With World War II still raging in 1945 various factions competing for current and postwar Hungarian political power sought to decide how to treat ethnic Germans. Opinions were divided, with the Hungarian Communist Party and its ally, the National Peasant Party, calling for the expulsion of all Germans, whereas the major democratic party, the Smallholder Party, favored only deporting former Volksbund and Waffen SS members. In May 1945, the Government announced that there was no Swabian question but only a question of German fascists. They then resolved to deport former Waffen SS soldiers and confiscate the lands of the members of the Volksbund. Shortly thereafter, however, they did ask authorization from Moscow to deport 200,000 to 250,000 ethnic Germans to the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. As this figure clearly was much greater than the number of Volksbund adherents, the issue really became one of eliminating an unwanted ethnic group rather than one of eliminating only German fascists. The German population in Hungary, however, was never subject to the same brutal persecution and excesses as in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia.