In the late 1940s, the coal mines and factories of Germany's heavily industrialized Ruhr Area were an ideological battleground. Moscow-led communists expected to gain control of the workers' councils as part of their plan to turn Germany into a communist state. Many of these workers' leaders were among the 120,000 from the Ruhr who saw the MRA play "The Forgotten Factor" and heard from employers who had changed their attitudes from exploitation to cooperation. Some senior communist leaders from the area embraced MRA and were summoned to account for themselves at the Communist Party headquarters for North Rhine-Westphalia. There they recommended that the Party should make itself acquainted with MRA and "take the next step of its development by facing up to the moral standards of absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love," supporting their contention with quotations from Marx and Engels. But their approach was rejected, and the men were expelled from the Party.