaving Alsace-Lorraine for Germany after 1918, several hundred thousand Germans leaving the territories ceded to Poland, and, under the Greek-Bulgarian convention annexed to the 1919 Treaty of Neuilly, about 92,000 Bulgarians moving from Greece to Bulgaria and about 45,000-50,000 Greeks from Bulgaria to Greece. Figures come from national refugee administrations, the mixed commissions and the League of Nations.
Share of the population affected
5.6%
of the population living in the territories transferred from Hungary, Germany, Austria and Bulgaria by the postwar peace treaties, 1920
Territory
189,907 km²
Zeidler records that historic Hungary lost about 189,907 square kilometres and 10.6 million people at Trianon, retaining 92,963 square kilometres and 7.6 million people; Germany lost Alsace-Lorraine to France, Posen and West Prussia to Poland, and further territory by plebiscite, and Bulgaria lost western Thrace and its Aegean coastline under the Treaty of Neuilly.
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What happened
The peace settlements of 1919-20 moved borders across populations that had not moved, and produced a decade of departures, expulsions and negotiated transfers. Hungary, reduced by Trianon to less than a third of its former territory, received over 400,000 refugees from the successor states between 1918 and 1924, many of them officials, teachers and railwaymen dismissed or pressured out, some living for years in railway wagons at Budapest stations. France removed a large part of the German population that had settled in Alsace-Lorraine since 1871, sorting inhabitants by identity card into four categories. Germans left the territories ceded to Poland in large numbers under emigration and option provisions. In the Balkans the Convention respecting Reciprocal Emigration annexed to the Treaty of Neuilly of 27 November 1919 created a nominally voluntary but state-organised exchange between Greece and Bulgaria, supervised by a mixed commission under League of Nations auspices, which moved roughly 140,000 people in total and served as the immediate model for the compulsory exchange agreed at Lausanne in 1923.
Parties
The peace treaties of 1919-20 redrew the borders of Austria-Hungary and Germany, and the successor states and France expelled or pressured out officials, settlers and minorities while Bulgaria and Greece agreed a 'voluntary' exchange under the Treaty of Neuilly
Disputed
Whether these movements are best described as expulsion, pressured emigration or voluntary migration differs by case and is contested in each national historiography; the Hungarian figure of over 400,000 in particular is used politically in arguments about Trianon.
The denominator
Trianon transferred about 10.6 million of the Kingdom of Hungary's 20.9 million inhabitants to Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; Versailles transferred roughly 6.5-7 million from Germany, chiefly to Poland; Neuilly and Saint-Germain moved smaller numbers from Bulgaria and Austria. Adding these gives roughly 18 million people whose sovereign changed, based on the prewar censuses used in the treaty negotiations.
The refugees were a specific slice of the transferred population — officials, railwaymen, teachers, landowners and urban minorities who lost position or feared the new states — not a random sample, so the low percentage understates how completely the treaties displaced the groups that did move.
Where the baseline comes from
On the death toll
These transfers were not accompanied by mass killing and no significant death toll is attributed to them; hardship, destitution and deaths from illness among refugees living in temporary accommodation are recorded but not quantified.
Documented forms of violence
Denationalization
Loss of citizenship and public employment, option clauses and the state-supervised emigration conventions are set out in the treaties themselves and in the mixed commission records summarised by Zeidler and Gatrell.
Movements mapped
- Hungarian officials and families from Transylvania and Slovakia -> rump Hungary400,000
- Germans leaving Alsace-Lorraine -> Germany
- Bulgarians of western Thrace and Macedonia -> Bulgaria under the Neuilly convention92,000
Countries touched, on present-day borders
Hungary, Romania, France, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria
Sources
This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.