Voices were raised in Hungary against these arbitrary expulsions. The liberal parties, particularly the Smallholder Party, and the surviving democratic press, criticized the sweeping nature of classifying every ethnic German as a traitor. Cardinal József Mindszenty (of Swabian origin), head of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary and fierce anti-communist, repeatedly protested the confiscation of property and expulsion of ethnic Germans. He appealed to world public opinion, strongly condemning government treatment of ethnic Germans in Hungary. These protests had no effect, and with increasing communist domination of the Hungarian Government, all opposition was gradually eliminated. (In 1949, Cardinal Mindszenty was tried for treason by the Communist government and given a life sentence. In the 1956 Hungarian revolution, he was given asylum in the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, from whence he was finally allowed to go into exile in 1971.)
