The Second Vienna Award of 30 August 1940 redrew the map of Transylvania with the stroke of a German and Italian pen. Northwestern Transylvania, including Salaj County, was transferred from Romania to Hungary. Eight of the region's 23 counties were entirely ceded; three more were split. For the ethnic Romanians living in these areas, the transfer meant waking up in a different country, governed by an army that viewed them with suspicion. The Hungarian Second Army moved through the newly annexed territory in early September, and on 7 September it arrived at Ip, a village in Salaj County. During preparations to depart, grenades stored carelessly in a sling-cart detonated. Two soldiers died. The cause was established as negligence, but the finding did not stop the rumor from spreading that Romanians had attacked the troops.

On 8 September, the Second Army entered Zalau. On 13 September, the military commander of the Simleu Silvaniei district received reports that armed Romanian groups, numbering between 80 and 100, were looting nearby villages. The 32nd Regiment, stationed in Zalau, dispatched a unit to investigate. When the soldiers reached Nusfalau, they learned of the two soldiers' deaths from the week before. The connection between the looting report and the earlier accident was tenuous at best, but it was enough. The unit raided the commune that same day. Eighteen people were detained. According to official reports, 16 were executed for attempting to desert, though the circumstances of those killings remain unclear. That night, Hungarian troops billeted in a local school reported being fired upon from the street around 3:00 in the morning. Five people with weapons were captured. The stage was set for retaliation on a scale that bore no relation to the original provocation.

Under the command of Lieutenant Zoltan Vasvary, soldiers went house to house through Ip, shooting indiscriminately. Between 152 and 158 ethnic Romanian civilians were killed, men, women, and children whose only connection to the alleged provocations was their ethnicity. Some sources indicate that Hungarian soldiers received support from local vigilantes. The killing extended beyond Ip itself. In the nearby village of Cehei, one person was killed. In the forests near Cosniciu de Sus and Cerisa, 55 more people died. According to some accounts, the broader toll across Salaj County reached 477 Romanian civilians. On Vasvary's order, a mass grave was dug in the village cemetery: 24 meters long, 4 meters wide. The dead were buried head to head in two rows, without religious ceremony. Families were denied the basic dignity of mourning their own.

On 13 March 1946, a tribunal delivered its public verdict. Lieutenant Colonel Carol Lehotcsky, the military commander of the Simleu Silvaniei district who had ordered reprisals against the Romanian inhabitants of Ip and surrounding villages, was sentenced to death. Lieutenant Zoltan Vasvary, who had commanded the unit that carried out the killings, also received a death sentence. Fifteen local civilians were tried for cooperating with the soldiers. Four received 25 years of forced labor. Six received 20 years. Others received prison terms ranging from 5 to 20 years. One was acquitted. Stefan Farago, a landowner from Ip who commanded a local militia, was accused of inducing Lehotcsky to order the reprisals but was also acquitted. The trial established a legal record, but no verdict could restore what had been taken from the families of Ip.

The Ip massacre was not an isolated event. It belonged to a pattern of violence that accompanied the Hungarian occupation of Northern Transylvania in September 1940, alongside massacres at Treznea, Nusfalau, and Sarmasu. Together, these killings reflected what happens when armies treat civilian populations as enemy combatants on the basis of ethnicity alone, when rumor replaces evidence, and when collective punishment replaces justice. The village of Ip still stands in Salaj County, in the northwestern corner of Romania. The mass grave in the cemetery remains. Descendants of those who were killed live in the region, carrying a memory that no border revision or political settlement has erased. What happened at Ip is documented in the findings of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania and in the records of the Museum of the Holocaust in Northern Transylvania, ensuring that the names and circumstances of the dead are not forgotten.