Helmut Brandt opposed manifestations of this development: he was ousted from his job with the ministry of Justice and his position as a member of the CDU party leadership team.
In the end it was only in the Soviet occupation zone (reinvented, formally in October 1949, as the German Democratic Republic / East Germany) that a return to single-party dictatorship was achieved, and even here implementation of the strategy was far from smooth, and stretched out over several years.
With the CDU in his part of Germany increasingly under state pressure from without and infiltrated within, in 1948 Helmut Brandt joined the pro-Soviet District Federation ("Landesverband") in the eastern sector of Berlin.
In West Berlin this led to accusations that he was leading a split of the CDU which still saw itself as a single political party across all the allied occupation zones in what was left of Germany after 1945.
however, the CDU leadership in the Soviet occupation zone was undergoing internal fragmentation, dividing those who, for various reasons, were prepared to collaborate, whether willingly or not, with the constitutional developments being implemented by the ruling SED (party) from those, such as Georg Dertinger and Helmut Brandt, who were less so.
[7] On account of his "bourgeois-conservative" propensities Brandt now found himself forced out of positions of influence within the CDU,[2] notably by Arnold Gohr of the East German party's collaborationist wing.
In May 1950 he protested to his minister Max Fechner (SED) and to his own party leader in East Germany, Otto Nuschke (CDU) over the Waldheimer Trials, a succession of rapid legal hearings of 3,324 of people who had survived and been released from the hitherto unacknowledged Soviet controlled concentration camps.
[2] A further trial took place, this time at Frankfurt (Oder) on 13 March 1959,[10] at which Brandt received another ten-year jail sentence for crimes that included espionage, inducing people to escape from the German Democratic Republic, producing propaganda that endangered the state and treason.
[11] Brandt promptly relocated to the Rhineland region of West Germany, employed by various universities and working, till 1977, as an expert consultant to the government in Bonn.