Alongside the business of wage negotiations and promoting a social-political strategy, there was necessarily always a more directly party-political dimension to trades union leadership during Otto Brenner's time at the top. From beyond the no longer so porous internal border, reports seeping through from friends and relatives of the short-lived and brutally suppressed 1953 East German uprising did nothing to refute the growing belief that the postwar Communist Party of Germany should best be understood as a proxy for Soviet imperialist aspirations. Nevertheless, the Communist party's rebranded sister party east of the "iron Curtain" had become the ruling party in a new kind of one-party dictatorship. Despite the fact that in West Germany the Communist Party never came close to receiving the levels of electoral support it had enjoyed before 1933, the power underlying Soviet-backed communism was a reality in West Germany from 1945 till long after Brenner left the stage. In the inter-union conflicts that were a feature of the West German industrial scene during the 1950s he was uncompromising in his hostility to communist activism, which he saw as a serious threat to trades union solidarity. Within IG Metall Brenner rigorously excluded from positions of power any trades unionists who refused to distance themselves from the goals of the KPD and SED. Just as resolutely - if a little less brutally - he rejected aspirations to positions of power of any "Christian-Socialist" unionists who, even while they complained that the DGB's close links to the Social Democratic Party undermined party-political neutraility, were themselves closely associated with the centre-right CDU and (Bavarian) CSU whose influence within the DGB they were happy (if without much success) to try and promote.