The dismemberment of Austria-Hungary: Saint-Germain and Trianon

The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, signed on September 10, 1919, set peace terms between the Allies and the new Republic of Austria, the German-speaking core of the dissolved Austro-Hungarian Empire, and formally recognized the independence of the empire's other successor states. Austria was reduced to a small Alpine and Danubian state of roughly 6.5 million inhabitants, a fraction of the more than 50 million the former multiethnic empire had held. The treaty explicitly prohibited Anschluss with Germany without the unanimous approval of the League of Nations Council, contradicting the wish of much of the Austrian population, and Austria lost German-speaking territories including South Tyrol, ceded to Italy, and the Sudetenland, incorporated into the new Czechoslovakia. Its army was limited to 30,000 volunteers, and Vienna, once the administrative heart of a vast empire, became the oversized capital of a small, economically strained state.